A smug smile; Hughes is going to show off a little. “Enantiomers, if I recall. Mirror-image molecules.”
Munin has forgotten the substance of Professor B.’s lecture. But he remembers it was at one of those boutique hotels near the university, a dozen residents in a small, airless room, stink of burnt coffee from urns sizzling on Sterno. The professor’s performance was off that day, his review of the slides interrupted by long pauses. His thoughts seemed to be straying to far-off places; his voice sounded as if he were unsure how to return. There was a question period afterward but few questions. The old man’s vagueness was a bit of an embarrassment, and the room cleared out quickly. In those student years there was always the feeling you were missing something important somewhere else.
Munin stayed even though he was late for rounds. Hotel waiters came in to clear the room. The session chairman, an associate professor jockeying for tenure, tried to wrap things up with a question: “What is your research interest at the moment, Doctor?”
A clatter of dishes by the hospitality staff just then, so Munin almost missed the answer.
“Love,” Munin reminds Hughes.
“The old bastard.”
As psychiatrists, they waited for these moments, brief flashes of uncensored thought. Almost hypnagogic in their half-asleep awareness, defences down but the mind still needing to dislodge a word, unburden itself of something long buried.
“Bascule studied it for years — love,” he tells Hughes. “He said he’d had made a thorough analysis. What was it? What purpose did it serve? Why do we have that capacity? Does it serve some function? Or is it only an epiphenomenon?”
“The fieldwork,” Hughes can’t resist saying, “must have been exhausting.”
“He said that other states — anxiety, depression, violence — were fairly well described. Neural circuits, neurotransmitters, that whole business. Why not study love?”
“Why not indeed?”
“He had isolated six aspects. Six elements that were necessary for love.”
“More or less, I should think.”
“No — precisely six. He was quite clear on that.”
“Was he?” Hughes says. “He must have been mad.”
Munin and Hughes stroll along an Italianate promenade of faux columns and kitsch fountains littered with coins too small to toss in a slot. At the corner Mexicans are handing out hooker postcards, gift certificates, coupons for free pulls. An interstate bus huffs out in a diesel fog and turns onto the Strip, heading south.
The glare makes the street surreal. Each of the casinos is a fantasy — ancient Egypt, the Arabian nights, the imagined desert — each as elaborate as a fuck dream. Just background noise to Hughes; he’s reading a flyer advertising blond college grads delivered direct to your hotel room.
They enter the stream of tourists crowding the boulevard.
“No one walks anymore,” Munin says, the pace too slow for his taste and he’s a little testy in the heat. “They lumber along.”
“Why stay put?” says Hughes. “Family ties? They hold you back. Ex-wife? Kids? Leave them behind. If you hate the east, go west. Hate the cold, go south. It has a certain charm, believing that life will be different somewhere else.”
At the corner they are recognized by two men wearing convention badges. “Dr. Munin, isn’t it? I’m Dr. Raffie, Nashville. I’m the director of the outpatient access prog —”
“Yes, of course.”
“I heard your lecture in Miami last year. Will you be speaking here?”
“Thursday,” Munin says. “Just a case I’m presenting at one of the satellites.”
“Yes, I seem to remember reading that in the program. I’m not sure if I can make it, may have to go back early — busy, so many people to see. This isn’t my favourite venue. Crass, don’t you think? My wife absolutely refused to come. If you’ve got a few minutes now, I’d appreciate your opinion on a difficult patient of mine.”
“Call me in a week or two. Or send an email.”
They cross the boulevard, Hughes intent on traipsing about a shopping mall modelled on a Roman forum to scrounge for souvenirs. “I’ll leave you here,” Munin says. “I’m going back to my room. I’ve still got a bit of work to do on my presentation.”
“That fellow didn’t ask about my case,” Hughes says, a bit peevish. He’s presenting at the same symposium. “You’d think he would have noticed. A case of gambling addiction — what could be more bang on in a place like Las Vegas?”
“Eating disorders for one,” says Munin.
“I expect so. It is a buffet-and-bulimia sort of town.”
“Did you see our waitress? The one at the coffee shop?”
“You barely glanced at her,” Hughes says.
“You didn’t notice anything?”
Too thin, that was the first clue. Pale complexion, muscle wasting, the drawn look on her face. Index and middle fingers were shiny as if etched by stomach acid. Teeth were a mess, the enamel worn away when she brushed to get rid of the taste in her mouth. There are always signs.
“Do you think we should go back and talk to her?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Curious that she’d work in a restaurant.”
“Is it?” Munin studies him for a moment, Hughes’s face naked in bright sunlight.
“Perhaps not,” says Hughes. “No, I expect it isn’t.”
On Thursday Munin will lay out the facts of the matter. The case of Penelope. He has been allotted twenty minutes to discuss the signs and symptoms, what occurred, how he has intervened. It will be enough: to review the obsessions she reported, the compulsions he observed, what he has done. There’s no need to capitulate and recapitulate her life. He will present only the small part bisected by treatment. He will not talk about the things that came before, or after.
The mall is an agora with marble columns, galleries of designer shops, the inevitable slot machines. The dim lighting heightens the glow of the storefronts, scads of people fluttering like moths but no one settling on anything. Puts Hughes in mind of a medication he once used in his patients with gambling addiction: it controlled their impulse to wager but also killed the urge to shop. There was a neurological link there, shopping and gambling, one of those clinical curiosities the British journals were keen to publish. He should really write it up. Nothing prudish, no rant against the false economies of consumerism and the gaming industry. Shopping was hard-wired so it must be essential, the soul equivalent of breathing or reproduction. That would get him a spot on the lecture circuit.
The air is chilled and ozone-rich. Hughes coughs; it’s hard to breathe. He blames the ceiling in this place, painted an oppressive sky blue with puffs of cloud looming overhead. It makes him anxious. Wherever he turns he is aware of
