and said “come in” to her twelve o’clock. Their voices disappeared behind the rush of the sound machine.
11.
I sat stunned. Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin. These words kept reciting themselves in my mind until I thought I must have said them myself. The sound machine was on; I might move about, but I did not, could not. The patient and I were kin, I suddenly knew, spawn of the same cursed line: the tribe of the inherently unhappy. How early one knows this! Too early, too young; she at thirteen, I at twelve. All unexpectedly the realization comes; that damned day; that indelible sight; that unreachable, shiny little happiness.
The nearby church bell tolled the slow strokes of noon. At the twelfth, my heart began to race. Sweat sprang out upon my neck and back. The weather had turned unaccountably hot; one day the late summer’s fog chilled the city as usual; the next came a dry, hot wind from the east, sending temperatures above ninety degrees under merciless skies. Even the cold breath of the old building’s soul had been vanquished by the heat. Yet the sweat that clung to me was chillingly cold. There was nothing I could do. I could only watch as my black mood descended upon me the crows, so delighted, flapping down for their meal of carrion. They pecked at my wishes, as they did always; sucked the world empty of hope. I thought of the weight of inheritance that had fallen upon the patient—so heavy, so like my own—and my dreams for her self-creation seemed doomed, a small, flapping bird chained to a stake at the foot.
The clock sounded one, then two. And only then, after Dr. Schussler left for her luncheon break, did I stand and try to calm myself. I took a turn about the office, visited the men’s room, then walked the length of the corridors: two long, perpendicular hallways—the building was shaped like a carpenter’s rule—where at the far end of each hall there gathered a dim, perpetual twilight. I could not return to my cottage by the ocean—the hot weather had beckoned hordes to the beach; their loud radios plagued me; motorcycles raced up and down the Great Highway without cease. I could only stay at the office, which I did, lying down as best I could upon the small settee, settling in before the therapist returned for her three o’clock patient.
The afternoon wore away. The sound machine kept up its empty breathing; Dr. Schussler spat out her Ts, hard-hushed her Ss. A faint current of hot air stirred the venetian blind, setting it to knock softly against the casement. Spears of light hit the walls, then vanished, then speared again in the uneven rhythm of the bare breeze. It seemed to me that I had seen and heard all this before: the stabs of light, the knock of the blind, the rush of Ss. A voice sounded in my head. When you’re adopted, said the voice, you don’t look like anyone. The sound machine took up the rhythm of the breeze, playing a deceptive melody. And all at once I knew how this moment had come to be, where it had happened, long ago.
I did not want to go there in my mind. I looked out the window—a statue on the roofline of the Palace, a naked man, loins draped—then looked away.
12.
The weather turned on us again. The heat subsided; there was one clear and temperate day; and then it began to rain. I had no idea that rain could fall with such steady determination, hour by hour, day after day. What kind of devilish place had I come to, I wondered, where humid fog could turn to sere heat and then to monsoon rains all within the space of a few weeks? A wet gloom now seemed to have settled over the city, and while San Franciscans went about their business as usual (the N Judah rumbled by; passengers ascended and descended; cars dashed by on the Great Highway), the fifth deluged day found me still in bed, in dirty pajamas, watching rainwater seep under my door. Out on the beach, no one appeared but a single haunted soul in a black hooded jacket: a suicide, I thought, surveying the sea for riptides.
Only the thought of the patient’s return enabled me to rise from my bed, dress, make my way under the drenched gargoyles, through the white lobby, past the black, circling eyes of the