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ten: that was when he and his brother Gus had started watching
The Tonight Show
, on those nights when their father stayed late at the club. Even then he’d had delusions of grandeur, casting himself as a movie star or NHL whiz kid and aping the rhythms and turns of phrase of Johnny’s guests.
Well, Johnny, I learned to skate on a little pond near our farm in an old pair of skates I paid two dollars for at Leamington Sporting Goods
. Things like that. Usually real things he dressed up in one way or another. Not so differently from now.
    To tell you the truth, Peter, the idea goes back to a trip I made to the Galápagos in my mid-twenties
.
    Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that have been just around Darwin’s own age when he was there?
    Well, pretty close, as a matter of fact
.
    At least he had moved on from Johnny to Peter Gzowski, though any number of guest hosts might make an appearance over the course of a day—Liz, his academic advisor, perfect strangers, indeed anyone, it seemed, except Dr. Klein. What was most disturbing about these exchanges was that it was almost impossible anymore for Alex to formulate a coherent thought outside of them. This meant that for most of his waking life the only way he knew his own mind, as it were, was through the suspect utterances that he contrived for his imaginary public. What did it mean to have a consciousness if the only way it was ever present to him was through this infernal talking head? Who was he, really, in all that? What did he really think? How could he know? All he really knew,in the end, were the canned opinions he put together for Peter Gzowski.
    It was all more evasion, of course, the mind’s endless editing, exactly the sort of thing analysis was supposed to get beyond. But so far, everything he said on the couch had the feel of being as calculated and processed as his mental interviews—there were no unexpected breakthroughs, no stumbling through the underbrush into sudden clearings, just the Talk Show of the Mind made incarnate. It was as if, for all his spite toward him, Alex was just trying to dazzle Dr. Klein with the crystal clarity of his thoughts. Or worse: he actually wanted to please him. Since the start of the analysis Alex’s dreams had taken on an almost parodic level of Freudian iconography, rivers and trains, rotting teeth, subterranean passageways, as if his mind were cribbing mental copies of
The Collected Works
to dredge up offerings for Dr. Klein.
    Alex’s father had made predictably frequent appearances in their sessions. Alex had told the story of the family dog his father had killed when Alex was four or five: this was a classic of his childhood, full of nuance and possibility. The dog, a stray they’d named Lassie after the TV dog, though it was a male, had been getting into the chickens, and his father had chased it down into the back fields and felled it with a couple of blasts of his shotgun. It would have been easy to portray his father as a villain in the matter, but instead Alex had made light of it, as if it had been a lark, merely the kind of thing everyone did in the country. But then why had he brought it up at all? It had been just another offering: see how I need you, the story seemed to say, see what a perfect Freudian disaster I am, hiding my pain.
    The thing was, there was no pain in his actual memory of the event—it had indeed been a lark, a veritable family adventure, almost festive in its sense of occasion. Dogs came and went in the country; if they were pests you drove them out to a deserted concession road to let some other farmer get stuck with them, or you got out your gun. When it came to it, his father had actually liked the dog, though Alex didn’t quite say this to Dr. Klein, or rather, he didn’t say it very convincingly. It wasn’t clear to Alex what exactly he had been trying to do, please Dr. Klein or mislead him, vilify his father or excuse him. Maybe it had just been his way of introducing