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wide of the mark: breaking up had been the only thing in their relationship that he and Liz had been right about.
    From the clock above the door, which he could just make out if he twisted his head, Alex saw that they were already at the halfway mark. A familiar panic went through him. What was he doing, forever fighting this man whom he’d come to for help? Why did he continue to avoid the most important things? He had yet to say a word, for instance, aboutDesmond and the Galápagos; he had yet to say a word about his son. These were matters of far greater import than Liz or his dissertation and yet he hadn’t gone anywhere near them, as if, for all his imagined self-knowing, he was as classically repressed as any of Freud’s Viennese hysterics. Of course, it might also be the case that he was just an idiot, a bourgeois with too much time on his hands, bilking the already overburdened health care system to the tune of forty-three dollars per fifty-minute session. If he continued to see the doctor at all it was only for this, that since he’d started his analysis he felt unaccountably better.
    “I don’t see what my dissertation has to do with it,” he said, thus inviting exactly the mind-numbingly obvious reply Dr. Klein gave him.
    “Sometimes there are patterns to what we do. That’s what we’re looking for.”
    He wondered if Dr. Klein didn’t feel it too, that same sense of hollowness when he spoke as if they were merely following a script. More and more Alex saw their relationship less in Freudian terms than in purely animal ones: they were both of them sniffing the air, circling each other, making feints; all the rest, all the talk that passed between them, was just so much barking and clucking. It might really be as simple as that, call it transference or whatever, that the shaky respite Alex felt since he’d started here was due entirely to his making an enemy of the doctor, to his focusing on him all his simmering animal rage. Alex would have liked to talk to someone about that rage, which was pretty much a constant in his life, attaching itself to whatever was handy—Ronald Reagan, Liz, the rude servers at the Van Houtte’s—and making him feel incessantly mean-spirited and exhausted and low, even when its targets were perfectly reasonable ones. And he would have liked to talk about the endless stream of vindication fantasies that ran through his head—I will finish my dissertation; it will be published to great acclaim; I will get tenure; I will win awards; a school of thought will be founded in my name—that was the other side of this rage, the gargantuan need for some sort of revenge against the world. Revenge for what? he had to ask. Against whom? The kids who had picked on him in high school? Did it really come down to this, that his main motivation in life was this simple need to get revenge for all his petty humiliations?
    Somehow it was not Dr. Klein, however, with whom he wanted to discuss these things. That would have been too awkward, really, toodemeaning. From there, it would have been only a short step to making incontrovertible what for most of his life he had striven to hide from the world, namely the dark den of banality and self-absorption that his mind truly was. There were the self-improvement fantasies that kept his revenge ones company—I will be more generous; I will quit smoking; I will learn Spanish; I will call home more often; I will stop plotting stupid revenge fantasies; I will become a better, more perfect person—or the embarrassing interviews he was forever conducting with himself in his head, and that probably constituted his main mode of self-presence. The interviews were particularly insidious. Alex himself could hardly believe how much of his mind time they took up, and yet he couldn’t seem to muster whatever strength of will it might take to put an end to them.
    They had been going on now for as long as he could remember. At the very least, since he was nine or