Chase was silent again.
Fauvel continued: “Perhaps when you chanced upon that scene in the park on Kanackaway, you recognized another opportunity to punish yourself. You must have realized that there was a strong possibility you’d be hurt or killed, and you must have subconsciously anticipated your death agreeably enough.”
“You’re wrong,” Chase said.
Fauvel was silent.
“You’re wrong,” Chase repeated.
“Probably not,” Fauvel said with a hint of impatience, and he used a direct stare to try to make Chase uncomfortable.
“It wasn’t like that at all. I had thirty pounds on him, and I knew what I was doing. He was an amateur. He had no hope of really hurting me.”
Fauvel said nothing.
Finally Chase said, “Sorry.”
Fauvel smiled. “Well, you aren’t a psychiatrist, so we can’t expect you to see into it so clearly. You aren’t detached from it like I am.” He cleared his throat, looked back at the blue terrier. “Now that we’ve come this far – why did you solicit this extra session, Ben?”
Once he began, Chase found the telling easy. In ten minutes he had related the events of the previous day and repeated, almost word for word, the conversations that he’d had with Judge.
When Chase finished, Fauvel asked, “So. What do you want from me, then?”
“I want to know how to handle it, some advice.”
“I don’t advise. I guide and interpret.”
“Some guidance then. When Judge calls, it’s more than just the threats that upset me. It’s – this feeling I have of being detached, separated from everything.”
“Another breakdown?”
“I feel the edge,” Chase said.
Fauvel said, “Ignore him.”
“Judge?”
“Ignore him.”
“But don’t I have a responsibility to-”
“Ignore him.”
“I can’t.”
“You must,” Fauvel said.
“What if he’s serious?”
“He’s not.”
“What if he’s really going to kill me?”
“He won’t.”
“How can you be sure?” Chase was perspiring heavily. Great dark circles stained the underarms of his shirt and plastered the cotton to his back.
Fauvel smiled at the blue terrier and shifted his gaze to a glass greyhound blown in amber. The smug, self-assured look was back. “I can be so sure of that, because Judge does not exist.”
Chase did not immediately understand the reply. When he grasped the import of it, he didn’t like it. “You’re saying what – that this Judge isn’t real?”
“Is that what you’re saying, Chase?”
“No.”
“You’re the one who said it.”
“I didn’t hallucinate him. None of this. The part about the murder and the girl are in the papers.”
“Oh, that was real enough,” Fauvel said. “But these phone calls … I don’t know. What do you think, Chase?”
Chase was silent.
“Were they real phone calls?”
“Yes. ”
“Or imagination?”
“No.”
“Delusions of-”
“No.”
Fauvel said, “I’ve noticed for some time that you have begun to shake off this unnatural desire for privacy and that you’re gradually facing the world more squarely, week by week.”
“I haven’t noticed that.”
“Oh, yes. Subtly, perhaps, but you’ve grown curious about the rest of the world. You’re beginning to be restless about getting on with life.”
Chase didn’t feel restless.
He felt cornered.
“Perhaps you’re even beginning to experience a reawakening of your sex drive, though not much yet. Guilt overwhelmed you, because you hadn’t been punished for the things that happened in that tunnel, and you didn’t want to lead a normal life until you felt that you’d suffered enough.”
Chase disliked the doctor’s smug self-assurance. Right now all he wanted was to get out of there, to get home and close the door and open the bottle.
Fauvel said, “You couldn’t accept the fact that you wanted to taste the good things of life again, and you invented Judge because he represented the remaining possibility of punishment. You had to make some excuses for being forced into life again, and Judge worked well in this respect too. You would, sooner or later, have to take the initiative to stop him. You could pretend that you still wanted seclusion in which to mourn but were no longer being permitted that indulgence.”
“All wrong,” Chase said. “Judge is real.”
“Oh, I think not.” Fauvel smiled at the amber greyhound. “If you really and truly thought this man was real, that these calls to you were real – then why wouldn’t you go to the police rather than to your psychiatrist?”