Читать книгу Valley of Fire - Steven Manners - Страница 10

America is roulette: streets, cities, states of mind. Waiting for a hit, waiting for your number to be called. As they fly into a Midwest stopover, a voice crackles in the background like a rumour, the news at noon over a neighbour’s headset announcing a flash flood in Maine, nuclear spill in the middle dozens, earthquake with its epicentre at thirty-six red. The statistics of fate in the air: in the recirculating stink of burger and fries, sweat tang of nachos, a godawful hummus stashed away in a carry-on knapsack. They were warned there would be no food on this flight so they’ve brought it aboard. Enough to feed the Russian army, as they used to say. Enough to feed the thrombus and embolus of future coronary events. They know the risks, they know the odds — they are gamblers, junketeers after all. Later, on their way home, there will be time to analyze the action, work the numbers like a tension knot in the back of the neck, head tight as a migraine, memories ruminating and repeating like flashbacks or flatus, thinking of the down and the double-down. But that’s later. Right now it’s the play. The straight-ahead path. Going west. To Vegas.

The airplane is shadow on landscape across a patchwork of forest and field and empty places. Where you live is busy. What you see is blur. But if you gain altitude — distance, Cynthia would have called it — you gain greater perspective. A bigger picture emerges. You can see that the slow creep of events is an illusion; the landscape is rushing past silently at a thousand miles an hour. Munin tried to explain that to her once. She didn’t say anything, or nothing he can remember. Her voice even then had become part of the silence.

They’ve been in Las Vegas for an hour, barely enough time to check in and have a shower. Munin wants to relax, review his notes for the psychiatry conference, but Hughes insists, “Time to have a bit of fun. Get our feet wet. You can work later.”

Hughes is newly decked out in khakis and hibiscus-print shirt — protective colouration, he’d call it in his English way, acutely aware of his un-Americanness. The elevator is a bubble of classic music, decrescendo to the casino floor as the doors glide open and they are greeted by the crash of slots. A quick reconnaissance as Hughes searches for a table of European roulette, thirty-six numbers and a single zero. Better odds, Hughes informs him, the double-zero tables were a damn local invention to increase the house edge. They find a spot between a young Vietnamese man and an older woman in a lime-green leisure suit, face a reticule of wrinkles dusted with powder, a hint of talc and something fruity to Munin’s nose. Hughes’s mother used the same brand, if he’s not mistaken.

“How is your mother?” The sense of smell a highway to the unconscious.

Hughes is busy laying bets, but the remark makes him pause. “Odd that you should mention it. I was just thinking I should call her.”

The ball stops on two black. The older woman strews chips about the table in no apparent order, the Vietnamese man lays a C-note on red, money plays. Hughes takes a flutter on the nearest six, nickel bets on thirty-one to thirty-six. “It helps to have a system.”

Perhaps a pointed comment, but Munin lets it ride. “You seem to have a strategy.”

“Simple, really. Stick with the same six numbers — it doesn’t matter which ones. None of that pet number or anniversary nonsense.” No anniversary for Hughes to remember, birthdays now too numerous to be something to celebrate. “I should hit one of my numbers in the next six turns.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Then I’ll increase the bet.”

Everyone’s got a system: straight bets, trios, corner bets, combinations. A college kid comes up beside Munin and lays a column bet to cover the whole street for a payoff of two to one. The man beside the dealer lays stacks of differing heights at random places on the table.

Up comes twenty-three red. The Vietnamese man pockets a century chip and lets the money ride. Next is five red, and he cashes out. Then it’s seventeen black, twenty-six black, ten black, zero. Hughes is focused now, quietly determined. All of his numbers have been losers so far, but he keeps to the game plan, laying out his two rows of bets each time the table is cleared. The older woman collects her chips and moves over to the machines. The college kid’s got a short attention span and drifts away. Only Hughes is left, showing terrific concentration, or maybe he’s mesmerized by the spin. On the seventh turn of the wheel he doubles his bets. The wheel turns. The marble clatters. Another loser, a trend now starting to gain significance. A half-dozen more bets and all the money is gone.

“Maybe that’s enough for now,” says Hughes. He’s out about five hundred.

Munin doesn’t understand the attraction of the game. “They could use a random-number generator. It would have the same result.”

“Not really the same thing, though, is it?” Hughes says. “The mandala of the wheel and all that. A computer doesn’t work as an archetype — at least not yet. No romance there.”

“It’d be a lot more efficient. I’m not sure your system was working.”

“It’s not much of a working system, I admit, more of a working hypothesis,” Hughes says cheerily. “Nothing really pays off in this game. That’s the beauty of it. Different combinations and permutations, black or red, betting strategies. Analysis is quite hopeless. It’s all just randomness.”

“You seem to think that’s a good thing.”

“A bit of chaos in the system. I find it refreshing.”

They cross the casino, carpet a sublimina of silver dollars and sea horses, gold brocade and clusters of grapes, a pattern so venal and Jungian that it makes Munin’s head ache, though the real misery is the clangour of slots, the spit of metal on metal. The noise almost drowns out Hughes, but Munin catches the drift. The comment about analysis isn’t neutral; Hughes knows Munin is fond of systems. The unromance of methodology.

Munin sees in categories, patterns — keeping his eyes away from the carpet. He can detect at a glance any evidence of anxiety, the smallest compulsion, trace signs of a disturbed personality or troubled soul. That’s how he’s been trained, but there’s a talent there, as well. Someone else — even Hughes himself — would be overwhelmed by facial features, gestures, the counter-transference coinage of skin, smile and distress. We are distracted by florid narratives, wild talk, sexuality, humanity. Munin’s eye doesn’t see the spectrum, only individual colours, signs and syndromes. In his lectures he’s fond of saying that the senses aren’t meant to detect what’s out there in the world. Their purpose is to filter out the extraneous, separate chaff from wheat. There are so many things to see we end up seeing nothing. The art is in the focus, in realizing what’s important. Something as simple as a word or an image that gets to the heart of things.

Hughes imagines that focus must be a little terrifying to Munin’s patients. They must sense that their bodies — perched half-naked and on display — aren’t being seen in the normal way: no desire or disgust, nothing intimate or even complicit. They are being read. But can they trust that their doctor will interpret the signs correctly? Their bodies covered in stigmata, the tattoo of slashes or cigarette burns that spell out their grief. Munin sees parallel cuts on a forearm as a paragraph of text, the body as a book, something to be read and analyzed. And rewritten, or so Munin tells his students.

He compares the body to another text, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the secular bible of psychiatry that characterizes the features of every form of mental illness. It describes the usual age of onset, clinical course, the criteria needed for diagnosing organic syndromes, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, schizophrenia. Hughes sees the DSM as part of that North American obsession for neatness, for putting everything in its place. Calls it the Damned Shitload of Madness for the benefit of his first-year residents, a bit of an act, the pose of the cynical Brit, and of course his students love the show. But there is a serious point to it. It is never too early to instill a little healthy skepticism about the means and methods they use.

