TokyoPewPew
Zman
Not a Sayan
Neziul
FunnyGuy
EtherealThorn
princess
Oso
Andrew Carlino
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Location: Andrew Carlino’s home office • Time: Dusk
Interactions: n/a • Mentions: n/a
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
She was late, the doctor noted, his annoyance mounting as the violinist span out that interminable final chaconne. She had already been late when the partita had started playing. Now she was unconscionably late.
Fidgeting irritably at his desk, Andrew Carlino glared resentfully at the clock mounted on the opposite wall of his office, as if it were somehow responsible for the inconvenience, mutely daring the contraption to tick off yet another minute with Ms. Godwin still not there. Eventually, inevitably, the clock did just that.
Realizing with a defeated sigh that his frustration was absurdly misplaced, the psychiatrist lowered his eyes to the file on his desk; he opened it and began to read it again, more to pass the time than to refresh his memory.
The file contained both medical records for Ms. Godwin and a referral letter from her primary care physician, one Dr. George Sokolov. Dr. Carlino knew Dr. Sokolov, had worked with him before. He was one of the good ones, and understood better than most of his fellow GPs what sort of referrals Andrew Carlino was interested in.
Evelyn Godwin. White woman, 67, widowed. Her emergency contact information listed just two relatives: one son, Blake, 45, and one grandson, Tariq, 20. Both were also surnamed Godwin. Much of her history was uninteresting: she had been reasonably healthy most of her life, but nowadays presented with some typical age-related physical complaints, along with bouts of mild depression. Lately, however, her mental state had become more unsettled. She had grown withdrawn and hostile and become obsessed with the idea that her grandson was transforming into some other person.
Dr. Carlino turned from the letter to the medical records. Dr. Sokolov had done his due diligence: appropriate physical and neurological tests, a basic mental health questionnaire, some common cognitive tests to check for signs of dementia. He had asked enough questions, and taken enough notes, to build a rough timeline for the development of her delusions, to present events in the context of the patient's life. It was a good referral; Dr. Sokolov had done everything a good PCP ought to under the circumstances, and nothing that one shouldn’t.
The chaconne was nearly finished. Dr. Carlino suspended his perusal of the file and waited for the music to end, then paused the recording before the next track could start. The office hung a while in expectant silence. The opposing clock ticked off another minute. There was still no sign of Ms. Godwin.
Grumbling discontentedly, Dr. Carlino restarted the partita from the very beginning, the opening allemande. Its linearity made a refreshing contrast to the involutions of the chaconne, exactly the sort of music his brain needed to think clearly. He briefly considered putting the allemande on repeat, but decided against it.
Returning his attention to the file, Dr. Carlino saw that Dr. Sokolov had indicated a working diagonosis: “Dementia-related psychosis. Delusional misidentification syndrome, intermetamorphosis.”
That final word was by far the most interesting to Dr. Carlino. Reading further, he learned that Ms. Godwin had been quite agitated on her most recent visit to her doctor, nervously recounting her last time seeing her grandson. He had been growing increasingly surly and ill-mannered lately, she said, probably on account of the company he had started keeping in “bad parts of town”.
On Tariq's last visit, she claimed, he had been especially nasty to his grandmother, and, she insisted, there was something off about him physically, as well, about the way he moved, among other things. She even mentioned thinking that his limbs looked too long, that he had more hair than usual. It was these last observations that had triggered concern in Dr. Sokolov, and motivated him to refer Ms. Godwin to Dr. Carlino.
The psychiatrist sat back and mused on what he had just read. Conflicting explanations, surmises, suspicions roiled about in his mind, their savage breasts only partly soothed by the music. He needed more information, a lot more. And he could not hope to have it until he had a chance to talk to Ms. Godwin.
There was still no sign of her. Dr. Carlino knew that it was premature to worry. It wasn’t *that* unusual for a patient to be late for, or even miss an appointment entirely, annoying though that was. Yet something was off. Dr. Carlino waited for the allemande to end before again pausing the music, so that the office would be quiet as he called the number in the file for Ms. Godwin.
The phone rang and rang before finally going to voicemail. The outbound message was one of those automated ones, rather than a personalized one from Ms. Godwin. At the tone, Dr. Carlino identified himself and his reason for calling, asking Ms. Godwin to please call at his office number. Once he had finished his message, he hung up and started the music again.
When that infernal chaconne came back on, he decided to try again, once again only reaching voicemail. Instead of leaving a message, he hung up and called the other numbers in the file, those of the son and the grandson.
The son picked up right away, with a dry, concise “Blake Godwin”. The ensuing conversation did little to reassure the men on either end of the line. The son had not seen nor heard from Ms. Godwin in a couple days. Until Dr. Carlino’s call, he had found that odd but not alarming; however, it was very much unlike his mom to miss an appointment. He asked the doctor to please call him as soon his mother showed up at his office.
After hanging up with Blake, Dr. Carlino then called the grandson’s phone number. The number rang and rang and didn’t even go to any sort of voice mail. He hung up and looked up the address given on the contact form for Tariq. It appeared to be a tenement on the South Side, in or near Gutter’s End. Not a nice part of town.
The psychiatrist rose up from his desk and began pacing. His vigil for Ms. Godwin had stretched by now into the evening, and his office had grown dark, so he flipped on lights as he passed their switches on his circuit of the room. Eventually his tour brought him to the console of his sound system, where Bach still hovered, waiting to bother him once more with his chaconne.
Dr. Carlino decided instead to change the music entirely, going to his usual standby: Scarlatti. The new music calmed him down enough that he was able once more to return to his chair behind his desk, where he then sat, musing, drumming his fingers absently to the music. One entire keyboard sonata had finished playing, and a second one begun, when his phone unexpectedly rang.
“Is this Dr. Carlito?” breathed a nervous man’s voice. “It’s Blake Godwin. Has my mother shown up at your office?”
The doctor frowned as he replied: “No, not yet. Look, I told you I would call when-“
“I’m at her house. She’s not here,” Blake interrupted. Alarm mounted steadily in the man’s tone as he spoke. “Her car is here. The lights are on, but she’s nowhere. I’ve looked all over. I have the key…”
Dr. Carlino adopted his best calm-but-firm voice: “Mr. Godwin, please listen to me. I do not wish to borrow trouble; however, it would perhaps be prudent if you called the police at this point.”
He heard a dismayed gasp on the other end. “The police? I…First my son ghosts me and now this. Oh, god…Do you think…?”
“I don’t necessarily think that anything has happened,” Dr. Carlino tried to reassure the other man. “But it is still important to take prudent precau-“ He noticed then that the line was dead, and looked down to see the “Call Ended” message on his phone’s screen.
He laid the phone on his desk with an exasperated sigh. As if commenting on the development, Scarlatti began modulating just then into distant minor keys. The doctor allowed himself a flash of amusement at that before considering his next move.
Blake had let slip that his son had “ghosted” him. It might well be a coincidence. But Andrew Carlino had gotten to where he was by trusting his intuition, and his intuition was now telling him that something was amiss.
He had not had a chance to intake Ms. Godwin, so she was technically not yet his patient. However, that didn’t make it alright for him to just share information from a medical record with third parties. Instead, he contacted the Bastion, to inform the Wardens that he was preparing to investigate an “anonymous tip” about a possible lycan-related incident at a South Side tenement address. That was a lie, of course, and the whole affair was an ethical gray area at best; however, Andrew Carlino somehow doubted that the Wardens would report him to the medical review board.
And it was better than having the police unwittingly stumble into a lycans’ den, should they follow up on a missing person report for Evelyn Godwin.
