So do you think the process somehow synthesized all the work done in those sessions?

Sure, that’s right, nothing works for twenty years. Then I undergo this new process, am immediately released from pain, and I should credit the things that didn’t work? Come on, Logan, you’re not serious?

He is staring at the toast, but has lost his hunger. His stomach is tight as a child cringing from a blow.

But how could anything work so fast?

Gabrielle has balanced two sugar lumps on the side of her cup, like swimmers on the side of a pool. She pokes each one in with a small brown splash.

Perhaps it didn’t know it was supposed to work slowly, she says.

Logan wants to get a cloth. Desperately wants to get a cloth. Controls himself.

But people spend years in therapy overcoming that sort of thing.

And not overcoming it, either, she says. You assume psychological change can only be achieved slowly, because that’s your experience. But perhaps it’s only slow when the methodology is wrong.

He can feel himself bristling. In what way, wrong?

Say you want to move a mountain of salt. Takes years with a teaspoon. Takes minutes with hot water.

Now she is on to the croissants, tearing one apart in its sections like a pastry crustacean.

We use electrical stimulation, Logan. And electricity isn’t slow. It’s instantaneous. Switch on a light – pow. Same in the brain. You know how I see it?

Logan knows he is about to find out.

In the nineteenth century, she says, medicine was biology. We’re at the organism level. Leeches and bleeding. Something wrong? Cut it off with a saw. Then comes twentieth-century medicine, and it’s chemistry. We’ve gone down a layer to the molecular level. Something wrong? Take a pill. And another pill for the side-effects. Twenty-first-century medicine will be physics. Dealing with matter in its fundamental form: energy. Brain stimulation. And goodness knows what else.

The tail of the crustacean: scooped through jam and popped in her mouth. Logan feels queasy, disoriented. The delayed effect, perhaps, of last night’s whisky, reactivated by tea and without the salvation of solids.

For mental health issues, he says, staring at the toast.

For physical ones too. Because what is the biggest underlying factor in all health conditions? Stress. And what is stress but emotional overload? Thoughts and feelings, Logan. Electrical charge.

He cuts his toast into six small squares, in the hope miniaturization will make it more appetizing.

It sounds like you’re intending – stretching for a lightness he fails to achieve – to put me out of business.