Three Moments of an Explosion (21 page)

For years I’ve been turning my thesis into a book, though Elliott, my therapist, thinks that I’m too busy
not-writing
it to write it.

“I don’t just mean you aren’t writing it,” he said to me recently. “Not-writing’s an activity that takes up a lot of your energy and time. At least as much as writing would. Do you think you’re invested in not-writing?”

Of course I’m sure there’s truth there, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I’m invested, yes, but in other things, and anyway I’ve been getting increasingly energized about the project again recently, as even he allows. I’m collecting and collating case studies. I’ve been enjoying thinking of pseudonyms for the patients, along the lines of Freud’s “Wolf Man.” In my notes, Annalise Sobel is AS, but in my head she’s Anguished Scholar.

It was my eighth session with Annalise. If I don’t have a pretty clear idea of what’s going on by session five, I’m probably not the right fit for a patient. With Annalise, I was clear.

She was not hyper or agitated as I’ve sometimes seen her. She was flat. I’d ask questions and she’d answer briefly, dutifully, without engagement. I was concerned but not surprised: it had been obvious enough that she was melting down that I’d recently suggested she come in more than once a week. “We can work out the financial stuff later,” I’d said, hoping she’d take the hint and let me do an extra session or two without charge.

Annalise is forty-four, single, with many friends, well-liked, sociable, and cripplingly, clandestinely anxious. She’s a linguist and a translator (I see her byline sometimes). Both her parents died a few years ago, within twelve months of each other, leaving a lot of stuff not dealt with. It was her mother with whom Annalise had been originally traumatically imbricated—gender notwithstanding, and without implying physical abuse, she’d been the “little husband.” She had for years been reenacting that model in her romantic and her overinvested social relationships.

She’s been working hard. Annalise is what Afnik calls an “inverted narcissist,” though I prefer the term “occult narcissist,” and I differ from those who see the condition as synonymous with covert narcissism: related, maybe, but not the same. She’s a compulsive caregiver, driven, full of deep need for, but discombobulated by, attention or praise. She has the fearful, resentful messianism of the child who’s been trained into a duty of caretaking she can’t fulfill. Annalise’s fantasies involve disappearance. She catastrophises all the time, and makes things worse than they need to be by doing so. She fretfully attempts, and fails, to negotiate dreaded outcomes.

A lot of OCD dreaded outcomes are highly specific: if I don’t wash my hands five times, my children will die, and so on. Annalise’s are powerful, but nebulous. She’s just full of dread.

She knows most of this, to some extent, and she knows she’s depressed, but if knowing the problem was the solution, most patients wouldn’t need us at all. I’ve been impressed with how she’s tried to step up, her drive to change. I’m committed to helping her break her dynamics.

“I don’t even really feel trapped,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t sound melodramatic or self-pitying. It’s not that I don’t see any way out, exactly—it’s that I feel like there’s no point looking for one.”

“Where are you feeling this in your body?” I said. I could see how constricted her chest was. “I want you to breathe deeply for me.”

“I’ve been trying some of the techniques we discussed,” she said. “With Sandra.”

“And?”

“And I think I’m doing OK for a while, but then …” She shook her head and her voice petered out.

Sandra was, or had been, a friend. She’d been part Annalise’s circle for a while, was a little younger, a financial analyst, driven and ambitious. She was also a veteran narcissist.

Over some months, she and Annalise had got closer, until Annalise had, with hard-won instincts, started to become aware that the relationship was provoking mostly unease and guilt in her. That the dynamic was dysfunctional. She’d been trying to pull back. Sandra, sensing this, had, in turn, ramped up the intensity, and the effective shame and guilt transference that characterized her behavior.

Sandra made sure Annalise—and others—knew she considered Annalise to be letting her down, or worse.

Annalise had done her best to negotiate this terrain, but she was floundering, and struggling with her own tendencies to shame. She couldn’t put the situation out of her mind. Her anxiety, and what might or might not be paranoia, was growing to disabling levels, keeping up with the vituperation. Annalise couldn’t shake her sense that gossip was growing against her, that she was picking up whispers among her friends to the effect that she had been manipulative—even abusive—to Sandra. She’d even found an anonymous post on a forum linked to her university, that, while it didn’t use names, she was convinced was about her, accusing her of cruelty, treachery, and so on.

