He really was concerned about her, one of his more interesting patients, she guessed. For if he wasn’t encouraged by her to speak of his home, she implored him to tell her about the people he treated on his night calls. She never tired of their histories—the elderly men living alone in rooms, morphine addicts, pregnant runaways, the demented, the poor, the declassed—those were his patients, his real patients. Despite their arguments, he’d brought a new idea into her mind, psychology. She was struck by the thought that people were ruled by laws of which they had no knowledge. He gave her a book called Totem and Taboo. She read a few pages, until she came to this sentence: “The prohibition owes its strength—its compulsive character—to its association with its unknown counterpart, the hidden and unabated pleasure, that is to say, an inner need into which conscious insight is lacking.” Her alarm outdistanced her comprehension. She dared not bring it up to Myron for fear he would explain the meaning of the sentence by applying it in some measure to her. Or to himself. She could not grasp the sense of it—yet it frightened her, like a voice speaking about her in an unknown language. Everything she was ignorant of spoke of her—and, she told herself, she was nearly ignorant of everything. Was that a reason to learn? To stop the world’s whispering? She noted the sizable library she had been gradually accumulating over the years. But those books, except for the few political tomes, were only stories; they did not turn in unfavorable reports on your own existence.

She told stories about people she’d known and knew, and Myron delighted in them, saying there was more than a passing resemblance between her friends and his patients. She wrote to Max, copying out Freud’s sentence, saying that all such information, if that’s what it was, filled her with dread as though she’d been suddenly struck blind. Max replied from North Africa. He said she ought to read history, it would give her perspective, she would not feel so persecuted by learning. Had she ever heard of mechanism, of Descartes? And was she still seeing that doctor? Seeing had been her word to Max. She had mentioned Myron only in passing. Max hadn’t forgotten.