Louise had had herself a very long week. It was the week before her life would begin to dig its way sunward, the week she would begin to see a brand new kind of therapist for a whole new kind of therapy. But she didn’t yet know this, couldn’t possibly fathom it, actually; so, her mood was rather tense and her body followed suit.

Monday had woken her up in the middle of the night with such muscle spasms she feared she would incite her husband to call 911 on the spot. Poor Nick, she had thought, even as her habitual premature reaction was sending recognizable hatred and resentment through her nervous system. The way that he cared, she found it impossible to receive. She despised being seen in her pain, and despised even moreso watching another person try to suck some of it from her, as if they could possibly make it better that way. No, it cannot be sucked: then you simply have two people in pain instead of one. She knew that Nick didn’t have the proper support structures in place to make a transaction like that the least bit intelligent, helpful, or sustainable. It’s the sort of thing Shamans in the Amazon could do, she thought, but that man speaks only English, and Business English at that. How in the world does he think he can carry this for me? What conceit. What total ratshit. And, that night in bed trying to subdue her spasms with silent anger, she had met the guilt of this tortured chamber of Doom and Repression exactly the moment she was hit with a fresh bout of unbelievable pain, and she staggered into the bathroom to throw up.

Tuesday had not gone well at all. After spending the pre-dawn in tepid, salty bathwater, she had worked up a sense of self to match, which she felt did her no good in the go-get-‘em world of real estate. Louise’s coworkers seemed to be having a particularly successful time going and getting ‘em, which only made her feel more like the faded photograph of a grandmother’s scowl. She closed her office door, trying hard to stay busy and keep still by organizing her computer files. By early afternoon, the pain meds had again worn off and someone had come to knock on her door. She felt like hiding under the desk.

“WHAT.” She was surprised at the crack of her own whip. Pain cranks up the volume on everything.

A timid head poked in. It was Stephani, the youngest partner in the business. A real nice lady. A fucking go-getter. She probably had good news.

“I have some good news, Louise,” she apologized gently. “We’ve closed the deal on the 10^th Street Market. Big bunch of going-green opportunists looking to put in some pricey organic shops and a wellness center, maybe even give Whole Foods a run for its money.”

“Oh,” sighed Louise, having held her breath without realizing it. “That’s good, Steph. Good job.”

Although it wasn’t a great stream of accolades, it also wasn’t a coffee mug in the face. Stephani closed the door with the look of a whiskey-n-coke: one part pissy and blue, having been let down by the one she loved, one part relieved and sweet, having come out on top anyway.

Wednesday wasn’t much different for Louise: lotta hiding, fair deal of organizing, bit of weary participation in office communications. Thursday, however, brought with it the particularly paralyzing sting that comes with too many days spent in uncontrollable, sporadic, unpredictable waves of numbness and pain. She had snapped off the heads of four people before her first cup of coffee. By lunchtime she had made several reckless deals, five of which were total longshots, two of which were joylessly finalized as she pulled long red strands of hair from her head. Louise, who had always been a rather handsome woman, was looking like a wax statue of her future undead self and acting about the same. From where she stood, the old neurotic habit of pulling hair had many benefits to offer: one, she got direct, physical evidence of being alive while she spoke on the phone with people who had no idea what was truly going on in her living body; two, she had a source of pain of which she was in control; and three, she watched herself declare, strand by strand, that her beauty was less important to her than the unquestionable reality of her pain. After knocking one of the long shots into an unexpectedly feasible range, she had a hairball the size of a newborn kitten next to her computer. By the time she closed on the second seemingly-impossible deal, the kitten had grown up into a toy poodle.

By afternoon coffee break [1], Louise was surrounded by a roomful of people who both thoroughly hated and ambitiously admired her. This must be what it’s like to be president of the United States, she thought, as a tiny intervenous gunman went on a killing spree along her sciatic nerve. The hairs that grew back where she had plucked them were gonna be white as the swan in her condo’s fake pond.

“Louise!!” shouted a gleefully uncorked Amy as she toasted her adversarial ally. “You won’t have to work for at least the next month!”

Ha ha ha, haha, ha. That’s right, Amy, it’s best when Louise doesn’t come in.

“Louise. Oh my goodness. Just when you think someone’s gone off the deep end, they show you what they’re made of.”

Nice backhand. Little did Bruce know. She was made of the deep end.

“I know. Really, Louise, it’s like you’re Mozart or something.”

Comment critique, uncut: Angela had seen Amadeus once, so in this regard she felt confident alluding to him as a tortured artist. She had not seen Frida or Basquiat, both of which would have worked in context, both of whose main characters were artists with whose work she was equally unfamiliar. The “or something” clause was thrown in because Angela didn’t seem to think that closing on two major real estate transactions in one morning while battling a particularly disruptive gang of MS symptoms was necessarily of equal value to the symphonies she had never personally taken the time to hear in their entirety. [2]

“Louise. What on earth have you been doing in that office—we thought you were playing online poker or writing your memoir. And all this time, you’ve been actually working. Way to show us up. Bravo!”

