Missing Persons

18

Bob entered my office for his additional, day before New Year’s Eve appointment carrying a boom box.

Mallory Miller had been missing for five days.

He and I had met almost a hundred times by then and he had never walked in the door with a boom box, or any other prop, for that matter. Without preamble, but with an almost sinister smile that underscored the fact that he seemed to lack a chin, Bob set the stereo on the table between us and pressed the “play” button. I didn’t recognize the tune at first-maybe because I’d managed to make it through the years on both sides of the recent cusp of centuries deprived of any familiarity at all with boy bands-but I realized soon enough that I was listening to a disappointing cover of Del Shannon’s glorious “Runaway.”

A run run run run runaway.

Bob’s preferred, but dubious, choice of versions was a seriously overproduced adaptation of the classic featuring a harmony of voices obviously lacking in testosterone. I patiently adopted the role of audience, unsure why that day’s psychotherapy required musical accompaniment, and unsure why-if we required music at all, and that song in particular-we couldn’t be listening to the almost flawless original. At what appeared to be a predetermined moment Bob decided to turn the session from surreal soundtrack to painful karaoke. His voice, a strange mix of soprano and something else, added a decidedly creepy new layer to the sugary harmonies that were filling my office.

Bob had chimed into the song at the precise point that the lyrical progression had reached And I wonder / I wa wa wa wa wonder. But he didn’t stop there. He sang, “Why / why why why why she ran away / And I wonder where she will stay.”

He reached forward and hit the “stop” button.

I wondered if I was supposed to clap.

Bob could carry a tune. I had to give him that.

Once I was certain he was finished, at least for the moment, I tried to think of something intelligent to say. I failed.

Sitting back, Bob was quiet for most of a minute before he said, “I’m writing about it.”

“You are?” I asked, trying not to reveal the true level of stupefaction I was feeling at what was happening in my office. Was Bob writing songs?

“Yes.”

Bob played board games. His favorite was Scrabble, but he’d always maintained that he was a pretty decent chess player, too, and I had no reason to doubt him. And I knew that he’d once driven all the way to Laughlin, Nevada, in his Camaro for a big Monopoly tournament at one of the casinos. Ideally, Bob’s vision of ideal human interaction was that everyone should follow game protocols, that people should take turns, that everyone should know the rules, and that any and all disputes should be handled via consultation with a reference manual.

Needless to say, since most people acted as though life had no rules and as though there were no manual to consult, in real life Bob was frustrated more often than not by the manner that people behaved.

In Bob’s game-centered worldview-a perspective that he definitely applied to conversations-it was my turn to speak. His hollow yes had constituted the totality of his turn and started the clock on mine. Given the presence of the boom box on the table between us, and the revelation about the writing he was doing, that probably wasn’t a good time to reiterate a salient point I’d been trying to make for most of a year about the actual parameters of human communication. I took what I hoped was a safer road. I asked, “What kind of writing are you doing?”

“A story. I think it’ll be a novel. I don’t know.”

My turn again. “What… are you writing about?”

I knew, of course. I was hoping that I was wrong, but I knew.

“I know some things about what happened to the girl. That’s what started it but it’s mostly stuff I’m making up.”

“You know some things?” I said, trying to smother the skepticism that had crept into my question.

“Things that aren’t in the news. I’m thinking I might call it My Little Runaway.”

And thus the song.

“The girl” had to be Mallory, right? She was Bob’s current obsession, wasn’t she? Had to be her.

Maybe, maybe not. In psychotherapy, assumptions are termites. Let them survive unchallenged and they’ll eat away at the foundation. In an effort to exterminate at least one termite, I said, “Mallory Miller? You know some things about what happened to her?”

“Yes.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him.

Bob leaning forward startled me. Why? Simply because it brought him closer to me, and “closer” wasn’t one of Bob’s things. “Closer” is what schizoid personalities try to avoid the way arachnophobes try to steer clear of spiders. For a moment I considered the possibility that Bob had only leaned forward to once again turn on the boom box so that he could sing along to another song.

But he didn’t touch the stereo. He had leaned closer for some other reason.

Belatedly, I realized that it was again my turn. All I could think of to say was “Wow.”

Bob nodded an acknowledgment that I’d caught up with the conversational progression. “What she was thinking. You know, like that. Nobody else knows it.”

