“I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Liar!”

“Why say that?”

“There’s more to you than you let on! How many kids your age whistle tunes from Figaro while they’re peeling potatoes?”

She strode out, expecting me to follow her, but I’m not the sort to follow anyone, particularly if they want me to.

I looked at the old Greek woman, washing the kitchen floor. This was the kind of reality I was adjusted to: getting a patch of earth the way you want it while thinking of nothing.

However, I left the kitchen and, outside, went up the steps. In the large, bright room, I could see that Patricia, along with the rest of the class, had been waiting for me.

She pointed at the floor. “Sit down, then we’ll start.”

Around the group she went, soliciting dreams. What a proliferation of imagination, symbolism, and wordplay there was in such an ordinary group of people! I stayed for over an hour, at which point there was a break. Breathing freely at last, I hurried out into the heat. I kept going and didn’t return, but went into town, where I had provisions to buy for the Center.

When I returned, Alicia was waiting under a tree outside, with her notebook. She stood up and waved in my face.

“Leo, where have you been?”

“Shopping.”

“You’ve caused a terrible fuss. You can’t walk out on Patricia like that,” she said. “I kind of admire it. I like it when people are driven to leave my lessons. I know there’s something pretty powerful going on. I don’t like poetry to be helpful. But we masochists are drawn to Patricia. We do what she says. We never, ever leave her sessions.”

“I had work to do,” I said. I wasn’t prepared to say that I had left Patricia’s workshop because it had upset me. Dreams had always fascinated me; in London, I wrote mine down, and Margot and I often discussed dreams over breakfast.

My dream on the “ghost watch” had been this: I was to see my dead parents again, for a final conversation. When I met them—and they had their heads joined together at one ear, making one interrogative head—they failed to recognize me. I tried to explain how I had come to look different, but they were outraged by my claims to be myself. They turned away and walked into eternity before I could convince them—as if I ever could—of who I really was.

The other dream was more of an image: of a man in a white coat with a human brain in his hands, crossing a room between two bodies, each with its skull split open, on little hinges. As he carried the already rotting brain, it dripped. Bits of memory, desire, hope, and love, encased in skinlike piping, fell onto the sawdust floor, where hungry dogs and cats lapped them up.