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Dedication

for my parents,

Mark Davis and Yueh-hsiu Chien

Epigraph

I have now long been aware that the persons I see about me are not “cursory contraptions” but real people, and that I must therefore behave toward them as a reasonable man is used to behave toward his fellows.

—Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

1

When Kirstie interrupted me I was in the break room. I had just sat down at the round, perpetually stained plastic table in the corner and was listening with satisfaction to the coffee maker as it began its quiet gurgle. Reluctantly I made a small gesture of greeting.

She asked if it was a “fresh pot,” and I nodded, and to discourage any further conversation I bent my head over the weekly paper that happened to be open on the table in front of me. She was dressed, I noticed, entirely in athletic clothing—black and elastic, with a muted sheen. Her cheeks were flushed, and the triangle of flesh below her collarbone was flecked with beads of perspiration.

She passed behind me and asked, startling me, “Is that the horoscopes?”

She moved closer to me and I could smell the scent of her freshly exercised body in the small, windowless room.

“That’s funny,” she said. She had not pegged me for the kind of man—the kind of “guy”—who read the horoscopes.

“Oh,” I said quickly. “I’m not—I’m not reading this.” And as I said it I saw that I looked like a very poor liar. I had failed to notice, somehow, that the paper in front of me had been turned to the horoscopes section, and not only that, but the facing page had been folded back with care.

“Could you read me mine?” she asked, reaching for a mug. “I’m a Pisces,” she said, and my heart sank.

As a rule, I maintained a careful neutrality toward my colleagues. I preferred not to involve myself in university gossip, or department politics, aware, without regret, that I had chosen for myself a somewhat lonely stance. But when Kirstie arrived, early last year, I found that she provoked in me a strong aversion that I couldn’t shake, an abiding hostility I could not explain even to myself. And yet, I thought, there was no real way to refuse her request, and so I found the right place on the page, next to a picture of two turning fish.