With those words I decided that Bob had indeed leaned forward to share a secret with me. From a therapeutic perspective, it was a sign of true progress. I began entertaining the possibility that he might, against all odds, be getting better, but that fantasy was short-circuited by my wish that Bob had shared a different kind of secret with me-something about sex, or petty theft, or self-medication, or violent dreams. Just about anything else.

Anything other than something about Mallory.

Bob had many personal faults. Some were born of his underlying pathology; some were more difficult to explain. He was cold. He was irritable. He was intolerant. I suspected he was a bigot. He was mistrustful. Organic vegetables were more compassionate than he was. The list could go on. And on. But as far as I knew-and after two years of Tuesdays I knew as much about him as anyone-Bob wasn’t a liar.

Which meant one of two things. The first possibility was that Bob somehow did know some details about Mallory’s disappearance, or at least about her state of mind prior to her disappearance.

The other option that I was considering? That Bob just thought he knew those things.

But was it likely that he could be so wrong? The natural history of schizoid personality is not that it’s a precursor to schizophrenia. Although schizoids may display idiosyncratic thinking, failure in relating typically doesn’t lead to psychotic failures in thinking. But, I reminded myself, the natural history of schizoid personality doesn’t rule out progression to serious thought disorder either.

I forced myself to entertain the possibility that I was witnessing initial signs that Bob might be showing signs of decompensation. Usually the resolution to such therapeutic quandaries mattered little, if at all, outside the confines of the consultation room. That time? That time it might make a hell of a lot of difference. The girl in question, Mallory, was still missing, and… I realized that I didn’t know how to finish that sentence, but also realized, belatedly, that it was my turn to finish some sentence. I said, “You know things that the police don’t know?”

He replied to my question with an apparent non sequitur. “I rent a garage for my Camaro. I’ve told you that. It’s why it’s still so cherry.”

“Yes, we’ve talked about the garage.” I had to try not to sound exasperated.

“Well, the garage is right next door to Mallory Miller’s house.”

He paused a long time, long enough so that I considered that it might, again, be my turn to speak. Although his news was interesting, I was getting ready to squander my move intentionally by saying something innocuous, like, “It is? Right next door?” But Bob wasn’t really done with his turn-he was the hesitant chess player who hadn’t quite lifted his fingertips from the piece he’d just slid across the board.

He said, “See, I know things. They say ‘write what you know.’ Well, I know about… this. At least a little.” He grimaced. Before I had a chance to respond and ask him about the reason for the grimace, he explained on his own by saying, “But I don’t want to be on TV.”

Although I’d not heard a direct answer to my earlier question-“You know things that the police don’t know?”-I was left with the impression that the answer was yes. Still, despite some concerted effort, I couldn’t get Bob to say another word about Mallory that day. My intuition told me that his provocative tease about the missing girl would lose its energy if a long weekend intervened. I said, “Let’s continue this tomorrow.”

“What?”

“This seems important. Can you come back tomorrow for another session?”

“Because of her?”

“Because it seems like a good idea. To me.” What I didn’t say was that scheduling three appointments with a schizoid personality in the same week was a clinical strategy that bordered on the absurd.

“I can’t afford it.”

“I’ll work with you on that.”

He didn’t agree; he acquiesced.

His departure at the end of his session was much less dramatic than his boom box entry had been. As he did sometimes, he asked for permission to leave using the French door that led directly outside from the back of my office. The alternative route-returning down the hallway that my office shared with Diane’s and then out through the waiting room-brought with it the risk for Bob of confronting another human being, an option that, on most days, he was unlikely to choose. I assented to his request, of course, and he grabbed his things and walked into the cold without a thank-you or a good-bye or a see-you-tomorrow.

I kept my eyes on him until he’d traversed the small backyard of the old house, scissored his way over the poor excuse for a fence on the south side of the property, and begun to close in on the distant sidewalk along Canyon Boulevard.

As I watched him trail away, I belatedly wondered whether I should have pressed him harder about Mallory and what he knew. But the truth was that at that moment, were I a betting man, I would have wagered that Bob’s knowledge of Mallory was something that approached delusion.

The conclusion saddened me. Regardless, I’d know more soon enough.

My last clinical appointment of the year was going to be the next day, with Bob Brandt.