Natural speed please.
In the year he fully expected to die, he spent the majority of his fifty-third birthday as he did
most other days, listening to people complain about their mothers. Thoughtless mothers, cruel
mothers, sexually provocative mothers. Dead mothers who remained alive in their children’s minds.
Living mothers, whom their children wanted to kill. Mr. Bishop, in particular, along with Miss Levy
and the genuinely unlucky Roger Zimmerman, who shared his Upper West Side apartment and it
seemed the entirety of both his waking life and his vivid dreams with a hypochondriac, manipulative,
shrewish woman who seemed dedicated to nothing less than ruining her only child’s every meager
effort at independence-all of them used the entirety of their hours that day to effuse bitter vitriol about
the women who had brought them into this world.
He listened quietly to great surges of murderous hatred, only occasionally interjecting the most
modest of benign comments, never once interrupting the anger that spewed forth from the couch, all
the time wishing that just one of his patients would take a deep breath and step back from their rage
for an instant and see it for what it truly was: fury with themselves. He knew, through experience and
training, that eventually, after years of talking bitterly in the oddly detached world of the analyst’s
office, all of them, even poor, desperate, and crippled Roger Zimmerman, would reach that
understanding themselves.
Still, the occasion of his birthday, which reminded him most directly of his own mortality, made
him wonder whether he would have enough time remaining to see any of them through to that moment
of acceptance which is the analyst’s eureka. His own father had died shortly after he reached his fiftythird
year, heart weakened through years of chain smoking and stress, a fact that he knew lurked
subtly and malevolently beneath his consciousness. So, as the unpleasant Roger Zimmerman moaned
and whined his way through the final few minutes of the last session of the day, he was slightly
distracted, and not paying the complete attention he should have been when he heard the faint triple
buzz of the bell he’d installed in his waiting room.
The bell was his standard signal that a patient had arrived. Every new client was told prior to
their first session that upon entry, they were to produce two short rings, in quick succession, followed
by a third, longer peal. This was to differentiate the ring from any tradesman, meter reader, neighbor,
or delivery service that might have arrived at his door.
Without shifting position, he glanced over at his daybook, next to the clock he kept on the small
table behind the patient’s head, out of their sight. The six p.m. entry was blank. The clock face read
twelve minutes to six, and Roger Zimmerman seemed to stiffen in his position on the couch.
“I thought I was the last every day.”
He did not respond.
“No one has ever come in after me, at least not that I can remember. Not once. Have you changed
your schedule around without telling me?”
Again, he did not reply.
“I don’t like the idea that someone comes after me,” Zimmerman said decisively. “I want to be
last.”
“Why do you think you feel that way?” he finally questioned.
“In its own special way, last is the same as first,” Zimmerman answered with a harshness of tone
that implied that any idiot would have seen the same.
He nodded. Zimmerman had made an intriguing and accurate observation. But, as the poor fellow
seemed forever doomed to do, he had made it in the session’s final moment. Not at the start, where
they might have managed some profitable discussion over the remaining fifty minutes. “Try to bring
that thought with you tomorrow,” he said. “We could begin there. I’m afraid our time is up for today.”
