Every time he had gone to psychoanalysis, Kai showed animosity toward her and Bent afterward, and he was more irritable than usual. If she didn’t know better, she would think he had returned from being with another woman. Sometimes she wished it were something like that. At least that was something you could wrap your head around, a battle you could win or lose. The way it was now, it was like some strong, invisible enemy was sapping her energy, but she wasn’t supposed to feel that way. Sometimes Kai tried to discuss it with her. ‘It’s important that one person in the world totally understands why I react the way I do,’ he explained.

During his first depression, Kai had begun studying ‘mental mechanisms’ and things like that; and when he started to brighten up again, he would only spend time with people who were involved in similar pursuits. They were studying for a test (she didn’t know what the subject was) or had already taken it. They often (no, almost exclusively) spoke with tortured faces about the doctors’ distrust of them, and they challenged Kai to ‘do something for their cause’ in his medical capacity. She had the vague feeling that they were in the process of seducing him into something mystical of which she could never be a part, since she, according to their ‘teaching’, could never understand or help him, because she was too close. But when his mood changed, and suddenly he wanted to have people around him, he gushed with brightness and attentiveness. ‘You have been so amazing,’ he said then. ‘How would I have ever gotten through this without you?’

Lulu sat down for a minute on the kitchen counter and wearily brushed her hair back from her forehead with her hand. Kai’s voice reached her from the living room: ‘The essential difference between a depression and a neurosis…’

She jumped down and started putting things away, rattling them unnecessarily loudly. They always talked like that. Psychoanalysis, repression, hypnosis, depression, neurosis, mania! Sometimes she actually felt guilty over her own boring psyche, and found herself rather lacking, that in the middle of a crazy and besieged world she could keep her grip on the insignificant, necessary things which formed the foundation of their existence. But she was incurably normal, even though Kai asserted at times that she was full of inhibitions and complexes which she wouldn’t acknowledge. ‘The way the world looks today,’ he said, ‘it’s more a wonder that a person can keep their ego together, than that they give up.’ He looked at her with a cool, questioning face, as if she were a kitten playing in the middle of a pile of smoldering ruins. She wondered how he would take it if one day she ‘gave up’!