The Origin of Species Read Online Free PDF

so much as a reception desk or even a sign to show what sort of facility one had entered. Alex hurried past the vaguely familiar presences shuffling through the halls—inmates? outpatients? cleaning staff?—to Dr. Klein’s office, or at least the office he was to be found in, for there was no indication, such as a nameplate on the door, that it was actually his.
    As always, when Alex was late, the door was slightly ajar. Alex gave a knock but then pushed through without waiting for a response. There at his desk sat Dr. Klein in all his sartorial splendor, perma-press-trousered and gabardine-jacketed, not poring over some new psychoanalytic text or the notes from some other client, not even furrow-browed in concentration, but cross-legged and blank-eyed as if he had simply been waiting for Alex without a significant thought in his head. It came to Alex in a rush how contemptible he found this man—for his novice’s exactitude and adherence to the rules, for his ill-fitting sports coats and anachronistically long sideburns, for his insipid commentary and insights. For the fact that he was such a boy finally, awkward and set to his task and blind to the plodding unimaginativeness of his methods. Alex would have liked to have been in the hands of someone he mightcomfortably turn himself over to, not this wet-behind-his-biggish-ears apprentice who was at most only a year or two older than himself.
    Dr. Klein nodded to him as he came in, said nothing about his being late, expressed nothing in his body language that might give Alex a window into his character and hence interfere with the necessary process of transference—another word, of course, that had never crossed the doctor’s lips.
    At once, Alex removed his shoes and lay down on the couch. In all the weeks he had been coming here Alex figured he had not held Dr. Klein in his gaze for more than an accumulated total of five or six minutes: a few seconds when he came in, a few when he left, maybe one or two stolen ones while he removed or replaced his shoes. It felt increasingly ludicrous, this sort of relationship. Far from keeping Alex from any hint of Dr. Klein’s real nature, it only seemed to heighten his sense of it.
    Alex was on the couch.
    “I met a woman in my building today who has multiple sclerosis,” he said, in an attempt to follow the rules, just speak what was uppermost in his mind. But the more he talked about it, the more the whole encounter with Esther seemed tainted. There was no way he was going to mention the incident at Ogilvy’s, though he could still feel the warmth in his hands of the bag with Esther’s urine-soaked underwear.
    “She seems quite an amazing woman,” he ended lamely, thus flattenning out all the nuance of their meeting.
    Dr. Klein had yet to say a word. Alex lapsed into one of the silences that were becoming more and more frequent of late, biding his time doing an inventory of whatever of the room’s spartan furnishings he could make out from where he lay: the vaguely African etching above the couch, with its abstracted sea and animal images, in particular a largish fish that Alex figured must be somehow significant; the unframed poster on the wall opposite of the 1976 Olympics; the bookshelf near the window that held a few bound annuals from the Canadian Medical Association, a featureless tome that Alex supposed was a guide to antipsychotic pharmaceuticals, and a copy of
Time
that looked like it had been picked up in passing from the reception area. Yet all this evidence was ultimately inconclusive, given the uncertainty of the doctor’s permanence here.
    “Maybe you’re talking about your new friend,” Dr. Klein said finally, and Alex cringed at the phrase
new friend
, “because you don’t want topick up where we left off, talking about Liz. And maybe that’s why you were fifteen minutes late.”
    Twelve minutes, asshole, Alex thought, though he also thought, You’re damn right I don’t want to talk about Liz, a