The Reflection Read Online Free PDF

some point I had lunch at an automat, and then the afternoon was lost to another restless meander across Manhattan. Without my usual routine, I felt unmoored, drifting through the mass of anonymous bodies, wanting to be alone, yet lonely at the same time. As I turned a corner, a newspaper hawker was yelling out the headline: “Russians have the bomb!” I remembered that piece I’d read on the subway, about Manhattan’s vulnerability to attack. Everything surrounding me—buildings, cars, people—could apparently now be vaporized in seconds. That simple fact seemed to steal some of the city’s reality.
    I rarely spent daytime hours in my apartment over the weekend—it was too claustrophobic—but sometimes I’d drop by my office to do paperwork. I considered doing that now, but could come up with no good reason for it. My mood kept jolting from numb sadness when thinking about Abby, to an excited unease when thinking about the Esterhazy case. Later, wandering around the Village, I passed by City Psychiatric, its neogothic gargoyles looming above me on Eleventh. How many people had I signed in to that hospital? How many had never left? I thought back to various occasions when the police had called me in for an opinion. Sometimes a singleglance confirmed that a person was disturbed and dangerous. Other times, it was more borderline. Would I have had Esterhazy committed if I hadn’t been so tired? If I hadn’t felt some obscure pressure?
    I’d finally realized something about Mrs. Esterhazy. Physically, she was very like one of my first patients, Miss Fregoli. The same bland good looks, young yet somehow ageless. And the same accent from nowhere. Miss Fregoli had suffered from a long-term melancholic illness, but after three months of therapy, I’d felt she’d made progress. The last time I’d seen her, she’d gone to a good deal of trouble over her appearance: new clothes, hairstyle, makeup. We’d discussed whether she should take a break from treatment. She’d seemed keen, and we’d agreed to suspend our twice-weekly appointments for a month. She’d been the last patient of my day and—unusually for me—I’d stopped for a drink on the way home, at a bar on Columbus Circle. It had been a private celebration of my success with Miss Fregoli, coming at a time when my self-esteem was low on account of Abby’s recent departure. But a few days later, Miss Fregoli’s mother had phoned me. Her daughter had hanged herself.
    Hoping for some respite from my own mind, I ducked into a movie theater. When the mood struck, I could sit in the dark for hours on end, as one feature melded into the next, in a loop of endless narrative. The more generic the movie, the more absurd, the more removed from anything realistic or artistic, the more I liked it. I bought my ticket and settled down to watch a romantic picture with an even more ridiculous plot than usual: a showgirl falls in love with a returned war veteran suffering from amnesia. Characters flickered by in ghostly fashion—thoughts still circled me, just beyond my grasp, as if they were emanating from somewhere else. After an hour or so, well before theend of the movie, I stood up and wandered out into twilit streets.
    I was thinking of Miss Fregoli again as I ordered my hamburger and coffee in a near-empty drugstore. In my mind’s eye, her face had now merged with Mrs. Esterhazy’s until they’d become indistinguishable. Miss Fregoli’s death had been a huge blow. But it had also triggered my sporadic writing career, as she’d been the subject of my first paper. For months after her suicide, I’d tormented myself with the fact that she’d killed herself just when I’d thought she was improving. Then walking home from my office one evening, I’d had an idea. In the depths of depression, people cannot summon up the energy or courage for suicide. It’s only when they get better that they can do it. The danger period is not when the depression is at its worst,