I pointed out that even if she was right about the existence, target, and source of these attacks (I suspected she was), few would take such claims at face value, that their traction would be negligible, that they would rebound worse on anyone propagating them than on Annalise. But even if she agreed with that reading, Annalise was tipping into a crippling—suicidal—anxiety.

She was facing one of the key issues of psychodynamics. Our routines of behavior and affect of course operate through our cognition and emotion—but they also externalize. This is a limitation of therapy that focuses too narrowly and exclusively—you could say hermetically—on the patient’s psyche. If patients have been trained into agonizing at being inappropriately responsible for others, say, they might be straining to break that dynamic but until they do, until they succeed, they’ll also compulsively seek out resentful narcissists. Who will hunt them, too, as an externalization of
their
issues. They’ll enter a dance, a spiral that feeds each other’s self-destruction.

The issues are not, in other words, all in a person’s head.

“You remember the diagram I showed you?” I said. “This is ‘love-addiction.’ You’re the object, right now. Of course you should be as responsible as you can for your behavior—considerate and mindful, and so on, taking responsibility when you mess up—but you can’t be responsible for someone else’s happiness. What she’s doing, in the jargon, we’d call ‘stowing away.’

“She’s afraid to take responsibility for her own actions and emotions. She resents her own agency. So she constructs situations in which she can tell herself she has none.

“She’s inserted herself into your dynamics because they’re a good fit for hers. That way she gets to be furious with
you
about where
she’s
going. She’s a stowaway. She got into your psyche, then blames you for the route.”

I don’t like labels, but it’s fair to say that my theory and practice broadly come under the small umbrella of what’s called TVT: traumatic vector therapy. It’s unabashedly pragmatic and eclectic. We draw on post-induction therapy, Gestalt, psychoanalysis, Adler (negatively), Kohut, Klein, whatever works. TVT once got described as “a homeopathy of Laing,” on the grounds that we take the idea from anti-psychiatry that dysfunction is a rational response to a pathological world, then dilute the insight until it’s all gone—then try to use it. Which, to be fair, is witty.

“She’s—are you saying it’s because of her that I feel—” Annalise said.

“It’s never that simple,” I said. “She’s not the
cause
. What she is is a
vector
.”

“What do I do?” Annalise’s voice didn’t break. We talked strategies again. I was careful to tell her I knew she was doing everything she reasonably could.

I had an appointment with Elliott, but I was agitated, thinking about Annalise, and feeling that I really needed to do some work that evening. I called him to postpone: I was relieved it went to voice mail. I spent an hour and a half at the gym, doing core, upper body, a hard treadmill session. I was near my PB over six miles.

It’s not obligatory for a therapist to be in therapy, not in New York State, but a lot of us are. Particularly among TVT practitioners, it’s considered a
sine qua non
. We take on a lot of our patients’ stress, and we need to talk to someone who understands.

At home I showered and listened to my messages. Two friends, suggesting a drink, a call from David.

He’s an architect. We met through a mutual acquaintance. We’ve been seeing each other, on and off, for a year. He’s keen to move in—my apartment is nicer than his. I’ve told him I need some time.

By the time I’d eaten it was past seven. I considered an early night, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I needed to work. I texted Annalise to check in on her. She replied that she was staying with her sister, which relieved me.

I sat on my sofa, pulled a couple of books off my shelves, and opened my laptop to do some research.

It was a little after 2 a.m. when I scaled the outside of a brownstone in Bushwick. I climbed the first two floors by the downpipe, brachiating silently up the rusting gutter to the fire escape.

A few lights were on in the houses around me but no one was visible. I was all in black with my mask down anyway, and I know how to stay still. I straightened the pack on my back, balanced on the stair railings and jumped up to get a grip on the building rim. I do a lot of finger chin-ups: from there it was pretty simple to get onto the roof.

I ran fast and silently the length of it and made the alley jump. I’d done recon: this was the best way to get where I was going. I took cover behind the wall at the roof’s edge, opened my hockey bag and got my equipment ready.

