Free The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken Page A

until now, even though I’d talked in some detail about my occasional affairs since the divorce. I couldn’t even remember if I’d told him that Abby was dead. An image of her floated into my mind, somewhere in the mental distance.
    “What’s there to say? I was married once. But only briefly. A long time ago.”
    “What was she like? Describe her to me.”
    “Tall. Brunette. She was an actress. Always looked very self-assured. Confident on stage.
    “But elsewhere?”
    “In other ways she could be less assured.”
    “How?”
    “She was the one who’d wanted to get married. We were much too young. Anyone could have seen we weren’t right for each other. But I was infatuated. And she’d needed that anchor, for a time.”
    “Do you attach any importance to the fact that she was an actress?”
    “How do you mean?”
    The doctor didn’t elaborate. Sometimes he’d leave these silences, and I’d feel forced to fill them.
    “She was an actress, it was what she did. In the same way that practicing medicine is what you do. That’s all.”
    What was he driving at? It felt like we were engaged in a game. The subject at hand—whether it be Abby or anything else—was of no importance. Only rules and tactics mattered. When the routine of his questioning set in, when I felt that I knew exactly what he was going to ask, that was the moment he’d stump me. I tried to imagine what kind of inner life the doctor might have, but I couldn’t easily. No doubt he had a wife, children, and all the usual cares and worries. But to me, he existed merely as a foil.
    He straightened his things, made as if to leave. Before doing so, he took a notepad from his briefcase and handed it to me, along with a pencil. “Here, have this. I want you to write down whatever comes to your mind about your wife—your former wife. All right?”
    “All right.”
    Once he’d gone, I could feel myself passing through the now-familiar sequence of emotional states: anger, disquiet,anxiety, puzzlement, contemplation. And then finally, a profound introspection. The outside world had its borders and demarcations, but this interior one was boundless. One could always go further and further inside, the retreat could never be complete. I stared at the pencil in my hand for minutes on end, as if it were an alien object. I remembered hospitals where I’d worked, and how when patients asked for something to write with, they were always given pencils and not pens. Why? Because pens were more messy? Because they might conceivably be used as weapons? Some department had probably issued a directive about it last century, I mused, setting in stone a practice that would remain for decades to come, simply because there was no particular reason to change it. How much of life was like that?
    I wondered why the doctor had suddenly brought up the subject of Abby. From my experience as a psychiatrist, what mattered most in any patient’s narrative were the things left out. When these things were eventually mentioned—by the doctor or the patient—it was an attempt to inoculate the story against them. I looked down at the blank pages of the notepad. There was no reason why I should obey the doctor and write anything about Abby, but I felt somehow compelled to do so.
    I see you now. You’re clearer than ever to me, even as I become obscure to myself. Our decade-long estrangement has made you more vivid, not less.
    You once told me that at the age of sixteen, you’d felt halfway through life, regardless of when you might die. It turns out you were literally correct. Your premonition haunts me. Your early death casts a black light over the landscape. Every memory of you has to be reconsidered, revised, under that light. An old man onhis deathbed is the finished work of his past, but you, in dying young, remain a hypothesis. You are the years never lived.
    You died childless. You told me that you wanted children, when you were older, when you’d made your mark in the