SPECIAL FEATURE: MISTAKES I MADE (A COMEDY IN FIVE ACTS WITH STUDY GUIDE) by Christie Hodgen

ACT I: PRE-SCHOOL

Between birth and the age of six I made thousands of mistakes, most of which are now lost to memory but which can easily be imagined, mistakes of the variety young children tend to make. It can safely be assumed that during these years I cried without cause, woke too early or stayed up too late, slobbered on myself, stumbled while learning to walk, fell backwards off of furniture and down sets of stairs, smeared food all over my face while learning to use a spoon, spilled milk down my shirt, choked on food and/or swallowed things not meant to be eaten, failed to sense danger or panicked when there was nothing to be afraid of, ran into the street without looking for cars, stepped in puddles or little piles of dog shit, lost control of my faculties while toilet training, lost track of shoes and other possessions, mixed up the names of relatives and friends, got lost, refused to share toys, assigned blame to my sister for wrongdoings of my own, flew without cause into indignant fits of rage, pulled the tails of dogs and cats, attempted to fit square pegs into round holes, etc. But for the most part these mistakes are the territory of one’s early years and can’t really be avoided; I can’t really be blamed.

From all these years only two mistakes stand out in my mind with any particularity. The first took place in an ice cream shop, to which my family had walked one Sunday evening, and in which I lingered too long staring into the freezer case at the brilliantly colored tubs of ice cream and sherbet. Without my noticing, my family ordered their cones, paid their money, and embarked for home. When I looked up and saw that I was alone I went out to the parking lot and stood waiting for my parents to return and claim me. Families came and went, walking into the store together and coming out with their cones, performing the simple maneuver I had just failed to execute. I spent a long while imagining my mother grown frantic, crying, telling her story to a policeman . . . I imagined my father meandering the streets in his rumbling, rusted Buick, his knuckles white on the wheel . . . I imagined my sister on her knees, supplicant to a bargaining God, recanting her previous prayers for my destruction, promising to devote herself to him if I might only be returned . . . But in reality, no one came for me, and eventually I walked home, where, having finished their ice cream cones, my family was seated on the couch watching an episode of The Three Stooges. Though I was expecting to be welcomed home with excitement and concern and even gratitude, perhaps taken back to the store and bought the cone I’d never gotten, no one even looked up from the television – no one had even noticed I was missing.

The second mistake occurred when I fell sick one afternoon and was sent home from pre-school with mumps and a high fever. It was two days before Christmas and my mother was busy with shopping. She took me around to a number of stores, pulling me by the arm across a series of parking lots. Likewise, I pulled along my favorite doll, which my mother had brought to keep me occupied. In one of the stores a Christmas tree stood in the corner, glittering with lights and ornaments, and I stood in front of it, mesmerized, while my mother tried on shoes. In a fevered trance I hallucinated that the ornaments – tiny Santas and teams of reindeer – were actually moving, their sleighs undulating over the tree’s branches. Later that evening in bed, covered in welts and delusional, I called out for my doll but no one could find her. A heated and bitter search ensued. I heard my parents walking from room to room, opening drawers and closets. Where is Baby Lydia? they said. Where the fuck is she? (I had, in a fit of egomania, named the doll after myself. This might be counted as another mistake, for whenever someone displayed affection for the doll, or mistreated her, it looked like an indication of their feelings toward me. Sometimes, in a good mood, my mother would fuss over the doll, kissing its fat face, but at other times she would pick it up by the arm and throw it across the room into a closet. Also, the dog was fond of carrying Baby Lydia around in its mouth, and there were little teeth marks in her plastic arms and legs, even her face, and there was something chilling about this . . .) Finally I heard my mother say, Well, I’m not going to spend all night looking for a goddamn doll. Weeks passed, during which the doll’s whereabouts remained an agonizing mystery. I kept searching for her, turning things over, pulling the pillows off the couch, going through closets. Every day I woke up and looked in the same places, as if some magical property would have transported Baby Lydia in the night. At the end of each search I cried, and my mother tried to counsel me. Get over it, she said. Shit happens. Which I would later in life come to appreciate as helpful advice. But at the time it was fruitless.

Then one day my mother went shoe shopping again and I saw the Christmas tree, which no one had bothered to take down. I walked over to study the ornaments and remembered that I had tucked Baby Lydia away on one of the tree’s branches. She was still sitting there, smiling (the problem with being a doll, I realized then, was that one was required to smile stupidly no matter what the circumstances, even if one had been forgotten for a month and a half on a Christmas display in a shoe store . . .), but along with the smile there seemed to be a wounded expression, one of betrayal and profound sadness. You forgot me, she seemed to say. Which was true. I had forgotten her; I had forgotten myself. In a flash of hot shame I plucked Baby Lydia out of the tree and stuffed her in the pocket of my coat. Some time later my parents noticed her and said, Oh, there she is.

ACT I: Summary & Analysis

This act devotes itself to two “mistakes” which center around the problem of being lost, with peripheral concerns in the areas of identity, belonging, and family. Taken together they suggest a character preoccupied with insecurities – the feeling of being disposable, a third wheel, a black sheep. These insecurities may or may not be justified. Most likely they are the result of some slight paranoia. The phrase, “I can’t be blamed,” for instance, at the bottom of the opening paragraph, suggests an overly-defensive personality. However it also seems clear – due to a stark disparity between our narrator’s absurdly heightened language, and that of her family (See: Shit happens, page 3 . . .) that a wide, impassable chasm exists between one and the other.

ACT I: Questions for Discussion

1. Discuss Lydia’s choice to name her favorite doll after herself. How is this multiplicity of selves symbolic?

2. Discuss the character’s ideas of her own importance, versus the reality of her circumstances. Why so much obsessive analysis of perfectly mundane events? Are we supposed to care? Really?

3. What character flaws are presented in Act I? What future mistakes might they foreshadow?

ACT II: SCHOOL YEARS

Apart from the usual spelling and multiplication errors, the mistakes I made during my school years had mostly to do with friendships. Though things started out well enough – in elementary school, I made friends with a number of children in my neighborhood – my fortunes began to decline as soon as Reagan took office. While it may seem ridiculous to associate Ronald Reagan with the sharp decline of my social life and mental well-being, in reality there was a direct connection. Something about Reagan’s policies translated into the failure or relocation of multiple factories in our city, which translated into the full-scale economic collapse of the city itself, which translated into a mass exodus. Every few weeks a family in our neighborhood – the father having lost his job, or decided to follow his employer to a Southern state, where land was cheap and taxes more favorable to business – put their house up for sale.

Though it was true that everyone was affected by this crisis, over time it began to seem that my case was exceptional, that I was particularly cursed. While my sister, for example, lost only a few of her companions, I lost every single one of mine. My father was the kind of man whose stale and unprofitable life – he worked as a janitor at one of our city’s sad universities – had brought about the desire to create narrative, in fact an endless stream of narratives (often he had been disciplined by his supervisor for standing around leaning on the handle of his mop, telling stories to his coworkers and other support staff, indeed even to students), and so he began working up a story just for me, a story whose protagonist was a gangly, unlucky tomboy who happened to be named Lydia. The story, which was serialized and interminable, went by the dramatic title of The Girl Who Drove Everyone Away. On car rides, at the dinner table, during the commercial breaks of our favorite television programs, my father would tell stories about Lydia, varying in location and plot but always ending with the same line: And that’s how the Girl Who Drove Everyone Away found herself alone, on the street, without friends or family to comfort her, without food or shelter, and she lived this way for a long, long time, until the winter came and she froze to death in a snow drift. At which point everyone would clap.

And so I wandered through elementary school in isolation, not only friendless but bereft of any hope of finding a friend . . . bereft, eventually, even of the concept of friendship.

Then, in eighth grade, our city closed down a third of its schools, and I was shifted across town. Though it hadn’t seemed possible for my new school to be worse than my old one – a rectangular cinder block compound with the air of a work camp – the new school, Roosevelt Junior High, turned out to be not only cheerless but menacing. The students at Roosevelt seemed to be invested in fulfilling every stereotype of delinquency: they smoked and fought in the bathrooms; they vandalized property; they defaced their clothing and books with the names of bands they liked – Def Leopard, Van Halen, Poison – scrawled in black marker; they wore leather jackets and carried wallets in their back pockets attached to their belt loops by chains, etc.

One morning as I stood in the mob outside the school entrance, waiting for the doors to open, I noticed a girl standing alone with her mouth open, staring off at the horizon, a girl who might as well have been my twin. Like me she was awkwardly tall and painfully thin, like me her hair was an unruly mass of hideous curls, like me she was covered in freckles, like me she was terribly slouched, as if trying to curl in on herself, snail-like, as if trying to disappear. I started shuffling toward her. Closer, closer. Then finally so close she had no choice but to look at me. Hi, she said. And I said, Hi.

Her name was Jennifer Barnes, and that year we went everywhere together. Soon enough our classmates took notice of us – two slouched figures lurking around the margins of school life – and developed nicknames for us. At first we were called The Redwoods, on account of our identical and excessive height. But this being unsatisfying – too practical, too straightforward – our peers decided to employ the art of irony and started calling us The Midgets, then The Dwarves, and then from there, Grumpy and Doc. I don’t know which one of us was supposed to be Grumpy and which Doc, or if we were interchangeable, or perhaps even indistinguishable, but I must confess it’s a question that sometimes still burdens me in the doldrums of a sleepless night.

Every Saturday night, I slept over at Jennifer Barnes’s house. Mostly we passed the time by watching movies – the same ones over and over, movies about high school students who threw destructive parties while their parents were out of town, who pined away for the homecoming king from the slovenly confines of their rent-controlled apartments, who cut school for the day and accidentally fell into collusion with bands of hardened criminals. We memorized dozens of lines from these movies and went around saying them, with little or no context. One of us would do an impression – Officer, I think I broke my butt! – and the other would say, No, no, it’s like this.

Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, Jennifer Barnes’s father would ask us to sit down at the kitchen table and play cards with him. Dad, Jennifer would say, and roll her eyes. I have a friend here.

So? he’d say. What’s the big fucking deal?

You’re so embarrassing! she’d say.

You think I’m embarrassing? he’d say. Lydia, do you think I’m embarrassing?

No, sir, I’d say, giving Jennifer a helpless look.

