Her lip curled a bit more, and it was a smile, and she lifted her chin so that her throat was exposed.
“It must be frustrating to deal with irrationality.”
“How can one be a psychologist and not deal with irrationality?”
“If I thought that were true, I’d never have gone near the field.”
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing for the field, then, that you don’t think it’s true.”
“But is it a good thing for the field that you do?”
Cass studied her face, which seemed both serious and friendly. He couldn’t tell from it, or from her serious and friendly voice, whether her question was ingenuous or sarcastic. Either way, he didn’t know how to respond. Lucinda held his gaze for several more ambiguous moments and then turned back to Held to resume their interrupted conversation.
He didn’t say more than ten words to Lucinda, nor she to him, for the rest of the semester.
Autumn and winter had gone by without his taking much notice. He must have shown up and taught his classes; he had his students’ class evaluations to prove it. And they were pretty good evaluations, too, considering he couldn’t remember a thing about the classes, neither preparing for them, nor giving them, nor reading the papers and grading the exams he had apparently assigned and administered. He had done it all sleepwalking with his eyes open, instructing the youth by day and writing, writing, writing by night.
Lucinda’s question to him, so direct and so undecipherable, had stunned him, and he needed to answer her. He needed to extract some answer out of the questions that had been roiling in him for the past two decades, the questions that he had lived out with Jonas Elijah Klapper and the questions he had lived out with Azarya. He had never cashed in that experience for hard insight.
Had he tried out any of his new thoughts on his students? He couldn’t remember, but a few of the more perceptive class evaluations had spoken of how it was cool to watch Professor Seltzer arguing with himself. “Sometimes it could get a little weird, like that dude at the end of Psycho. But in a good way.”
No doubt he had been distracted. It had been all he could do just to keep up with his classes and his fantasies. He never skimped on his fantasies, no matter how busy he was. He didn’t need to, since they blended with all he saw and thought and wrote and said. It was the love of the impossible that made everything possible. He was battered by the beating wings of unlimited desire, but they lifted him, too. Battered, emboldened, and exalted, and all at once.
