Lithium for Medea

6

The operation took seven hours. The doctor, paunchy and optimistic, smiled at us at noon. He looked like a man on his way to a tennis court. When he pushed through the operating room doors at seven P.M. there was sweat on his forehead. His hands were shaking.

Francine and I had waited together. We sat at a Formica table in the hospital cafeteria while surgeons in green smocks munched between cuttings. Delicate Filipino nurses scraped by softly in their special padded shoes. The light was very white.

“I can’t bear this,” Francine kept saying, over and over. She was slumped in her chair, her elbows pressing hard against the hard Formica tabletop.

My mind wasn’t working. My mind had shut down. I had gone on vacation and left my shell behind, some hollow facsimile that slowly, dully kept dragging along.

Francine suddenly stiffened. She looked like someone who has just realized that what she is smelling is smoke. Her eyes went wide.

“He’s hemorrhaging,” she screamed. “His heart’s stopped!” Francine leaped up. She rushed into the corridor.

Everything was moving too fast. The room seemed composed of separate pieces, like a shattered mural. I picked up my mother’s coat and pocketbook. I ran into the corridor. I was riding on a train at night, hurtling past cities, harbors, junkyard, graveyards. Buildings and bridges snaked and danced in the center of the train window. The landscape was smeared, a smoky magnetic ruin, part hallucination and mirage. Nothing was certain.

I found Francine in the doctors’ lounge. “This is fascinating,” she was saying. She glanced at me and smiled. “Dr. Harris plays chess, too.” She indicated the dark-haired man on her left. He seemed to nod encouragement.

I walked out of the room, still holding her coat and pocketbook. I sat down on a curb in the hospital parking lot. A phrase began repeating itself in my head.

Fear is merely a condition of the mind, a condition of the mind. Isn’t it? Fear is merely a condition of the mind, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

And the mind? The mind is a warm black pit. The mind is a kind of web, a nest where things hatch, things breed and grow, flutter, float and stab out with sharp impossible wings.

In the beginning, Gerald believed the mind could be described by the neurological model. I thought he was wrong, anchoring himself to an abstraction in flux. Every year the blackboard was erased clean and a new foundation laid. They called it the obsolescence of knowledge. They called it breakthroughs and progress. They had an almost infinite number of labels and designations for their system, their process, all subject to revision and annihilation on a yearly basis. Why bother learning them at all?

Gerald thought it was a matter of mapping synapses. He thought it had something to do with placing pleasure electrodes in cat brains and shoving lights at glistening dazed worms. In his scheme of things, rats and mice running starved and terrified through mazes heralded a new era.

I knew the mind was soft and filled with waves like the ocean, dark at night, ebbing and flowing. The mind was connected to the moon, to currents and tides. It had nothing to do with the hard evidence.

“You’re too whimsical,” Gerald would say.

Were we arguing the nature of the mind? One point of view led to a commitment to technology. One side led to elitism and ultimately, unavoidably, fascism. One side denied, as true science mustn’t, the evidence of alternative modes, the collective unconsciousness, the intangibles. It was a complicated argument with branching and forking side paths erupting everywhere. The whole world was like that then. Gerald was studying psychology in Berkeley. It was 1968.

Gerald’s face was square, even and pale. It was the legacy left to him by generations of struggling shopkeepers and tavern owners, squinting over pennies by candlelight and voting without fail or principle for prosperity.

I would watch him walk toward me, up the steep path near my father’s balding backyard ivy, and think, but he isn’t yellow enough! Surely the one who will come to love me must be distinguished in some way. If it is to be this paleness, then let it be white, white as the side of a star, white as a sea-spit shell lying in sand, white belly up to a full white moon.

There was an unformed quality about Gerald. Later I would think he looked as if he had been created by a manufacturer of android astronauts. Not that Gerald looked like an astronaut. Rather, he was a reflection of that type. He was the stuff toy models were made from. He was like the perfectly detailed and non-functioning gadgetry attached to plastic ship decks, the miniature machine guns on glued-together airplanes. It looked fine but nothing worked, nothing.

Los Angeles spread out in all directions, a wound in soft flesh, impossible to contain. My world was bounded by the ocean, the slow arc of Santa Monica Bay gray and dying behind the breakwater. To the north, flat dull hills arched like clubs. Somewhere the desert sat, hot and blank into Nevada.