See? She loves me! he’d say. Now sit your asses down and play some cards.

It was sort of true that I loved Mr. Barnes. He was older than most fathers – his hair was completely white – but even still he had the spark of a young man. He was always red-faced with anger or excitement, and his blue eyes darted everywhere. He spent his days working as a supervisor at the nuclear power plant forty miles north of the city, and there was something charged about him, something dangerous, suggesting contamination or explosion, suggesting great power. In his off hours he wore green pants and a white wife beater, and he liked to walk around the house making a display of his arms, flexing them for our approval and admiration. Bam! he’d say. What do you think of that? Wanna squeeze? Go on, give it a squeeze. He would never let you alone; he always wanted your participation, your opinion on something. When we played poker – Billabong, Follow the Queen, Chicago High and Low, and a variant he’d invented called Transylvania Freak-Out – he’d keep asking you what he should do with his cards, or asking you to defend your moves. What’d you play that for, Dummy? he’d say to me. And Jennifer would object. But Mr. Barnes would always say, Relax, she’s family. I get to call her whatever I want. And soon enough it seemed true – that I was family. That family was getting to call someone whatever you wanted.

Then one night, that spring, everything – to use one of Mr. Barnes’s favorite phrases – shit the bed. During one of our poker games, Jennifer broke the news that her father had gotten a promotion at the power plant – Damn right, he said – and this meant that next year she would be going to Worcester Academy, a private school full of rich kids. But don’t worry, she said. We’ll still be friends. You can still come over on weekends and stuff.

How did I react to this? Well, I’ll tell you.

For about a week I tried to act like everything was fine. But when school was in session all I could think about was the following year, when I’d be forced to walk the hallways and brave the cafeteria and bathrooms by myself. I began looking around for another outcast with whom to join forces, but everyone else had already paired off. The only candidate was a new girl named Colleen Pigano, who indeed had the face and build of a wart hog. She must have been looking around, too, because one day during gym class she approached me and invited me over to her house after school. Come over, she said. Her voice was hoarse and wheezy, bordering on emphysemic. My parents are working the dinner shift and they won’t be home ’til like midnight.

So I started going over to Colleen Pigano’s house. She always wanted to walk down to White City Shopping Mall, and hang out in the parking lot. But first she had to get ready, and it took Colleen Pigano a very long time to get ready to go anywhere. I’d sit on her bed as she tried on and discarded various outfits, then applied makeup. The whole time she would talk about her parents, managers at the local Denny’s, what assholes and dipshits they were. They’re so fucking stupid, she’d say. I had a boy sleep over last week and they didn’t even fucking notice. They’re so tired when they get home they just fall asleep in their disgusting uniforms. It’s pathetic.

The most time-consuming portion of Colleen’s ritual was the curling of her hair. She kept coating her hair with aerosol hairspray and a series of sticky, stifling clouds would drift toward me. Why she put so much effort into things – why she didn’t just go hang out at the mall in her school clothes, like I did, like everyone else did – I couldn’t imagine. While it was true that, in the parking lot of White City, boys stopped their cars to talk to her, and occasionally invited her to go out for a ride – there was never, mercifully, room for me – I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with her hair, or her clothes, or her makeup. I was pretty sure it was because she was a slut.

Meanwhile I was trying to maintain a friendship with Jennifer, but she and Colleen hated each other. On one of the last days of school, during a class in which Jennifer Barnes was also enrolled, Colleen handed me a note – a picture of Jennifer, with crazy hair, her face spotted with acne, and a dialogue bubble that said: I’m so fucking ugly my own dad won’t even fuck me. I laughed. Then Colleen passed it to Jennifer, who cried, and that was pretty much the end of things between us.

Over the course of that summer Colleen went about making herself popular. On the weekends her parents drove their mobile home to a campground in Maine, and Colleen stayed home by herself. Kids our age, along with a bunch of high school kids I didn’t know, went to her house and brought bottles of liquor and six packs of beer. They listened to rap music and sang along with it, as if they themselves were accustomed to the thrills of urban life – performing in clubs, fucking two girls at a time – but in reality we were only in eighth and ninth grade and most of us still slept with stuffed animals. Towards the end of these parties, kids would split off two by two, repairing to various bedrooms, and I’d go around picking up plastic cups and putting them in a trashbag. Sometimes, as I cleaned, I would think of my time at the Barnes’s house, and actually cry.

Colleen and I grew more and more distant, until one day toward the end of summer we went to a drugstore and she stuffed a handful of items into my backpack without my noticing. When we were a safe distance from the store she reached in the bag to claim her loot, and we got into a fight. You just made me steal! I said. And she said, You’re such a fucking baby! I can’t fucking stand you! We stopped talking. At the start of the next year she spread rumors about me that were difficult to disprove while still maintaining my dignity – for instance that I was actually a boy, that I cried out for my mother in my sleep.

At the end of this terrible friendship I realized that I was a traitor, a person with a bad character. I had betrayed Jennifer Barnes for the favor of Colleen Pigano, and now I was justifiably friendless and alone.

All through high school, I lived the life of a ghost, floating from class to class, not speaking a word. I ate lunch with a handful of other ghosts – kids who, for one reason or another, were also friendless. One girl was missing the fingers on her right hand, another girl was in a wheelchair. One boy was an Albino who had tried to kill himself multiple times and had brutal scars running up his arms and neck. There was an Indian kid, Nilesh, who was so obnoxious and sanctimonious he’d been shunned by the other Indian kids, who had their own table. Instead of bonding together, as one might hope would happen with a roundtable of outcasts, we hated one another. Now and then someone would venture an observation, criticizing one of the normals who walked by – Hey, someone needs to call Amnesty International about her butt. It’s like, cruelly imprisoned in those jeans. – and someone else would say, Shut the fuck up, loser.

When it came time for college, I moved as far away from my family as I possibly could, and lived the life of a hermit. I decided to concentrate my studies in a field which would require me to spend all of my time with my head stuck in a book – or, as my mother liked to say, the real-world equivalent of sticking my head straight up my ass – which is to say, I majored in Russian Literature. In my second year I became a resident assistant, the kind of sanctimonious, niggling bureaucrat who carried a clipboard and went around knocking on doors, telling people that their merriment was in violation of several ordinances. I know it’s Saturday and you want to have fun, I’d say, but some of us are trying to get through ‘War & Peace’ and it’s not a pursuit particularly helped by the sound of people cackling like hyenas. I don’t expect you to understand. I just expect you to keep it down.

One night, during my junior year of college, something happened that proved how unlikable I was. It was Christmas Eve and I was home from school, walking downtown with my father, on his usual last minute quest to find my mother a present. A light snow was falling, the beginnings of a forecasted blizzard. We ducked in and out of stores, looking at clothes and gold-plated jewelry, but failed to find anything quite right. When all the stores had closed and we were walking back to my father’s car, my father in a panic – Jesus Christ, I’ll have to get her present at the gas station again! – we saw a homeless woman shuffling toward us, pushing a shopping cart. The woman was a shapeless pile of dark rags, with silver hair and a hooked nose, like the witch from Snow White. When I approached her, holding out the dollar I’d pulled from my pocket, she erupted in screams – I don’t need it! I don’t need it! – and came at me with her shopping cart. I just stood there with the bill in my hand as she crashed the cart into my legs and knocked me over. I don’t need it, she kept saying, driving the wheels of the cart into my back. My father, despite his love for dramatic, bloody stories, was in real life something of a pacifist whose method of handling conflict involved holding his hands up in the air and saying, Whoa. Whoa, there. When the homeless woman finally worked her cart over my back she continued on, cackling like a cartoon witch, her long black robes flowing behind her. I rolled over on my back and just lay on the ground for a while, bewildered, looking up at the stars, while my father stood over me. You’re the only person I know, he said, who gets beat up for offering somebody money. He started laughing and couldn’t stop. He was bent over, hands on his knees, in the posture of someone vomiting. He laughed so hard that he cried. Christ, he kept saying. Jesus H. Christ. This was going to be a great story.

But I couldn’t see the humor. Not at the moment, nor later that evening, when my father started telling the story from his point of view – You should of seen her ramming that shopping cart over you, it was like, Holy shit! – I just couldn’t see it. In those years, studying all those Russian novels, it seemed that the true nature of the universe was revealing itself – the humanity, the horror – and nothing was funny to me, nothing at all. After the shopping cart episode I started to see myself as a character in one of those novels. I saw myself as linked to the homeless woman in some kind of cosmic way – as if she had chosen me, marked me, anointed me with her affliction, dragged me into her narrative, inserted herself into mine. I tried to imagine how a person might end up like her – on the street, wild and raving, bedraggled, friendless, without shelter. It didn’t seem possible. How could it be that one person ended up okay, and another ended up like that? How did one get from here to there? I kept working the puzzle of madness, kept studying the image of it, like Narcissus.

Through the rest of college, then graduate school, I devoted myself to the problem of the homeless woman, to the study of madmen in Russian Literature. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Gogol’s delusional clerks – they became my brethren, my bedfellows. Someone had to study them, I thought. Someone had to understand them, interpret them, speak for them. And I was just the person to do it.

ACT II: Summary & Analysis

These years demonstrate how a handful of coincidences can come together and, simply by their suggestion of reality, create it. The loss of a few friends, the notion of a curse . . . and suddenly our character is living a life of loneliness, of awkwardness, one whose failings can’t help but compound and perpetuate themselves. Act II also introduces a dangerous preoccupation for our narrator – the fascination with madness brought about by the encounter with the homeless woman. Certainly this fascination calls to mind the teachings of Nietzsche – He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. – and sets the stage for the repeated, profound conflicts in the following acts.

ACT II: Questions for Discussion

1. Discuss the narrator’s betrayal of Jennifer Barnes. What else might she have done? What would you have done?

2. Discuss the use of italics instead of quotes. What does this suggest about the dialogue? Does it make the author more or less credible? Does it lend a European sophistication to the text, or is it just annoying?

3. Is the encounter with the homeless woman as meaningful as the narrator suggests, or is it just a random occurrence better off forgotten? If such a thing happened to you, what would you have done? Would you turn it into a funny anecdote you could tell at a party? Or would you allow it to determine the very course of your life? What is wrong, exactly, with this narrator, in your opinion?