I use a 22” Pro-Series 2000 PHL with a Leupold VX-3 scope and a three-round magazine. My colleagues can keep their HK417s and M98s: we’re not in downtown Basra. And sure, the 2000 has a kick. But we work in modern cities, not battlefield conditions. The PHL has a ½ MOA, and it comes in at less than 6.5 pounds, which for situations like this one, involving climbing and running, is worth a lot.

I’d considered a VSS Vintorez, for the silencer, but honestly, if you take one shot, most people roll over in their sleep and think an engine’s backfired. If you have to take more than one shot, maybe you shouldn’t be a therapist.

There are reports of a new model out of Iran, the Siyavash, supposedly ultra-lightweight. I’m officially interested.

The light I was looking for, on the first floor of the building opposite, was on. Judging from time stamps on the messages Annalise showed me, Sandra often wrote in the small hours. I braced the barrel on its stand and took a crouching position, sighted through the glass.

A small tidy living room lit by a TV I couldn’t see. Many books, a table with the remains of a meal on it. No people. I waited.

As therapists, the emotional welfare of our patients is our highest priority. Our job is to actualize mindfulness, maximize emotional welfare, help break compulsive and harmful dynamics, and to eradicate vectors of trauma.

As a TVT practitioner, I’m versed in detective techniques. I’d never asked Annalise any direct questions about Sandra. She’d never even mentioned her full name. Based on what little she had said, though, it hadn’t been difficult, with some careful search-strings and phone calls, to ascertain her details, her address, enough about her life to make a plan.

Most of the time what our patients need is a compassionate, rigorous, sympathetic interlocutor. Sometimes the externalized trauma-vectors in dysfunctional interpersonal codependent psychodynamics are powerful enough that more robust therapeutic intervention is necessary. I checked my ammunition.

It’s often parents and partners, but not always. I’ve intervened with teachers, friends, bosses, subordinates, exes, and stalking strangers. In an ideal world, I’d have had longer to plan. It makes things easier. A spring-loaded blade on a timer switch by the cables under a car, and the love-avoiding conduit for inadequacy in my patient Duane B had been lost in an accident.
While no one else was on the road,
let me add: I’ve never had any collateral damage. The father whose undermining of my patient Vince R kept him in a state of depression and anxiety died in what appeared to be a mugging gone wrong (I study Muay Thai). The guy still punishing his ex for his failure to be responsible for him half a decade on, skillfully feeding his anhedonia, had a tragic allergic reaction (this is why research is so important: I could have wasted time with potassium, cyanide, and so on, but it merely involved some judiciously placed peanut butter). Occasionally, though, therapy might be required on very little notice.

Sandra entered the room. She held her laptop in one hand, a glass of wine in the other. She wore a dressing gown and expensive glasses. She was tall and curved, with long blond hair, striking and intense-looking. She sat at the table, squinted at her screen.

I adjusted for wind. I breathed out, steadied my hand.

As I started to tighten my finger, something shook against me.

I jerked, released my grip on my weapon and pulled my hands back, blinking. Being startled like that, in that moment, it would take almost nothing, the tiniest movement, to fire at the wrong instant, or to twitch the barrel, and then there’d have been a whole situation.

It was my phone. A text from Elliott, rescheduling. Another night owl, clearly. I was angry with myself for not turning vibrate mode off during a session. It was unprofessional. I shut the phone down and shook my head. At least I hadn’t left the ringer on.

I rearranged myself and my rifle, looked back through the scope. Sandra was typing. I focused again. Got her in my crosshairs.

I squeezed the trigger.

The shot punched through the window and took out the back of her head. She went face down hard onto her keyboard.

I reloaded and waited and held my breath. Long seconds passed and nothing happened.

I was pleased. Annalise had made a real breakthrough.

I got home at about 6 a.m. When I’d been confident I wouldn’t be interrupted, I’d descended, forced entry and removed the body and whatever money and valuables I could quickly find (as per the ethics of TVT practice, I would only keep money to cover my costs for the evening—everything else I would dump). To any detective with time and energy, this would look like a very peculiar robbery, but a lot of detectives don’t have time or energy. And my patients, of course, know nothing about these radical interventions.