He leaned forward in his chair and said, “Okay, let’s talk about what’s really on your mind.”
I thought about it. “There’s nothing really on my mind.”
“Alfred,” he said. “Anything you say in this room stays in this room. I’m not allowed to tell anyone.”
“What if I told you something about a crime?”
“You’ve committed a crime?”
“Well, I guess technically I did.”
“All right.”
“So say I tell you about that—wouldn’t you have to turn me in?”
“Our doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct, Alfred.”
“What’s that—like holy?”
“Something like that.” He was smiling. Dr. Benderhall had large yellow teeth, like somebody who smoked or drank too much coffee. “So—what was this technical crime?”
“I beheaded somebody.”
“Really?”
“And shot somebody.”
“Shot and beheaded them?”
“Not the same person. Oh, and I guess I stole a car. Maybe two cars. A cop car and a Jaguar. And the Lamborghini. So I guess that would be three. No, there was the Bentley too. So four cars. You sure you can’t repeat any of this?”
He nodded.
“I haven’t told anybody since I came home,” I said.
He promised me anything I told him would be held in strictest confidence, so strictly confidentially I told him everything.
Then he promptly sent me into the waiting room and I listened as he picked up the phone and called the social worker assigned to my case. He had left his door open, so I could hear almost every word.
“Clinically depressed,” I heard him say. “Borderline psychotic with delusions of grandeur and paranoid fantasies . . . the death of his mother when he was twelve . . . the murder of his only surviving relative six months ago . . . issues with his father abandoning his mother before he was born . . . Alfred believes he is descended from the knight Sir Lancelot. . . . Yes, that Lancelot, and that he was involved with an international spy organization in an operation to rescue Excalibur from what he calls ‘Agents of Darkness.’ He also reports encounters with angels, particularly Michael the archangel, whom he believes took the Sword to heaven following Alfred’s own death and resurrection as ‘the Master of the Sword.’ He also believes the Sword wounded him, endowing his blood with magical healing powers . . .”
Then he said, “Intensive therapy to work out his issues of abandonment, guilt, and betrayal. . . . I’m recommending a CAT scan and an MRI to rule out any physiological abnormality. . . .Yes, such as lesions or tumors. I’d also like to start him on Thorazine, which has been proven effective with paranoid schizophrenia.”
I couldn’t believe it. He was telling the social worker everything, not five minutes after he promised he wouldn’t, and he was a doctor. If I couldn’t trust somebody like him, who could I trust? I felt lonelier than ever.
When Betty Tuttle, my foster mom, showed up to drive me home, Dr. Benderhall took her into his office, closed the door, and when she came out thirty minutes later, it looked like he had hit her upside the head with a baseball bat.
“I’m not crazy,” I told her in the car on the drive to the pharmacy to fill the prescription for the crazy drug.
“Oh, no, no,” she said, bobbing her head up and down. “Just a bump in the road, Alfred. Just a bump in the road.”
I overheard the Tuttles arguing late that night. Horace wanted to get rid of me.
“He’ll lose it completely one day, Betty,” he said. “Murder us in our beds!”
“The doctor said—”
“I don’t care what the doctor said!”