The Origin of Species Read Online Free PDF Page A

Klein worked from an outbuilding of Montreal General that served as some sort of rehab. It stood at the head of another steep set of stairs that came up from Pine—and the symbolism of all this climbing was not lost on Alex—and passed along the high-fenced schoolyard of the Académie Michèle-Provost, whose children’s sounds and construction-paper-decorated windows always filled Alex with a not-so-obscure sense of shame. The rehab building sat four-square and gloomy amidst a clumpof spindly pines at the top of the steps. To the west, above the treetops, you could make out the upper stories of the General; to the north, up the slopes, the red rooflines of the Shriners children’s hospital and then the undifferentiated woods of Mount Royal Park.
    Alex had never quite been able to determine what went on at the rehab except that everyone there seemed much crazier than he was, with either the vacant stare of the overdrugged or the weird, screwed-up intensity of the perpetually embattled. He had ended up there by fluke: after his breakup with Liz he had gone into the university’s counseling center when his usual low-grade depression had taken a turn for the worse, and the center, being unequipped, it turned out, for any kind of long-term treatment, had sent him on to the health clinic for a referral. That was where he had met Dr. Klein, who worked shifts there as a medical doctor.
    “Actually, I’m just setting up a practice,” he’d said, clearing his throat. “I might be able to fit you in.”
    The look of him then had hardly inspired confidence. Everything about him was boyish and gawky, his mop of hair, his adolescent thinness, the way his doctor’s smock hung on him like a disguise. Even the way he’d put the thing had sounded suspect, as if he was shilling for clients. But Alex had been feeling pretty black at the time. He had moved into the place on Mackay by then but didn’t always trust himself to go out on his balcony.
    The counseling center had warned him it might be months before he found a placement.
    “When can you see me?”
    Dr. Klein made a show of looking through his agenda.
    “I could put you in tomorrow.”
    Alex hadn’t even known Klein was a Freudian until he’d gone in the next day and seen the couch.
    “The way we’ll work is you’ll lie on the couch and say whatever comes to you.”
    That had been pretty well the full extent of their discussion of methods. Indeed, in the three months that Alex had been coming in, five days a week, fifty minutes a day, the word
Freud
, or, for that matter,
psychoanalysis
, had not so much as crossed Dr. Klein’s lips. Alex, though, who was not unfamiliar with Freud, recognized even these omissions ashallmarks of the Freudian system: the important thing was to keep the analysis free of all contaminating influences. Once, to test the waters, Alex had pointedly asked about Dr. Klein’s education, and the doctor had put him off at once.
    “I don’t think it would be useful to the therapy to talk about that.”
    In fact Alex couldn’t believe his good luck at first. Freud was about as close as anyone came to being a hero for Alex: back in first-year undergrad he had read the
Introductory Lectures
and had never looked back. He credited Freud with releasing him, finally and irreversibly, from the last shackles of the Catholic Church; he credited Freud with teaching him whatever little he understood about the mythopoeic mind. It had long been his dream to do an analysis, something he’d assumed would forever be beyond his financial means. But here in socialist Quebec, wonder of wonders, the treatment was fully and generously funded by the taxpayer.
    The thirteen-minute walk to the clinic meant that Alex arrived, as he saw from the hall clock, some twelve minutes late for his appointment. He was happy to be spared waiting in what passed for the building’s reception room, a squalid foyer with a torn vinyl couch and a few ratty chairs where there was not