Munin admits the DSM is an imperfect tool, but it’s no worse than any other bible. It can be revised, fine-tuned, corrected. Munin rarely consults it; his experience is the sort that can’t be contained in a clinical cookbook. But he agreed to join the advisory group when it reconvened to revise the manual. Hughes wasn’t invited; if asked, he would have refused.

In a diner on the Las Vegas Strip. An Edward Hopper scene but in reverse: customers in the dim cool, passersby in blinding light. Just a short walk along the Strip from their hotel, but the day is already hot enough to make Munin sweat. They are both parched, but when the waitress asks if Munin wants water — they always ask, it’s a desert, you’ve got to conserve in a city of fountains, golf courses, waterslides — he orders coffee instead. “Do you remember Professor Bascule?”

“I haven’t heard that name in how many years?” Hughes says. “Twelve, thirteen?”

He and Munin met during their residency, Hughes newly arrived from England and Montreal still a bit of a mystery. Didn’t know a soul, spoke some French from family holidays in Normandy, but nothing anyone in Quebec could understand. He latched onto Munin soon enough — it was his town — and in those student years they made the rounds of bar-restos downtown, St-Laurent, as far east as St-Denis.

“Is he here at the conference?” Hughes asks. “I wasn’t sure he was still alive. I bumped into him about five years ago. Anaheim, I think it was.”

“Atlanta.”

The psychiatry convention alternates from east to west each year. Admittedly, it’s difficult to keep track. Such a terrible sameness to these affairs: a week of lectures, workshops, poster presentations, oral sessions. Meetings with the professor. Brown-bag luncheons. In the evenings: a few fireside sessions, dinner meetings, and the usual assortment of drug company symposia followed by an excursion to the trendiest restaurant in town. Damn dull at times. Hughes tries to muster a sort of nostalgia, but it doesn’t take: each city only stirs up recollections of other cities in other years.

Do you remember… the Baltimore oysters that sent a panel of experts to hospital? The symposium — where was it, out west at any rate — where the speaker wandered off, simply disappeared, I heard he went mad, poor chap. Each year not a fresh start but just an overlay of the previous one. What Munin would call a palimpsest if he were in another mood.

“You’re right,” Hughes concedes. “It was Atlanta. I remember it was miserably humid.”

When the waitress arrives with their coffee, Munin is staring out at the Strip: tourists with cameras, gamblers with plastic cups mostly half filled with coins, car jockeys and casino workers before their shifts. An endless parade of back-and-forth. Everyone in America is in a constant state of migration. They quit jobs, swap spouses, get on the interstate. Everyone looking for a second chance, and Vegas is there to give it to them. The signs as you drive into town are your guide: get a free spin at the wheel of fortune, reverse your vasectomy, double your paycheck.

The waitress takes Hughes’s order: fried eggs, sausages, toast, as close as he’ll get to an English breakfast in this country. Munin is looking at two crows or ravens on the windowsill when he catches the waitress’s reflection in the glass. She’s making a stab at patience; lost souls that ended up here were always staring outside. The desert’s a blank slate, a promised land of life without credits or debits. Of course, it’s mostly debits around here, the way it is everywhere.

“What about you? Can I get you anything? Something to eat?”

Munin notes the waitress’s hands: pitted nails, white sheen of fingertips. Her teeth are bad, and she self-consciously holds the notepad in front of her mouth when she speaks. “No, I’m fine.”

He scans the room, an old habit from his days working the ER. Addictions, of course, at least a half-dozen withdrawal disorders; signs of self-mutilating behaviour; social anxiety in the rear booth; a woman in hiking sandals reading apartment want ads, curling her toes in a way that suggests a neurological disorder. He spots three men at a nearby booth. They nod at Munin. They look familiar — an advisory panel, a paper they’ve co-authored? — but he can’t recall their names. How many times has he been here, in a place like this? How many coffee shops, hotel bars, airport lounges, hospital cafeterias? He feels tired, and it’s only early afternoon. It’s evening at home, that other place. He nods in the direction of the men and lets his gaze drift back to the window.

“See anyone you know out there?” Hughes asks.

Munin taps the glass, and the birds fly off. “Everyone wears sunglasses. Even indoors.”

“I had a patient who wore sunglasses during every session,” Hughes says. “Rainy days, evenings, didn’t seem to matter. These horrible mirrored specs. I thought it was very revealing.”

“They were prescription. He broke his other pair.”

“Did I tell you that story before?”

“I can’t remember. Probably.”

“Still, it made for a queer dynamic. I spent the whole time staring at myself while he talked endlessly. Finally, I couldn’t bear it and stared at his earlobe. He became quite self-conscious about it, I’m afraid. We spent a couple of sessions talking about his ears, although they were normal enough.”

“You told me about him. You called him the Amphora Man.”

“I suppose he was a bit jug-headed, poor man. But that’s off the point.” Hughes pauses as the waitress arrives with his meal.

“Looking deep into a person’s eyes is old-fashioned. Mirror of the soul and all that. Only infants look at the eyes.”

“What do we look at?”

“Hair.”

Munin laughs, but Hughes is quite serious. He’s read it somewhere. Adults study a person’s facial features but remember only the rough outlines — ears, beards, hair. To character and personality we are blind.

“It was in one of the medical journals — I can’t remember which one,” Hughes says. “Of course, it might have been The National Enquirer. People only retain bits and pieces. They never remember the source of the information.”

“Something else you read?”

“I expect so.”

Hughes eats quickly and precisely, a bit of egg, a bit of sausage. Toast cut into thin strips — what Hughes’s mum still calls soldiers — and dipped neatly in the runny yolk. Pushes his plate aside when he’s done and sighs. Breakfast not quite up to snuff: no kippers, runny eggs, fried bread, the whole lot swimming in grease. Would kill for a nice cup of tea, but the miserable tin pots they use spill more than they pour. “Simply hopeless — all the marvellous technology in this country and they can’t make a decent teapot. It’s enough to rot your socks.” Settles for more coffee, a little testy even with his third refill, a caffeine withdrawal symptom that an addiction expert might be expected to self-diagnose. “We’ll have to try that English-theme casino. I expect they know how to make a proper meal.”

“It’s a replica of King Arthur’s court, Merrie Olde England and all that,” says Munin. “You’re more Greenwich Mean.”

“Well, a half-display of wit. You’re on the mend. Now what were you saying about Bascule? He was researching antidepressants at the time.” A smug smile; Hughes is going to show off a little. “Enantiomers, if I recall. Mirror-image molecules.”

