Current Therapist

The Current Therapist is the male clinician the Narrator consults after the death of the Deceased Friend. He listens as she describes bereavement, social withdrawal, and thoughts about suicide, and offers interpretations that sometimes feel obvious to her and sometimes unsettle her. His presence is practical as well as interpretive: when the Narrator has left Apollo tied up outside, he suggests bringing the dog into a future session. Their arrangement makes room for the Narrator’s attachment to Apollo while keeping the therapeutic meetings going. Yet the sessions do not resolve the mystery of the Deceased Friend’s death; they give the Narrator a setting in which to approach what can and cannot be known.

Identity and Role

The text identifies the Current Therapist as a man but gives no name, detailed professional background, or account of his life outside the sessions. The Narrator describes his manner as gentle, including when he asks about her holidays and reflects on the ways her loss has altered her wish to be with other people. His role is defined through these exchanges rather than through a formal description of his practice: he asks questions, listens to her account, and offers possible meanings for the distress she reports.

The sessions occur alongside the Narrator’s work and writing, but she clarifies that writer’s block is not why she has come to see him. She has felt relief, rather than the dismay she expected, when someone else publishes a major piece on the subject she has been working on. The relief releases her from pressure around the project, but it does not address the reason for her visit. The distinction establishes the therapy as a place for concerns that cannot be reduced to a problem of writing or productivity.

Listening to Bereavement

When the Current Therapist asks what she did during the holidays, the Narrator tells him she would have wanted to be alone even if concern about leaving Apollo had not kept her from going out. He identifies her reluctance to be with other people as one effect of her loss. The Narrator privately sharpens that account: the feeling is not merely dislike but fear. The gap between his gentle formulation and her more severe, unspoken correction shows how much of her experience remains unvoiced even in the consulting room.

She later recounts a cluster of disruptions: moments when reality seems distorted or fogged, exhaustion despite sleeping, clumsiness, missed meals or reliance on junk food, misplaced belongings, and anxiety about ordinary dangers and obligations. One episode involved stepping off a curb into the path of a car before someone pulled her back. The Current Therapist calls these symptoms of bereavement. The Narrator considers the explanation obvious, but the list gives the label concrete weight: grief is not only sadness or longing in this account; it affects attention, routine, bodily coordination, and her sense of the world around her.

Suicide, Love, and Interpretation

The Current Therapist’s questions also bring the Narrator’s moral response to suicide into focus. He observes that her anger is not directed at the Deceased Friend and asks whether this could be because she believes suicide can be justifiable. The question opens rather than settles the issue. The Narrator turns over examples from philosophical tradition, but the text does not present her as arriving at a final verdict about why the Deceased Friend died. The therapist’s role is to make the unspoken question explicit, not to supply an explanation for a death that remains inaccessible to her.

In a later session, he offers a more intimate interpretation: he thinks the Narrator has been in love with the Deceased Friend and is grieving as a lover or wife might. The suggestion complicates her understanding of the relationship and of her bereavement; it is presented as his reading, not as a settled fact independently established by the narrative. At their last meeting, he suggests that writing about the relationship might help. That suggestion returns the conversation to the Narrator’s vocation, but does not promise that writing can explain the death or end the grief.

Apollo and the Continuation of Therapy

The Narrator’s care for Apollo shapes what can happen in the sessions. After she tells the Current Therapist that Apollo is tied up outside, he asks why she does not bring him in next time. She registers the prospect of another visit with surprise. The agreement that follows is described as an exchange: the therapist will give her what she wants, and she will return for at least a couple more sessions. The account leaves the desired accommodation indistinct, but links Apollo’s presence and the continuation of treatment without turning either into a cure.

The dog matters to the therapy because the Narrator fears leaving him and believes that another move could harm him. She also wonders whether caring for Apollo is bound up with her hope of recovering the Deceased Friend, a hope she recognizes as a kind of madness rather than a literal possibility. The Current Therapist’s invitation makes room for that attachment in the practical conditions of a session, while its emotional meaning remains unresolved. His role is therefore modest but consequential: he helps the Narrator name patterns in her grief, proposes a way to keep meeting, and offers an interpretation of love, but neither his explanations nor the act of talking dissolves the silence left by the death.