By Blood Read Online Free Page B

across them to let myself into the building with my key, one of them abruptly turned over and grabbed the hem of my coat. I tried to pull away, but the man held his grip, growling at me, Hey, mister! Gimme your money! Gimme your money! Then he flopped on his side and passed out again, too drunk even to rob me. I stepped back, shaken. In an empty streetcar, I took the long ride home, resolving I would never again go to the office by night.
    I next tried the weekend. The hubbub from the nearby shopping streets was reassuring, providing the general social context I had sought at the office. But the empty building was disquieting. The lobby stank of stale cigarette smoke, as it never had during the week, the sort of ghost-smoke that lingers in bars and badly aired hotel rooms, although the small bar-and-grill on the ground floor had been shuttered for a decade. The creaky elevators were often out of order, and I was afraid of becoming trapped between floors with no one there to hear me. As I worked, I kept hearing the ding of the elevators but never the tread of anyone getting on or off. Now and then, doors would slam up and down the corridors, yet I never saw anyone in the halls. I looked out to find only the empty, block-long hallways that, at their distant ends, disappeared into an odd, hazy, indoor twilight.
    The next morning, Sunday, I rode up in the elevator with great apprehension. Rising floor by floor, I became more comically distressed. For I suddenly saw myself as a big, circus-decorated balloon that was designed to expand as it rose and then spectacularly explode. I knew this image was ridiculous, yet I simultaneously could not shake its efficacy. It was the same problem I had faced throughout all the long years of my therapies, when I had learned to be aware of my own thoughts and feelings, even to the extent of understanding why I was having those thoughts and feelings—their root causes, the curious emotional subterfuges through which certain emotional propensities install themselves in the psyche—yet, withal, finding myself powerless to change them. The dark emotions seemed to be part of my body, instinctual, issuing from the cells as surely as saliva or blood or urine, and with as little conscious opportunity to intervene in their production. By the time I reached the eighth floor, all I could do was step out into the corridor, look up and down the empty twilit halls, press the elevator button once again, and ride my way back down.
    I spent Monday in the house, avoiding Dr. Schussler and her patients, and by Tuesday, while the wind and sand still knocked at the windows, the reasons that had prompted me to lease the office reannounced themselves with renewed urgency—indeed, I felt there was a grave risk in my staying home for another day. I had been in my nightclothes since Sunday afternoon; I hadn’t washed; I hadn’t shaved. On Tuesday night, in a nameless rage, I had smashed all the cheap glassware the owner of the house had left for me. I knew that Wednesday morning, whatever else I might do, I had to go back to the office.
    As the N Judah carried me away from the beach, I awaited that moment when the fog would drift, thin, lift, and clear. Finally in sunlight, I thought of the cool white lobby that awaited me, the benign cherubs gazing down from elevator lintels, the man-high wainscoting standing marble-hard outside my office door. And above any other anticipation was my desire to hear the analysand’s voice once again; for she was, after all, the only person in all of San Francisco I could say with any truth that I knew.
    So it was that at eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning, which last week had been the patient’s appointed hour, I sat very still in my office, sipping air in the smallest quantities respiration would allow, awaiting the next installment of her therapy. The sound machine gave off its torrent; the patient walked past my office; the door to Dr. Schussler’s office slammed shut. And