Munin has forgotten the substance of Professor B.’s lecture. But he remembers it was at one of those boutique hotels near the university, a dozen residents in a small, airless room, stink of burnt coffee from urns sizzling on Sterno. The professor’s performance was off that day, his review of the slides interrupted by long pauses. His thoughts seemed to be straying to far-off places; his voice sounded as if he were unsure how to return. There was a question period afterward but few questions. The old man’s vagueness was a bit of an embarrassment, and the room cleared out quickly. In those student years there was always the feeling you were missing something important somewhere else.

Munin stayed even though he was late for rounds. Hotel waiters came in to clear the room. The session chairman, an associate professor jockeying for tenure, tried to wrap things up with a question: “What is your research interest at the moment, Doctor?”

A clatter of dishes by the hospitality staff just then, so Munin almost missed the answer.

“Love,” Munin reminds Hughes.

“The old bastard.”

As psychiatrists, they waited for these moments, brief flashes of uncensored thought. Almost hypnagogic in their half-asleep awareness, defences down but the mind still needing to dislodge a word, unburden itself of something long buried.

“Bascule studied it for years — love,” he tells Hughes. “He said he’d had made a thorough analysis. What was it? What purpose did it serve? Why do we have that capacity? Does it serve some function? Or is it only an epiphenomenon?”

“The fieldwork,” Hughes can’t resist saying, “must have been exhausting.”

“He said that other states — anxiety, depression, violence — were fairly well described. Neural circuits, neurotransmitters, that whole business. Why not study love?”

“Why not indeed?”

“He had isolated six aspects. Six elements that were necessary for love.”

“More or less, I should think.”

“No — precisely six. He was quite clear on that.”

“Was he?” Hughes says. “He must have been mad.”

Munin and Hughes stroll along an Italianate promenade of faux columns and kitsch fountains littered with coins too small to toss in a slot. At the corner Mexicans are handing out hooker postcards, gift certificates, coupons for free pulls. An interstate bus huffs out in a diesel fog and turns onto the Strip, heading south.

The glare makes the street surreal. Each of the casinos is a fantasy — ancient Egypt, the Arabian nights, the imagined desert — each as elaborate as a fuck dream. Just background noise to Hughes; he’s reading a flyer advertising blond college grads delivered direct to your hotel room.

They enter the stream of tourists crowding the boulevard.

“No one walks anymore,” Munin says, the pace too slow for his taste and he’s a little testy in the heat. “They lumber along.”

“Why stay put?” says Hughes. “Family ties? They hold you back. Ex-wife? Kids? Leave them behind. If you hate the east, go west. Hate the cold, go south. It has a certain charm, believing that life will be different somewhere else.”

At the corner they are recognized by two men wearing convention badges. “Dr. Munin, isn’t it? I’m Dr. Raffie, Nashville. I’m the director of the outpatient access prog —”

“Yes, of course.”

“I heard your lecture in Miami last year. Will you be speaking here?”

“Thursday,” Munin says. “Just a case I’m presenting at one of the satellites.”

“Yes, I seem to remember reading that in the program. I’m not sure if I can make it, may have to go back early — busy, so many people to see. This isn’t my favourite venue. Crass, don’t you think? My wife absolutely refused to come. If you’ve got a few minutes now, I’d appreciate your opinion on a difficult patient of mine.”

“Call me in a week or two. Or send an email.”

They cross the boulevard, Hughes intent on traipsing about a shopping mall modelled on a Roman forum to scrounge for souvenirs. “I’ll leave you here,” Munin says. “I’m going back to my room. I’ve still got a bit of work to do on my presentation.”

“That fellow didn’t ask about my case,” Hughes says, a bit peevish. He’s presenting at the same symposium. “You’d think he would have noticed. A case of gambling addiction — what could be more bang on in a place like Las Vegas?”

“Eating disorders for one,” says Munin.

“I expect so. It is a buffet-and-bulimia sort of town.”

“Did you see our waitress? The one at the coffee shop?”

“You barely glanced at her,” Hughes says.

“You didn’t notice anything?”

Too thin, that was the first clue. Pale complexion, muscle wasting, the drawn look on her face. Index and middle fingers were shiny as if etched by stomach acid. Teeth were a mess, the enamel worn away when she brushed to get rid of the taste in her mouth. There are always signs.

“Do you think we should go back and talk to her?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Curious that she’d work in a restaurant.”

“Is it?” Munin studies him for a moment, Hughes’s face naked in bright sunlight.

“Perhaps not,” says Hughes. “No, I expect it isn’t.”

On Thursday Munin will lay out the facts of the matter. The case of Penelope. He has been allotted twenty minutes to discuss the signs and symptoms, what occurred, how he has intervened. It will be enough: to review the obsessions she reported, the compulsions he observed, what he has done. There’s no need to capitulate and recapitulate her life. He will present only the small part bisected by treatment. He will not talk about the things that came before, or after.

The mall is an agora with marble columns, galleries of designer shops, the inevitable slot machines. The dim lighting heightens the glow of the storefronts, scads of people fluttering like moths but no one settling on anything. Puts Hughes in mind of a medication he once used in his patients with gambling addiction: it controlled their impulse to wager but also killed the urge to shop. There was a neurological link there, shopping and gambling, one of those clinical curiosities the British journals were keen to publish. He should really write it up. Nothing prudish, no rant against the false economies of consumerism and the gaming industry. Shopping was hard-wired so it must be essential, the soul equivalent of breathing or reproduction. That would get him a spot on the lecture circuit.

The air is chilled and ozone-rich. Hughes coughs; it’s hard to breathe. He blames the ceiling in this place, painted an oppressive sky blue with puffs of cloud looming overhead. It makes him anxious. Wherever he turns he is aware of that crypt of ceiling, as he is not aware of other ceilings, or of the sky itself. He can feel himself starting to hyperventilate.

In an hour the show will start, the fake Roman statues will come to life, or so a sign says. Hughes doesn’t wait. He hurriedly buys a few T-shirts, a coffee mug, a deck of cards, then flees to the adjoining casino where the air feels more breathable. Kills a few hours at a blackjack table. The environment entirely artificial but soothing somehow; it isn’t pretending to be real. A casino is a self-enclosed world, mad in a way but conforming to its own logic. It succeeds, like all delusions, as long as the doors remain shut and reality isn’t allowed to intrude.

Flick of cards, whir of the automatic shuffler. Hughes hits and busts, hits and busts. Stands and is beaten by the dealer’s two face cards. Surely there’s a pattern to it all. Hughes tries to visualize it, the rhythm, the flow that makes up a run of luck. Something mysterious, hidden from the weekend punters. Munin would see it, Hughes is quite sure of that. His colleague has the rare ability to understand the play of physical symptoms, the behaviours, the random thoughts that aren’t so random, after all. A diagnosis is simply an attempt to wrest some sort of meaning from the human chaos. All that messy business of a patient’s life: the false starts, dead ends, and the path that’s left in front of you becoming ever more constricted. You are tired and freighted with baggage. Who wouldn’t want a guide, someone with a map, a way of categorizing and organizing everything? Who wouldn’t welcome someone with a fresh way of looking at things? Who doesn’t desire to have a system? Nothing predetermined. Nothing judgmental. Nothing so procrustean that it couldn’t accept every conceivable complaint, every mad thought, any unsettling act. Munin’s world could even accommodate those absurd “six aspects of love.”

