Missing Persons

13

I had an additional tie to the Miller family, one that certainly fit any definition of tangential anyone might wish to apply, one that was marked by the requisite degree or two of separation. The link didn’t come into focus for me until my solitary psychotherapy appointment late on the afternoon of the day that I played reluctant Sherpa for Diane as she trolled the Mall for Christmas bargains. The source of the connection was someone I never would have anticipated.

Bob Brandt.

Bob had been coming to me for individual psychotherapy for almost two years, and progress had been glacial. Pre-global-warming glacial. The meager speed of the treatment neither surprised nor particularly disappointed me. Diagnostically, Bob’s underlying character was a caustic blend of toxic pathologies. Had he been using health insurance to pay for his treatment-he wasn’t-the DSM-IV code his insurer would have required would have had as many digits as a Visa card.

The first five of those digits would have spelled out the cipher for schizoid personality disorder. In addition to having a serious schizoid character, Bob was also a chronically depressed, mildly paranoid guy. Forty-three years old, he’d been ensconced in the same dead-end clerical position in the physics department at the University of Colorado for almost two decades.

His mother and an older brother were his only living relatives. Bob had maintained contact with his mom for most of his adult life. A few years before, however, his brother had written him a letter notifying him that their mother was moving to an assisted-living facility near his house in southern Colorado. Bob had interpreted the missive as his brother’s order to “butt out,” and he hadn’t spoken with either his mother or his brother since.

Where did reality lie? Sadly, I didn’t know. Nor was it clear to me exactly how Bob felt about the artificial estrangement. He deflected all my inquiries about it, and resisted my occasional attempts to question his harsh appraisal of his brother’s letter.

Bob had no current friends or romantic relationships and no history that I could uncover of any significant friendships since childhood, or of romantic relationships, ever. His sole social outlet was occasional attendance at local Scrabble clubs and tournaments. Mostly, though, he preferred to play his games online.

The Internet, for all its interpersonal anonymity, is a schizoid’s dream.

Schizoid.

The dictionary, nonpsychological meaning of the word is the “coexistence of disparates.” Something that is part this, part that. In mental health terms, schizoid has surprisingly little in common with either its Webster’s definition or its similar-sounding, polysyllabic psychopathology cousin, schizophrenia. Unlike schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder isn’t a disorder of thought or perception.

Not at all. Schizoid personality disorder is a disorder of relating.

People with the malady have a history, often since early adolescence, sometimes even before that, of aloofness from relationships, emotional coldness, immunity from praise or criticism, generalized anhedonia-the inability to experience pleasure-and limited affective range.

The portrayal fit Bob like a custom-made wet suit.

Bob was, by his own description, “a dork, a geek, a nerd, a snarf-you pick the synonym for loser, that’s me.” He had a head shaped like the bow of a boat, and I surmised that his hair had been receding from his temples since the second or third grade. Exploratory surgery would be necessary to determine if he actually possessed a chin. His eyes were tiny and at times they seemed to shake in their sockets. The effect was so disconcerting to me that early in the treatment I’d actually referred him for a neurological evaluation to have those vibrating orbs assessed.

The neurologist had a name for the condition, which he assured me was benign. As was my style, I’d managed to forget the specific medical terminology by the time I was reading that night’s bedtime story to my daughter.

Bob liked cars, or, more accurately, was enamored of his own car. He had a thirty-something-year-old Camaro with a big motor that he’d bought from a guy in Longmont who’d lovingly restored it to its original ebony luster. Every time Bob mentioned the old muscle car, which seemed like at least once a session, he reminded me that its condition was “cherry,” and every month or two he assured me that it was a “matching numbers car.”

After two years of reminders I still didn’t know what that meant.

Bob lived in a couple of rooms he rented above the detached garage of a modest house near Nineteenth and Pine. He described his landlords as “old people,” and maintained that he never spoke with them at all. Despite the fact that they lived less than fifty feet from his rented rooms, he mailed his rent check to them every month.

He could walk to work at the university from his flat and used the classic Camaro primarily to cruise around downtown or the Hill or other student haunts on weekend nights. In a rare flash of insight he’d once acknowledged that he drove his prize around town on pleasant evenings hoping that someone would find his ride cool, though the few times that he and his car had generated attention out in public he’d been pretty certain that the students had been taunting him.

