In the past, life was fun and wild,

Mother, father, and young child.

But all the good times went astray,

When my father sailed away.

Poetry is not my strong suit.Hatred is.You may ask three questions. Yes or No answers, please.Use the same method, the front-page ads in the New York Times.I will reply in my own style within twenty-four hours.Good luck. You might also try to find time now to make your funeral arrangements. Cremation is probably preferable to an elaborateburial service. I know how much you dislike churches. I don’t thinkit would be a smart idea to contact the police. They would probablymock you, which I suspect your conceit would have difficultyhandling. And it would likely enrage me more, and, right now, youmust be a little uncertain as to how unstable I actually am. Imight respond erratically, in any number of quite evil ways.

But of one thing of which you can be absolutely certain: My angerknows no limits.

The letter was signed in all-capital letters:

RUMPLESTILTSKIN

Ricky Starks sat back hard in his chair, as if the fury emanating from the words on the page in front of him had been able to strike him in the face like a fist. He pushed himself to his feet, walked over to the window and cracked it open, allowing the city sounds to burst into the quiet of the small room, carried by an unexpected late July breeze that promised an evening thunderstorm might be tracking the city. He breathed in, looking for something in the air to give him a sense of relief from the heat that had overcome him. He could hear the high-pitched caterwaul of a police siren a few blocks distant, and the steady cacophony of car horns that is like white noise in Manhattan. He took two or three deep breaths, then pulled the window closed, shutting away all the outside sounds of normal urban life.

He turned back to the letter.

I am in trouble, he thought. But how much, he was initially unsure.

He realized that he was being deeply threatened, but the parameters of that threat were still unclear. A significant part of him insisted he ignore the document on the desktop. Simply refuse to play what didn’t sound like much of a game. He snorted once, allowing this thought to flourish. All his training and experience suggested that doing nothing was the most reasonable course of action. After all, oftenfinds that maintaining silence and a failure to respond to the most provocative and outrageous behavior by a patient is the cleverest way to get to the psychological truth of those actions. He stood up and walked around the desk twice, like a dog sniffing at an unusual smell.

On the second pass, he stopped and stared down at the page of words again.

He shook his head. That won’t work, he realized. For a moment he had a shot of admiration for the writer’s sophistication. Ricky understood he would probably have greeted the “I’m going to kill you” threat with a detachment closing on boredom. After all, he had lived long, and quite well, he thought, so threatening to kill a man in his middle years didn’t really amount to much. But that wasn’t what he was facing. The threat was more oblique. Someone else was slated to suffer if he did nothing. Someone innocent, and in all likelihood, someone young, because the young are far more vulnerable.

Ricky swallowed hard. I would blame myself and I would live out my remaining time in true agony.

Of that, the writer was absolutely correct.

Or else kill myself. He could taste a sudden bitterness on his tongue. Suicide would be the antithesis of everything he’d stood for, his entire life. He suspected the person who signed his name Rumplestiltskin knew that.

He felt abruptly as if he’d been placed on trial.

Again he began to pace around his office, assessing the letter. A great voice within him wanted to be dismissive, to shrug the entire message off, to anoint it an exaggeration and a fantasy without any basis in reality but found that he was unable to. Ricky berated himself: Just because something makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

But he didn’t really have a good idea how to respond. He stopped pacing and returned to his seat. Madness, he thought. But madness with a distinctly clever touch, because it will cause me to join in the madness.

“I should call the police,” he said out loud. Then he stopped. And say what? Dial 911 and tell some dull and unimaginative desk sergeant that he’d received a threatening letter? And listen to the man tell him So what? As best as he could tell, no law had been broken. Unless suggesting that someone kill themselves was a violation of some sort. Extortion? What sort of homicide could it be? he wondered. The idea crossed his mind to call an attorney, but then he understood that the situation posed by Rumplestiltskin’s letter wasn’t legal. He had been approached on the playing field that he knew. The game suggested was one of intuitiveness, and psychology; it was about emotions and fears. He shook his head and told himself: I can play in that arena.

“What do you know already?” he spoke to himself in the empty room.

Someone knows my routine. Knows how I let patients into my office. Knows when I break for lunch. What I do on the weekends. Was also clever enough to ferret out a list of relatives. That took some ingenuity.

Knows my birthday.

He breathed in sharply, again. I have been studied.

I did not know it, but someone has been watching me. Measuring me. Someone has devoted considerable time and effort to creating this game and not left me much time for countermoves.

His tongue remained dry and his lips parched. He was suddenly very thirsty, but unwilling to leave the sanctity of his office for the kitchen and a glass of water.

“What did I do to make someone hate me so?” he asked.

This question was like a quick punch in the stomach. Ricky knew he enjoyed the arrogance of many caregivers, thinking that he had delivered good to his small corner of the world through understanding and acceptance of one’s existence. The idea that he’d created some monstrous infection of hatred in someone somewhere was extremely unsettling.

“Who are you?” he demanded of the letter. He immediately started to race through the catalog of patients, stretching back over decades, but, just as swiftly, stopped. He understood he might have to do this eventually, but he would need to be systematic, disciplined, dogged, and he wasn’t ready to take that step yet.

Ricky didn’t think of himself as very qualified to be his own policeman. But then he shook his head, realizing that, in a unique way, that was untrue. For years he’d been a sort of detective. The difference was truly the nature of the crimes he’d investigated and the techniques he’d used. Buttressed slightly by this thought, Ricky Starks sat back down at his desk, reached into the top right-hand drawer and removed an old, leather-bound address book so frayed around the edges that it was held together by a rubber band. For starters, he told himself, we can find the relative who has been contacted by this person. It must be some former patient, he told himself, one who cut his analysis short and plunged into depression. One who has harbored a near-psychotic fixation for a number of years. He guessed that with a little bit of luck and perhaps a nudge or two in the right direction from whichever of his relatives had been contacted, he would be able to identify the disgruntled ex-patient. He tried to tell himself, empathetically, that the letter writer-Rumplestiltskin-was really reaching out to him for help. Then, almost as quickly, he discarded this wishy-washy thought. Holding the address book in his hand, Ricky thought about the fairy tale character whose name the letter writer had signed. Cruel, he told himself. A magical gnome with a black heart that isn’t outfoxed, but loses his contest through sheer bad luck. This observation did not make him feel any better.