He yawned as he glanced at the clock; it was already ten-thirty. He was extremely tired—his calves were already painful and short, intense bursts of pain shot up and down his back.
With a foreign degree in Clinical Psychology, he had never imagined he would be listening to endless rants of bored housewives, suspicious husbands, and rebellious teenagers. He’d always believed that his contribution to the discipline would be academic; he’d thought that he would open up new fields in this particular area.
He stepped out of the office for a few minutes and waved to the orderlies—one of the attendants gave him a small smile, and he returned it with some hesitation. He never comprehended what these people were thinking. Their ‘cognitions’ remained forever hidden from him. The thought evoked a small smile on his lips, and he returned to the office with his third cup of tea.
He had never seen an apparition (or hallucination) in his life, but when he reentered his office—just after he had crossed the threshold, he was startled by the woman sitting on one of the seats next to his desk. The odd thing was he had not seen anyone in the corridor.
“Hello?” he said, trying to sound professional.
He noticed his voice was shaking a little.
The woman said nothing, and what a strange woman she was: dirty, dark hair covered her face so that he could not make out her features, and she was dressed in soiled old clothes that really reeked. He was certain that the guards at the main entrance would have never permitted her to enter. Perhaps she had eluded the guards at the gate and entered the building somehow.
He spun and was just about to call one of the orderlies to his aid when his eyes fell upon the seat again. There was no one in the office, and the seat remained vacant. What was going on?
He felt his limbs shaking, and there was a peculiar feeling in his chest. Was it a heart attack? Was he about to die in his office all alone? Or did the hallucination signal his descent into the dark abysses of schizophrenia?
He was a psychologist, for God’s sake—how ironic it would be if he descended into one of his clients with abnormal phobias or other various disorders.
He decided to exit his office as calmly as he could without revealing the sudden embarrassing image he had seen to anyone—he was convinced now it had been nothing more than a mental image. Ghosts did not exist in real life—there was no scientific evidence to prove it.
Trying to act as calmly as he could, with the plastic cup of tea in one hand, he grabbed his briefcase and was just about to leave the room when it happened again: the strange woman with thick black hair that covered her face appeared again. This time she loomed silently in the corner of the room, watching him with her hidden eyes. She lunged in his direction, and the good psychologist actually screamed.
He screamed again and stumbled for the door.
He twisted the doorknob and realized that it was locked. He kept screaming until the orderlies came running.
But the room was changing, and it seemed he had been under some delusion: there was no table, only a bed, bare and grey, and the walls of the room were completely white.
* * *
The orderlies outside the patient’s room shrugged.
“It’s one of his episodes again,” said Garber with a quick smile to his partner. “He imagines that he is a psychologist and is leaving his office.”
“Why is he screaming?”
“He keeps seeing her—the woman he killed in an accident.”
“No…”
“Yes,” said Garber quietly. “He was a psychologist once—a pretty distinguished one too—a PhD from Germany and an American Master’s. When he was leaving his office, for the last time ever, he accidentally hit a woman on his way home. Wanting to hide his crime, he dumped her body in a ditch and went home. He has never been the same since.”
“Sad,” said the smaller orderly. “Coffee?”
“Yes. Just give me a minute to administer a dose of Xanax to the madman.”
“Does this happen every day?”
“Not every day—just on Wednesdays—I suppose that’s when he killed her.”