There’s a woman at the slots counting coins in the metal tray. A man at the craps table is rubbing his fingertips on the felt; he touches his heart, he touches his temple, he blows on the dice before rolling them. Hughes would like to believe that these gestures, the small rituals and superstitions, mean something. But he’s a skeptic. He lacks faith. When he’s with his patients, he listens carefully to what is said, and what isn’t. He understands just enough of what they tell him to make a diagnosis, prescribe something, have them come back in a few weeks. But still, after ten years of trying — after what has been said, after what has been done — he knows he’s missing something. He hasn’t grasped the heart of it.

He pretends, of course. He dutifully conducts the examination, completes questionnaires, checks items on a checklist. He fills uncounted files with his painfully acquired observations. He tries to break things down to their essential elements, their six aspects, or nine, or twelve. He records gestures, counts physical symptoms. He shines a light in his patients’ eyes. He sees all that can be seen. But there is a shadow, always.

Munin dials his home number. Out on the Strip, a stream of early-evening traffic, river of people looking up at signs as though they meant something, bright neon bleaching out the heavens. The phone rings. Munin realizes he’s no longer staring at Vegas but at the glass.

He turns away, phone still ringing, and shuts off the television. On the fourth ring the phone clicks over to voice mail and he hears her: “I’m sorry we missed your call.”

Munin didn’t expect to hear Cynthia’s voice live, not really. Imagines her in her workroom in front of the French doors, rapt, late-afternoon sunlight dappled, if that was the word. “You should be outside on a day like today.” She, of course, would remain indoors; moments like this were so rare. “It’s all about the light.” She notices such things, each place with its own signature of sun and dark. The brilliance of beginnings, afternoons swaddled in grey. She has told him about the artists’ studios — sentimentalized notions of workrooms and garrets, filthy, cluttered with paintings, drafty with only the heat from a small wood-burning stove. Chill spaces up the hill in Montmartre that he tries to imagine but cannot. She describes a Paris twilight filtered through Impressionist cloud, the fine soot of centuries over skylight. None of that here, in Montreal. If she’s ever going to succeed as a painter, well, it’s an old argument.

She applies more paint to the canvas as he watches. If she is withdrawn, it’s an inner thing, nothing visible to the naked. He knows enough to stand behind her, not intrude on her line of sight. She’s studying herself in the window. He kisses the nape of her neck. She continues to work. The painting is a self-portrait, another one. It seems narcissistic — a term she would loathe — and he can’t resist recalling the list of cardinal symptoms: grandiosity, the need to be admired, preoccupation with fantasy, a lack of empathy. But he doesn’t want to think about that. He isn’t about to diagnose, he isn’t being asked to analyze. He wants to live this moment, experience it in all its richness, without thinking of what has passed or what will come. Which is hard. Which is impossible; only fools and madmen can manage it.

In the painting her head and shoulders float; there’s no line of breast, curve of belly. The outline of her face holds the colours of a prism — reds, yellows, violets — as if in the wavelengths of light she is depicting a Doppler shift of mood — heat to coolness, near to far — away from here, away from him. But perhaps he’s reading too much into it. He examines the eyes, sky blue, deeply set, clearly hers. But somehow detached from the face as if they were sketched on the windowpane. They are weeping, and the tears seem to bleach the colours of the garden beyond: sun-faded plastic of patio furniture; tired purple flowers; the dusty climbing vines that Cynthia planted along the fence when they first moved here.

“I like it. It’s very good.” And perhaps she hears something in his voice, a tone audible only to her? For she turns away. He takes her hand — her right, not her brush hand — and kisses it, tastes the liquor of paint, turpentine, the hint of dark earth in the cracked terrain of skin.

“What do you like about it?”

“The flowers,” he says, “they’re very nicely done.” He comments only on the background and imagines she doesn’t notice.

“The cheeks are too fat.” She is foreground, Cynthia, always the subject. “Do you think it looks like me?”

How to respond? What is there to say? He’s a trained observer, yes. Surely there is something to be said about the monomania of self-portrait? The body dysmorphia of cheeks fat or thin, eyes sunken as buried desire, pupils like holes burned in canvas. What of the shapes? What of the colours?

If he were to speak now, she would be impatient with him. “I didn’t marry an analyst” — something she has said often. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you feel,” as if they were two separate things, and maybe once they were not. He responds as a husband. “I think it’s wonderful,” caressing her cheek, “it’s a beautiful painting. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

She frowns. He’s patronizing her. Or worse: he’s blind to her inadequacies. She can’t stand that. It’s infuriating. She desires something in him — ruthlessness — that she calls honesty. He can’t manage it.

Cynthia brushes away his comment. Munin retreats to the door. Throughout the exchange she hasn’t turned. Now her profile is one-quarter, one-eighth, nothing, as she remains fixed on her reflection, the brush hesitating over the canvas. She doesn’t say anything more; her eyes don’t follow him as he goes. Something else he notes but doesn’t comment on.

“Cynthia ...?”

He waits for her to respond. The expectation in his voice is audible, but she doesn’t pick up. The phone records the long pause not as hesitation, indecision, analogue thoughts hissing unexpressed, but as something binary — not presence only absence — before he hangs up.

The first aspect of love was narcissism. As in the story of Narcissus, a myth as ancient as love itself. The youth who was condemned to love only himself. When he saw his reflection in a pool of water, he realized his love was unattainable and stabbed himself in the breast.

He was an invert, a homosexual, or so Freud believed. He had taken himself as the sexual object, and would doubtless have searched agora, village, shepherd’s field for someone who resembled his reflection. But the embrace would be an empty one: water is cold, it runs though your fingers, and in its depths there is only darkness.

Munin knows the unattainable wasn’t what killed Narcissus. It was need. Or rather the realization, as he stared at his image, that the pool was endlessly deep. The water reflecting eyes reflecting water, on and on. We can never satisfy our desires. The empty search, the thirst that cannot be quenched, the pool of need that cannot be plumbed. It overspilled its banks, flowed from pool to stream to river. It was a vast flood, enough to fill an ocean, drowning everything and everyone.

They meet at eight for cocktails in the hotel’s grand ballroom, an intimate gathering of a thousand guests. They have been specially selected by tonight’s host, Janus Pharm, a Swedish pharmaceutical company. They are the experts, the key opinion leaders, the high prescribers.

