The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken Page B

the fabric—those are the suspect ones.
    The doctor left. Later, there would be lunch, followed by a trip to the bathroom accompanied by an orderly—a brief yet intoxicating glimpse of the world beyond my room. But right now there was the bed, the white walls, the window, and myself. In the solitude of it all, my mind spun back. Faces of old patients from years ago returned to me, so clearly, and I wondered what had happened to them, how they’d fared in life, following my intervention. Why had I so rarely had the curiosity to find out? I recalled one of the few instances when I had indeed tried to follow up. A man in his fifties, excessively polite, who’d spent years working on intricate ink drawings of an imaginary city. They had a peculiar, ghostly quality, and he’d claimed that the images came to him in visions. I’d asked him where he thought the city was, and he’d said he didn’t know, but that he imagined it was somewhere cold, and in Europe. He’d believed that he had a telepathic link with a person in this cold, European city. His theory had been that as he was having his visions, this other person would in turn be having visions of New York, seeing the city through his eyes. They would be mirroring each other.
    Then one day a colleague who was originally from Sweden had come to see me. I had one of the drawings on my desk. “It’s Stockholm,” he’d said, and he’d pointed out landmarks he recognized. “And yet this building here, I remember it only as a boy. It was pulled down at least twenty years ago.” For a few weeks, I’d become obsessed with this patient. I’d ascertained that he had no family connections with Sweden. That he had never been to Stockholm, had in fact never been out of the United States. I’d gone to the New York Public Library, taken out illustrated books on Stockholm, identified for myself various buildings in the drawings, mapped them out topersuade myself that there was a common viewpoint from which they’d all been executed. I’d entertained all sorts of increasingly far-fetched ideas about my patient and where the drawings had come from, ideas that went beyond mere psychiatry. I’d gotten myself in too deep: I was beginning to buy into my patient’s story.
    Eventually I’d managed to pull out of it, pull back. It had occurred to me that if I had been able to go to the library and look up images of Stockholm, then so had my patient, and that I needed no other explanation than that. The rest really was psychiatry. It was simply a question of whether my patient was a charlatan, or whether he actually was deluded, and if so, what to do about it. All this had struck me in a second, with the force of revelation.
    I’d changed tack with my patient. Up until then, I’d been going along with him. I’d allowed him to tell his story without contradicting him, without passing judgment, without letting him know what I thought of it. Now I’d felt the time had come to take a more aggressive stance. As my secretary had shown him into my office, I’d scattered my desk with the pictures he’d drawn, together with some illustrated books on Stockholm, open on panoramic city views. I’d wordlessly pointed to various illustrations that were evidently models for his drawings.
    “Amazing, amazing,” he’d muttered under his breath.
    “What’s amazing? You’ve simply copied out these photographs, haven’t you? Admit it!”
    He would admit nothing. All he’d do was continue to shake his head and mutter, “Amazing!” A frustration rose in me; I’d abruptly stood up and berated him: “You know you copied these photographs! Admit it to me now! If you don’t admit it, there’ll be trouble!” My patient had looked up at me in fear and surprise, then clammed right up. I knew I wouldn’t get anything more out of him that session, so I’d eventually calleda halt twenty minutes early. All week, my failure had gnawed at me. It had been a silly idea to confront him like