ME: It’s called the reverse Socratic method. Or if it isn’t, it should be. Where the patient leads the therapist to the answer.

* * *

Moira parks in the little bay for which she pays an extortionate fee every month. It is close to the English Department, which is making my PTSD symptoms worse. I haven’t screamed or beaten her yet, but I am considering the possibility that I won’t be able to manage this.

“You know he’s not there, right?” Moira says. “You know there is no chance you will run into him? He isn’t even in the country. You need to chill. You look horrible.”

Apparently, I’m not wearing as much of a poker face as I like to think.

“It feels as though he is here. Everything looks the same. It seems impossible that the building can be here without him in it. He was an institution. He practically lived here.”

“Because he had no life. Now he has a life. It’s the life of an internationally celebrated and fêted novelist. He’s at a film premiere somewhere, Lucy, rubbing shoulders with other famous people. He’s having cocktails with Jonathan Franzen. You can do this. You can come inside with me.”

I go inside with her.

It all looks the same—crepuscular light, dust motes dancing. It smells the same—lavender furniture polish, dusty floorboards. It sounds the same—rubber-soled shoes squeaking down the corridor, a murmuration of students in the junior seminar room.

We turn the corner and see a tall man with stooped shoulders, a maroon cardigan, and a halo of silvery hair walking away from us.

“It’s not him,” Moira says as I grab her arm. “Look properly. That’s Dr. Bentelstad.”

She’s right. This is the English Department of Constantia University. Old white men in cardigans are ten a penny.

Moira steers me toward Prof. September’s office. “Do you want me to go in with you?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Text me when you’re done. I’ll be in my office.”

* * *

Prof. September is a little smaller and more faded than I remember. She looks like a photograph of herself that has been left out in the sun. Powder clings to the fine, post-menopausal hairs on her cheeks. Her hands are bonier, her plait paler. The pigment has leached from her skin. She was mahogany; now she is oak.

She is explaining to me why it is okay that my rape is the one part in Coetzee’s book that goes undescribed.

“It’s a lacuna, Lucy. You remember what that means?”

“An unfilled space. A gap.” Ever the good student, I parrot the definition.

“Then you know the power of the lacuna in literary fiction. The absence of something can be more powerful than its presence.”

“So, the absence of any meaningful discussion about rape in the public domain all these years is more powerful than its presence?”