Ricky narrows the track,

Getting closer, heading back.

Ambition, change, clouded your head,

So you ignored all the woman said.

Left her adrift, in a sea of strife,

So abandoned it cost her life.

Now the child, who saw the mistake,

Seeks revenge for his mother’s sake.

Who once was poor, but now is rich,

Can fill his wishes, without a twitch.

You may find her in the records of all the sick,

But is it enough to do the trick?

Because, poor Ricky, at the end of the day,

There’s only seventy-two hours left to play.

The simple rhyme, like before, seemed mocking, cynical in its childlike pattern. He thought it a bit like the exquisite torture of the kindergarten playground, with singsong taunts and insults. There was nothing childish about the results that Rumplestiltskin had in mind, however. Ricky tore out the single page from the Times and folded it up and slid it into his pants pocket. The remainder of the paper he thrust to the floor of the taxi. The driver was cursing mildly under his breath at traffic, carrying on a steady conversation with each and every truck, car, or the occasional bicyclist or pedestrian that crossed his path and obstructed his route. The interesting thing about the driver’s conversations was that no one else could hear them. He didn’t roll down the window and shout obscenities, nor did he lay on his horn, as some cabdrivers do, like some nervous reaction to the traffic web surrounding them. Instead, this man merely spoke, giving directions, challenges, maneuvering words as he steered his cab, so that in an odd way, the driver must have felt connected, or at least, as if he interacted with all that came onto his horizon. Or his crosshairs, depending, Ricky thought, how one saw it. It was an unusual thing, Ricky thought, to go through each day of life having dozens of conversations that couldn’t be heard. Then he wondered if anyone was any different.

The cab dropped him on the sidewalk outside the huge hospital complex. He could see an emergency entrance down the block, with a large red-lettered sign and an ambulance in front. Ricky felt a chill sweep down his back despite the oppressive midsummer heat around him. It was a cold defined by the last time he had been at the hospital, which corresponded to visits to accompany his wife, while she was still fighting the disease that would kill her, still undergoing radiation and chemotherapy and all the other attacks against the insidious happenings within her body. The oncologists’ offices were in a different part of the complex, but this still didn’t remove the sense of impotence and dread that resurfaced throughout him, no different from when he’d last been on the streets outside the hospital. He looked up at the imposing brick buildings. He thought that he’d seen the hospital three times in his life: the first time, when he worked in the outpatient clinic for six months, before going into private practice; the second time when it joined the dismaying array of hospitals that his wife trudged to in her futile battle against death; and this third time, when he was returning to find the name of the patient whom he’d ignored or neglected, and who now threatened his own life.

Ricky trudged forward, heading toward the entrance, curiously hating the fact that he knew where the medical records were stored.

There was a paunchy middle-aged male clerk, wearing a garish Hawaiian print sport shirt and khaki pants stained with what might have been ink or the remains of lunch, standing at the records storage bank counter who looked at him with a bemused astonishment when Ricky first explained his request.

“You want exactly what from twenty years ago?” he said with undisguised incredulity.

“All the outpatient psychiatric clinic records from the six-month period I worked there,” Ricky said. “Every patient who came in was assigned a clinic number and a file was opened, even if they only came in one time. Those files contain all the case notes that were worked up.”

“I’m not sure those records have been transferred to the computer,” the clerk said reluctantly.

“I’ll bet they have,” Ricky said. “Let’s you and I check.”

“This will take some time, doctor,” the clerk said. “And I’ve got lots of other requests…”

Ricky paused, then thought for a moment, finally picturing how easy it seemed for Virgil and Merlin to get folks to perform simple little acts by waving cash in their direction. There was $250 in his wallet, and he removed $200, placing it on the counter. “This will help,” he said. “Perhaps put me at the head of the line.”

The clerk glanced around, saw that no one else was watching, and scooped up the money from the countertop. “Doctor,” he said, with a small grin, “my expertise is all yours.” He pocketed the cash and then wiggled his fingers in the air. “Let’s see what we can find out,” he said, starting to click entries into the computer keyboard.

It took the remainder of the morning for the two men to come up with a viable list of case file numbers. While they were able to isolate the critical year, there was no corresponding way to determine by computer whether the file numbers represented men or women, and similarly, there wasn’t a code that identified which physician had seen which patient. Ricky’s six months at the clinic had run from March through the start of September. The clerk was able to eliminate files started before and after. Narrowing the selection down further, Ricky guessed that Rumplestiltskin’s mother was seen sometime in the three-month period, over the summer, twenty years earlier. In that time frame, new patient files at the clinic had been opened for two hundred and seventy-nine people.

“You want to find one person,” the clerk said, “you’re gonna have to pull each file and inspect it yourself. I can get ’em out for you, but after that, you’re on your own. It isn’t going to be easy.”

“That’s okay,” Ricky said. “I didn’t expect it would.”

The clerk showed Ricky to a small steel table off to the side of the records office. There was a stiff-backed wooden chair, where Ricky took up his position, while the clerk started to bring the relevant files to him. It took at least ten minutes to collect all 279 different files, stacking them on the floor next to Ricky. The clerk provided him with a yellow legal pad and an old ballpoint pen, then shrugged. “Try to keep ’em in order,” he said, “so I don’t have to file ’em back one by one. And be careful with all the entries, please, like, don’t get documents and notes mixed up from one file to the next. Of course, I’m not guessing that anyone will ever want to see these again anyways, and why we keep ’em is beyond me. But hey, I don’t make the rules.”

The clerk looked at Ricky. “You know who makes the rules?” he asked.

“No,” Ricky replied, as he reached for the first file. “I don’t. The hospital administration, most likely.”

The clerk guffawed, snorting contempt and laughter. “Hey,” he said, as he walked back to his own perch by the computer, “you’re a shrink, doc. I thought your whole thing is to help people make up their own rules.”

Ricky didn’t reply to this, but considered it a wise assessment of what he did. The problem was, he thought, that all sorts of people played by their own rules. Especially Rumplestiltskin. He picked the first file from the top of the first pile, and opened it. It was, Ricky thought abruptly, like opening a folder of memory.

Hours fled around him. Reading the files was a little like standing in a waterfall of despair. Each contained a patient’s name, address, next of kin, and their insurance information, if there was any. Then there would be some typed notes on a diagnosis sheet, which delineated the patient’s assessment. There were also suggested modes of treatment. In a clipped and quick fashion, each name was broken down to their psychological essence. The meager words in the files were unable to hide the bitter truths that lay behind each person’s arrival at the clinic: sexual abuse, rage, beatings, drug addictions, schizophrenia, delusions-a Pandora’s box of mental illness. The outpatient clinic at the hospital had been a vestige of 1960s activism, a do-gooder plan to help the less fortunate, opening the hospital doors to the community. To give back was the operative phrase of the times. The reality had been significantly harsher and substantially less utopian. The urban poor suffered from a vast array of illnesses, and the clinic had rapidly discovered that it was no more than a single finger in a dike sprouting thousands of leaks. Ricky had come to it while completing the final stages of his psychoanalytic training. At least, that had been his official reason. But when he first joined the clinic staff, he had been filled with idealism and the determination of the young. He could remember walking through the doors wearing his distaste for the elitism of the profession he was entering, determined to bring analytic techniques to the wide range of the desperate. This liberal sense of altruism had lasted about a single week.