After a lifetime feeling that he’d been born with the birthmark of a bull’s-eye on his chest, Bob was familiar with being taunted and appeared immune to it. Frankly, the incidents with the university students hadn’t seemed to trouble him. He was perplexed, however, that the kids didn’t find his car cool.

To Bob, that was crazy.

Over the last year he had begun to visit Boulder’s clubs and bars with some regularity, at least a couple of times a month. His pub-crawling wasn’t designed to accommodate a drinking habit-a period of severe bingeing in his early twenties had actually caused him to swear off alcohol. Regardless, he was way too cheap to splurge on nightclub-priced drinks. And he didn’t go out to the clubs to hang out in the glow of the pretty people. After a firm confrontation from me one day-“Come on, Bob, why do you go?”-he admitted that he went out to nightspots to “watch them.”

I guessed that he meant the girls, but I couldn’t get him to admit it. So I reserved judgment, aware that Bob could just as well have been spying on the boys. In my presence, he’d never admitted to any feeling that I would categorize as either romantic or sexual toward people of either gender.

That’s all he would say about his clubbing predilection, that he went to “watch them.” I was left to wonder: If the watching wasn’t some once-removed sexual thing, was it voyeuristic? Anthropological? Maybe part of some arcane sociological experiment? After almost two years of trying to understand such things about Bob I still wasn’t sure, and on those Tuesday nights when I was driving home after I’d completed a session with him and found myself still musing about Bob’s narrow life, the fact that there was so much I didn’t know troubled me.

I suspected that the pretty objects of Bob’s fascination were at least equally troubled when they looked up to discover Bob’s shimmying eyes locked on to their own as they downed designer cocktails in Boulder’s latest trendy nightspot.

I also had little doubt that Bob would avert his eyes the moment his prey noticed that he was staring. I knew it because in two years of sessions Bob had never held eye contact with me for more than a split second.

Other than the regular interaction he had with his boss in the physics department at the university-it was at her insistence that he’d sought therapy-the psychotherapy with me was, to my knowledge, Bob’s primary ongoing human relationship that didn’t include at least one cyber-buffer. Although I suspected that he trusted me more than he trusted his boss, I reminded myself that he didn’t even trust her enough to allow her the responsibility of keeping the begonia on his desk watered during his infrequent holidays from work.

He certainly didn’t trust me enough to accept my oft-repeated suggestions about the potential benefits of psychopharmacology. I raised the issue occasionally, but never pressed it. Although I held out hopes that the right antidepressant might dent his veneer of despair, the odds of medication impacting Bob’s underlying character disorder were slim. But then-I had to admit-so were the odds that psychotherapy would ever make any profound difference in his functioning.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try.

Bob did trust me just enough to come back to see me every Tuesday afternoon at 4:45. That was the foundation of our relationship. In two years of treatment, he’d missed only one session, and had canceled that appointment four weeks in advance. Forty-five minutes, once a week, that was our deal. Bob knew what time our appointment started. He knew when it ended. After a hundred tries, though, he still had only the most vague concept of what should happen in between.

I saw him on a sliding scale, discounting my usual fee by well more than half so that he could afford to come in. Bob would always pay me at the beginning of the last session of each month, just before I handed out my bills. His personal check to me was always placed in the same type of security envelope, was always folded the same way, and was always double sealed, once by licking the flap, and once by the addition of two long strips of Scotch tape.

Bob’s handwriting was tiny and precise and rounded. The first time he gave me a check I had to use a magnifying glass to read the amount. I didn’t know how the university credit union managed to clear his checks. But it did.

On occasional Tuesdays during our time together we did something that loosely resembled traditional psychotherapy. More often the sessions were an odd interchange that to an outsider probably would look more like social skills training than anything psychotherapeutic. Not unlike someone afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome, Bob had no innate sense of how human interaction should work. He would end up being insulting when his intent was to be impersonally cordial. He would often be cruel while he was merely trying to create some protective psychological space. During the first year of treatment we’d spent a half dozen autumn Tuesdays troubleshooting how Bob might respond differently when a student walked up to his desk in the physics department and said, “Good morning,” or “Hi.”

His previous stock reply-“What difference does it make?”-hadn’t been working too well for him.

The most surprising thing about psychotherapy with Bob? As the months passed I’d grown fond of this man who was about as easy to get close to as a porcupine. In the lingo, I had developed a positive countertransference for him. And maybe because I’d developed affection for Bob my empathy for his plight was sometimes swollen out of proportion.

I vowed to keep an eye on it.