Free City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland by Kevin Baker Page B

but when he put it down he only felt more irritable, and a little woozy.
    “What would we learn? We learn from the couch, from talking to patients. My dear doctor, a well-preserved physical specimen is no more relevant to our work than a mounted butterfly!”
    “How do you know?” Jung persisted. “Who knows how the mind has evolved? Maybe they are different. Maybe we can find a window, deep into the primitive soul—”
    “What are you talking about?” Freud snapped, his voice rising. “Every living person contains the whole history of the human race!”
    He took another sip of the wine to steady himself, but the room was lurching around him. He stood up abruptly at his place, his vision narrowing to Jung’s face across the table—inquisitive as a terrier’s, the squashed circles of his pince-nez magnifying his eager, greedy eyes.
    “My dear friend!”
    “What? What is your obsession with this poor man, deserted by his friends and fellow workers? Left to be a sideshow exhibit—a freak—on display for the gawking public!”
    “It was just an observation, in the spirit of scientific inquiry.”
    “Jah!” Freud shot back sarcastically. “Are you sure, Herr Doktor, that what you are not really after is my death? My crown prince!”
    That was when he swooned. He tried to move away from the table, but his legs were suddenly as heavy as bags of sand, and he slid down to the carpeted restaurant floor. Fainted away, just like some little virgin—the last thing he remembered being the not unpleasurable sight of their worried and astonished faces.
     
    • • •
     
    Sigmund Freud awoke to find himself staring into the face of Carl Jung. He closed his eyes again.
    “How sweet it must be to die,” he murmured.
    “How’s that?”
    Freud’s eyes snapped back open. Jung’s balding, bullet-shaped head was still hovering over him.
    “Never mind.”
    He sat up on the sofa where they had carried him and where Jung had laid him out like a schoolboy, feet crossed over each other on the soft red cushions.
    “It must have been the wine,” he said weakly. “I hardly slept last night, I had the most extraordinary dream.”
    Jung smiled patronizingly, his eyes skeptical behind the flattened orbs of the pince-nez.
    “Naturally, we will not let Papa pay for us anymore,” he said to Ferenczi.
    Freud got quickly to his feet, buttoning his coat and smoothing his hair to mask his agitation. Jung offered his arm, but he shook his head, leading the way back to the table, ignoring the other, whispering diners—already analyzing his own behavior.
    “There was, perhaps, an element of guilt involved,” he conceded, once he had regained his seat. “Over getting you to break your abstinence, I mean.”
    Jung contemplated him for a long moment—then resumed his dissection of the fish.
    “Perhaps,” the crown prince said—and Freud had the sudden, irrational desire to snatch off the pince-nez and grind it under his heel until he heard the glass snap. Instead, he smiled inquisitively.
    “What, then?”
    “Well, it’s just that you fear me as a usurping son,” Jung said. “Taking your place.”
    “Really? You deduced all that, just from one fainting spell?”
    “It’s just a hypothesis, of course,” Jung said calmly, springing his trap: “If I could psycho-analyze you, perhaps on our voyage over.”
    “Perhaps,” Freud said darkly.
    “There may be an element of truth in what both of you were saying,” Ferenczi intervened sweetly, always the precocious child, mediating between his quarreling parents.
    “The two greatest psycho-analytical minds in the world, searching for a solution! Think of it!”
    “We shall see,” Freud told him. “We shall see.”
     
    After lunch, Jung hired an automobile to take them around town. Another patronizing commentary on his age, Freud thought, but he was secretly grateful not to have to walk, after his experience at the Essinghaus.
    They drove toward a Viennese cafe Jung knew,