ACT III: PROFESSIONAL LIFE

The first mistake I made in my professional life was deciding to delay it by pursuing a Ph.D. While it is often more profitable, in the long run, to attain a doctorate, in my case it proved to be a fool’s errand. When our national identity had been tied to Russia, it had followed that a study of its character and culture might prove marketable in some way. But by the time I finished school, our nation had a new set of enemies and interests, and a great many academic programs in Russian Literature were folding up. When the time came to find a job there was nothing to be found, and I began to think of myself as the academic equivalent to Sergei Krikalev, the cosmonaut who had been stranded alone on the Mir space station while the Soviet Union dismantled, while people on the ground tried to figure out who was responsible for bringing him home. I remembered the picture of him that had run in the newspaper, his long, impassive face, the Earth behind him in the distance, like a cheap backdrop.

So there I was: a person with a completely useless Ph.D., with no skills and no connections, no means of support. What does one do in this situation, you might ask? Apparently one tries to find any way possible to stay latched to the breast of one’s university. Apparently one presents oneself to the university’s human resources office and volunteers one’s services for temporary secretarial positions.

This is how I found myself working as a secretary for a group of nephrologists. I’d walked straight from my dissertation defense –wearing the only decent outfit I owned – to the staffing office, and from there was dispatched – with no inquiries having been made into my skills and abilities, and with no particular instructions or letters of introduction – to a research lab, connected to the University Hospital by a long, Kafkaesque series of tunnels and walkways. The lab was incredibly bright, bustling with people wearing white coats and giant plastic goggles. They were all bent over microscopes and Petri dishes, making notes on clipboards, dashing to and fro to retrieve equipment. It looked like something terribly, terribly important was going on.

I stood at the lab’s entrance and cleared my throat conspicuously, but no one noticed. After a while a phone started ringing, shrilly, in a glass-walled office in the corner of the lab. Slowly it occurred to me that answering the phone might in fact be my job. I walked toward it, then picked it up. Hello? I said. I was hoping the person on the other end might tell me what to do with my life. But instead the person on the other end said: Tell Karl his mice are late. And hung up.

I inched out into the lab and called out for Karl. A gigantic bearded man looked up from his work. What is it? he said, in a stereotypically harsh German accent.

Your mice are late, I said.

Tell him I do not think so, said Karl.

Okay, I said. Tell who?

Dr. Feigenbaum, said Karl. Who else? He gave me a disapproving look. Only then did he seem to realize – vaguely – that I was new, that the previous secretary had been replaced with someone else.

Okay, I said.

I went about trying to find out who Dr. Feigenbaum was, and how to call him back. I sensed that it would be a mistake to bother Karl, or anyone else in the lab, with questions like that – and that it would also be a mistake not to do what needed to be done. So I spent the rest of the day, and every day thereafter, rooting through all of the papers and computer files in the office, worrying about who to call and what to do and how to do it without having to ask anybody. I had no practical idea of what was going on in the lab, only that its team of doctors and graduate students and techs were conducting research in hopes of finding cures for various kidney-related disorders. Here before me, separated by a thin wall of glass, was a room of the type I had always expected existed – a room in which people were doing things that actually mattered, instead of sitting around talking about the psychological profiles of nineteenth century fictional characters – and I felt a strange pride swelling in my chest. I was part of it all – the world – at long last, or at least it could be said that I answered the phones in a small corner of the world – and I wanted to do well. I wanted to help. I wanted to be industrious, useful. I wanted to sit in that little glass office, answering phones, for the rest of my life.

But in order to succeed, of course, there were all kinds of things I needed to learn about working life, and fast. I couldn’t, for instance, wear the same clothes every day, or show up to work in clothes I’d slept in the night before, which had been my custom as a teaching assistant. In the mornings I had to brush my teeth and wash my face and do something about my hair, which always looked as if it had just reacted to an electric shock. In the office, I had to learn about billing and accounting and ordering and scheduling. I had to arrange travel. There was a tremendous amount I had to learn about phones – how to answer them correctly, how to forward and hold calls, what information to take down on messages. I had to learn who was responsible (me, as it happened) for the office tasks which weren’t officially designated, such as policing the refrigerator in the break room for violations, such as stolen and forgotten items, and the occasional creepy specimen floating in a glass jar. Then there was all the political stuff with the doctors. I had to learn who everyone was, who was in charge of the lab nominally versus who really kept things running, who thought he was important versus who was actually important, whose work needed immediate attention and whose didn’t. As with any work environment there were eccentrics, wallflowers, egomaniacs, perverts, petty bureaucrats, suicidal depressives – and I had to make constant, microscopic adjustments to my demeanor, in accordance with whomever I was talking to. I consoled myself that my degree hadn’t been a complete waste of time; I was working with a cast of characters worthy of a Russian novel, and I knew how to read them.

One of the particular challenges I faced at the lab was that almost no one spoke fluent English. Dr. Gho, the person who seemed to run the lab in practice if not in theory, was exceedingly hard to understand. He was a short, frail, bald man who tended to bow whenever he spoke to anyone. At his side – always – was the aforementioned Karl, the enormous and hirsute German who, before his career as a researcher, had been a professional bodybuilder. They made quite a pair. Dr. Gho would speak, and then Karl would make efforts at translation. They were always coming into my office to make requests, and between their poor English and my general ineptitude, we made something of an improv act.

One day Dr. Gho and Karl appeared in my office door, each looking friendly and sheepish.

Hello, I said, and waved.

Hello, they said, and waved back.

For an awkwardly long moment we regarded each other with stupid, well-meaning smiles, until finally Dr. Gho spoke. Big shipment today, he said, holding his hands wide apart, to indicate largeness.

Okay, I said.

Mice. Big delivery.

Oh! I said. Okay. I’ll keep an eye out for them.

Big trouble today, he said. So hot outside.

Yes! I said. It’s very, very hot. I wiped my hand across my forehead, like an idiot. Whew, I added.

Big problem for mice traveling, he said. Too hot. He made an anguished face.

Oh, I said. I made a corresponding face.

If you would please call the mice? he said, wringing his hands together.

Call the mice? I asked.

Yes, he nodded. Call the mice and find out . . .  He searched a moment for the right phrase. Find out if they are comfortable.

My only defense with Dr. Gho was to just keep repeating what he said until I could figure out what he really wanted.

You want me to pick up the telephone, I said. And call the mice. To see if they are comfortable.

Yes! he said, pointing to me.

I think what he wants, said Karl, his hands pressed together in something resembling prayer, is to find out if their travels are refrigerated.

Oh! I said. You want me to call the mouse company! And see if the mice are in an air-conditioned truck! I said.

Air condition! shouted Karl and Dr. Gho, in unison. Yes! Yes! We all gave each other high fives.

It was from Karl and Dr. Gho that I found out about my role in a long-running joke at the lab. Number seventeen, Dr. Gho said once, after we’d determined – through a tortured conversation that I initially thought had something to do with Disney World – that he wanted me to sign him up for a conference in Orlando, sponsored by Rodentia Monthly.

Maybe lucky number! said Dr. Gho.

Did you buy a lottery ticket? I asked.

No, said Karl. He intends to inform you that you are occupying the seventeenth position of the year thus far.

Seventeenth? I said.

That is to say, seventeen assistant officer persons have performed here since January, said Karl.

All fired! said Dr. Gho. Fired, fired, fired! He made a slashing motion with his arm.

Oh! I said. Sheesh.

Sheesh! said Dr. Gho, pointing enthusiastically.

Yes, sheesh! said Karl, smiling. These nonsense words, these onomatopoeiae, were our most satisfying currency.

After Dr. Gho and Karl left I made a quick calculation. It was July, which meant that I had already outlasted each of my predecessors. But instead of being relieved by this calculation, consoled as to my relative competence, I slid into a state of neurotic anxiety. It seemed fairly obvious to me that the only reason I had lasted so long was because I had barely set eyes on the lab’s director, a mysterious figure named Dr. Marquez. Dr. Marquez was a bearded man with long, roguish locks – something like the Che Guevara of scientists. He was regarded by everyone as both a genius and a flake, an authority and a rogue, an idol and a fuckup. His attention to the lab went in and out, sometimes so intense that he would sleep at the lab on a couch in his office, not even bothering to go home to change clothes, for weeks at a time – the year before, he had reportedly gone for two months wearing the same brown polyester pants and plaid shirt. At other times, he was a mere shadow passing in and out of the lab, disappearing for hours or even days at a time. These stretches were difficult for the other lab workers to navigate. Often they would need his advice or approval on some matter, but Dr. Marquez was nowhere to be found. Or sometimes he was relatively easy to find – he spent long hours chain-smoking in a hidden corner of the back parking lot, in the shadow of a dumpster – but he was so disdainful of being disturbed that no one ever wanted to retrieve him. Whenever an urgent call came in for Marquez, or a critical problem arose, the lab techs would fight like children.

You go get Marquez, one would say.

And the other would answer: No, you do it.

I did it last time.

No, you didn’t!

Did, too!

Well, I have seniority. I don’t have to go get him.

But that’s not fair!

Sometimes the techs would join forces and decide to send me. I’d walk up the stairs and out into the lot, where Dr. Marquez sat on a folding lawn chair. His back was always turned to the door, and I took comfort in the thought that he probably couldn’t even tell who in particular was bothering him.

Um, Dr. Marquez? I’d say. They need you downstairs. He never gave any indication that he had heard me – he just dragged on his cigarette. Thank you, I’d say.

When I got back to the lab the techs would surround me. Did you get him?

I told him you needed him.

What did he say?

Nothing, he just sat there.

Did he follow you back inside?

No.

Well, is he coming?

It was hard for me, in those moments, not to say something sarcastic. I have no way of ascertaining that, I’d say.

Then one morning, when I’d been at the lab about three months, Dr. Marquez appeared in my office holding a stack of letters. I cannot put this off any longer, he said, in a thick Spanish accent. All of the letters, it turned out, were requests for Dr. Marquez to speak at conferences, or edit journals. His invitations were so numerous, and from so many prestigious places around the world, that I began to understand he was something of a star in his field. We sat all morning and through lunch, then into the afternoon, declining every single invitation, even the ones so old that the proposed engagements had already come and gone. My office grew thick with Marquez’s scent – cigarette smoke overpowered by a piney cologne. He smelled, I realized at one point, like my father’s car.