Bow-tie wearing Ben had gone for the razor-sharp compliment, as was his style. But it was the last straw in a game of short straws.

“SHUT UP,” shouted Louise. “All of you. Fucking wretched pretentious passive aggression fiends! Constipated competition hacks! I don’t have time for this bloodbath. Get back to work, and please, for the love of god, leave me the fuck alone!”

But they all kept schmoozing there just the same, completely unphased. Continuing their spiked praise and poison punch. Louise white-knuckled her coffee mug, realizing with a sickening flush of stomach acid, I must not have said it out loud. Shit.

“Louise!” “Louise.” “Oh, Louise!” continued on for another ten minutes, until she was finally able to zombie-walk back into her office, where she sat and ate pudding. The cold, soft sweetness was the only thing she could think of that would not offend her in that moment. She ate a four-pack of individual snack-sized lunch-box filler before she felt calm enough to cry.

Friday morning, after her husband left for work, she called herself in sick. Despite the disgusting response (“Oh honey, you deserve it!”) and the inner voice shouting defeat (You’re proving them right, you’re proving them right!), she felt like it was the only thing worth doing. She lay comatose on the couch all morning, until her wounded pride out-throbbed her nerve endings. At noon, she gathered the last of her sanity and rode the metro to a coffee shop across town where no one would know her nor expect her to smile. Then she ordered the most expensive drink on the menu just so she could taste it.

Plopping down in a giant leather armchair, Louise set about organizing her mind files. Getting it together. Being useful. She was ten minutes into the process before registering she was working pro-bono, doing for free the same shit she did at work, keeping busy and staying still. It stank of futility.

She sighed, sank back, and took a moment to look around. Dim lights cast their fake-fire glow across the faces of important business meetings, studious kids, and hand-holding lovers alike; the coffee shop is to gentrified art districts what the disco-lit karaoke bar was to the 80’s or the generic “bar & grill” is to the suburbs. People huddled together over unspoken underlying agreements, increasing their sense of self and generally trying to keep dry in the storm of cultural warfare.

One thing, and one thing only in this dreary commercial break, caught Louise’s attention.

Across the posh squat table sat a long-limbed olive-skinned beauty with mahogany eyes directed so far out the window it seemed that the time of the air around her was at least one hundred years ahead. Or behind. Something like a lush forest dripped imperceptibly in her atmosphere, almost visible the moment before blinking. Or after. Her breathing was noticeably deep and still, if she were covered in birds, snakes, a jungle cat or two. Perfectly, unshakably calm. Louise double-blinked to be sure: yes, there was indeed an actual bee buzzing back and forth on the woman’s orange pen, which itself buzzed in harmonious syncopation, back and forth on the thick pages of a hardcover book. She occasionally pressed her eyes and blood-red lips together into the closed focus of sensory deprivation, only to come open again more breathtaking, more ferociously alive with color and silent song.

Louise watched her for a gracefully long moment, mouth open like a child. Then, shaking it off, bringing her coffee mug sheepishly to her waiting lips, she glanced down into the liquid black pearl, hoping to see a reflection of some aspect of the beauty she saw in the other. Quite on the contrary, what she saw was a pair of tired eyes folded deeply into wary layered sockets of chronic fatigue. She put the mug down. When her vision adjusted from the shadow shapes of the black mirror, it flickered swiftly to register the pair of lit brown fire agates blazing back at her. Looking far too directly at Louise, the woman blinked the slow shine of a lighthouse weathering a storm, then, in no hurry, let her mouth bear the shelter of a small smile.

Delirious enough with her Circus of Fucking Exhuastion [3] work week, and mesmerized enough to have been caught completely in the headlights, Louise actually heard herself ask in the voice of a starry child, “Are you an angel?”

“No,” said the smile of Vanni Rigamonte. “I’m a therapist.”

**

1. …which is a funny, old-fashioned tradition in a place that breathes & pisses coffee all day long.
2. It’s important to be accurate.
3. CFE: Certified Fraud Examiner.

Louise wandered through the falling leaves, lost in thought. Though she was hardly speaking with her feet these days, they crunched along dutifully as she leaned heavily into the elbow crooks of her crutches. About half a block earlier on her trek, she’d been passed by a spandex-wearing couple pushing along a double stroller at the speed of light. She hadn’t even been able to catch a glimpse of the two newborns swaddled against the October chill; she imagined them to be cute as little ducklings, all snuggled together for warmth. Nauseating. Watching the bright blue and black shimmering parental forms bouncing their go-getter rhythm into the distance, Louise’s mind spilled over with the shiny images of her own first days as a new mother, the same pictures she always pulled up when the thought struck her heart. Little red snuggly. Blue bonnet. Pinched-up face and squirmy hands. Eyes that never saw their sister’s.

