Tracking Time

Sixteen

Before his class Jason ran over to Maslow's office to leave a note on his door telling his patients he wouldn't be in that day and to call Dr. Frank. He also had some information on Maslow Atkins-his number at work, his parents' home number, his father's office number. He knew Maslow's analyst, an M.D. called Bernie Zeiss. Bernie and Jason served on several committees together at the Institute. Jason thought of Bernie as a plodding, rule-following prig of the old school who obstructed every attempt at modernizing the field of psychoanalysis. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to the man about sensitive issues that involved confidentiality. To get anywhere with Bernie he was going to have to lie. If he lied, he might get in trouble. He decided to risk it.

After teaching his psychiatric residents at the hospital, which was about a half mile north of his Riverside Drive apartment, Jason walked home. Several taxis slowed as they neared him, but for once he didn't flag them down. He needed a few minutes to rethink the situation, and even more, he needed a break outside in the fresh air. As he walked, he was grateful for the caress on his face of the light breeze off the Hudson River and the familiar view of the New Jersey skyline. On this Wednesday in early September the trees on the Palisades were green, and there were still sailboats scooting around on the water. He had the terrible foreboding that big trouble was coming. Without realizing it, he picked up his pace. He was jogging by the time he turned the corner on his block. A large blank-faced doorman he hadn't seen before opened the heavy wrought-iron and glass doors of his prewar building and stood in his path.

"Can I help you?" he asked, indicating the sign that said all visitors had to be announced.

"It's okay. I'm Dr. Frank. I live here."

"Oh, okay. I'm George."

"Hi, George."

Jason didn't have time for more pleasantries. He had twenty minutes before his next patient and a lot to do. He nodded and rushed to the elevator, which was visible in an old-fashioned cage, was over eighty years old, and broke down all the time. Jason could see its bottom all the way at the top of the building. The stairway circled the cage. Jason took it two steps at a time. His stomach rumbled as he ran up the five flights, but he didn't want to think about the comfort of food.

In his office, his phone told him he had nine messages. His answering machine drove him nuts. Many people left extremely long messages about absolutely nothing. Sometimes it took fifteen minutes to get through them. He skipped through this group quickly. His stomach rumbled. There was no message from Maslow, but he hadn't expected one. He punched out the number of Manhattan East, where Maslow worked as a staff psychiatrist thirty hours a week. It took a while to locate Dr. Ira Kiln, who had employed him there.

"Oh, Maslow is turning out very well. He's an excellent doctor," Dr. Kiln assured Jason when he finally got him on the phone.

"Yes, I know-"

"And a wonderful young man-very caring and easy to work with." Dr. Kiln went on at some length, frustrating Jason's effort to inform him that he was not calling for a reference.

"I know he's a first-year psychoanalytic candidate at your Institute. He talks about you often, and-"

"Did you happen to see him last night?"

Dr. Kiln stopped short. "No, Maslow doesn't come in on Tuesdays. What's this about?"

"Thank you so much. I really appreciate your help."

"What's this about?" Dr. Kiln asked again.

"Oh, nothing. I'm just trying to locate him, and I didn't have his schedule."

Jason sighed and called Bernie. Naturally, Bernie's machine picked up. Jason told Bernie's voice mail he needed to talk to him about a matter of extreme urgency, gave his number, and hung up. He checked his watch. He had seven minutes left. He dialed Maslow's parents' home number. A woman answered on the second ring.

"Hello, this is Dr. Jason Frank," Jason began.

"How do you do, Dr. Frank?" The woman had a soft, hesitant voice.

"Is this Mrs. Atkins?" Jason asked.

"Yes."

"I'm one of your son's teachers at the Institute. I'm trying to locate Maslow-"

"My husband isn't here right now. You can reach him in his office some time after noon."

"I'm sure you can help me. Do you know where Maslow is?"

"No idea, he travels a great deal for his company. His secretary will know. She has his schedule."

"We're having a little miscommunication. I'm not talking about your husband. I'm talking about your son, Maslow. Do you know where I might find him!"

"He's very busy, too."

"I know he is. That may be the reason I'm having difficulty locating him. When did you speak to him last?"

"Let's see, what day is it?"

"Wednesday."

"I think we spoke with him last Sunday-or maybe it was the Sunday before…" The soft voice trailed off.

"You didn't talk to him last night or this morning by any chance?"

"Oh no, he never calls when he's traveling."

"Maslow is out of town?" Jason was puzzled.