As the day wore on, Dr. Marquez’s pace kept flagging, his sentences punctuated by pauses so long that I often turned around to see if he was still in the room. The letters grew lengthier, less and less professional. Around two o’clock, in the middle of a letter to a colleague in Brazil, Dr. Marquez lost all pretense of dictating and simply started narrating his life story. It is with regret that I write to inform you that I will not be able to come and speak to your students, however much I would like to. You see, I was a poet, when I was younger, I found myself typing. Back in Buenos Aires. What I wanted to do with my life was poetry. But my father wanted me to be a doctor and sent me here to the states to medical school. And then next thing you know, here I am, at the top of my field, completely miserable, sitting in my office with my door closed reading poetry and wondering what my life would have been like if I’d remained in Argentina, poor but happy, penniless but rich in soul. I stopped typing and swiveled toward Marquez. But it is too late for all of that now, he said, looking me in the eye. Even if I walked away today, I still would have spent the majority of my life in this absurd laboratory, surrounded by people who don’t understand me. And for what? If I hadn’t made the advancements I made in nephrology, somebody else would have. But poetry. When a man writes a poem, he is the only person on Earth who could have written it. But no one here understands this. Everyone says, ‘Oh, Dr. Marquez, you’re so important to nephrology! You are so indispensible!’ It sickens me, how no one understands.

I understand you, I blurted out. I mean, I have a Ph.D. in Russian Literature. This was the first time I’d ever said this aloud. My voice broke, as if I were eulogizing a beloved relative.

My God! said Dr. Marquez. He bent down and grabbed my face with his hands. My God! he said again. He kissed the top of my head, over and over. I should have known. I noticed as I was dictating that you spelled everything correctly, and put commas in the right places without my having to tell you. He started kissing my head again. I should have known. Oh, thank God. Thank God. You are the answer to my prayers. He started kissing my cheeks, side to side. Thank you, God, he said. Merciful God. His kisses were dry and bordering on violent. When he had gotten them all out of his system he sat on the floor and held his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. I’m actually crying, he said. These are actual tears.

I had no idea what to say or do.

You see, he said, in a conspiratorial whisper. I have been praying for God to send me something, someone, anything, to help me. And you are that something! I want us to talk literature, he said. I want to spend the rest of the day talking about the soul. He stood up and stepped out into the lab. I want all of you to know that we are talking about poetry in here, he shouted, and we won’t be disturbed! All of the techs looked up from what they were doing. Karl was so startled that he dropped the mouse he was holding. It scurried across the counter and leapt onto the floor, across the lab, and out the door.

If you have anything interesting to say about literature, Marquez announced, or about the human soul, you may write it on a sheet of paper and slip it under the door and we will read it and decide if we wish to discuss it with you. But if you have anything else to say, we don’t care. Then he slammed the door, and sat back down on the floor of the office. Let’s talk about your Russians, he said. I love the Russians. How they suffer.

Yes! I said. That’s exactly it. The suffering! I was so excited to have someone to talk to that I was wriggling my fingers.

The suffering, he said. He made a small circle in the air with his hand. It is there like it is at home, in my country. So much suffering. It brings about such beauty.

I often think, I said, what’s wrong with this country is a general lack of suffering. This was in the nineties, when things were good.

Exactly! he said, sitting up in his chair. Even someone like Neruda – and I’m not inclined toward Chileans, understand, but I give credit where credit is due, when it comes to poems – he suffered in his heart. He stabbed at his chest with his finger. He loved.

What we needed in this country – we both agreed – was a war, followed by a brutal dictatorship. One that kidnapped and imprisoned. A violent state breathing down the necks of every moment of our lives. What we had here was an abundance of freedom and it had killed the fire that burns in each of us. As things stood now, in this abundance of freedom, all we did was sit on the couch watching television.

It’s suffering, I said, that gets the imagination going. Exile. Poverty. Loneliness. Oppression. These are the things that develop one’s imaginative powers. My hands were still flailing around.

Dostoevsky, said Marquez.

No one suffered like him.

Imagine, Marquez said, a mock execution. Facing that firing squad. I mean, they actually stood him against the wall, they went through all the motions. Blindfolded him. Gave the order. He truly thought it was the end. He really must have soiled himself.

And Chekhov, I said. Visiting all those Siberian prisoners.

Contracting tuberculosis.

The cold.

The pain.

The foul conditions.

The food.

No wonder they drink so much vodka.

That’s really the only thing worth living for.

From then on, Dr. Marquez and I spent the majority of our time sitting in my office talking about literature. I gave him books by Russians, and he gave me books by South Americans. We each read a book a night and spent the following day talking about them. We had more or less the same conversation every day. Because all of the great books – they all came down to suffering.

During these conversations, which lasted for hours, people would step into the office to drop off work they wanted me to do, but Dr. Marquez would shoo them away. Get out of here, get out of here, he’d say. And when they came back a while later, he’d really lose it. He’d stand up and shout across the whole lab. I want all of you to know that we are having serious, life and death conversations about poetry and the human heart, and we can’t be bothered with your meaningless bullshit! How many times do I have to tell you people to fuck off? Then he’d slam the door and sink down to the floor again, holding his face in his hands. These people, he’d moan. These animals.

Occasionally, after Dr. Marquez and I had left for the night, someone would tape a sheet of paper to my door that said, Poetry is the crutch of pathetic, weak-minded slobs or Poetry sucks big donkey balls, and when Marquez found it, he would scream at the whole lab. Whoever wrote this, he’d say, crumpling up the paper and aiming it at the head of a graduate student, usually Karl, I pity you!

On Wednesdays, when Dr. Marquez was at the hospital, seeing patients at his clinic, the other doctors descended on me with piles and piles of work. I needed this done Monday, they said. But you and Marquez were having one of your symposia. I’d work through lunch and stay until ten o’clock, sometimes midnight, doing everything that needed to be done so that I could spend the rest of the week talking about poetry, about the soul.

One of the other doctors in particular started giving me a hard time. Her name was Dr. Norwood, and she wore her black hair slicked back in a bun so severe it pulled up on the corners of her eyes. She was an ambitious assistant professor who applied for grants practically every week. She’d stand in my office every Wednesday morning and dictate letters and notes. Her voice had a hard, robotic edge to it. She had an unsettling habit of raising her voice at the ends of her sentences. She even did it when she ordered lunch. As in: I want a spinach salad with dressing on the side.

As the months went by, Dr. Norwood came to blame me for all of the professional stresses and failures she and the lab were undergoing, for all of Dr. Marquez’s indifference to her efforts. For a while she contented herself with making little jokes at my expense – Let me try to dictate this in iambic pentameter, maybe it will interest you – but one day, after Marquez had put through the paperwork to hire me on a permanent basis, she really lost it. This entire lab is going down the fucking toilet because you keep talking to Marquez about poetry, she said. She was practically spitting. Or you’re letting him diddle you in here, for Christ’s sake.

I burst out laughing.

She put her face right in my face. Her breath was hot, stinking of coffee and something else, something necrotic. You think that’s funny? I don’t have tenure yet and I know this doesn’t mean shit to you, this is all a big laugh to you, but it means a lot to me. I have kids, you know. If I don’t get tenure, I’m fucked. And the first thing I’m going to do is fuck you up. A vision flashed to mind of Dr. Norwood in a ski mask, stalking me as I made my way home from work. I could see her coming at me with an aluminum bat. I kept laughing.

Do I amuse you? she said. Am I a clown? She said this with total sincerity, apparently unfamiliar with Travis Bickel. Well, we’ll see who’s laughing next. We’ll just see who’s laughing. She stormed out. But a few seconds later she came back and spun my chair around, gripped it by its sides, got right in my face again. If you tell Marquez about this, she said, I will eat your family.

So there I was: the stooge of a capricious dictator, the vice of an unpopular president. I started to worry about how long things could go on this way. My job was safe so long as Marquez was running the lab, but if he had a nervous breakdown, or retired, or returned to his senses, I was fucked. I had only been at the lab a few months but already I had become dependent on it; already it meant more to me, as a sanctuary, than my graduate studies.

       My initial plan had been to treat the lab as a life raft, something I clung to while fighting my way toward shore, where my real life – as a scholar, a writer – was waiting. I had planned to work at the lab from 8 to 5, then go home and write articles which I would try to publish in obscure academic journals so that eventually, some day, I could land a job in my field. But with Dr. Marquez I was making the same salary as an assistant professor and talking about literature just as much, if not more, and it was hard to see the point sometimes of rushing home to write yet another essay about Raskolnikov and his phallic axe. I should have been unsatisfied with what I had – I was living in a two-room apartment in a four-plex on the far edge of town, near the train tracks and the factories, with a bean bag and a card table in the living area, and nothing but a mattress in the bedroom – but I wasn’t. I was fairly content.

As a measure against loneliness I took in a stray cat and named her Mimi, the kind of cat I’d always wanted: black, with white feet and a white bib. I never let Mimi out of the house – not once, not ever – even though she sat all day in front of the window, looking desperate and imprisoned. I started having long conversations with her – which I suppose is typical of people living alone with their pets. Except that in my case, I attributed opinions to Mimi that slightly differed from mine so that we could argue. I know you think Chekhov is a superior writer. And line by line, Mimi, you may be right. But if you really want to twist your guts into a knot, if you’re looking for impact, you’re not going to do better than Dostoyevsky. Or: I know you think I should get out of the house more. Meet people. I know you think if you keep staring at me I’ll eventually have to get up and do something with my life. But you know what, Mimi? You’re just a fucking cat. I don’t have to listen to your shit. If you have a problem with me being here all the time maybe you can open your own goddamned cans of fancy cat food, and scoop your own goddamn litter box, okay? Oh, what’s that? You got nothing to say now? That’s right, just walk away now, Mimi. Walk away.

ACT III: Summary & Analysis

These years display our narrator’s characteristic passivity and complacency, her lack of drive and fortitude, and her tendency to give up too soon – to seek the easiest and most convenient shelter, regardless of how unsuitable it might be. They also reiterate our narrator’s habit of forming strong but ultimately doomed attachments to one person at a time, rather than developing a balanced and varied group of friends, coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances, etc. On a related note, the narrator’s family seems to have all but disappeared, indicating a deepening sense of loneliness, isolation, and failure.

