The room was yellow, never a good sign. English ivy climbed the window sills. Plush cornflower blue armchairs sat one in a corner. A simple mahogany table supported a matching blue lamp and an oversized plastic clock that was transparent and revealed the works.

She was a secretary, she was a single mother, and this was nothing she remembered, not even when her boss bent her over the desk, not later when the child came. Synaptic cauterization is very effective, the nurse said. I've had it myself. The nurse leaned in close, squeezed her hand. You'll see, she said. It feels kind of like Christmas.

Posture, posture, preen and peck. Freud got kicked off the Ark, as it were, too amped up, as he was, for a cruise. They left him turning quick circles on the dock, trying for gyroscope, coming up up up, listing giddy instead. We talked once. He never met my eyes, never met, while his own eyes threw sparks fantastic and spectres fantastic and theories inedible and somewhere on that voyage he lost me. His sneezes stank of cinnamon, his face dusty with chalk. Three years ago he tried to grab my hand unanchored because I really really had to go. Razored digits raked my wrist and cut my skin like paper.

As a child it was slammed down slicked with fixative and interviewed through high-powered lenses. Familiar not alien, the lenses, them, and that was what burned. At night the machine was left running unattended. Downstairs cupboards were interrogated and picked clean. In no time at all they sat hunched over eggs and bacon and loaves birthed by fishes. It was all most delicious rattle rattle tap tap great slurpings and grunts. Coffee percolated and sent them shivering down hallways sniffing out domestic asymmetries and straightening chairs. Great gumdrops of raspberry jam mottled the floor under the kitchen table. Upstairs vigilance ensued.

Like tissue paper, a kind no one could write on unless writ small, like tissue paper that offered itself up to wrap lightly, to rustle insubstantial barrier. Freud wrote several times to that ship by practicing with semaphores from the dock. First sending up signals from that cigar of his that smelled like asphalt and fennel like leather and whiskey like no shame smells. When that failed the ever industrious fellow strode to a nearby shop wherein he purchased a set of red semaphores are they ever any color it doesn't matter, much. Stirred to mouthings of abandonment stirred to open open open his orifice his office appeared only slightly diminished. Passersby recognized him. This was, as the ladies gossiped, where he was to be found every Sunday, here stranded, unshaven, foaming at the mouth, his hair salt-sticky, licking his fingers, testing the wind and taking dictation from the burning sensation in his nasal cavity. Sometimes it made him spit. But today he was in top form and signalling the ship till it sailed out of view, stopping only occasionally to say hello to a taffy-stickled child, to a dog with one eye, to attractive young women who laughed, kicked up their heels. Back again, then, to frantic flagging. But sir, the ship is gone. What ship? Freud asked.