“Sorry,” I said, “I’m sorry, I should go—”

“What for?”

“For screaming at you, for being so angry, it’s ridiculous, I don’t even know why—”

“What’s wrong with anger?”

“You said ‘stop’!” I yelled. “Didn’t you? You said that!”

“I said to stop pushing me, not to stop being angry,” he said. “What is wrong with anger?”

“Being calm is better, anger makes you look bad, it’s unseemly—”

“Where are these words coming from? Whose words are they?”

“They’re mine,” I said. “I’m talking. Me.”

“Are they yours?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Who else’s words could they be? I had said them with my own mouth. But that phrase was worming its way back into my mind, She’s being a baby, and I realized it was echoing through my memory in a man’s voice. Whose? I played the tape again and an image resolved into focus: the inside of a taxicab, black leather, the filmy window separating me from the driver. I was a child—I knew this because I was wearing soft, thick black tights, a pair that my mother had thrown out not long after, to be replaced with sheer stockings. My parents were outside the taxi, trying to get me to come out; I had been in a rage, I couldn’t remember what about, but my cheeks were slick with tears. I remembered willing myself to stop crying, but I could not; I remembered my father yanking my arm, trying to pull me out of the car, but I refused to budge, just continued to cry and cry. “She’s being a baby,” he had said to my mother, voice icy and hollow, and I had looked out the cab door and seen his face, like he wished I had never been born. I didn’t remember what my mother had said in return, just her pursed lips. But it was my father’s face that had stayed with me, a face I had seen other times when I had been too much to handle, times when I had revealed the depths of who I really was.

“What are you thinking?” said Freud, and I told him my memory.

“It sounds like his response was quite painful for you,” Freud said, and I felt the urge to cry.

“But he was right!” I said. “I’m sure they were bringing me someplace wonderful, and I had to ruin it!”

He stood there silently, just looking at me. A man walked by in shorts, and I watched the thick muscles of his thighs jiggle and then clench with each step, both supple and firm, like Jell-O. Muscles, hair, skin. He had a tattoo on the back of one calf; I could just make it out as he walked away into the darkness, a geometric shape comprising thin black lines. I wanted to run my fingers along it, so lightly it would make his hairs stand on end. I looked back at Freud.

“Why don’t you want to fuck me?” I whimpered.

“Why do you think you are so fixated on that question?”