The dripping of water had become a constant irritation for me. If it had become an irritation, then I had failed to concentrate hard enough. I had not left enough of myself outside the room. I wondered how long the session would last—more specifically, how long my patience would last. If we are to be honest, the members of my profession, then we must recognize that our judgments are based on our own endurance. How long can we go on before we simply cannot stand to hear more and leave the room? Often the subject, the patient, has nothing to do with the decision.

“I hear music down here sometimes,” X said, staring at the ceiling. “It comes from above. It sounds like some infernal opera. Is there an opera house nearby, or does someone in this building play opera?”

I stared at him. This part was always difficult. How could it fail to be?

“You are avoiding the matter at hand.”

“What did you think of my book?” X asked. “One writer to another,” he added, not quite able to banish the condescension from his voice.

Oddly enough, the first novella in the book, “Dradin, In Love,” had struck me, on a very primitive level, as evidence of an underlying sanity, for X clearly had conceptualized Dradin as a madman. No delusions there, for Dradin was a madman. I had even theorized that X saw Dradin as his alter ego, but dismissed the idea on the basis that it is unwise to match events in a work of fiction with events in the writer’s life.

Of course, I did not think it useful to share any of these thoughts with X, so I shrugged and said, “It was fanciful in its way and yet some of its aspects were as realistic as any hardboiled thriller. I thought ‘Dradin, In Love’ moved slowly. You devote an entire chapter to Dradin’s walk back to his hostel.”

“No, no, no! That’s foreshadowing. That’s symbolism. That’s showing you the beginning of the carnage, in the form of the sleeping mushroom dwellers.”

“Well, perhaps it did not speak to me as forcefully as you wanted it to. But you must remember, I was reading it for clues.”

“As to my mental state? Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Of course. To both questions. And I must also determine whether you most identify with Dradin, or the dwarf Dvorak, or the priest Cadimon, or even the Living Saint.”

“A dead end. I identify with none of them. And all of them contain a part of me.”

I shrugged. “I must gather clues where I can.”

“You mean if I don’t give you enough information.”

“Some give me information without meaning to.”

“I am not sure I can give you what you want.”