"Yes, Doctor, it's me." "Ralph." "How did you find me?" "All the others gave up trying long ago." "Love is a treacherous, nauseating, hurtful thing, Doctor." "I do not give up such treasures casually." "I thought I would be safe here, hundreds of miles from civilisation." "Your other patients were - how can I say it without causing you pain - were weak, fickle." "A brief panic but then they've all found other analysts, Doctor." "I was a prince in my native land!" "Doctor, I..." "A prince!" "I was young, strong, precociously brilliant!" "I had magic rings on all of my fingers!" "Libido, transference, polymorphous perverse - all gratification, sublimation, anality." "Love is an ego-centric thing, Doctor." "In my native land, I would have been a king someday." "But no, instead I have been driven into exile." "To live like a solitary animal." "A beast of the forest." "Love is destructive, Doctor." "I never denied that my love for you is destructive, but I can't say sorry." " Can you understand that?" " Understand, understand." "Always understand." "Your kind are only after one thing, Ralph." "Communication!" "Communication was the original sin." "At least there in my cathedral, my ark." "There I am not forced to claw open the rotten locks of other peoples' minds." "Doctor, stop!" "How can you talk about it that way after all we've been through?" "When we were together I was a sullen, blue flower." "You came to me, a dark butterfly, probing, gently probing." "Stop snivelling!" "You're sick!" "Do you know what it means to have other minds dragging their dirty feet across your own mind, just after you've waxed it and polished it and it's shiny and bright?" "An analyst has to dip his fingers into the murky, forbidding, scummy aquarium of the sick mind, Ralph!" "Psychoanalysis could be a miracle - if only it weren't for the sick mind." "I had to get away!" "Wreck!" "Self-pitying wreck!" "I'll kill you first!" "Ah-ha!" "My self-conscience becomes hollow, pathetically futile without you." "How I anticipated our sessions together." "I circled the Tuesdays on my calendar for the entire year." "I took pills to put me to sleep, pills to wake me up, just so that I'd appear vibrant and fresh in your office at 3:15." "So that I'd radiate disease." "Blossomed before you like an aphid-stricken tulip to enchant you, intrigue you." "I tried to be a constant source of wonder and delight." "I..." "I don't know, Ralph..." "I..." "I don't know what to say, I..." "I just never wanted to get involved." "Oh, I would be kind." "I wouldn't hurt you any more than was necessary to make you hurt me." "And what of your preoccupation with the inexorable passage of time?" "I'm still dreadfully afraid of growing old, Doctor." "In the id, you know, the sub-conscious, time is a vast, dark, motionless pool." "To me, time is a hot, boiling, fiercely malevolent river, rising wild and untamed." "They've all found other analysts, Doctor."