"Really? Where is he?" Mrs. Atkins asked.

Jason chewed on his lip. The woman was on another planet. He spoke patiently. "As far as I know Maslow is right here in the city, and I'm trying to reach him, not his father."

"Well, his father is more likely to know where he is than I am. No one tells me anything. Do you want his number at the office?"

Jason had Jerome Atkins's number at work but he said, "Yes, thank you," and wrote it down a second time.

The clock on his desk told him he had four minutes left. Jason noticed that the two numbers he had for Jerome Atkins were different. He figured one must be the company number and the other his private line. Jason dialed the one his wife gave him.

"Mr. Atkins's office."

"Yes, this is Dr. Jason Frank calling. I'm a colleague of Mr. Atkins's son, Maslow, and I need to talk to him. Is Mr. Atkins available?" Jason shifted his gaze from the clock on his desk to the six valuable skeleton clocks on his bookcase. He watched their pendulums swing back and forth, ticking off the precious seconds until his next patient was due. He shook his foot with impatience.

"No, Mr. Atkins is out to lunch. Can I give him the message?"

"Yes. Would you tell him Dr. Frank called, and it's a matter of some urgency." Jason gave her the number and hung up.

His phone rang. He grabbed it on the first ring.

"Jason, this is Bernie Zeiss."

"Oh, Bernie, thanks for getting back to me so soon."

"What's up?"

"Look, to make a long story short, Maslow Atkins is missing and I need some information about him."

"Oh, I'm a nonreporting analyst at the Institute. You know I can't tell you anything without talking first with the head of the educational committee-"

"Bernie, just listen for a second. I know it's highly unusual to call an analyst about a patient, but Maslow is a student of the Institute, he's part of our family, and he may be in trouble. We have to-"

"Well, I can put in a call to Ted right away. He'll put the question to the committee, and I'll get back to you tonight after the scientific meeting."

"Bernie, this isn't the program committee where we argue over whether we're going to accept a paper no one will come to hear. A man's life may be at stake here. There's not time to check with Ted Tushy. You understand?"

"What do you have to do with this, Jason?" Bernie asked, suddenly suspicious.

"The police are looking for Maslow. If you don't talk to me, Bernie, you'll have to talk with them." Jason tried to be patient.

"Jason? What has happened?"

"I don't have time to go into it. There are police and tracking dogs searching for Maslow in Central Park. I need information right now."

"Well, what do you need to know?" Bernie said hesitantly.

"Was Maslow involved in anything illegal?"

"What? No, no. Of course not!" Bernie sounded shocked. He recovered quickly. "Maslow was a very fine young man. Obsessional with marked sexual inhibitions. We were making very fine progress."

Jason's stomach growled.

"He spent an excessive amount of time studying and exercising, a good boy. He was terrified of his sexuality.

But we were making good progress. Excellent progress." Bernie clicked his tongue, thinking about it. "You know, last week he had a date, his first in a year. He met a girl in the Institute library, a graduate student at Columbia. A fine girl. It didn't go as well as I'd hoped. Unfortunately, her specialty is the representation of the Virgin Mary in the iconography of the Roman Catholic Church. For Maslow, it was as if she herself were a Madonna. He tended to view women as either asexual idealized madonnas or as whores."

That got Jason's attention. "Was there a whore?"

"He did have this analytic patient, the borderline hysteric you were supervising him on. He was troubled by the treatment. He saw her as a wounded bird to be rescued. She was obsessed with him. He thought he saw her on the street, following him. I wasn't concerned about his competence. I felt his anxiety was induced by her intense transference. You were very helpful to him, but of course he felt he couldn't be completely honest about it with you. He was worried that his feelings for his patient were not appropriate and were making her worse. She's a self-mutilator and he feared suicide. My own view is that Maslow had a patient who was trying to get him to enact the overly intimate relationship she had with her father, and it made him nuts as he tried to resist."

It made sense. Jason knew that Maslow's patient had been abused by her father and figured out that she was trying to embroil her young analyst in some kind of reenactment.

"Working, working, run, run, run. That was Maslow. He wanted to keep his feelings at bay," Bernie was saying. "But around this patient, he had uncanny experiences."

"What kind?"

"He thought he saw her on the street. He heard her call his name or thought he saw her. She told him stories that had eerie resemblances to things in his own life. Things that no one else knew. He wondered if she was doing research on him, if she followed him. I told him we've all had experiences where a patient has seemingly supernatural intuitive knowledge. Freud himself believed in telepathy. It doesn't mean that the patient is doing research. Maslow was having difficulty accepting that such feelings are natural for him to have with such an ill patient."

