I remembered looking up at my dad, who stared impassively at the stage. On impulse, I touched my finger to the front of his part and dragged it down the length of his head. He shuddered, then turned to me, his face a map of repulsion. I had already retracted my bad hand, was hugging it to me.

“I did not like that,” he whispered, his voice like sandpaper. But why? Why didn’t he like the feel of my finger on his head? Why hadn’t he laid his head on mine when I’d rested on his shoulder, making a sandwich? He didn’t, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered back. “It looked shiny…“

He squinted at me, breathing through widened nostrils, then turned back toward the stage, where Werther was making arrangements to leave the town. My organs seemed to shrivel. If I’d thought Werther was full of desire when he’d entered the stage, he was now exploding with it, his movements grand and beseeching. He was going to go away, yes—but now he was bellowing out into the hall that he wanted to end his life.

“And that was when I ran to the bathroom,” I said to Freud.

I waited for Freud to make a pronouncement, but he just sat in silence, his palms still arcing across my head. So much time passed that I began to grow drowsy, wondered if perhaps I would drift off to sleep.

“Why did you tell me that story?” he asked finally.

The shame swept up into my face. His words echoed in my mind, becoming more savage with each reverberation: Why did you tell me that story? Disgusting—a story about you diddling yourself at the opera?—really?—

“You said to say whatever came to mind!” It was something about his hands, which were still on my forehead—his hands, the opera house, its five fingers—I grabbed his wrist and pulled it toward me, stuck his finger in my mouth. I had expected it to taste dirty, like after his bar shift, but there was just the faintest bitterness in the middle of my tongue.

“Let go.”

“No,” I said, forming the word around his finger, and pressed my teeth into his knuckle. He didn’t make a sound. I wound my tongue around his finger, round and round, the thick hairs grazing the underside of my tongue, which was so tender.

“Why are you doing this?” he said.

“You don’t like it?”

“You need to think about why,” he said. “Isn’t that the reason you’re here?”

I inched the finger out of my mouth, scraping my teeth along it, but when I got to the nail I bit down.

Freud yelped. I laughed.

“Finally!” I said. “Finally!”

“Finally what?” he said.

“Finally, I win,” I said, “me!”

“What did you win?”

“I won your pain.”

I had meant to say “attention.” I could have said a thousand words that didn’t make me sick, but “pain” was not one of them.

“That isn’t what you want.”