What did I expect to emerge from the smog, the greasy numb boulevards? Gerald was a pale stain, August blond and blank as the sunbaked streets, a man like the anemic palm fronds and listless spokes of drained yellow day lilies.

I married him in Las Vegas, two days after we shared a mescaline picnic in a Colorado blizzard. We climbed partway up a hill blanketed by new soft snow before the drug overwhelmed us and we collapsed laughing on the cold white ground. Snow fell like arrows shooting down, like meteors, gorged flowers, mandalas with mirrory eyes. Our laughter shook the stiff mountainside. Our footprints were like craters in the snow.

“I want to marry him,” I had told my father.

My father was watering his peach tree in the backyard. He was smoking a cigar and evaluating something in the pastel distance. In the dusk the houses were simply pinkish and yellowish boxes. The strips of yard between them were pale green ribbons. And the pink-tinged dusk was draining, sickening. The whole world looked like papier-mâché stage sets, artificial, lifeless and absurd.

“He’s a jerk,” my father said. He gave the hose a yank and wrapped it around the trunk of the apricot tree. “O.K.,” he amended when I began crying, crying. I was always crying then. “He’s a nice guy. But he’s not for you. He’s got no balls. He’s a shy retiring professor type. He doesn’t know shit about sports.”

“Sports? Is that a criterion?” I screamed into the pastel patch of backyard surrounded by a twenty-foot-high bamboo fence, a yellowish wall in which stalks of banana and rubber plants and wild black grapes were imprisoned. And it was always pinkish, always summerish, and nothing seemed to change, nothing.

My father pulled the hose to the back of the yard. He sent a stream of water across the strawlike stalks that would open into bird-of-paradise, that stiff orange and purple flawed flower in the shape of a bird. And paradise was mindless and hard.

“You’d be surprised,” my father said. “You think it’s nothing?” He looked somewhere into the pinkish layer of night air above the tops of the pale yellow houses on the other side of the street. Houses on their own small mounds of green hill on a street where the neighbors never spoke to us and said our shouting made the dogs bark and twice they called police. And my mother and father were shouting at each other, were throwing glass ashtrays through the glass windowpanes, were packing suitcases at midnight, were fighting on the curb below the house in the soft white arc of a streetlamp and I was getting tired of it, tired of it.

“Sports is a clue, an indication. Take my word. You think I can’t spot a stiff?” my father said.

But I hadn’t taken my father’s word. What were his reference points? New York City pool halls and horse rooms? The route of race tracks between Saratoga and Hialeah? The year he spent playing triple A ball for the Yankee farm club before his knees went bad? His manhood of trains and bookies and hotels, football and basketball games, boxing matches? What did that have to do with the issues?

Lyndon Baines Johnson came to Los Angeles. I went with Gerald to demonstrate against the war. LBJ was staying in Century City, a five-minute drive from the place where my father stood with his hose, inspecting his new crop of avocados.

I had witnessed a policeman beating a woman with a stick. She was trying to keep up with the flow of demonstrators circling the Century Plaza Hotel. She had a child with her. The little boy kept trying to jerk out of her grip. She was falling behind the others. The police were waiting. I watched them club her.

“The cops are beating up people,” I told my father. He was watering his balding ivy. He was watering the bougainvillaea that snaked and danced purple across the roof of the built-in brick barbecue.

“We saw a policeman club a woman,” Gerald said.

“Hippies?” My father wasn’t looking at Gerald. He was dragging his hose toward the lemon tree. “They deserve it.”

“Not just hippies,” I shouted. And why should they be beaten, for that matter? “Ordinary people. Housewives with children. There was blood.”

“You exaggerate,” my father said. He was filling a rounded wicker basket with peaches. “Besides, the cops are all lowlifes, morons and sadists. Who else would be a cop?”

I watched my father wind up the hose into a neat green coil. I looked at Gerald. Gerald looked at me. We married four months later.

Suddenly we were living in Berkeley. And all at once, Gerald was a college boy with a desk and a Tensor lamp, yelling, “Quiet. Turn off that music. I’m thinking.”

He began with physics, but it was wrong. Physics disappointed him. Physics did not make him feel complete. There were gaps big and wide as the black holes of space. There were limits strung everywhere like rows of barbwire.

