Tracking Time

Three

Dr. Maslow Atkins was due at Dr. Jason Frank's office for a supervisory session at eight-fifteen to discuss Allegra Caldera. As Jason waited for him, he couldn't help feeling just a touch manipulated by the younger doctor's urgent request for extra time that evening-not tomorrow or some other more convenient date. Jason did not get paid for supervising analytic candidates, nor for any of the teaching he did, but he rarely thought about that. His problem these days was stamina. He'd already been exhausted in the late afternoon when he agreed to extend his working day another half hour, and Jason wasn't taking fatigue as easily these days as he used to.

A year ago Jason Frank had reached his thirty-ninth birthday determined to devote his life to his patients, his teaching, his myriad speaking engagements, books, and articles, and whatever free moments he had left, to his actress wife, Emma Chapman. But now he was over forty and the birth of his daughter, April, had changed his priorities.

Tuesday was always Jason's longest day. Since seven a.m., he'd seen ten patients. The difference the baby made to his life was in what he did between and around them. Previously, he'd spent his fifteen minutes between patients opening his mail, returning phone calls, and fiddling with his clocks. Jason had an antique clock collection that measured time in a bunch of quirky and inventive ways and that required his constant attention. Other men loved cars, gadgets of all kinds, stereo equipment, big-screen TVs, sports. Jason was fascinated by time, the completely neutral force that worked for both good and evil. Without time there could be no change in the universe, no seasons or life cycles of any species, no growth of babies to adulthood. Time was many other things to humans, too. It was the good medicine that healed many wounds, and it was the poison that deepened others. Time's effect on a devastating blow to the ego could turn a person into a victim forever, or alternatively, a sadist, even a killer.

Mediating time's impact on the psyche was a big part of his job as a doctor. Jason's own preoccupation had been to create a diverse collection of mechanical clocks, all over a hundred years old, that accurately exhibited time's advance. His goal was to coax them to tick more or less together, neither gaining nor losing minutes as the day progressed. With a host of different movements, however, the clocks did not make uniformity of measurement an easy task.

Since the baby's arrival, Jason had allowed many previously important activities to lapse, including the constant winding of his thirty-three clocks. For him, it could be said that although time was marching on, it was no longer measured by the sweep of a pendulum, but rather by the feeding times, the developmental milestones of his child. That day, during his lunch break, he'd run three miles (instead of his previous five) and spent the gained time with Emma and April, who was now nearly six months old and vocalizing freely for her besotted psychoanalyst father.

Jason's office was two rooms that he'd separated from his apartment years ago. Before the arrival of the baby, he'd rarely gone home during the day. Now he moved back and forth between the spaces almost on an hourly basis.

On Tuesday evening, after his last patient left, he picked up his messages. Two were cancellations for tomorrow and one was a request to speak in California in March. When he was finished rescheduling the appointments, he glanced at the row of clocks on the bookcase and realized that Maslow was late. He dialed home to tell Emma.

"Hi, sweetheart, when do you want to eat?" she asked when she heard his voice.

"I'm sorry, honey. I'm a little hung up here. You go ahead without me," he replied.

"I'll wait for you," she promised.

"I may be an hour."

"I'll wait."

"Up to you. How's the baby?"

"Sleeping." Emma yawned, and Jason's heart swelled. "I love you," he murmured.

"Love you, too."

He hung up, sighing. He was tired, and anxious about a number of things, but life was good. All he needed was a nice dinner, a glass of wine. And to go to bed soon with his beautiful wife. The very last thing he wanted was to spend another half an hour or so dissecting Maslow's difficult patient session.

Four of Jason's own ten patient sessions that day had been painful. Marshal, a physician with AIDS, said he constantly fantasized flying to a splendid vacation spot to end his life there. Jason didn't think he meant it as a threat, but he was left with a nagging doubt. Daisy, a borderline personality he'd been struggling with for years, came in this morning claiming she'd been raped at a fraternity party on Long Island the previous weekend and now wanted to drop out of school for the fourth time. Then, Jason had visited Willis in the hospital where he was on suicide watch after his estranged wife got a court order to keep him away from her and the children. Last Friday Willis had attempted to gas himself with car exhaust in the family garage. The fourth case was Alicia, a former tennis prodigy managed by her father. Her father had given her a dog as a reward for her athletic talent when she was ten. He'd allowed her to pet and play with the animal only when she was playing well. In a rage, after Alicia lost a crucial juniors match just before her eleventh birthday, he'd given the dog to the ASPCA, where it was put to sleep. At the present time, Alicia was almost eighteen, weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, and for the very first time was seeking help, against her parents' clearly stated wishes.

Jason had no doubt that he would be brooding for some time about the things these patients had said to him and he had said to them. Still, having to address the therapeutic skills, or lack thereof, of the spectacularly insecure Maslow Atkins was a duty he would not dream of shirking. Psychotherapy was a skill that had to be rigorously taught, one on one, by master to beginner.

At a quarter to nine, Jason's mood changed from impatience to alarm. It happened like the audible click in many of his clocks when the second hand advanced to the half hour, just a beat before the peal of the chime. He experienced a cold shiver and felt something was wrong. Maslow was compulsive about time. He was always five minutes early. Jason knew how many minutes Maslow was early because he could hear the hinges on the door squeal each time someone came or went from his waiting room.

He frowned at the phone. As he did so, he realized that the two skeleton clocks on his desk, always four minutes apart, had both stopped at the same time. Spooky. Jason didn't like spooky. He wondered if Maslow could possibly have gone out to dinner and forgotten the appointment. He picked up the phone and dialed Maslow's number. It rang six times before the answering machine picked up. Jason hung up without leaving a message and sighed again. He reached for the knot in his tie, pulled it loose, and stuffed it in his pocket. Uneasy, he wound and reset the two clocks on his desk. Then he dialed Maslow's number again, and this time he left a message. When a very compulsive person like Maslow wasn't where he was supposed to be and didn't call, something was wrong.

Jason had worked with the police often enough now to know how they thought about this kind of thing, how they acted when something turned up funny. Cops didn't wait overnight to see how a suspicious circumstance sorted itself out. They acted on the first shiver. Jason realized that in this particular situation he was thinking like a cop and fearing the worst. But he reminded himself that he wasn't a cop, so he left a note for Maslow on his office door and went home to Emma for dinner. The next morning the note was still there.