Esther and Holden’s honeymoon
- It’s so dramatic, isn’t it?
- What?
- This surgery thing. I always find it so overdramatic in books and movies when they take place in a hospital.
- I know what you mean. I know what you want to suggest. But you’re no protagonist to no hospital movie, Karin!
- I know… It’s just… It just gets tiresome sometimes, you know. Every two, maybe three years, and the same shit, the same butchers, the same shame, shame, shame!…
- It’ll be the last time, I promise you…
- I don’t want to be the protagonist of a hospital book, Dr. Rhoda.
- Darling, you’re not! This isn’t your whole life!
- But I guess it is my whole subconscious life. Otherwise I wouldn’t be so miserable.
- You credit you misery to the surgeries?
- I guess so. I don’t know. I mean, it’s the most serious thing that ever happened to me. The one big thing to justify my great dissatisfaction.
- But you told me you’ve been different your whole life. Unsociable, bad self-esteem.
- Yeah, but maybe it was inside me from the beginning, you know? Like a curse or something. Since I was a little kid I sensed my life wasn’t to be normal. Sometimes I think of this feeling as a prediction, at others I’m simply convinced that I caused it… That I caused it by having those wishes… To have wished things in a sorta sickly way from the very beginning, like I had a demon in me! And this demon, he did it to me!
- You think you caused your…?
- I don’t think anything, Dr. Rhoda, I’m just here telling you these things because I’m nervous and I have to keep saying shit so that you won’t tell them I am not cooperating, but I know I’m contradictory, as all the time I feel like what I’m saying is totally foolish and definitely nonsensical, because that’s what it is. And I know it’s no use to keep telling you or anyone these things, for they’re just as empty as I am. You’d better stop believing me, Dr. Rhoda, you’d better doubt my moods and my words, I’m no self of my own, I’m a personae, it’s all lies, you know? I’m such a big liar, I’m the greatest liar you’ll ever hear in you whole life, Dr. Rhoda!……………………. And I just can’t see where there is to get to.