Gerald decided to study mathematics and lost his scholarship. That’s when I left school and went to work at Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant. That’s where the pasta sat in big black pots steaming and it was always hot, always dark, the secret tunnel down into the oily black center of hell.

Mathematics was closer, but still, Gerald sensed something missing. He conferred with more professors. A job was found for him in something called mathematical psychology. He was, after all, brilliant. He was on the ninety-ninth percentile in everything. Gerald dragged himself to his Monday, Wednesday and Friday teaching assignment as if he were living in a seething, form-fitting nightmare. He forbade me to come.

Once I went secretly. It was a small dark room in the basement of the Life Sciences building. The room was a permanent, windowless gray. Gerald was not wearing his glasses. I doubted that he could see me, hunched in shadows along the back wall of the room, squatting down, knees on the cold gray floor. Gerald was smearing chalk on the blackboard. It made a chilling sound like a rake scratching pavement. Gerald’s mouth seemed oddly hard, as if the words he uttered were actually choking him and tearing his lips. They seemed to bubble from his lips and hang in the air all around him like gray stones. When they fell to the floor, there was a dull gray thud. I never mentioned this to him.

Gerald was settling into his thick silence. He stayed up late every night. He seemed disoriented in the morning, like a traveler, clothes crumpled, sickened by some subliminal, interminable motion.

Psychology was the answer, he assured me. I nodded my head. Gerald was talking about the human mind, where all the possibilities were stored. When Gerald talked about the mind and the possibilities, my head filled with an image of long empty gray corridors lined with identical gray metal doors. The doors were locked.

Gerald began with physiological psychology. He reread his chemistry books and talked about blood groups, electrical charges and mapping the brain. He made it sound like an expedition into unknown territories. I thought of birds with emerald and purple plumes half hidden by jade green leaves.

Then the limiting factor appeared. Gerald decided that the system was rigged in favor of the experimentalists. He no longer believed rats were going to lead the way.

“Don’t you see? The cosmos is infinite. It’s man that’s limited.”

“Of course,” I immediately agreed. I felt as if I were taking a holy communion. Gerald hadn’t spoken to me for weeks.

The experimentalists were added to our list of enemies. Gerald was developing a social conscience. It was unavoidable. There were terrible events and forces all around us: the government, the war machine, the military-industrial complex, the Dow Chemical Company, the Pentagon, Nixon, the racist police, the FDA, the undeclared war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, fragmentation bombs, napalm, the systematic annihilation of civilians, the rotting of stockpiled wheat while millions starved, the emerging American welfare caste system, the middle-class biases of IQ tests, the pollution of rivers and seas, strip mining, the destruction of bay seals and dolphins, the imminent extinction of most mammalian species, the draft, corruption at all levels of everything, anomie, ghettos, the oppression of women, the denial of civil liberties to just about everyone, the fascist AMA, the persecution of homosexuals, the plight of Indians, the threat of nuclear reactors built on top of earthquake fault lines, carcinogenic dyes and preservatives in virtually all foodstuffs, apartheid, urban decay, Detroit’s planned obsolescence, the gun lobby, the exploited farm workers, Governor Reagan, the National Guard, the regents, the slum landlord we had, and now the experimentalists.

I tried to imagine the experimentalists. I thought they were identical men in identical white jackets. When I walked through the Life Sciences building and waited obediently for Gerald at one door or another, in one corridor or another, like a trained dog not even needing a leash, I watched the whitecoated men pass near me. I imagined their identical cocks severed and placed in bottles of formaldehyde. The identical bottles sat on a neat row in a shelf at the bottom of my mind.

The experimentalists wanted to ring one universal bell and have the whole planet rise up en masse and salivate on cue. In time they would press one single buzzer and the world’s population would march mindlessly out into the fields, harvesting the land past the point of calluses, smiles on their stripped and blank mouths, blood on their fingers.

“Don’t complain to me,” Francine said over the phone. “You want to live that stinking hippie life style, so be it. You want to be a big girl, all married, living in another city, then be a big girl. You don’t know what hardship is, kid.”

I was expected at work in ten minutes. I leaned over the toilet bowl and vomited my dinner.

On the television, Kirk said, “What do you make of it?”

“Most unusual,” Spock answered. “Our data banks show no such culture on Gamma Four.”