ACT III: Questions for Discussion

1. Are the characters in this section believable or exaggerated? Sympathetic or ridiculous?

2. In your opinion, is it a good thing, or a bad thing, that the narrator’s boss happens to share her obscure interests? Does this help her, or does it simply allow her to cling to an impractical and foolish set of ideas? Do you find it even remotely believable that an upper-middle-class nephrologist would harbor such a passion for poetry? If I told you it really happened, in real life, would you believe me then?

3. Why do you think the cat is named Mimi? Is it selfish to keep a stray cat indoors, or is it loving? If you had a cat, what would you name it?

ACT IV: THE MARXIST

One of the worst mistakes I ever made was that I fell in love with a Marxist. This was during the third year of my so‑called professional life, when I had settled into my apartment with my cat and had more or less given up on the possibility of anything ever happening to me again. I was living a very ordered life: rotating through the same five outfits, in the same order, every weekday; riding the bus to work; eating a peanut butter sandwich and an apple for lunch; riding the bus home in the evenings; reading in bed at night; falling asleep with the cat; weekends riding my bike around the city, to the library and to the movie theater; weekend evenings staying home and making all kinds of lists: articles to write, books to read, things to do, things to clean, conversations to have with Marquez, pros and cons of getting another cat, characters in novels i like, movies to go to, reasons for living.

Then one morning as I approached the bus stop there he was, seated on the bench, The Marxist, looking exactly like you’d think a Marxist would look. Though it was early spring and there was still snow on the ground, he wore very little defense against the cold, just black jeans and a t‑shirt, knee-high black combat boots, and a flimsy black trench coat that had gone gray and tattered at the hem. He was exceptionally tall and thin, his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. His head, which was bent over a book, was shaved. I had the feeling, looking at him, that I was looking at the hero of a tragic novel.

I sat down next to him on the bench and looked over his shoulder. I could hardly believe it: he was reading The Brothers Karamazov. Here is where I made my big mistake. The mistake of believing that stumbling upon someone, someone who was reading one of your favorite books – the mistake of believing that this was fate. No matter what happened in the years that followed – no matter what agony, what violence – I kept going back to this moment at the bus stop. It had to mean something, I thought.

I read over The Marxist’s shoulder for a while, until finally I couldn’t help myself. I don’t want to spoil the book for you, I said, but things don’t exactly end well.

I never would have guessed, said The Marxist. He had a surprisingly deep voice, and an English accent. When he looked up at me I saw that our faces were similar – his face was long and pale, with an angular, crooked nose, and his eyes were a disturbingly pale blue. The only real difference between us was that he was bald.

From then on I saw The Marxist every morning. He was always reading something new, usually something I’d read in school. We’d talk about books and authors, making little jokes. A real pain in the Balzac. Turn your head and Kafka. One Friday morning he told me about a political group he sometimes met with, in a bar called Manifesto. You should come tonight, he said, handing me a flyer with a picture of Che Guevara on it. The Revolution, it read, Is In Effect. As always, Che Guevara was looking angrily off in the distance, at some righteous horizon he’d never reach. But by then it was hard for me to take Che Guevara seriously, because he reminded me so much of Dr. Marquez.

When I arrived at Manifesto, The Marxist was sitting at a table with a crowd of people surrounding him, three rows deep. The crowd – comprised of old, bearded men, young girls in short black dresses, laborers in flannel shirts and overalls – stared raptly at The Marxist as he lectured on the evils of capitalism. I sat in the back as he talked. His voice was now soft and lulling and incantatory, now charged and violent. At one point, to emphasize a claim he was making about Reagan, The Marxist stood up, and when he noticed me, he stopped mid-sentence. Everyone, he said. This is Lydia Cosgrove. A scholar in Russian Literature. She’s read everything there is to read. She knows all about suffering. She’s one of us.

He motioned for me to join him at his table, and for the rest of the night, as he lectured and argued, he kept his arm around me.

Me!

Well, as you might imagine, I was in love.

From then on we were always together. I met up with The Marxist every night after work, and we went to all kinds of places – to Manifesto and other bars, to the basement apartments of his friends, to art galleries, to political meetings in abandoned factory buildings. The Marxist was always holding court, offering his opinions on politics, literature, pop culture, foreign wars, tax policy, astronomy – and at least once a night he’d get into an argument with someone, wherein they would stand up and scream at each other and point their cigarettes at one another and threaten each other’s families. The Marxist always won, because the breadth and depth of his knowledge on every imaginable subject was insurmountable. We’d get home late, two or three in the morning, and collapse on my bed, then squirm until our arms and legs were comfortably intertwined. I’d tell him about my life, in all of its petty, uninteresting detail, and he would explain how the drudgery and isolation and hopelessness of my upbringing had been brought about by market forces. I had lost all of my childhood friends because of capitalism, he pointed out, and had lost Jennifer Barnes to class warfare, to the impassable chasm between public and private education. Even the homeless woman, he said, was born of the evils of capitalism, one of its byproducts. The fact that she was pushing around an empty shopping cart, he said, bordered on the poetic.

Eventually The Marxist would fall into a deep sleep, but I’d lie awake, feeling the pressure of his limbs against mine, his breathing, thinking that I finally understood what it was all about, life, how people got through it. So long as there was a room to go to at the end of the day, a room like this, where you could fall asleep with someone, so long as there was this, I thought, nothing else really mattered.

Then one morning, for reasons I will never understand, everything changed. Instead of sleeping in, as he usually did, The Marxist got up and started following me around the apartment as I made breakfast and got ready for work, criticizing everything I did. My showers were unnecessarily long, he said, and wasteful. My coffee was too strong. Furthermore, I put milk in my coffee, which meant that I didn’t really like coffee and shouldn’t bother drinking it. And why did I heat up my oatmeal in the microwave instead of on the stove? Didn’t I know that a person who used a microwave was a weak person? That a person who used a microwave was essentially announcing to the world: I am a person willing to sacrifice quality for convenience? I am a cheap, lazy, ugly capitalist?

When I went to leave for work I found that The Marxist had turned the deadbolts with my keys, then hidden them from me, that I was locked in. I don’t know what your problem is today, I said, but I need to leave for work.

Oh! he said, in an hysterical falsetto that sounded absolutely nothing like me, I have to go to my job! I have to go because they told me to! Oh, hurry, hurry, get out of my way, I’m late for work!

You have a problem with my going to work? I asked.

Insofar as you work for the system, he said, insofar as you’re a cog in the wheel of the military industrial complex, then yes, I have a problem with your going to work.

Are you fucking kidding me? I said. You’re not going to let me out of my own fucking apartment?

I will, he said, as soon as you admit you love being a part of the system. Repeat after me, he said. I love kissing the ass of my fat, bourgeois, capitalist boss.

We stood and stared at each other. I felt the seconds ticking by. I heard, faintly, the sound of the bus’s struggling engine. I love being part of the system, I said.

And? he said.

I love kissing the ass of my fat, bourgeois, capitalist boss.

And my boss, said The Marxist, no matter how much he prattles on about suffering, is really just a spoiled twat.

My boss is a spoiled twat, I said.

Off you go, then, he said. He plucked my keys from his pocket and handed them to me. Enjoy your day!

This kind of thing went on almost every morning, and the evenings were even worse. I never knew what I’d return home to at the end of the day. Once, after a pair of shoes I’d ordered had been delivered during the day, I returned home to find them unboxed and sitting on a plate at my usual place at the table. You had shoes delivered? The Marxist said. You actually ordered shoes and had a delivery truck driver, a full-time employee driving all over the place, hogging the streets and polluting the environment, just to deliver your fancy little shoes? Who do you think you are, the Queen of England? I want you to eat those shoes, he said, like Charlie Chaplin. Just to remind yourself what a spoiled pig you’ve become. I pointed out that the delivery truck driver had other things in his truck, to deliver to other people, and that furthermore, they weren’t fancy little shoes, not at all – they were clunky, mannish shoes with rubber soles, in which I intended to walk to work, thereby saving whatever damage the delivery truck driver might have done to the environment on my behalf. But The Marxist said it didn’t matter – that the real problem was my sense of entitlement, my willingness to enslave a poor, humble driver to my slightest whim. I pointed out that the delivery truck driver was a steadily-employed member of a union who made a wage equal to if not greater than a university professor, which was something even Marx wouldn’t have a problem with. But The Marxist just told me I was a pathetic, brainwashed victim of capitalism, and he went off to the bar.

Often The Marxist and I fought about what to do with our evenings. Partly because I was tired and usually wanted to stay home. Or because, when pressed, I never had any ideas besides watching a movie, or going out to eat. Maybe we can try that new Pakistani place, I’d say, hoping it would make me seem worldly. And then see that documentary about the Sudan.

But The Marxist would only scoff. You talk all revolutionary, but you’re just a little white girl with little white interests and little white thoughts.

I’m sorry I’m so white, I said once. There’s really nothing I can do about it. I mean, I’ve tried.

None of us can do anything about being white, he agreed. But you don’t have to act white. Oooh, let’s go to Blockbuster and rent a video. Oooh, let’s go to a restaurant. I mean, Jesus Christ. You might as well just kill yourself.

I don’t know what else to do, I said. As was my custom in our arguments, I started crying.

How about going around the rich neighborhoods and kicking people’s trash cans over? said The Marxist. How about vandalizing billboards with the pictures of personal injury lawyers with funny captions, like: I have a tiny, tiny penis.

But if the lawyer is on a billboard, it wouldn’t really make sense to say he had a tiny penis, because on the billboard, you know, proportionally . . .

It was just a hypothetical! he said. The point is to get out there and do something! Fuck with the system!

It’s like, twelve degrees out. I started really slobbering.

You think you know about suffering? he’d say. You can’t even take a little cold?

I don’t really see what good it would do to knock over all those trash cans. I mean, those rich people would just have their maids clean it up the next morning.

It’s about shocking the system. It’s about going into those neighborhoods and saying, you think you’re safe, Motherfuckers? You think you’re safe in your little beds?

Well, you go do it, then.

I can’t, he said. You ruined my mood.

At work, I was groggy and failed to respond to Dr. Marquez with the usual enthusiasm. Something is wrong with you, he told me. You have lost the poetry in your heart. You have lost the beauty. You have replaced it with anger and disdain. I have seen this many times before. You must do something to help yourself. You must do something right now.

I’m just really tired, I said.

