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the whole issue of his father’s brutality, except that even there he was on shaky ground—when he tried to tally up in his mind the real instances of violence, he couldn’t come up with more than a meagerhandful, none of them touching on him directly. What had always been worse had been the shame afterward, how his father had sulked for days or weeks after some outburst so that they’d have to keep living the thing like a penance.
    Eleven minutes remaining. Still enough time, perhaps, to bring up something of import. Ingrid’s letter was the really pressing thing, he knew that; everything else was just noise. In his mind’s eye he saw it again, Ingrid’s familiar airy script, which had always made his heart leap, and then the familiar red and blue of the airmail stripes. The letter had reached him so freakishly it seemed to have been delivered by the very hand of fate—it was that blasted article of his in
Canadian Studies
again, which somehow had turned up in, of all places, a teacher education center in Lund. By chance Ingrid had seen it, and had written him, care of the journal; by chance the journal—since he’d happened to update them when he’d moved to Montreal to keep up his free-subscription-in-lieu-of-payment, though he never actually read the thing—had had his address. What were the odds of that chain of events? And yet the letter had come. The upshot of the letter was this: he had a son.
    Eight minutes.
Blah, blah, blah
. Liz this and Liz that. What he did not say was the truth: that Liz was not to blame in any way. She might be messed up, she might have lied, evaded, distorted, she might still have horrible unresolved issues with her parents, and yet he was the one, he, he, he, no one else. He was an asshole, a shell, there was no way around it; all Liz’s flailing had just been her pounding against the emptiness of him, to no response. Fuck, he thought, fuck, and then, where his mind always bottomed out,
Fucking Desmond
.
    He had lapsed into silence again. He heard the hand jump on the clock above the door, but didn’t look over.
    Well, Peter, I suppose what stopped me from bringing things up with him was a kind of superstition, the fear I’d wreck this precarious balance I’d set up
.
    Isn’t that interesting. So you thought that by not talking about things you’d somehow keep them in check
.
    Something like that
.
    But you’d have to admit, that’s pretty Freudian
.
    Tick, tick. Too late now to start something new. There’d be a three-day hiatus—he’d had to cancel the following day’s session on account of his exam, and then came the weekend.
    I want to thank you for being here, Alex—is it really Alex? Or Alessandro?
    Alex is fine
.
    Though I guess it could also be Alejandro, since I understand you’re fluent in Spanish
.
    Tick. He heard the doctor shift behind him, impatiently perhaps, and then he said, in the same slightly admonishing tone he used every day, as if to underline Alex’s foolish squandering of his time, “I think our time’s up.”
    Alex sat up and started pulling on his shoes.
    “Monday, then?” he said to the doctor.
    “Yes, Monday.”
    Outside, he saw that the rain hadn’t dried completely on the steps yet. He made his way down, negotiating the little puddles, feeling a bit less taken than before with the budding spring.

– 3 –
    A lex just had time to pop up to his apartment to grab his lesson books before heading over to give his language class at St. Bart’s. He was afraid he was going to run into Esther again—why afraid? what kind of monster was he?—but he got in and out cleanly, though he’d done so little in the way of prep he might as well have gone to class empty-handed.
    St. Bart’s was in Little Burgundy, a short walk down Guy past the new Faubourg market at St. Catherine and then the massive mother house of the Grey Nuns to where the road dipped down into the lowlands of the urban poor. The neighborhood had apparently been the heart