“But it’s there, isn’t it?” Kirk sounded as if he was thinking about what he planned to eat for dinner, after the taping.

Gerald was sitting on the couch. Buckminster Fuller’s book was opened on his lap. It was a brown Naugahyde sofa I had bought for six dollars in a thrift shop. I called Gerald to help me. He was outraged. He complained. He had been reading Marcuse. We didn’t need a sofa, anyway. We already had the three oversized pillows I’d insisted on buying. What was wrong with me? Had I no historical perspective at all? Most cultures had existed throughout time without any furniture at all. There were numerous examples of elegant, productive societies with nothing more than straw mats. I was too Western, too hopelessly middle class.

Gerald read Freud. He cut out a picture from a book. The photograph showed five men in stiff black suits staring straight ahead at the camera, unsmiling. They seemed to have a secret sneer on their lips as if they were silently thinking, there, assholes, see how right we were? Gerald tacked the picture to the wall near the brown sofa. I didn’t know who the men were. I waited for Gerald to tell me. He didn’t.

Whenever I remember Berkeley it is, in my mind, always autumn, always punched open, stinging and alive. It is the last apartment Gerald and I lived in, with the small asymmetrical bedroom opening into a dark hallway and the miniature living room with the three oversized pillows I’d insisted on even though we really didn’t need them. Gerald was right. No one came to visit. We had no friends. It would be sunset. Below, the traffic was still and hushed. It might have been the rushing of small animals, gray scurrying rodents, perhaps.

Gerald was memorizing theories of primate social behavior. He talked about langurs, gibbons and howler monkeys. He was struck by the implications of sexual dimorphism and dominance hierarchies in hamadryas baboons. He said he was getting back to the essentials. The pieces were beginning to fit.

Jung appeared in our life. Now Gerald talked about dreams, trances, tarot cards, flying saucers, astrology and visionary states.

“What are you dreaming?” he demanded. He had flicked on the light.

I stared at him, rubbing my eyes, trying to wake up. Gerald and I no longer slept in the same room.

“You’ve got to remember. Tell me,” Gerald screamed.

I couldn’t remember. There was a red cast to everything. Red and black, like a fire at night when the black smoke burns into the black air and night itself smells singed. I clutched the blankets against my chest.

“Don’t pretend,” Gerald said darkly. I had never seen him so angry. “I’m warning you. Blue magic has the greatest spatial complexity. But green magic has the eternal power.”

“Yes.” I tried not to stare at him. “Of course.”

“You’re good, real good,” he said. “You’re not like the others. Sea traps over their holes. Weeds that smell.” He made a kind of sucking sound. “You’re not like the others. You keep yourself covered. Thank you. God will bless you.”

“Of course he’s crazy,” Francine said over the telephone. “I told you that two years ago.”

“I can feel them,” Gerald exclaimed. He stretched his arms wide. He flexed his fingers. “My cells, my cells,” he cried, rapturously.

His cells were ancient, he explained. Within him the first amoeba stirred. A fish struggled to grow lungs. An amphibian was washed upon a primeval shore and squatted in the sun, blinded and gasping for air. The climate changed. Mammals scurried out into a new world. A beast gambled, climbed down from the trees and left the dwindling forests. The beast was neither fast nor well-armed.

It scavenged. It ate what other animals left behind. It was, from the beginning, an unspeakable creature. In time it realized its full potential and became man.

Gerald said he could sense the truth of it in his blood. He, Gerald Campbell, was a microcosm of the entire evolutionary life process on the planet earth.

I never doubted him. I simply never cared. Gerald was the scientist. He wanted me to understand. It was vital for my development as a human being that I become aware of the great events that shaped my destiny.

“You’re not applying yourself,” Gerald told me. He sounded disappointed.

Give him the black holes of space, I would think, slowly pulling on my short black skirt and pinning up my long hair for work, sticking the bobby pins in and jamming them hard against my scalp. Give him quasars and pulsars, African folk tales, the books with diagrams on how to build wigwams and canoes. Anything to keep him talking, anything to feel that we were still connected to some outside reality beyond the three rooms of our apartment. I put on the white cotton blouse of my waitress uniform, the blouse that denied the existence of my breasts. Then I leaned over the toilet bowl and vomited.