The theme tonight is “Go West!” The room is decorated with a mock Apothecary Shop stocked with modern-day detail aids — when the healing needs help — along with flashlights and free pens. In the Dry Goods Store there are sombreros sporting the product logo, lapel pins, key slides, interactive software. There are Conestogas filled with souvenir serapes featuring a two-headed Janus that Hughes calls Mr. What?What? as if the head were a cartoon freeze-frame looking ahead to the future but also behind at something in pursuit.

In the far corner of the room there’s a three-piece combo playing cowboy tunes. There’s a lariateer doing tricks with rope. Waiters in western gear sidewind through the crowd, spurs jingling, serving Tex-Mex hors d’oeuvres — fiesta mussels, guacamole, stuffed chayote. Young women in Navajo vests are pouring California wine, margaritas and Mexican beer, open bar courtesy of an educational grant. The food stations are chuck-wagons with tenured professors waiting in the chow line, paper plates overflowing with fajitas and refried beans.

At the reception desk they are branded with ID cards, invitees only: the wagons are circled tonight. Munin and Hughes are spotted at once. “Good — you made it. I’m glad you could come.” A petite woman in a black cocktail dress identifies herself as Judith Moore. She is vibrating with nervous tension. “Your flight — I saw it arrived on time. Any problems?” But before they can answer she is interrupted by the squawk of her walkie-talkie. “They’re here,” she tells it. To Munin: “Soren has been very anxious to meet you.”

“Not too anxious — he’ll be his own best customer,” Hughes says. Well, Judith’s smile is a little forced; her client’s product is a drug to treat anxiety disorders.

“Soren and I have talked on the phone,” Munin says, intentionally bland, “about my presentation.” He can see she’s stressed, too thin, terribly intense as she scans the room; slight exophthalmia there, perhaps a thyroid deficiency.

Judith hands them both a small binder that will be distributed at the meeting. She flips it open to show Munin the page with his postage-stamp photo, brief bio, an abstract of a case that he recalls having reviewed a few months ago. The session is a satellite to the annual meeting, all content sponsored by Janus Pharm. “I’ve sent welcome packages to your rooms. The event is Thursday evening, 6:00 p.m.”

“We got the package, thanks.”

“We’re expecting a good turnout. We’ve got about six hundred people pre-registered.” She doesn’t mention that many of the delegates have been paid to attend.

Munin uses the binder as a makeshift table, balancing his drink, a cocktail napkin, and something that appears to be a miniature quesadilla. He nods to familiar faces — that histrionic psychodramatist from New York, an interpersonal therapist from Texas with his third wife — that he last saw at the meeting a year ago.

An outsized Swede in a Stetson comes over, introduces himself as Soren, tips his hat to reveal reddish-brown hair — “You see?” — but is greeted only with mild curiosity. He looks marvellously out of place. Quite a feat in Vegas: no one belongs here, so everyone fits in. Says he was transferred to this country just over a year ago. How are you liking it? It is never home, ja? A stranger in a strange land, and each week the people grow stranger, ha-ha. Voice a little loud; Munin can tell he’s been drinking. There are other signs — there in the eyes, in the complexion — not hard for Munin to imagine those long Swedish nights, Soren shit-faced and singing along Sveavägen on the long walk home. Here he drinks because it’s too quiet, the light is different somehow, it keeps him awake; restive as myoclonus at 3:00 a.m., he imagines product positionings and repositionings as he tosses and turns in bed.

“At last the famous Dr. Munin. I have wanted so much to meet with you. And Dr. Hughes — you are in your element. This bedlam,” he adds, meaning Vegas. Until recently the psychiatry association had boycotted the city for its conventions.

“Coals to Newcastle,” says Hughes, and is greeted by blank expressions. Soren blanker than most — a bit too slangy for the Swede.

Judith feeds Soren the translation. “The association was concerned that a meeting here would be seen as endorsing gambling.” Vegas is the Mecca of madness: the Strip is a slow march of the multiply addicted, Hughes’s speciality; or of the obsessional, Munin’s bread and butter. The association’s past president, a specialist in seasonal affective disorder, pushed for a return to Seattle or San Francisco — rain was good business — but he was outvoted.

Judith tells them that the registration this year is reported to be a record. Vegas is a draw: bigger even than Miami last year before the hurricane hit, Soren hosting a rooftop soirée in South Beach when the rains came, driving his guests indoors to cold canapés and warmish white wine until power was restored, the host himself remaining alone in a poolside cabana drenched in Gulf stink and saltwater rain like tears.

Yes, far from home in a foreign land, feeling a little at loose ends in his Middle American middle manager’s office, his view of a parking lot with not a Saab in sight, feeling off balance when Judith made her pitch for this year’s satellite symposium. Vegas? Western theme? Thirty-eight-litre hats? It sounded terribly foreign to him, fetishistic even. In the Tunnelbane he has seen them, those slim boys with white-blond hair sporting bandanas and leather chaps, tall as the actor Randolph Scott and with that same expression, faces frozen in a rigor that was almost neurologic in origin.

Judith tried to get her client back on track. “We’re not talking tunnels here, Soren, just wide-open spaces. The meeting will be the key pre-launch event, the last promo hit before the new indication.” The plan was to corral the key opinion leaders — those cagey KOLs — and get them to present case examples of patients: obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety, gambling addiction. Let people hear the success stories. Learn who has responded favourably to the drug. But just a soft push, the marketing had to be low-key until the product was actually approved for OCD.

Soren: “We’ll need an opening talk. Neurobiology. How the drug works. Bioavailability, pharmacokinet —”

“Who cares?” said Judith, quick to nix it. “I’m sorry, Sor, but you’re competing with the most entertaining city in the world. Leave the details to the reps in the field. The important thing is to have your key doctors do their thing. Each case is a product endorsement,” said Judith, moving in for the close, laying her hand earnestly on his sleeve. “The touch of Lady Luck.”

No luck for Soren lately; he’s got issues back at head office and he’s pissed away his per diem rolling them bones. Apologizes for being late to the dinner, says he was at a competitor’s session. “I forgot my watch,” winking now, “and you know there are no clocks in a casino.”

“They want you to lose track of time,” says Judith.

“Is that what you think?” Munin asks. More offhand comment than confrontational, but it still gets a rise out of Judith, eyes narrowing, nostrils widening, all textbook. But she’s a supplier, so she’s quick to retreat (“That’s what they say ...”), Munin giving her the impression she’d better have her facts straight before she ventures another opinion.

“I’m just curious,” Munin says. “We hear it all the time — no clocks in a casino. There are no clocks in a supermarket. No one thinks that’s some kind of conspiracy.”

“It’s probably healthy to be a little paranoid,” says Hughes, healthier than most. “What was the topic at the session, Soren?”

“Sex addiction.”

“It’s one of the better addictions to have,” Hughes says.