That’s how it starts, he said. Believe me, that’s how they get you.

       Once a week or so, just when I’d gotten up the courage to break up with The Marxist, I’d return from work to find a candlelit dinner on the table, something warm and delicious and exotic. After dinner The Marxist would massage my feet, then read to me from one of our favorite books. I’d lay with my head against his chest and he’d stroke my hair. I’m sorry I’m so hard on you, he’d say. I’m just trying to help you. I just want to cure you from the disease of our society. Sometimes the poison is so strong you need to burn it out. I hate to do it, I hope you know. I just want you to be free. I’d fall asleep on top of him, hoping that everything would get better. I couldn’t imagine living alone again, living without him.

       When we had been together about a year, The Marxist started calling me a fat pig. Since one of his other complaints about me was that I was too thin, anemic and sickly looking, this didn’t entirely make sense. I don’t know what you’re talking about, I told him, after he’d been calling me a pig for about a week.

Up here, said The Marxist, tapping at his forehead. You’re a fat pig, mentally.

One day he went so far as to make a hat – a conical dunce cap fashioned out of poster board, with the words I AM A FAT CAPITALIST PIG printed across it in black marker. I want you to put this on, he told me, after we’d fought about the fact that I was planning on filing my taxes, and stand in the corner for fifteen minutes while you think about your problem. When I refused to wear the hat, calling him a sadist and an egomaniac and a hypocrite, he started screaming. I’m an egomaniac? You’re calling me a fucking egomaniac, you fucking narcissistic egomaniacal pig?

The next day, in the hospital gift shop, I saw a jarful of small plastic pigs. The pigs were about the size of jellybeans, and had their mouths open in wide smiles. I took a pig out of the jar and inspected it. Its expression was happy and unabashed, and it cheered me. So I bought the pig and decided to use it to comic effect in my relationship with The Marxist. Whenever I was about to say something that had anything to do with my job, with eating or travel, with clothes or furnishings or my family – basically anything not directly involved with the politics of the working class – I took the pig out of my pocket and held it next to my face, to indicate that yes, I was a capitalist pig, I was a talking capitalist pig. As I talked I waved the pig around animatedly, to increase the illusion that the pig was talking. Though nothing much ever struck The Marxist as funny, he always laughed when the pig came out. I could say whatever I wanted to so long as the pig was around. I could talk about the catalogues that arrived in the mail, the things I was considering buying, my disappointment with meals served in restaurants, the network television programs I’d watched.

After the first few weeks I started worrying that the pig would become tiresome, which it did, though not in the way I imagined. The truth is, I grew tired of the pig before The Marxist did. As I waved the pig in the air I started to wonder: Was I really a pig? Was I really so awful? In the end, though I acknowledged The Marxist had many fine points against me, I didn’t think I was all that bad. Slowly I phased out the pig, at first simply holding a small slice of air next to my face, which was shorthand for the pig in the absence of the pig itself, then leaving it out altogether. The Marxist grew increasingly sour, recalcitrant. We started fighting just like we used to. He lobbied insults at me again, but instead of calling me a pig, with which he now had a fond association, he called me a capitalist whore. Soon enough I started wondering if there were such things as little plastic whore dolls, where I might find one.

Eventually, bored with the quality of our arguments (among my flaws, he always said, was that I didn’t argue well, that I didn’t spout off lines from Machiavelli or Nietzsche to assert or defend myself), The Marxist veered toward violence. When we fought he started smashing glasses and plates, brandishing knives. I swear to God one of these days I’m going to fucking kill you, he’d scream, running the flat end of a blade against my throat. Or myself, he’d say. He’d pull up his sleeve and press the knife against his flesh. But we fought so often, in such an endless and tedious and predictable cycle, that I never took him seriously. He’d be shouting at the top of his lungs, a vein bulging at his temple, and I’d just get up and make myself something to eat.

Really? he’d yell. Your lover is holding a knife to his wrist and you’re making a sandwich? Really? You’re so fucking cold!

It would seem impossible for two people to live very long in this state, rotating through the same arguments night after night after night, with the occasional relief of making up and having a meal and falling asleep together, then erupting into screaming again, but I’m here to tell you that it’s possible for this sort of thing to go on and on. In the case of me and The Marxist, it went on for three years. We were locked in something so tangled, so intricate, that only a spectacular, weapons-grade episode would break us out.

       One Saturday I received a note in the mailbox addressed to skinny black haired girl. The letter explained that I was the victim of a fraud, that The Marxist wasn’t actually British; rather, he had been to Manchester for a semester in college and had returned with an accent and a new identity. The Marxist’s name wasn’t really what I thought it was, either; despite what he went around calling himself, his actual name was Roger Filmore, and he was the son of a wealthy couple who owned over a dozen car dealerships; he lived off a trust they had set up for him. Included in the letter was a photocopied picture of Roger Filmore from the yearbook of a high school in Terre Haute, Indiana. Though he had a full head of dark hair in the picture, his face was unmistakable. It was definitely him.

I sat and stared at that picture all day, realizing how little I knew about The Marxist. The few times I’d asked him about his childhood, or how he survived in the world, he alluded to his parents’ untimely death in a car crash, to the insurance money he drew from. There’s nothing to tell, he always said, sadly. And I believed him.

Is your name Roger Filmore? I asked The Marxist, when he came home from the bar.

Why? he said.

I showed him the letter.

So you’re going to believe this anonymous person, this anonymous note with a fake photograph, and accuse your lover, your life partner, of being a fraud?

Well, it really looks like you, I said.

You’re disloyal, he said, crumpling up the letter. That’s why nobody likes you.

That’s not true, I said. I’m loyal. People like me.

Name one person who likes you, he said. Name a single friend you have besides me.

Well, I said, there’s Mimi. I cringed. My only friend was a cat.

God, you’re pathetic, he said. He shook his head.

He went off toward the kitchen and I hoped, for once, we had avoided a fight. But then I heard the microwave start up, and a terrible howling and commotion. I ran toward the kitchen, where The Marxist was standing in front of the microwave, staring into it. I beat on his back, flailing desperately, and he held me back with his arms. I kicked and punched and scratched, and finally got ahold of the plug and yanked it out.

Let her out! I screamed, beating my fists against him. I kept punching him as he lifted Mimi out of the microwave. She clung to him in terror, she was so stupid.

I’m just trying to help you, he said. You can’t spend your whole life with this fucking cat.

Oh, really? I said. I took Mimi from him. Just watch me!

I kicked The Marxist out of the apartment in a flagrant, stereotypical display. I threw all of his clothes and books, and everything he had ever given me, out the window and onto the front lawn. As he gathered up his things, stuffing them in a trash bag, we said hateful things to one another. No wonder nobody loves you, he said, you stupid hysterical bitch.

You’re a fucking psychopath! I said. I can’t believe I listened to your bullshit so long!

You’re terrible in bed! he said. You’re like a wilted piece of lettuce!

Half the time you’re talking, I said, people are just waiting for you to shut up!

That did it. The Marxist went on an unbelievable long rant – enumerating all of my flaws, and telling me I’d be sorry, that I’d come crawling back to him, that he couldn’t wait for the day his phone rang and it was me – humbled, repentant, sobbing, begging him to come back – and that maybe, if I was lucky, he’d take enough pity on me to return. Meanwhile a Neo-Nazi was coming down the street, walking his dog, a giant German Shepard. The Marxist’s rant provoked the dog, who started barking like crazy and pulling on his leash. The Neo-Nazi fought to hold back the dog – his muscular arms were tattooed with swastikas, I noticed – but the dog prevailed, and soon enough he was at The Marxist’s heels. When The Marxist finally noticed the dog, he turned his anger on the Neo-Nazi. Get that fucking dog away from me! he yelled. And the dog went even crazier. The Marxist started backing away, holding his trash bag in front of him, making threats back and forth between me and the Neo-Nazi and the dog. Fuck you! he said. And fuck you! And especially fuck you! Several of the neighbors came to their windows, and they started yelling, too. All of my life I had tried to remain inconspicuous – in fact invisible – and now here I was, at the center of a humiliating public display, the principal of a freak show. Step right into the tent, ladies and gentleman. And see the world’s biggest fool. The world’s most ridiculous life. The world’s loneliest girl.

ACT IV: Summary & Analysis

Another disastrous failure, which seems to petrify our narrator’s sense that she is a hopeless social outcast. Compounding matters is the fact that by now the narrator has lost the blush of youth, and the ability to blame her mistakes on naivety. She seems to have missed the window in which change might be possible.

ACT IV: Questions for Discussion

1. What do you think of The Marxist’s worldview? What points are in his favor? What points count against him? Do you think it’s possible that economic models affect the personal lives of citizens living within them? Do you think it’s possible that capitalism breeds isolation, social anxiety, depression, failed relationships, etc.?

2. In a relationship, how much does a person’s past really matter? Was it wrong of The Marxist to conceal his identity? Or are we free to make new people of ourselves? How much do you really know about your partner? Hmm?

3. Why do you think Lydia stays with The Marxist so long? Didn’t you want to just slap her? Have you ever been in a troubled relationship? Did you find yourself confused, desperate, paralyzed by fear? How did you get out of it? Afterwards, could you believe you had been so stupid? Now that you are free, cycling through the colorless drudgery of normal life, do you ever kind of miss your former partner?

ACT V: DECLINING HEALTH

Once I rid myself of The Marxist, who had kept me up late arguing every night, I started going to bed earlier and earlier. For a while this seemed sensible, even salubrious, but eventually it started to seem that something was wrong. I was sleeping twelve hours a night, but in the mornings, when my alarm went off, it was a battle to get myself out of bed. Sometimes as I lay there, listening to the morning news, listening to the various ways in which the world was going to hell, I even missed The Marxist. It was nice to have someone around, someone to get you going, even if that person wanted you to stand in a corner wearing a dunce hat.

That winter I developed a number of strange ailments. First came the taste of metal in my mouth, which wouldn’t go away. Then one morning I woke with a painful lump in my toe, which also wouldn’t go away. Another morning I woke up with my arms covered in painful, blistered red patches. So I went to a doctor, who sent me to another doctor, who sent me to another, but none of them could find anything wrong. You just have red patches on your arms, said the last doctor, a Napoleonic figure who never looked up from his clipboard, covered with shiny scales, and a bad taste in your mouth, and a lump in your toe that won’t go away, but it doesn’t look like you have anything else. According to this doctor, my body was in effect behaving like a petulant teenager. Sometimes when people go through a bad personal stretch, a bout with depression or a breakup or the loss of a loved one, or a bad professional situation or what have you, he said, listing what he supposed were only hypothetical examples, these kinds of things happen. The body gets down on itself, and it goes into a state of rebellion.

