“I’m going to. I’m really going to. I’m going to quit until my birthday. [I’m only going to drink on Saturday nights. I’m never never drinking again on Sunday afternoons. I’m only going to drink at parties. I won’t drink before five o’clock in the afternoon. I won’t drink until we go to the coast. I won’t drink anything else after this one drink, this last night, this one final party.]”

I am going to find out about Freud, I decided one summer afternoon. I went down to the Alexandria Public Library and found the books and spread them out on a table and began to try to read them. Okay. There are three parts to the brain. The ego, that’s the part that talks to itself. The id, whatever that was. The superego, that sounded like my daddy, maybe.

I sat at the library table, desperately trying to concentrate, to understand. What did it mean? I didn’t know. I couldn’t guess. I looked around me. A poor mangy-looking lot of people were in the room. There was one tall man with glasses who looked as if he might want to talk about Freud but I didn’t think I should risk it. He might follow me home. No, I would figure it out for myself. I read it through again. It was beginning to make some sense. I envisioned a phenomenological head. A large ugly egg with veins in it. It was divided into three parts, this superego, like my father, this ego, like the thing I call I, whatever that meant. I was I, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I? Anyway, the third part was the id. The id was like a fairy or something. It was the crazy part. I didn’t like it. I closed my eyes, thought as hard as I could, trying to penetrate the mystery of the mind. All I could see were coils of flesh, flesh and maybe bones, so thick, like intestines, or liver. How could it think? What does it do? How does it do it?

All of a sudden I thought I was going to suffocate from the dusty smell of the books and the dust all over the library floor. The library was too hot, there were too many people and not enough air.