children of our mothers’ wombs. His alien genes had blessed him; they had given him the knowledge of his difference, his singularity. Now it thrilled me to think that I, sitting quietly behind a thin door, could follow the psychological turns whereby my dear friend had extricated himself from the engulfment of family; whereby he, like the patient, had come to the realization: These are not my parents.
If Paul—and now the patient—could extricate themselves, why not I? Why could I not learn the art of being parentless from these adoptees: these very models of self-creation?
At that moment, it seemed to me that my relocation to San Francisco had not been a stumbling error after all. The sudden leave, the dismal house by the beach I had rented, the ad in the newspaper that had led me to this strange office building in a rough neighborhood—each of these steps now seemed a requisite stage in a propitious process designed to bring me to Room 807, to the adopted patient, and, through her, to a possible release from the clammy hand of ancestry. Such a release had been the quest of my many psychological explorations; and to think that now I sat so close—physically and psychically—to the nub of this matter filled my heart with the first true joy I had experienced in decades.
Yet my happiness alarmed me. I was drawn to the patient, excited by the thought of an intimacy such as the one I had had with Paul, but a deeper intimacy for my being hidden and therefore more liable to know her secrets. But I was simultaneously ashamed of that excitement. My crouch behind the wall was too familiar, a stance too close to the postures of my darker nature; to impulses I had pledged to resist.
I ached as I considered it—to lose this grand opportunity of escaping my progenitors!—yet my pledge was made. Not to honor it could lead me farther into the shadows. How clever were the crows of my nervous condition: to thus show me a path to freedom but one that led directly through their realm, so to speak.
I therefore resolved, steadfastly, to avoid the patient’s sessions. But here I faced another difficulty: I had no idea when the patient’s next therapy hour might be. Did she come once a week, twice, daily? For that matter, what other patients, coming at any time of any day, might similarly want Dr. Schussler to turn off the sound machine and whose privacy I might therefore also breach, behind whose lives I would crouch in silence?
I could not decide on a plan of action; the office was to be a refuge for me, as I have said, a place where I might pierce the isolation that had so exacerbated my current nervous spell. Nonetheless, before Dr. Schussler’s next client could arrive, I left the building and made my way to Market Street, there to begin the long, rumbling ride on the N Judah streetcar out to its terminus at Ocean Beach.
The car rocked westward, and by degrees the fog closed in on us. At first, there were only small puffs of low-lying clouds blowing across the sky, which caused the sun to blink on and off disagreeably, glare one moment, sun-blindness the next. The intervals of darkness grew gradually longer, until the drifts finally coalesced into a bank of cloud; so that by the time I alighted at my stop by the Great Highway, with the ocean just beyond, the insatiable fog had completely swallowed up the sun. There was a stiff wind. My teeth were gritted with sand as I walked the three short blocks to the small house with peeling paint I had rented, sight unseen, during my hasty departure from the university. The idea of living by the sea had seemed recuperative. Never having visited San Francisco, I had had no idea that the Sunset District, through which I now walked, was a treeless neighborhood of cheerless houses, where the fog swirled relentlessly and the wind blew without cease. I arrived home and tried to calm myself by reprising my expansive moment at the office—the joyful certainty that I had come to San Francisco and Ocean Beach for a purpose—but all night long the wind rattled the windows, and I found no peace.
The next evening, a Thursday night, I tried to return to the office at a time when Dr. Schussler’s hours would certainly be over, eleven o’clock. But the moment I approached the building,