There’s nothing wrong with my life, I told the doctor, my voice trembling. I may not be as successful as I once hoped, and I still have a lot of articles I haven’t finished, but I’m very happy just as I am. I’m very . . . I was on the verge of tears and stopped to compose myself.

Of course! said the doctor. He finally looked at me, and his expression seemed to flicker with fear.

There’s nothing wrong with a life devoted to Dostoevsky, I choked out.

The doctor raised an eyebrow and scribbled something on my chart. Of course there isn’t, he said. He detached a sheet from his clipboard with a flourish and handed it to me. Call if anything gets worse, he said, and left.

I walked around all winter convinced that something was truly wrong with me. I diagnosed myself with various autoimmune disorders and sat around feeling sorry for myself. I read pamphlets in which people living with these disorders described themselves as warriors and survivors. In their testimonies they said things like, Some mornings I can’t get out of bed, and the pain is so bad it hurts to breathe. But I just keep going! I imagined my life confined to a small bedroom in a halfway house, supported by Medicaid. I imagined my picture in a pamphlet, underneath the heading: They called me crazy, but I was really just terminally ill!

Toward the end of winter I developed a real problem but, embarrassed by my previous failures with doctors – each of whom had given the impression that I was bothering them unnecessarily, like a child who, during her parents’ dinner party, keeps lurking at the perimeter of the dining room – I put off seeking treatment. The problem was that I had slipped on the icy steps outside my apartment, and herniated a disc. But I didn’t realize I’d herniated a disc – I just kept hobbling around, bent at a strange angle, because I couldn’t stand up straight. I kept telling myself that it would get better, that I just had to wait it out, but I was wrong. A hellish, fiery pain started shooting down my leg, and I started losing sensation in my foot. At first the numbness and tingling and the fiery pain were intermittent, then constant. But I just kept hobbling around. This went on for six weeks.

Around this time a strangler started breaking into apartments in my neighborhood. He targeted single women, killing eight of them in six weeks, and our city went into a frenzy. The murderer was all that anyone talked about, even in the lab, which had always seemed impervious to the charms and troubles of the outside world. My neighborhood was clogged with camera crews from all of the major networks in the country, their news vans parked up and down the streets. Reporters stood outside the sad, crumbling apartment complexes of the victims, speaking earnestly into cameras about the cleverness of the murderer, the troubling lack of evidence and leads. I learned more about serial killers than I ever wanted to know. Apparently this one was on a virtually unprecedented rampage. Whereas your average serial killer will space out his murders – savoring the last one and anticipating the next – this one was murdering like it was going out of style. He was thought to be mad beyond belief.

People in our city started to live as if under siege. They went to work, then scrambled to get home before dark, where they locked the doors and turned on all the lights and sat inside watching the news. Groups of neighborhood men formed citizens’ brigades, and started patrolling the streets in shifts. All through the night the police patrolled on horseback, flew overhead in their helicopters. When I woke to the sound of hoofbeats it was like waking up in the nineteenth century; when I woke to the sound of rotor blades it was like waking up in Vietnam.

In the initial weeks the murderer was unknown to us, a total mystery. But then one night, in the middle of being attacked, a woman had managed to cut the strangler’s face with a knife she kept under her pillow, and she had hurt him so badly he’d fled. The headline of the morning paper read: “I cut his eye right out of his head.” The woman was able to give a description to the police, who released a sketch. The strangler turned out to be bald and hulking, with a hoop earring – bearing a striking resemblance to Mr. Clean. Within hours his picture was posted everywhere, on telephone poles and billboards, in every place of business. Finally the man that haunted us – the man that chased us in our dreams – had a face. We each imagined him coming for us, like a repo man sent to collect for all we’d failed to make good on – all the youth and talent and love we’d squandered, all we’d failed to appreciate. I imagined what Mr. Clean would say to me as he squeezed my throat with his giant hands. You fucked up, he’d say. You were given a lot, but you amounted to nothing. Something about him prowling around the neighborhood made me want to do better, get my life together, make something of myself. I thought about writing a book, something about suffering, something that would change the world, make people understand each other, something like The Brothers Karamazov. But usually I just ended up cleaning my apartment.

As far as my chances of being murdered went, I felt reasonably safe because my apartment had iron bars on its windows and its front door. The back door, however, was just a cheap composite door with a flimsy lock. Most of my fears had to do with this door, which was just the kind of weakness that would tempt someone who wanted to punish a person for not being thorough. I imagined Mr. Clean kicking down the back door and thinking to himself: Let that be a lesson to you. Given the condition of my back, it took me an entire hour to push a heavy bookcase out of the living room, through the kitchen, and against the back door. I also put a knife under my pillow, so I could cut his eye right out of his head, if the opportunity presented.

All this time I was hobbling around – tilted at three o’clock, barely able to function, having to stand at work instead of sit, hot flames of pain shooting up my leg – until finally one night I woke up to find that my foot was completely paralyzed. I lay there for a few minutes wondering what to do. I didn’t have a car, so I would have to walk to the hospital in the cold, dragging my leg behind me, which didn’t sound so good. On the other hand, part of me was pleased that I finally had a real symptom to show to a doctor. So I worked myself out of bed and bundled up in practically every piece of clothing I owned. As I set off for the hospital I was determined, hopeful, but I only hopped ten steps before I slipped and fell on the ice again, coming down hard on my head and arm.

I lay there on my back, assessing my injuries. I would have to get up, I knew; I would have to get help. But for some reason I couldn’t move. I thought about all the accounts I’d heard of people who had frozen to death. The cold gave way to a warmth, they said, and you just fell asleep, which didn’t sound all that bad. It didn’t sound that bad at all.

After a few minutes I heard footsteps approaching, crunching in the snow. For a fleeting second I was relieved, grateful, but then it occurred to me that it might be the strangler. In a dizzying rush, I saw all the things I’d ever done wrong unfurl in my mind, as if a carpet leading me ineluctably to this place, this moment in the snow, this moment when I was about to be strangled to death. Frantically I tried to think of something I could do to defend myself, something I could pull from my long, dull history that might save me. Maybe, I thought, I could subdue the strangler with the quality of my conversation. I’d let him know that I’d read whole books from the point of view of murderers, that I understood and sympathized with them. Maybe all my knowledge of pain and loneliness and suffering would finally be put to good use. I’m reminded of Raskolnikov, I’d tell him. Do you know about Raskolnikov?

At which point, I realized, he’d obviously kill me.

A man approached and leaned over me. He was wearing a giant coat with a fur-lined hood pulled over his head. His face was completely obscured, just a shadowy black space. My heart was beating out of my chest. I’m sorry! I blurted out. Which was an odd thing to say. I suppose I was apologizing for everything I’d ever done wrong, every stupid mistake I’d made that had led me to this place, compelling him to murder me.

But in the end it wasn’t the strangler. It was a member of the citizen’s brigade who was walking around with a Coleman lantern, looking for the strangler. Can you move? he said. His voice was deep and resonant, like the voice of God in movies.

Not really, I said.

In a display of remarkable strength the man lifted me up and carried me all the way to his car, then drove me to the hospital. He smelled like a cave – damp and musty. You’re too kind, I kept saying. Really, this is too much.

He didn’t say anything, not a single word, until we got to the ER and he delivered me into the hands of an orderly. I found her in the street, he said. She fell down and can’t move.

In the flurry of activity that followed – in which it was determined that I had fractured my skull and broken my arm – I had some difficulty communicating to the people in the emergency room that my skull and arm were, as far as I was concerned, minor problems. My back, I said. I can’t move my foot.

Finally they ran an MRI and determined that I had not one but two bulging discs, which were compressing my sciatic nerve, paralyzing my foot. The next thing I knew people were bustling around preparing me for surgery. I had to hand over my glasses, and everything went by in a blur. Someone drew blood, someone tucked all of my hair into a paper cap, someone put a pair of socks on my feet. A doctor came into and fiddled with the computer by the bed. How long has your back been like this? he asked.

Oh, I said. I don’t know. A few months.

A few months? the doctor said. He made a face. No one would voluntarily walk around like that, he said. For more than a day.

I shrugged.

Do you have a husband or boyfriend? he said.

I thought of how I might explain The Marxist. Sort of, I said. Not really.

I’ll be frank with you, said the doctor. He pointed to the computer screen, on which my MRI results were glowing, the long archipelago of my spine. This injury is not consistent with a fall. In twenty years I’ve only ever seen one other spine like this. It was on a woman who was beaten and left for dead by her husband. Though she made it through surgery, she later died of complications to her liver. What I’m saying here is, he said, it is my belief that you were beaten.

I started crying again, which seemed to satisfy the doctor, seemed to confirm his suspicions. But of course I wasn’t crying because I had been beaten. I was crying because I was leading a boring, lonely life – a life in which I slipped and fell and had no one to tell me to go to the hospital – and this seemed to be, in the social hierarchy, worse than not having a husband or boyfriend, even one who beat you.

       After my surgery I couldn’t go back to work for three months. I spent the first weeks in a fog of painkillers, going in and out of sleep, day running into night into day. When I tried to write out the alphabet with my foot, which the nurse had advised me to do as many times a day as I could stand, it was still a great effort to get my foot to do what I wanted. By the time I got to Z I was sweating and nauseous, exhausted from the effort.

At some point Dr. Marquez came by with a few bags of groceries, things I could live on without getting out of bed – mainly crackers and peanut butter. He kept wandering around the apartment, complaining about the temp who had replaced me, her misplacement of commas and her complete lack of knowledge about literature. As he talked he kept opening closets and cupboard and bureau doors, picking up what few artifacts I had – a picture of Mimi, a few candles from The Marxist. You live so simply, he said. This is really how I ought to be living. But I had once taken a long walk after work, for the sole purpose of seeing how Dr. Marquez lived, and had seen his house – a mansion that glowed in the night, a light blazing in every one of its rooms. I knew that he would never live simply again. Suddenly all of his talk – our talk – seemed as ridiculous to me as it did to everyone else in the lab. For all of my philosophizing about suffering, I had never known it before. Now that I was stuck in bed, struggling just to move my foot, everything was different, and I had to admit, The Marxist had been right about one thing. Dr. Marquez really was kind of a twat.