For no particular reason they find themselves looking at Judith. An awkward silence until Soren gestures to a waiter dressed as Pancho Villa to bring them another round of drinks. “Now, Doctors — your cases? You are satisfied with them?”

Hughes reflexively touches his neck; he has his slides saved on a flash drive hanging around his neck, a sort of a string-tie look. “It’s pretty well done, but I was thinking of adding a few things.”

He’s had a few thoughts on video poker and dissociation, those legions of slots players in a Zen state bordering on psychopathology. It was an illness, video poker linked to dissociative experiences; the phenomenon has been well documented by several groups. Inserting the coins, transfixed by the images on screen ... it’s a form of flight, the flash of cards appearing and disappearing on screen was the beat of wings struggling in air. It’s a fugue state: you abandon job and home to cross the country, and each step isn’t distance, it’s time. One of the cardinal symptoms is amnesia — and why not? With so much space between here and home, why wouldn’t you leave behind the past? Forgetting is a survival skill in America. You need it to loosen the ties of family and friends — the job strangling you, the bondage that’s your life. Time to flee and forget. Cut the anchor. Let yourself drift, a dromomane beyond the known and imagined, in greater and greater orbits until you hit the apogee ...

“Of course, leaving familiar ground and familiar faces isn’t enough,” says Hughes. “The problem isn’t the people around you. Identity itself is ballast, you see. If you want to escape, you must jettison identity itself.”

Hughes has studied them, there at the banks of video machines — uncarded college kids, housewives, middle-aged men with no ID — hypnotized, dizzy with the spin, a whole legion of people who have forgotten who they are. With dissociative fugue that was diagnostic:

Do you ever find yourself in places and you have no idea how you got there?

Do you set out on a journey but find you end up somewhere else?

Do you lose time?

“All those poor beggars at the video slots,” says Hughes. “They’re gone. Completely lost.”

“No wonder they bankrupt themselves,” Judith says.

“That’s just it — there’s nothing to bankrupt. There’s nobody home.”

“Fascinating,” Judith says in an unfascinated way before getting back to business. “Dr. Hughes, would it be too much trouble to give me what you’ve got so far?” She’s on the clock and wants to nail down some of the details from the docs. “You can always add more slides later. Of course, you’ll still have to keep to the twenty minutes we’ve allotted you.”

“If you insist,” says Hughes, surrendering his string tie. He’s a little reluctant to hand it over; it’s what Winnicott would have called a transitional object.

Judith smiles at her client — “Got it!” — but Soren just nods politely. Hughes’s talk is a nice-to-have; it will be years before the drug is approved for gambling addiction, if ever. Soren will be in a new job by then, leaving product management like a tapered withdrawal, the higher-ups awaiting the OCD launch before they decide on his promotion. The problem is he’s already behind schedule. Munin was supposed to have completed his preliminary trial by now.

Another ten minutes of badinage before the group disbands. Judith leads Hughes over to the chuckwagons so he can rustle up some grub. It seems pre-arranged, a chance for Soren to have a few minutes alone with Munin.

“I wanted to thank you,” he says. “We expect your case to be the highlight of the session. I read your report. Your results have been very encouraging.”

“They’re still preliminary.”

“As you know, we want to proceed. You’ve seen the plan. We have to move forward. I’m a little concerned that we’re falling behind schedule.”

“I’ve got a few concerns of my own,” Munin says. “There have been a few developments that weren’t in my report.”

“Side effects?”

“Not in the usual sense,” Munin says. “Adverse events.”

A side effect is common enough; predictable at times, generally explainable. An adverse event is a researcher’s term for an unexpected occurrence during a clinical trial. It isn’t an adverse reaction: that implies cause and effect. Event is less judgmental. It doesn’t assume the product is directly toxic or interacts with other drugs, is given at too high a dose, is misprescribed, misused, or abused.

There is only the Event. Like a weather anomaly — a freak storm, a hurricane or tornado. Like an accident, a mistake, a sudden death. Call it bad luck, call it a bad beat. It may be a sign of something malign, or just a coincidence. It may have no significance, statistical or otherwise. All that can be said with certainty is that it occurs. There is no question of liability. It can’t be predicted. It is never the intent. It is random, it is fate. It is part of the design of the universe.

The Singing Caballeros are line-dancing with the guests; there’s a dealer giving blackjack lessons. Crowd visibly thinning now, getting on to eleven o’clock. Pharma reps still out in force, but they’re running out of audience, tag-teaming two to a doctor now. The late hour silly with cerveza, mostly one blue-suited soul telling jokes to another with a doctor — poor sod — caught in the middle. But the sales pros can see the mark is starting to drift — eyes glazing, feet shifting, it’s all that pinstripe, some kind of moiré effect — until mumbled good nights, long day, he’ll see them at the conference tomorrow.

The late-stayers are rewarded with tequila shots and C-note Macanudos, Cuban contraband from the Winnipeg rep who smuggled in the goods in his sample case. Room emptying fast, but the salespeople will be the last to leave. All according to plan, the industry makes a point of hiring only the outgoing, glad-handers, extroverts ... it’s there in their files, securely locked away, evidence from psych tests, mostly pop versions of the Myers-Briggs or MMPI used in the interview to identify the extraverts, screen out the wallflowers. Does not enjoy solitude. Prefers to be in the company of others. Tough shank of the evening for them working a near-empty gig. Normally, they would have to return to their room, a hotel suite where the outward gaze turns uncomfortably inward. But this is Vegas: free booze, nolimit tables, lounge acts, quiet bistros, off-Strip strip joints for a little G-string action, bottomless clubs for the hip-flask crowd. In this town you don’t have to be alone, not ever.

Soren shepherds Munin through the hotel to a retro ratpack lounge, fifties-chic mahogany and leather, like something he’s seen on SVT. They sink into leather armchairs, overstuffed as an exec’s wallet. Scotches all around. A Johnny Mercer tune playing overhead gives a vibe that’s supposed to be mellow, but it isn’t working. Soren’s keyed up, inhaling a swig of single malt as if it were air. “You understand —”

“Yes —”

“That this symposium is very important to us.”

Munin’s heard the sales reps chatting it up, thick as thieves at the baccarat table, the new indication in OCD. Not officially, of course. They can’t discuss any off-label uses; it’s mostly broad hints of the backslapping variety. The rules don’t apply to Munin, the administration of a drug — how much, to whom — is left to his discretion as a clinician. “I’ve heard talk of a large trial.”

“A major study,” Soren says. “We’re planning to announce it here, maybe recruit one or two investigators.” They’re hoping for a bandwagon effect. The reps are already lobbying to get one or two docs in their territory on the short list of investigators. All of them will be there on Thursday, honorarium in breast pocket, and that’s just the beginning ... Then the follow-up visit, the letter thanking them for attending, the invitation to participate in a new study that’s in the works ...

