In the five years since my wife's death, I'd had relationships with two women, both before my assign¬ment to Trinity. My time with Rachel wasn't a "relation¬ship" in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and dis¬cussed the most disturbing aspect of my life-my dreams. Through her questions and interpretations, she had probably revealed more about herself than she had learned about me, yet much remained hidden.

She'd come down from New York Presbyterian to accept the faculty position at Duke, where she taught a small cadre of psychiatry residents Jungian analysis, a dying art in the world of modern pharmacological psy¬chiatry. She also saw private patients and carried out psychiatric research. After two years of virtual solitude working on Trinity, I would have found contact with any intelligent woman provocative. But Rachel had far more than intelligence to offer. Sitting in her leather chair, dressed impeccably, her dark hair pulled up in a French braid, she would watch me with unblinking concentra¬tion, as though peering into depths of my mind that even I had not plumbed. Sometimes her face-and particularly her eyes-became the whole room for me. They were the environment I occupied, the audience I con¬fided in, the judgment I awaited. But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would ques¬tion me about certain images, then question the answers I gave. She sometimes offered interpretations of my dreams, but unlike the NSA psychiatrists I had seen, she never spoke with a tone of infallibility. She seemed to be searching for meaning along with me, prodding me to interpret the images myself.

"David, you don't have to drive around all night," she said. "I'm not going to hold this against you."

Right, I thought. What's wrong with delusions of a secret government conspiracy? "Be patient," I told her. “It's not much farther."

She looked at me in the semidark, her eyes skeptical. "What's the monetary award for a Nobel Prize?"