There were tears in Lillian's eyes, for having made friends immediately not with a new, a beautiful, a drugging place, but with a man intent on penetrating the mysteries of the human labyrinth from which she was a fugitive. She was almost angered by his persistence. A man should respect one's desire to have no past. But even more damaging was his conviction that we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is solved, understood, liquidated...

"You will never rest until you have discovered the familiar within the unfamiliar. You will go around as these tourists do, searching for flavors which remind you of home, begging for Coca-Cola instead of tequila, cereal foods instead of papaya. Then the drug will wear off. You will discover that barring a few divergences in skin tone, or mores, or language, you are still related to the same kind of person because it all comes from within you, you are the one fabricating the web."

Other people were dancing around them, so obedient to the rhythms that they seemed like algae in the water, welded to each other, and swaying, the colored skirts billowing, the white suits like frames to support the flower arrangements made by the women's dresses, their hair, their jewels, their lacquered nails. The wind sought to carry them away from the orchestra, but they remained in its encirclement of sound like Japanese kites moved by strings from the instruments.

Lillian asked for another drink. But as she drank it, she knew that one of the drops of the Doctor's clairvoyance had fallen into her glass, that a part of what he had said was already proved true. The first friend she had made in Golconda, choosing him in preference to the engineer and the nightclub manager, resembled, at least in his role, a personage she had known who was nicknamed "The Lie Detector"; for many months this man had lived among a group of artists extracting complete confessions from them without effort and subtly changing the course of their lives.

Not to yield to the Doctor's challenge, she brusquely turned the spotlight on him: "Are you engaged in such a repetition now, with me? Have you left anyone behind?"

"My wife hates this place," said the Doctor simply. "She comes here rarely. She stays in Mexico City most of the time, on the excuse that the children must go to good schools. She is jealous of my patients, and says they are not really ill, that they pretend to be. And in this she is right. Tourists in strange countries are easily frightened. More frightened of strangeness. They call me to reassure themselves that they will not succumb to the poison of strangeness, to unfamiliar foods, exotic flavors, or the bite of an unfamiliar insect. They do call me for trivial reasons, often out of fear. But is fear trivial? And my native patients do need me desperately... I built a beautiful house for my wife. But I cannot keep her here. And I love this place, the people. Everything I have created is here. The hospital is my work. And if I leave, the drug traffic will run wild. I have been able to control it."