The boyfriend at the literary magazine had determined that he preferred men. He told Clare a story about a day when, walking through a glass revolving door, he had accidentally tried to get out of the way of his own reflection.

They had almost the same problem, she and this ex-boyfriend.

But Clare was confused, because in fact the campus was all brick.

“I need to be by myself for a while,” the ex-boyfriend told her, through the phone.

Clare walked calmly to the library and did not cry.

She tried to pick out a poem.

Clare was well!

Clare wrote her prize-winning story and the ex was jealous, then relieved.

Clare had a close female friend with whom she slept. The female friend liked to play a game in which she and Clare would, on separate occasions of course, sleep with the same man. They never discussed the nature of the game but played it often and maybe furiously. Perhaps it made them feel better. It was, as everyone was saying, fairly painful to be alive these days. As the news got worse, fashion’s call for whittled hip bones intensified.

Clare was reading all the essays of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Clare knew that, in doing so, she flirted with hackneyed undergraduate predilection, but Lacan liked shiny things, and Clare did, too. Lacan enjoyed cybernetic suspicion. Something glinted along the horizon and you thought it was alive; you felt yourself recognized and therefore had faith in your existence.

Clare understood that according to this theory of mind she did not, strictly speaking, exist. It was just a trick done with light and air.

Clare read Lacan’s early essay “Logical Time,” in which three prisoners are called before a warden who must liberate one. The boon will not be given outright; instead, the warden arranges for a test in which five disks differing only in color, three white and two black, are to be handed out. Each prisoner will receive a disk, black or white, and must divine its color. Any conclusion as to the color of one’s disk must be arrived at by logic. Random guessing is not permitted.

The three prisoners are each outfitted with a white disk, and, having hesitated together for a certain time, exit the room in unison.

Lacan says that he knows why.

A prisoner who looks and sees two white disks knows that he can be either a black or a white disk. This prisoner then imagines the points of view of the two others: If he were a black disk, he thinks, the others might be able to think, If I were a black disk, too, then the third person would leave immediately, because he would know, seeing two black disks, that he is a white disk. But this third person hesitates, and, indeed, we all hesitate, and, therefore, we are white.