18

IT IS SUNDAY. He stands in the shower until the hot water fails him. He cannot shake the feeling that he is coated in slime. He goes to the sporting club and showers there; he takes a sauna and showers again. He returns to Spells and throws himself down on the floor, where he sleeps through the day and the night and awakens only at dawn when the sun tears into his eyes. It takes him a moment to realize it is Monday and that he must return to Drear to see a client.

The client asks him if he is unwell. “You are very perceptive,” he says, “I seem to be fighting the flu.” His tongue is swollen in his mouth or his teeth have grown uncannily large; it is very difficult for him to speak, his voice is not his own. His client says, you don’t sound like yourself, and peers at him from behind his thick glasses with misgiving. He asks his client: “Would you like to end the session—you won’t be charged—and come back next week? By then I should be over this.” The client, who suffers paranoia, is very relieved and takes him up on this offer. The client, when he sees his wife later in the day, will say: “He looked so strange! I’m not even sure it was him. And I didn’t like the way he smelled!” After a few hours reflection, he will decide to terminate his sessions.

That week he manages to see his clients on time, to get to both offices, Drear and the downtown Spells. He finds he has to remind himself, for some obscure reason, that he has two offices, has abandoned one; that Drear and Spells are offices, not “theaters.” Except when he sleeps and they are both theaters in Hell where people are pleading and sobbing and damning him.

One morning, after an infinite number of mornings, he calls all his remaining clients to tell them he is ill and must cancel all sessions for an undetermined period. This surprises no one, because by now he is swimming in his clothes. Yet they are all profoundly upset and ask him whom they can see instead. But he had long ago broken from the psychoanalytic community in town, and has no idea whatsoever.