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himself. He does not trust the depths. Though the river is for rowing, it also has the terrible ability to swallow him up entirely. For him, the crocodiles that drift indifferently beneath the boat are wily demons from the underworld. His is the anxiety of the paranoid who has come to fear even his paranoia.
    As the boat moves toward the center of the river, a large red bloom drifts slowly toward it. Dr. Ludtz watches as it nears him. When finally it has come close enough, he leans forward to scoop it up but, as he does so, jostles the boat. He quickly renews his grip. Holding to the edge of the boat, he watches the bloom float past him, his face slightly drawn and disappointed, a famished Tantalus from whose grasp all good things recede.

T HE YEARS immediately following my father’s suicide were difficult but not altogether unpleasant. Scrupulous in all matters, he left my mother and me quite enough to get by without undue hardship. But he also left us with a stigma, one my mother was hardly aware of, but which I used to the utmost. The child of a suicide has about him something of the radiance of celebrity. His peers presume that such a person is in touch with occult circumstances, that he has seen behind the locked door and gained some dreadful knowledge that has so far been denied them. It is a dreary notoriety, not unalloyed to pity, but for such a one as I, it was not an altogether unfavorable condition. As I felt no real love for my father, or even very much respect, his loss was no great matter. I tried to grieve, but the cold solitude of his life, his inability to touch without awkwardness, to speak without formality, so distanced him from me that his absence seemed little different from his presence. As a consequence, I was granted the special privileges of my condition without having to experience the pain. Indeed, the only real sorrow I felt at my father’s death was my mother’s survival, and that from now on I would be under her authority exclusively.
    As the months passed, my mother grew increasingly worthless and embarrassing in my eyes. I continued to attend school and gained some small acclaim in swimming and academics. I met Anna. These were happy circumstances, so I cannot really excuse my life by an unhappy childhood, as so many others habitually do. For whatever discomfort attended my coming of age, it was discomfort only, not torture. What discomfort there was originated almost entirely with my mother. She was much as my father understood her — altogether beyond reflection on matters that did not immediately attend to the domestic. Ignorant of literature or art, heedless of the political turmoil that increasingly swept around us, beyond concern for any of the issues that enlivened public debate, utterly at home within the confines of her own grotesque physicality, and smelling always of raw fish, my mother came to epitomize everything I wanted to escape.
    To the people of the village she was simply the unfortunate Frau Langhof, whose crazy husband had taken a pistol to himself. But to me she was a large, dull mop of a woman, unkempt and frowsy, her oily, matted hair forever licking at her eyes. Perhaps it could be said that it was her slovenliness that inspired my later commitment to the study of hygiene. And yet if it were that easy to explain ourselves, we would know a good deal more of what we are.
    I do know this: that beside my mother, Anna, my fourteen-year-old infatuation, appeared as a creature out of myth, the very image of perfect maidenhood with her pale blue eyes and elaborately braided hair. She radiated health and vigor, while my mother lumbered forth in a cloud of putrescence. Anna was lithe and agile, a body glinting in the sun as it sliced through the waters of the public pool. My mother was squat and unwholesome, with small milky eyes that stared mindlessly over my proudly squared shoulders.
    â€œWhat are you reading there, my dear Peter?”
    I was sitting in the