That he could begin to examine the scenarios which gave coherence to the desires that intermittently drove him showed how weak those desires had become, how almost optional. Naturally, when he looked at them up close there was nothing to see since no individual act or staging of an act could explain the strangely compulsive force that had made his desire seem to embody a certain deep truth about himself, as if to satisfy it was to return to an earlier and more real version of himself, one to whom he positively owed this service. Yet they had always operated in a kind of negation, an 'I know very well but...', because the only kind of compulsion he recognised was logical and desire had never made any sense. It was like having a disgraceful friend for whom he retained an inexplicable soft-spot, so that the only way to indulge Jekyll was to indulge a petted Hyde. If he needed to violate some code it could only be in an indirect way, in submission to energies he would only afterwards acknowledge as his own. Enough though, that he always kept an acquiescent margin in reserve, a sort of stash of doubt and will and rude sanity. While others may have seemed to be the undivided doctors of their own desires, able to deduce the particularities of their usages out of the general oversupply of certified wants, he had generally to rely on what he found himself doing to discover what it was that he'd wanted. But then such vague and hedged retrospectivity was a general condition and at times he too slipped into the role of doctor of desire to another without even noticing the shift.