Jason noted that for someone who had been so reticent about confidentiality, Bernie was now spilling out information at a rate of more density that he had in thirty years of Institute meetings, and also that he was talking about Maslow in the past tense. Bernie couldn't be stopped. Now he was Sherlock Holmes.

"But you know, last week he looked up, saw this Virgin Mary girl across the table in the library. They started talking and he asked her out for dinner. It started out well. They were both bright, intellectual, attractive, and the conversation was easy. He asked her about her work. She had documented anti-female bias in the depiction of the Madonna in the church of San Paolo de Tey. Maslow was impressed. She asked him about his work. She was very interested in the concept of penis envy, and it gave him a chance to expound. Then she turned on him, told him that psychoanalysis is phallocentric and a central tenet of the male hegemony. In other words, the date didn't go well. I'm worried about this Virgin Mary girl. She had a lot of anger about this. She could be a latent psychopath who went after him."

"Unlikely," Jason said.

"Well, she hated psychoanalysis-you never know."

"What about homosexuality?" Jason asked.

"Oh, for him just admitting he had feelings for a girl was difficult enough. To help him get in touch with his unconscious homosexuality would have taken another twelve years." Bernie chuckled. "No, he liked girls."

Then his voice changed. "I've got to go. Now I'm going to need you to sign a release for this, Jason. You are to tell nobody. You understand, nobody! I broke analytic confidentiality for you. You have to sign a release."

"Yes, of course," Jason said, thinking Bernie should be so lucky. His stomach rumbled some more. Now he was really concerned. Forget the Virgin Mary, it was that patient contacting Maslow out of his office they had to worry about. They could have underestimated her pathology. Instead of a garden-variety hysteric, she could be a psychotic stalker. And they missed it. He was appalled. They'd been encouraging this boy like a lamb to keep treating the patient in analysis while he became more and more anxious. They missed it, both analyst and supervisor. They'd failed Maslow.

Jason knew he had to talk to this girl right away, but also that he had to go through the Institute to do it. Could he lie to Miss Vialo in the education office to get the patient's chart? His many clocks told him he had three minutes to his next patient, not enough time to start the process.

Jason's patient who was due now came from a mid-town office and was often late. His stomach growled louder, demanding fuel. He'd settle for a soda. Did he dare take a chance on running home for a minute to grab one? He didn't have a door leading directly from his inner office to his apartment. If he wanted to go home, he had to go out into the hall, dash to his front door, unlock it, and duck into the apartment, adrenaline racing with the fear of getting caught. If he were seen going next door, of course, his patient would know where he lived. It was bad enough when they caught sight of Emma. She was a movie star, and her appearance in the hall got them all excited. They wanted to know what she was like and if he knew her. It made him want to move to another planet.

Jason debated quickly: to slip out or not to slip out. Thirst won. The buzzer hadn't rung yet so he strode out into his waiting room. Then, stealthily, he opened the door to the hall. Empty. Good. Heart beating, he sprinted to his front door, opened it, fell in, and slammed it just as the elevator stopped on his floor. Inside the apartment the mail was still stacked on the hall table. In the kitchen Emma waved at him from her stool by the phone. Sounded like she was talking to her agent. Jason kissed her on the forehead, grabbed a diet ginger ale, and poked his head out the door. Damn. In the hallway, the thirty-two-year-old investment banker waiting there had an angry look on his face.

Jason gave the man a weak smile and broke his no food rule. "Hi, want a soda?"

Jergen Walsh put his index finger to his chin. "Do you have a Sprite?"

What did he think it was, a restaurant? "Sorry, no." Jason let him into the waiting room, then excused himself. He dashed into his office, closed the door, checked his machine to see if Jerome Atkins or Maslow Atkins had called. They hadn't. He went back to the waiting room door, opened it. "Please come in."

The young man came into the office, looked around suspiciously, then pointed at a plant in the corner. "What's that doing here?" he demanded.

"Is it a problem?" Jason asked. It was a very pretty geranium plant that Emma had given him.

"It's full of spores. I'm very allergic."

Jason was exhausted. He needed to call the Institute and talk to Miss Vialo. He didn't have time for psychosis. He took the time anyway. Not to deal with Jergen would have made him much worse. No matter what, Jason didn't want to fail anyone else today.