All's Well(4)

“Is it your hip?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Oh. I thought it was your back?” Fauve ventures. She is invisible to my eye, but I can feel her hovering in the doorway, the chimes and feathers of her. Clutching that silvery-blue notebook in which I imagine she records all my inconsistencies, my transgressions, with an ornamental pen that dangles from her pendant-choked neck. All false concern that is also taking literal note in shimmering ink. Sharing her findings with Grace.

She told me it was her back.

She told me it was her hip.

“It is,” I tell them. “It’s both.”

Silence.

“I’ll be right down, all right?” I say.

“Do you need help up?” Grace asks.

It’s like she doesn’t even ask for help.

It’s like she’s always asking for help.

Well, nothing helps Miranda.

“No. Thank you though.”

“Well,” Grace says, mashing her cigarette into my teacup, “I better get down there.”

Fauve says nothing about Grace’s cigarette. If she just found me in here smoking, as she often does, she’d cough and cough. Wave her hand violently in the air as though attempting to swat at a swarm of flies. Scribble scribble in her notebook. But Fauve just smiles at Grace through the smoke.

“I’ll go with you,” Fauve offers. “I have to photocopy something.”

“Great.”

What sort of a name is Fauve, anyway? I once asked Grace at a bar after rehearsal. Sounds like an alias to me. Grace looked at my nearly empty wineglass and said nothing.

They leave together. Hand in hand, I imagine. Surely Grace’s ancestors would have burned Fauve’s ancestors at the stake, wouldn’t they? Pale women who cast wispy shadows. All feathered hair and cryptic smiles. Reeking of duplicity and mugwort. How Fauve and Grace became friends is a true mystery to me. Not a mystery exactly, I know when it happened. It happened, I suspect, after my falling-out with Grace. Fauve insinuated herself then, of course she did. Stepped right in on her soundless sandals.

I am so glad when their footsteps fade away. The fires within actually quiet a little. The fat man might abandon his post to make tea.

I get up, and for a moment I fill with hideous hope. But no. The entire left side of my body is still ablaze. The right side is in painful spasm. All the muscles in my right leg still concrete. The fists in my back have multiplied. The fist behind my knee is so tight that I can’t straighten my leg at all, can only limp. My foot is still being crushed by an invisible weight. I think of telling Mark this at our next session. But would he believe me through the wall of his certitude?

Our ultimate goal, Mark will say during a session, often while stabbing needles into my lower back and thigh, is centralization. To move the awareness (he means my pain) from the distal places (he means my leg) and return it to its original source (he means my back).

The distal places, I murmur. Sounds poetic.

Mark appears confused by this word, poetic.

You could think of it like that, I guess. He shrugs but looks suspicious. As though this way of thinking is part of my problem.

From the bottle marked Take one as needed for pain, I take two. From the bottle marked Take one as needed for muscle stiffness, I take three. I look down into the dusty bowels of the plastic orange pill jar, and I briefly consider taking all of them. Throwing the window back open. Falling to the floor. Lying there and letting the snow fall and fall on my face. Pressing my hand to my chest until the pounding of my heart slows and then stops. Joe, the custodian, possibly finding me in the morning. I’ll be beautifully blue. He will grieve. Will he grieve? I picture him weeping into his broomstick. Didn’t a fairy-tale heroine die this way?

I take a well-squeezed tube of gel that contains some dubious mountain herb that one of the polo-shirted, one of the lab-coated, one of the blue-scrubbed, said I might try, that is useless. You could try it, they all say with a shrug and a Cheshire cat grin. I rub it all over my back and thigh and I tell myself it does something. I can feel it doing something. Can’t I?

Yes.

Surely it’s doing something.





CHAPTER 2


WHEN I GET to the theater, they’re already sitting on the stage as they were in my daymare. Legs swinging over the edge. Faces shining but unreadable. Mutinous? Maybe. Hard to tell. Still, they’re here. They each appear to be holding a copy of All’s Well (my director’s cut)—that’s something. They haven’t torched them in a communal burning. Yet. That’s something too. Third rehearsal. They have already formed vague alliances in accordance with the social hierarchy and are sitting in their respective clumps. Not smiling. Not frowning. Waiting. Just staring with their young eyes that think they see. Briana sits in the center, my soulless leading actress, my Helen, who doesn’t deserve at all to play Helen. Beside her is Trevor, her boyfriend, who is playing Bertram. And of course there’s Ellie in the corner. My gray-fleshed, gray-eyed favorite. My dark mouse of a soul. Last year she played the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. This year, she plays the ailing King, though she would be the perfect Helen. The rest of the students to me are a sea, a dull and untalented sea, and have been cast accordingly. They stare at me, their glazed eyes registering my decrepitude, their open mouths yawning in my face.

My leg stiffens. I smile. “Hello, all,” I say.