Munin is out of the loop, but he knows the switch has been thrown, the machine has started to hum ... they’re talking dates for an investigators’ meeting to iron out the details, they’re working up a draft protocol for a phase II/III study, data analysis by Christmas. Soren’s damn determined to get this thing back on the fast track for a Q3 launch next year.

Playing with his Scotch on the rocks, making hexagonal rings of condensation on the cerise tabletop, Munin says, “It’d be better if we had more time.” The water marks resemble the phenylpiperidine structure of Soren’s product, some sort of synchronicity at play here. If Soren notices, it’s strictly subliminal.

“Your report last fall, you said you had a dozen patients lined up.”

“I haven’t updated you on the numbers,” says Munin.

They screened how many to get a mere twelve souls to enroll? Janus insisted on drug-naive subjects, so it was a tough slog. Who wasn’t on some medication nowadays? Most didn’t make it past the screening. Then they had to run the gauntlet of entry criteria — not young or old, no coexisting medical condition, willingness to be a trial subject. Six months collecting names. He started them on the target dose, the full measure right from the start. No slow titration, another Janus requirement. Time was already a factor; in an eight-week study there’s a small window to show efficacy, what the number crunchers called separation from placebo. Of course, the subjects couldn’t tolerate the high dose; the first six patients complained of side effects and dropped out of the study. They ended up dosing it the way Munin had planned all along: ten milligrams to start and doubling the dose every two to four weeks until the target was reached.

Soren knew all about it — on the job just two weeks when Grant Hublis, one of the research associates, cornered him in the cafeteria to give him the heads-up. “Dose titration? What is he, some kind of homeopath, Sor? It’ll take him what, four months to get the blood levels we need?”

“He knows his business.” Soren figured he’d cut Munin some slack. After all, he was the man in the trenches.

“His business just buggered our timeline,” said Hublis, a bit idiomatic, but Soren got the idea.

The first six dropouts were just the beginning. Two more quit after a month on study, one of the senior nurses joining the general defection. One lost to follow-up, a couple of protocol violations, skipping doses, forgot to take the drug, that sort of thing ... well, any trial can expect a few of those.

“I count eleven,” says Soren.

“Not that unusual,” Munin says.

“Eleven out of twelve?”

Always obstacles, challenges. Getting people to join. Getting people to stay. The number of subjects like so many half-lives tapering off to extinction ... Munin perhaps a little negligent in that regard; it takes the talents of a motivational speaker to keep some people on drug, and Munin was, shall we say, distracted.

Ring structure more elaborate now, Soren cold sober enough to notice that it resembles a Schedule II controlled substance. “So you’re saying?”

“Just one. One completer. She’s the case I’ll be presenting on Thursday.”

It took a year of planning: correspondence to define the objectives, work out the study protocol, inclusion/exclusion criteria, primary and secondary endpoints. Munin was to complete the pilot, and they would then proceed to phase II. Medical Affairs had budgeted a million dollars for the trial, and it had to be spent in the current fiscal year. Clinical Liaison had already contacted other centres. They had scheduled internal and external meeting to discuss the data from Munin’s study.

There was no study. An N of one. N, as in nothing, nothing to discuss.

Soren hadn’t wanted the project; it was just something he’d inherited when he took over the job. Munin had already been signed up, he was recruiting patients. The preliminary reports looked highly promising. But that was in September.

When they heard the news about Munin in December, well, it was godawful timing, of course. Something of a favourite topic at Janus; they’d all heard the story. Nothing first-hand: Munin was away from the office, off the radar, the sales rep hadn’t been able to see him for months. Soren’s calls weren’t returned. There was no response to his emails.

The VP of marketing pulled Soren aside after the sales-forecasting meeting. “Listen, Sor, this is a business like any other. Your customers —” what they called the physicians they solicited “— you can’t really trust them. They’ve got their own agenda. You take a situation like this ...” But what was the situation? Soren couldn’t find out. Was Munin on some sort of sabbatical? No one seemed to know when he was coming back. A secretary assured Soren that Dr. Munin would certainly return his calls once he was back in the office. Any idea when that will be ...?

Well, Soren couldn’t wait. He had to get this thing nailed down. More phone calls. So many emails that the university server flagged him as spam; another two weeks to sort out that mess. Then the holiday season and no hope in hell of contacting anyone. On New Year’s Eve he sent a registered letter: We would like you to present a case at the annual meeting in five months’ time. Silence. In January he went to Montreal and called on the hospital. Yes, Dr. Munin’s here. Not here exactly, at work. It’s his clinic day. Tomorrow would be better.

He returned the next day. No Munin.

For three days Soren waited, pacing from hospital to hotel room and back again. He stayed in his room, a business hotel on Sherbrooke Street, chrome-and-glass austerity so Scandinavian that it seemed to be mocking him. What are you doing here? hissed the Svanstaler chair. Fool — you should never have left home! bawled the Biedermeier bed.

He took to walking great distances, from the Old Port to the top of the mountain, the river view grim as an Edda in the damp winter air. Soren kept his cellphone on, but when it rang it was always head office pressuring him for an update. Are you on top of things? What have you found out? Where’s your report?What’s going on with Munin?

He was at the Trudeau airport business lounge scrolling through emails when he received a call from someone in Munin’s office. “I believe you wanted to speak with him?”

“I’ve been trying for three days. Is he there?”

“This is his office returning your call.”

“This is most urgent.”

“Are you a patient? Are you thinking about harming yourself?”

Harm was there on the horizon — to himself, Munin, career, prospects — but he told her no, it was a business matter. Not much time. He wanted Dr. Munin to present a case at a meeting in May.

“Then there’s still time,” the assistant said. Her calm was maddening.

“You don’t understand.” They were talking about months of prep work. Before the submissions and approvals there had to be talk among investigators, a pre-market push. Enough buzz to stir up some out-of-indication sales — nothing grand, expectations still European in their modesty, but they had to show something on the books. He’d worked the numbers. The major depression indication was worth a fortune, but there was no more room for growth. After a couple of billion dollars a year, it gets tough, market leader always pushing to expand the market, but there’s never enough illness.

Oh, there was talk about doing a few deals with their competitors, promote comorbidity; if there were no more patients, the ones they had would have to take more meds. No one wanted to go that route. A better strategy was to use more drug, double, triple, the dose. A higher dose wouldn’t provide any benefit in depression. A few early adopters had tried it, but it didn’t look good. Medical had already copied the case reports for Legal, just a matter of time before someone — FDA, Scientologists, chat-room crybabies — raised hell as if it were the coming of the Antichrist.