A tiny yapping dog scurried through the path of her left crutch, causing her to start, almost taking her balance. The owner followed immediately [1] .

“OH! Oh my god. I’m so sorry! Chippy, NO! Please, are you okay? Oh my god, I’m so sorry. No, Chippy! NO. Bad girl. NO!  God. Chippy!”

Watching the terrier’s little panting smileyface flinch ever-so-slightly every time its companion shouted “No!”, Louise wondered if the discipline was always like this or if it was merely for her benefit that the woman was flooring the pedal in her Alpha seat. Ole Chip clearly had no idea what she was being reprimanded for, aside from her owner’s embarrassment. In that case, Louise would have preferred the two of them cruise right on by in the pretentious Alpha Romeo of their human-canine bromance. People were always blaring their discomfort around Louise, on loudspeaker, as if she were new to this, as if she had a perpetual bone to pick with the more able-bodied population. It was obnoxious. Chippy is a yippy and undisciplined little chancre, yes. Nothing about this is improved by you falling all over yourself proving that your heart goes out to me. Just get a damn leash.

Louise noted the available reaction just in time to override. Not my monkeys. Instead she just blinked a polite, shruggy grin, “Not to worry. No harm done. You have a good walk, now.” [2]

The woman was still Oh-ing her God and attempting to brush all the chalk dust off of her clean morning slate by yelling at the tiny dog as they speed-walked. All the way down the block. Until they turned out of earshot, after which point Louise could be sure she could hear the high-pitched coos of “Come on, girl! Chippy, baaaby!” wafting through the cool autumn air. Wherever they were going, there were sure to be face-swap selfies. Adorable.

Where was she going, again? It always took Louise a moment to regain her balance after letting someone else’s disability-guilt ruffle her few last feathers. The truth was, it wasn’t a new phenomenon. She’d wrestled the symptom-tentacled dodgy beast of MS for over 6 years now, and the most annoying side-effect was the way other people acted around her. It’s very simple, she thought. It’s like if you had a headache, and when you tell your friend about it, instead of being quiet or offering you an aspirin, they furrow their brow and get in your face about how bad THEY feel about YOUR headache. Shut up. You are now the source of my headache.

Like anything, there were times when it felt better and times when it felt worse. There were pains that obliterated the sensation of everything else in the world, days she locked her door and let her husband sleep in the recliner all night. Then there were stretches of time in which the disease seemed, to observers, nowhere on the radar, times she executed her duties with a merciless efficiency that left coworkers and clients marvelling at their own disabilities. Recently, however, the latter extreme had begun calling in sick and showing up late for its shifts. Always, always, Louise had a sense of some watchful squadron inside waiting for the other shoe to drop. And, no matter how competant she felt when she came home from work, the creases layered over her husband’s eyelids were enough to bring that shoe right back into her vision field.

These days, the folks at Domestica Colombia Realty were becoming as jumpy and watchful as her inner vigilantes. Louise could be seen smoothly closing on five houses in an hour surely as she could be counted on to snap the heads off three associates and an intern in the very same hour. Just last week, following a day of stellar track-star success hurdling over a problem neighborhood’s epic challenges of landlord properties versus single-family homes [3], duly winning that race in flying colors with crowds cheering and medals dispensed, Louise came into the office over an hour late with a whole thermos full of coffee she was ready to throw in the face of the first whimperer to come her way. Within ten minutes, she got her chance, as an intern from Georgetown scuttled up to her door with an armload of copies he’d made upside-down which, he thought, “could be saved if there was some way to cut and paste individually into the folders, if you could just let me see the other files, if you don’t mind, if you’re not too busy… or… maybe… um…”

As these words quaked out of his voice box, she looked at him like a velociraptor might look at a chicken [4]. Having unscrewed the lid to her thermos, she made her way around the desk, and, wearing a steel-faced sheath around the live blade of her nerves, she slowly walked over, and, locking her grey-blue eyes on those of the young lad, she dumped the steaming liquid over the offending papers as generously as one offers gravy to a cut of Thanksgiving turkey. The boy screamed and dropped the papers on the spot, running to the bathroom for the shaky cry and costume change that would precede his resignation. Meanwhile, Louise summoned Housekeeping to get this mess the fuck off of her floor, and then requested someone please, for the love of mercy, hold her goddam calls for the rest of the day.

After twenty years as a notorious magician in the real estate, she was at times much more dismayed by the change in her work status than she was in her deteriorating physical health. What was the use of a pain-free existence if she would have nothing to show for it?