Meanwhile, no one had caught the murderer. All during my recovery he kept prowling the city, working back and forth from east to west. I kept the TV on twenty-four hours a day, running at the foot of the bed, wanting news of him. Though they were completely unrelated, I had come to associate his reign of terror with my downfall, and I wanted to know what was happening, every detail, how bad it was, when it would end. The murderer’s victims were all middle-aged single women, women whose chief defining characteristic was their solitude, their lack of connection to the world. They were librarians and cashiers and kindergarten teachers, factory employees and secretaries. Their neighbors described them as quiet, their families as shy. They were, in other words, my people, and their fate seemed tied to my fate, the murderer’s capture tied to my recovery.

Things weren’t looking so good. Days went by, weeks, and I didn’t seem to be improving. I spent long hours in the dark, sleepless, my spine throbbing. It was very tempting, some nights, to take the knife I kept under the pillow, as a safeguard against the strangler, and plunge it through my heart. Often I held the knife in front of my face and contemplated it. Its blade caught the bluish light coming in through the barred window, and as I turned it this way and that I saw sections of my face reflected back in thin slices – the cold blue eyes, the long nose that had always tortured me, my bloodless, chapped mouth, which almost never opened anymore, rusted shut like the mouth of the tin man from The Wizard of Oz. The problem was, I realized, not the murderer, but how easy it would be to do it myself, to slit my own throat. The problem was, I couldn’t think of a single reason not to.

       Then one morning I woke to the news that the strangler had been caught. The news cut into programming for an entire day, the same handful of images rotating again and again – the strangler’s mug shot, his license and yearbook photos, a picture of the dog food factory where he worked. Most interesting were pictures of him from the eighties – from his brief, doomed career as a pro wrestler. Back then the strangler had called himself The Grizzly Bear, and had wrestled in a bear suit. The news ran clips of The Grizzly Bear – grainy footage recorded with a handheld camera – engaged in the perennial battle that had defined his career. His opponent had been The Hunter, a burly, bearded man in camouflage. They’d gone after each other in the ring, The Grizzly Bear standing with his arms raised, or making wild swipes with his paws, the hunter tackling him at the waist and getting him down, punching him in the nose. In one clip the bear was dragging a woman – the hunter’s wife – around the ring by her long blonde hair. The woman kicked and screamed, but the bear just kept dragging her around. Then he stopped in the center of the ring and stood over her with his arms raised, a final display of prowess before he bent down to eat her. But then a shot rang out, and the hunter rose up from the depths of the stadium. The bear fell to his knees, then flat on his face, and that was the end of his career.

Throughout his wrestling career the strangler – whose name was Rodney Jones – had worn a bear mask, and so no one had known what Rodney Jones – personally, the man – looked like. In the statements he made in the following days, admitting to the murders, Rodney Jones blamed the bear suit for his troubles – the fact that no one had ever seen him, known him, recognized him. What he had done, he said, he had done for the sake of recognition. In the end, it was all the bear’s fault.

       After the strangler was caught it was like all had been forgiven. Like our city had another chance. The snow melted, flowers came out of the ground; the world seemed good again. I could hear people at night walking past my window, laughing on their way to and from the bars down the street. But as for me, I was still stuck in bed, struggling to move my foot. I had progressed beyond the alphabet and started writing sentences – Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad – but it still hurt too much to stand, to walk. I still spent my days in bed, going over every mistake I had ever made, the small, sad disaster that was my life. There was no longer any need for the knife, but I kept it under my pillow. I kept staring at it at night, sometimes with terror, sometimes with something like lust.

One morning, after spending hours contemplating the knife, I called the surgeon’s office and spoke with his nurse. I don’t think I’m recovering like I’m supposed to, I said.

I’ve been wondering about you, said the nurse. You know, you really and truly had the worst spine I’ve ever seen.

I’m not doing so well, I said. I feel like I’m not getting better. I feel hopeless and desperate. I feel like I can’t go on living. I had never believed in burdening anyone with my troubles, but now here I was, crying to a complete stranger. I felt like something had broken, like I was no longer myself. An image flashed to mind of the homeless woman, the one who had run me over with a shopping cart. I was beginning to understand her, I thought.

Oh, said the nurse, that’s not uncommon. In a case like yours, you’re looking at a year or so before you’re really up and around again. She explained to me that although I wasn’t back to normal, I was still able to walk, and that was better than expected. The best thing you can do, she said, is walk. Try to get up to a mile a day.

Okay, I said. I’ll try.

If you just stay in bed all the time you can get blood clots. You don’t want one mistake to lead to another.

Certainly not, I said, regaining the composure I hoped I was known for. Thank you for your time.

 So I started walking around the neighborhood in the mornings and evenings, dragging my leg behind me. At first I could only make it down the street and back, and sometimes had to stop to lie down on the lawns of neighbors, but eventually I started covering some ground. One day, when I thought I had gathered enough strength to make a longer outing, I walked down to the outdoor shopping mall about a half-mile from the apartment. There were mobs of people walking about in little groups, laughing and talking together. They were cheerful, buoyed by their purchases, their giant bags of clothing and housewares. I thought of The Marxist, the crimes he saw in everyday life – people buying things, buying, buying, buying – because they had run out of the only truly valuable currency, which was community, the art of being together, of talking amongst one another. I scoffed at a woman carrying a large bag from a shoe store. Buying shoes! I thought. Ridiculous!

Just then I spotted a payphone and decided to call The Marxist. He didn’t answer, so I left the first message I had ever left in my life. It’s me, I said. Lydia Cosgrove. Even though we’d spent three years together, I thought he might not remember me. I just want you to know that I think I finally understand you. I think I finally feel the same way that you do. You know, about the world. All the shoppers and everything. The meaninglessness. I just . . .  Here I broke off, my voice warbling with regret and desperation. I don’t understand why people have to buy so many pairs of shoes! I started sobbing. I was giving The Marxist everything he ever wanted.

I hung up and stood in front of the phone with my head in my hands. I could see, with startling clarity, what would happen in the coming days. The Marxist would start coming by again. He’d be solicitous at first, and in my weakened state I would succumb to his charms. By the end of the month he would have moved in. But soon after that he’d start hounding me again, and I’d spend my days defending my every word and action. He’d keep hounding and I’d keep defending, until one night when we lost control of ourselves and killed one another in a knife fight.

I picked up the phone and left him another message. Never mind, I said. Forget it. I’m on a lot of medication and I don’t know what I’m saying. But it was too late. Nothing I could say now would convince him that I didn’t need him as my guide and savior. I could already see his shadow lurking around the perimeter of my consciousness.

 I wandered around the shopping mall for a while, and made my first purchase in months – a hot cup of coffee. I walked around with it held up to my face, sniffing. For a brief moment I was convinced that life was worthwhile if one could only manage to fully enjoy its small pleasures. But in the following moments, as I inhaled the steam from my coffee, it started to seem to me that people were looking at me funny. I stopped and looked myself over. Though it was spring, and quite warm out, I was wearing my winter coat and boots – just as I was the night of the accident, as if the world had stopped. I put a hand up to my hair, which was dirty and tangled. I hadn’t showered in a while. I hadn’t been out amongst people, and had forgotten about some of our most basic social principles. I was suddenly embarrassed, and turned around for home.

I made my way slowly down the sidewalk, dragging my left leg. Groups of shoppers saw me and shuffled to the side to clear a path. Often they stopped their conversations and stared. At one point a smartly-dressed young businessman passed by and dropped a handful of coins into my coffee cup. The coffee splashed against his hand and there was an awkward moment when we both came to a realization: I realized that he believed me to be a homeless panhandler, and he realized that I wasn’t a homeless person panning for change. We stared at each other with terror, like two people who had just witnessed a crime. I’m so sorry, he said. I’m so, so sorry. He started fumbling in his pocket and I stood, stunned, unable to speak. I actually started crying, my shoulders shaking. In slow motion, it seemed, the man pulled a bill from his pocket and thrust it toward me. Please, he said, motioning toward my hands, which were clenched around the coffee cup. Please get yourself another coffee.

That’s when I lost it. Get away from me! I screamed. I don’t need it! I don’t need your filthy money! I don’t need it! He scurried off, and a mad laughter took over. I laughed and laughed, my head thrown back, my shoulders shaking. And I realized finally how these things happened, how one thing led to another, and another, and another, how a person could lose so much, could drift so far, could sink so deep. I realized I had finally solved the puzzle, completed my research on madness. I finally had an answer to my question.

ACT V: Summary & Analysis

This act completes the narrator’s disastrous arc, plunging her into the same depravity and madness she has always romanticized in her studies. However, the romance is gone, and our narrator is made to face the cold, hard reality of suffering. Good riddance!

ACT V: Questions for Discussion

1. It is interesting to note here that our story is labeled a comedy in five acts. Since comedies traditionally end with a marriage, how might we interpret this ending? Is there a marriage, of sorts, between the narrator and someone? Do you think the narrator will reunite with The Marxist? Or is the marriage perhaps between the narrator and something else – perhaps some concept? On the subject of comedy, do you find any of this funny?

2. Why does Lydia see her troubles as being connected to the prowling murderer? Does this make any sense, or is it simply an egomaniacal delusion? What did you think of the bear suit? Did it trivialize the murderer and the murders, or did it provide just the right amount of bizarre verisimilitude to bring Rodney Jones to life?

3. Do you regret the time you spent reading this narrative? Do you think literature is worthwhile, or is it – as Lydia comes to believe – a romantic delusion? Does it help us to understand other people, in a way that helps us in our real lives, or is it simply fantasy, a meaningless distraction? Do you know any writers? Do you think they are noble, or unstable? Do you think they will end up on the streets? If you saw a writer on the street, would you reach out to her? Would you give her a dollar? If you did, do you think she would take it?

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Christie Hodgen is the author of the novels Elegies for the Brokenhearted (W.W. Norton, 2010), Hello, I Must Be Going (W.W. Norton, 2007), and the short story collection A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Her short stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, and American Short Fiction.