So the per-patient spend was a non-starter for depression, which was where OCD came in. The problem, what Soren’s boss called the challenge, was the limited market potential. OCD wasn’t common enough. Yes, there were dark nights imagining that the epidemiologists had it all wrong, our various obsessions — for pristine armpits, sterile countertops, pangyreic awareness — were so common now, so man-in-the-street pedestrian that they escaped notice. There under the radar, a plague of obsessions and compulsions waiting for a smart marketer to declare a pandemic. Just wishful thinking; Soren was forecasting a couple-three percent of the population as candidates for the drug. The only way to compensate was to use higher amounts, maybe four times the dose they were using for depression. But they needed to show proof of principle, feasibility. They needed the pilot study. They needed Munin to show it could be done.

Soren drafted a memo to Medical Affairs — May be a problem at the Montreal site. Recommend we consider someone else as principal investigator — but was overruled by the higher-ups. Munin was their first choice as PI. They wanted him to do the preliminary work. Munin had the reputation. He could attract other researchers to the project.

But not now. Not with an N-of-one study. It’s a disaster.

Affect calm. Smile. Probe gently. “Who, may I ask, is the patient?” Soren asks Munin.

“P.N. You understand I can’t give you her name.” Munin sees Soren struggling for an expression of infinite patience. “Call her Penelope.”

“This Penelope — she completed what, four months, six months?”

“Eighteen weeks. On the full dose.”

“And she responded? The drug works?” Soren sees Munin hesitate; doctors never like to commit themselves to anything definite. Tries to dial down the marketing angle. “It appears to provide some benefit, yes?”

Munin hesitates but has to agree there is some benefit. They achieved the primary endpoint: a fifty percent reduction in symptoms according to the questionnaires Munin has been filling out every week. Do you avoid public restrooms? Do you wash your hands over and over? Are you tense when you throw things away? Five questions on obsessions, five on compulsions. Yes or no, yes or no.

Are you afraid you will harm someone?

Do you think things should be arranged in a particular configu ration?

Do you have blasphemous thoughts?

Sexual thoughts?

“The treatment cut the severity of her symptoms in half,”

Soren says. “That’s an important gain.”

More of Munin’s famous caution. “A fifty percent reduction appears significant, but her scores were five times higher than normal when we started. She’s still very ill.”

“But the criterion was fifty percent. That’s how we defined response. It was decided. You agreed to it.”

Munin had agreed. His patient was objectively better. But what was the benefit, and what unintended harm had been done?

Soren doesn’t ask about Cynthia — that damn Swedish discretion. Munin figures he’s heard the story, but there are other stories. How cold it was that winter in Montreal, the wind tunnel of McGill College, the chill rolling down the mountain to the river. They took shelter in a half-deserted maison de torréfaction, the inviting damp of the overheated room, the cough and sputter of the machines. The afternoon passing in conversation, ordering coffees, maybe sharing something sweet. He and Cynthia and everything was new. She was animated then, talking about love or destiny, half-wired on caffeine, and Munin was thinking of the corona of light that was her hair. There was a draft from the door that chilled his kidneys, and he tried to ignore his need to urinate. He wanted to master the urge. Oh, he was young. The romantic impulse, he didn’t want any interruption, nothing to disturb this moment, for it would mean the moment had ended, and it was too soon to think of endings.

When he couldn’t hold off any longer, he excused himself. He half wondered if she would still be there when he returned. He wanted to ask but knew how foolish that would sound.

When he returned, she was still life: coffee untouched, the same wisp of hair outlining her cheek. In his absence she had sketched him from memory on a small artist’s pad she carried with her in those days. “Do you like it?”

“Of course I do.” His face was lean and tense, but the eyes were soft. Harder now. “Is that how you see me?”

“I tried to capture your expression, the look in your eyes.”

“They look sad. Sort of watery.”

She apologized. She had imagined tears. She had thought she had said something to upset him — that was why he had left the table so abruptly.

He explained that he had to go to the men’s room. Their first misunderstanding, one they could laugh about. He told her a story about a friend, another med student, who had a phobia about having a car accident with a full bladder — she was afraid it would burst on impact and she’d die of peritonitis.

“She?”

They walked through the grey desert of downtown on that cold afternoon, to a dim bistro for lunch, to Chinatown and the Old Port, a winter sea sharpness under a leaden sky, and then it was night and it snowed and they had to get back. Returning along the rise of St-Laurent, the parade of skin parlours and steamie joints and army surplus stores, all the forlorn places that become a theatre backdrop in the first act of love. They crossed downtown, the follow spot of lit windows on snow, the slow goodbye as they trudged along to her walk-up in the student ghetto.

Cynthia was about to kiss him when she saw he was shivering and invited him in. She opened a bottle of wine, a heavy Amarone to warm them, but he was still chilled, and she told him he didn’t look well. She wrapped him in a blanket and drew a bath, adding eucalyptus to clear his head, and he remembered the oil coating his skin as he slid into the water. He was starting to feel the tension ease when she came in to bring him towels and the tension returned. She crouched beside the bath and drizzled water over his chest and saw how rigidly he held his body. “Are you self-conscious?”

“Of course not. I’m almost a doctor.”

Cynthia teased him about that. She thought people were driven to study the things they were most anxious about: gynecologists with mothers who died of cervical cancer; liver doctors with a family history of alcoholism. She felt deep down he was anxious about something, there was an edge to him, and it was so like Cynthia in that moment to attribute it to nervousness. It was only later that she called it arrogance, that edge.

She had many theories — about people, about him, about her — that he would later think about. He would consider them carefully, no matter how foolish, but if he ever mentioned them again she would claim to have forgotten them. Ideas to her were like art: inspired, soaring, light as air. They were just something to experience. Why discuss them?

“It’s important to understand everything.”

“You can’t,” she said. “If you analyze something, all you do is drag it to earth and kill it.”

Munin was feeling light-headed. “I drank too much tonight. What about people who become psychiatrists?”

She said nothing, just looked at him with a sort of wistfulness as if she saw something he would never understand. He tried to press her for an answer, but she simply shook her head. Munin was always trying to shine a light into the corners to understand what we are. Cynthia must have known even then: we are the shadows. They define us.

He drew her closer, and she tried to get away, but he pulled her into the bath. They made love that first time with her half-dressed, water churning, the tub overspilling. He held her tightly against his chest until the water cooled and she said she was chilled, they would both get pneumonia. She stripped off her clothes and wrapped them both in large towels. As she was drying his hair, he saw she had been crying. He should have said something, some word or sign to acknowledge the fact of her tears, but he didn’t like to ask a question when he didn’t already know the answer.

Was it joy or sadness or something else? Had she seen in those first moments, on that first day, how every beginning holds in its heart an ending? Every seed, every cell, contains its own death.

Begin in September. Begin again.

Penelope thought of September as the start of the year, a leftover from her student days. Ridiculous, a woman her age. Married, now unmarried, what’s done is undone. She had made a new start. She was a working woman now. She had a job. That was August. In September, no job. That was when it came undone. Not fired, not terminated. They informed her they had eliminated her position.

What does that mean — no position? I have no place? Or I’m in no position to argue?