The Last Rule

I arrived just after the new year. The old psychiatrist, Dr. Kovac, had finally retired—pushed out, really—and no one wanted to take his caseload. I was promised a research stipend and access to decades of patient records, but when I got there, the archive room was locked and the key was “missing.” That was my first clue. The second was that everyone referred to Ward C as “the stage.”

I didn’t meet Marnie and Felix right away. Their sessions were scheduled once a week, always together, and always in the same windowless room on the lower level. On paper, they were unremarkable. Co-dependent delusions. No family contact. Resistant to medication. A note in the file from 1999 called them “mutually reinforcing and largely harmless.” Another, written in the margins, simply read: Let them play.

It wasn’t until I listened to the tapes that I began to understand. The first one was labeled in Kovac’s tight block handwriting: Session 83: The Crossing. I assumed it was some sort of trauma reenactment. What I heard instead was Marnie’s voice, calm and clipped, describing the texture of ice under her boots, the way the sun looked like a hole punched in the sky. Felix responded in measured tones, noting wind speed, rations, the weight of the sled. It went on like that for forty-three minutes. There was no deviation, no acknowledgment of where they actually were. Just two voices locked in a shared illusion, steady and certain.

I made notes. The details were oddly specific—dates, temperatures, maps referenced by number and latitude. It felt more like a debrief than a delusion.

In person, they were less dramatic than I expected. Marnie wore a gray cardigan and a long skirt that covered her shoes. Felix looked younger than his file suggested, hair buzzed short, posture too perfect to be accidental. They sat side by side on the small couch, not touching, not looking at each other. When I entered the room, they both stood. Marnie offered her hand.

“Dr. Kovac has retired,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied. “We’ve read his obituary.”

“He’s not dead.”

She smiled faintly. “No, not officially.”