The papers were drawn up in a hand too neat even for any lawyer she’d met, every clause precise, the funding language left deliberately, almost provocatively broad.
She read it twice.
The second time was not for comprehension.
“Please forgive me for being thorough,”
she said, setting the pages down between them.
“I’ve made something of a habit of it.”
“I’d think less of you if you weren’t.”
She let a silence sit before she spoke again, the kind she used on patients who needed room to fill it themselves, and found he simply waited it out with her, unbothered, which told her something she filed alongside everything else.
“I understand I’m not the first psychiatrist you’ve hired for this position.”
“You are not.”
“May I ask what became of the others?”
“Some found the arrangement wasn’t to their taste after all.
Vienna is a small city for physicians who wish to remain respectable, and I imagine a few worried what it would mean to be seen keeping company with new money.”
He said it lightly, an answer built for a question about reputation rather than the one she’d actually asked.
She noted his persistent use of “physician” even through her use of “psychiatrist,” not unlike many men in his position.
He stands in opposition to his surroundings, his “normalcy” becoming the bizarre in contrast to it.
“…And the ones who didn’t leave by choice?”
Something in his expression did not change so much as settle, the way still water settles after a stone has already sunk out of sight.
“I’m told some of them found the position more taxing than they expected.
I don’t pretend to understand the particulars, Fräulein Vingler.
I only know that I’ve been in want of a physician for some time now, and I would rather not lose another to nerves before we’ve properly begun.”
It was, again, a plain and reasonable answer, offered without heat, without the too-eager insistence of a guilty man overexplaining himself.
She thought of Elisabeth Hartl, sitting across from her three weeks prior with her hands folded too tightly in her lap, explaining in a voice gone thin with something between grief and relief that her previous physician, a Doktor Rung, well regarded, if privately known among certain circles for a habit of diagnosing every anxious woman who came to him with the same tired word, had taken a position at an estate outside the city.
He had not returned from his first appointment, the same man who left for it.
Fräulein Hartl had come to her instead, and had cried, when she said it, not for the doctor, but for the two years she’d spent believing his diagnosis of her.
She had gone looking for Doktor Rung after that, more out of professional unease than any real suspicion, and what she’d found had unsettled her far more than the man’s condition alone would have.
A list, half compiled from her own private records of psychiatrists she warned patients away from, half assembled from asylum admissions no one seemed eager to discuss and disciplinary murmurs that never quite became formal complaints, and every name on it belonged to a man with something to hide.
A doctor twice accused, never charged, of overstepping the bounds of his female patients’ trust.
A surgeon whose ledgers didn’t survive a fire that conveniently followed an inquiry into his billing.
A specialist quietly asked to leave a hospital in Graz for reasons the hospital declined to put in writing.
Man after man, and every one of them either broken and murmuring now in a private room somewhere, or silent, changed, warning off any colleague who so much as raised the subject of the offer in their presence.
It was the pattern itself that troubled her more than any single name in it.
Vienna’s medical circles held their share of dubious men, certainly, but not in the numbers this list suggested, not concentrated so neatly into a single, self-selecting group.
Something about the offer, or the man extending it, seemed to know precisely which kind of men to draw, the way a lure is shaped for the specific fish it means to catch.
She had gone to visit Doktor Rung once, in the quiet, curtained room they kept him in now.
He had not looked up when she entered.
He sat with his hands folded, exactly as Elisabeth Hartl’s had been, and murmured a single word, over and over, in a voice worn thin from repeating it.
“Mori”
She had not known, then, whether it was a name.
But nonetheless, this might be the work of her kind.
And as someone called a doctor, she must prevent further damage.
“Fräulein Vingler.”
His voice pulled her back into the study, gentle, unhurried.
“You’ve gone quiet.”
“A force of habit.
I think through terms slowly.”
She turned back to the papers, drew her pen, and signed where indicated, watching him rather than the page as she did it.
“I don’t frighten easily, Herr Mori, if that’s what you were hoping to determine with all this patience.”
“I wasn’t hoping to determine anything.”
He took the signed pages from her with both hands, unhurried, and set them aside without so much as glancing over her signature.
“I find patience is simply the correct way to treat a guest.”
It was only once the papers were settled, once the business of the afternoon had properly concluded, that he stopped tapping the desk, an action of his that she had already forgotten about, and looked at her with an expression she would later struggle to name, not menace, nothing so simple.
Something closer to a child asking a favor he already half suspected would be refused.
“A small tradition, before you go.
I ask it of everyone who sits where you’re sitting.”
He smiled, easy, almost embarrassed by his own request.
“A silly game, really.
Please say these carefully and clearly, an old formal ritual.
Consider it superstition.
My mother’s, again.”
He handed her a small piece of paper, it was old and weathered, as if ripped from a book that doesn’t belong to this era.
She should have refused.
She would think of the moment over and over for years afterward and never be entirely certain why she didn’t, professional curiosity, perhaps, or the simple fact that a dozen doctors before her had apparently done exactly this and she needed to know what it was they’d said.
“The Eternal Darkness;”
She said, and felt the room change before she reached the end of it yet she could not stop.
“Singularity of All;”
“Space-Time-in-One.”
Somewhere in her bag, forgotten since its failure, the mirror blazed to life.