“On your left,” came a chipper voice from behind, and once again the spandex-clad parents came whizzing by with their Featherlite baby portable. Great. She was getting lapped on a track she didn’t even know she was circling. But the whizz brought her blinking back to the present. And the totally un-pitying nature of their communication helped to shake her thoughts out of the internal detour, placing her firmly back into the reverie of her long-lost motherhood. Same detour, maybe, one layer away. Inception. [5]

This was before the diagnosis, even before realty. This was from that other life she’d lived.

The boy had come first. This was part of the unbearable sadness: birthing the living twin first, knowing what was bound to come next, driven mad beyond cognition and recognition as the labor pains split her passageway wide open to make way for life and death. Life had chosen to come first, already wailing with loss: loss of the warm cocoon that had offered the only shared incarnation he would ever know with his intimate other, loss of the most precious sense of completeness that our mortal forms are given, that meditative space when nothing needs to happen and everything is free and the self does not know separation in any way.

She heard the cries long before she saw his little squished face and shock of blood-red hair, and they tore the sound out of her heart. She knew this cry well already and cried along with it as she moved into the second stage of her last labor.

Pushing and screaming, sobbing and grunting, she sweated out the tears of her unborn second child for what seemed like an eternity. Everyone knew what was coming, yet in the wake of childbirth, welcoming the miracle of life into its first sensations of new consciousness, there was this wretched air of doomed hope in the room. Bloody dynamite. There was an illogical buzz around everyone’s smiles, having seen the first twin come out just peachy, all covered with the color of life and screaming a tone to match. They all wanted everything to be okay. Even her husband, the senseless bastard.

The only one who was really there with her was the midwife. She was the only one really mourning, from the moment Louise had arrived in the maternity ward all the way through to the silent finality of the dead twin’s crowning head. She had seen plenty of births and plenty of deaths to match. She had held Louise’s hand and nodded slowly into her eyes when it seemed like there was no use to continue, when it seemed like continuing would be worse than giving up entirely, when it seemed like delivering the baby its true death would be a far worse crime than dying around it, a far worse crime than killing oneself in the fantasy that there was no death as long as the fetus remained inside the space where it had once known life, a far worse crime than cutting oneself from the consciousness of its existence. Even then, with the midwife holding her hand, Louise was willing to let it come to that. Willing to keep her own life umbilically fastened to that of the Other Twin; so long as she had succeeded in giving the brother his runaway freedom, she had license to choose to forever abandon him along with her own mortal memorystation and meaningmaker. She could drift into the solace of nothingness as the tomb of that lost sister.

But the brother! Oh the brother, oh! those twenty first minutes of his life when Louise was hard at work completing the death of his sister, oh! how it would continue to ache separately in their hearts years and years and years after the cords were cut.

The face of her stillborn daughter Louise would always recall, even as the memories of the rest of that evening crumbled into sand around her. The room had gone completely still the moment the beautiful tiny face had appeared. Purple and perfect and soft and quiet, eyes closed in permanent reverie, arms curled and criss-crossed like Ophelia drifting out to sea. She was lovely, and the breath that she never exchanged with the world swept through the delivery room in the most reverent gasp those walls had yet held.

There landed a hush stark enough to fell a forestfull of trees. Nothing moved in the wake.

And then, with the rude immediacy of insurance benefits, movement resumed. They took her away. The boy was brought over. Things happened in bricks. The husband sat down. She tried to call out. The midwife was back. Her daughter was gone. The people were talking. The baby was crying. Her arms didn’t work. They asked her some questions. The husband said “Oh, honey.” Her voice didn’t work. The nurses were blustered. Machines kept on beeping. And she finally groaned out, “Get him OFF OF ME! Let me go! Give her back.” In a flyswarm of fever, she flung the baby boy at her husband and swung her legs off the hospital bed before anyone could spring into action. Bleeding like a horror film, she stood up, took two steps, and collapsed unconscious on the floor.

What a commotion that must have caused. Presently, the nervous system swarmed to subdue the tragic memory. A hot flash swirled over her tired, slow, leaf-crunching embodied memorial. Even now, years into carrying the hole, Louise still imagined herself lying there in the bloody pile with a final smirk of justice on her face. None of them could ever know the pain of what she had endured, and none of them, save for that midwife, made any attempt to even witness it. But then there she was, spiking up the emergency punch for the melodrama of the medical field. This is what they need, huh? My birthing a dead body wasn’t enough for them, huh? Well, looky here. I’m dying on the floor. Gonna be a bitch to clean up.

-**

1. Though not under the crutch.
2. Not today, Chancre!
3. Let’s be more rigorous with language, when available: “problem” in this context means “poor” and “neighborhood” refers to “place that has been encroached upon by what’s called ‘business’ & ‘development’ by those colonized to see it that way, until said place is condensed to the size of a rentable dog kennel meant to host several families and a few actual dogs.”
4. Like a great-great-great-great-great-greatˣ grandkid who just broke a family heirloom?
5. There’s the drop.