We had lived in the apartment two years. Previous tenants had painted the half-sized bathroom an enamel red. I would sit in the small tub after work, water hot, trying to empty my mind of everything while my legs and thighs turned lobster red. Above the tub, the walls felt sticky like blood, like some hidden and unforgivable wound in the building itself.

The bedroom walls had been painted a pale lavender. I slept in that room alone. Gerald slept on a straw mat on the living room floor. I would lie in bed after my bath and watch the car lights on the boulevard below. I would watch the sunset. The sun was a thick ruby. It looked close enough to pluck and swallow. Then one could grow red eels inside. One could fill the bloodstream with red moths trying to push out.

Gerald was talking about the hard evidence. I turned away. Hard evidence had nothing to do with my life. Everything in my life was soft. Gerald was soft, as if his baby fat had returned. He held his blue jeans together with a safety pin, refusing to accept or deny his new white belly. And Gerald was soft, soft in the sharp darkness, the darkness that fell down on me like a huge clawed bird.

Heat clamped a lid over the city. Berkeley was sealed shut, air thick and hopeless. Not even the bay breeze stirred.

Slowly, stretched out on my bed, on the cool sheets, I pinched my nipple. I felt my breasts rise hard and red like the enamel walls. My breasts had stony eyes in the center, eyes straining to see something.

“You want it, don’t you?” Gerald said.

He had appeared in the doorway. From habit, I immediately pulled my legs up and shielded my breasts with my arms. I was never naked in front of Gerald.

“I can tell you want it,” Gerald said.

He sat down on the far edge of the bed. The it, I supposed, was sex. The it was Gerald on top of me, a paler layer of night, doing something to me, pushing some small splinter of night into me and collapsing near my shoulder, asleep. It was becoming difficult to remember exactly what the it was or why it had ever mattered.

“Why don’t you admit it? I know you want it.” Gerald’s voice was hard. He seemed to be talking to a third party.

“Yeah, I want it,” I said. I looked at Gerald. A stiff smile was positioned on his lips.

“If you want it so bad, go pick it up on the streets,” he said.

I stared at him, startled. It sounded like the line from a movie. A nasty line, right before someone gets slapped. I didn’t remember seeing that film with him.

“Go on,” Gerald said from the hallway. “Whore. I’ve seen the devil. Big deal. He opened an import shop on Telegraph Avenue. He’s got a backpack and smokes hash. Go on, whore.”

Then night exploded, a tunnel collapsing in. And I was running into the night barefoot with the car keys.

I had rarely driven the car. Gerald said my manual dexterity and peripheral vision were inadequate. Now I pushed the car into darkness and let the night swallow me. I crossed the bridge into San Francisco feeling heady, letting myself glide down to the coves of flickering light. I parked the car in North Beach and began walking down Broadway.

The streets were crowded with summer night life. I walked quickly, as if I were meeting someone. I walked so fast I did not see the posters of naked women on the walls and doors of burlesque clubs. I felt the jostle of shirt-sleeved men and women, felt the imprint of their arms and legs as they passed. I felt the obsidian I had swallowed. I felt it turn inside, cutting new blood grooves. Something was moving through the empty corridors I imagined myself to be. Something was growing legs and a spine. Something was breathing. Soon it would start kicking down all the fine identical rows of pale gray locked doors.

I went with the first man who asked me. I was asked more than once, but in the beginning I didn’t quite understand, didn’t hear. Now I said yes, said yes before I clearly noted the man’s features. I had walked nearly a block with him before I realized he was a sailor and young, maybe younger than I. He was chewing gum.

“Where’s your place?” He had a Southern accent.

“Place?” I repeated, looking carefully at him for the first time.

“Room? Hotel?” He stared at me.

I was speechless. Perhaps I was not satisfactory. Perhaps he would not want me when he saw me, saw me as Gerald did. Maybe it wasn’t Gerald at all. Maybe I was the source of the terrible lack. It was my failure. I looked down at my legs. They were clearly outlined under the thin cotton skirt. Perhaps even the dark hairs showed, a blacker smudge in the night.

“I’ve got a car,” I suddenly remembered. We were walking slower now, retracing my route, wandering parallel to Broadway, looking for the car.

“I haven’t done it in a car since I left home,” the man said.

I handed him the car keys. I leaned back against the seat, into the seat, and let the city reach out silvery neon spokes at my face.

We were winding down along the bay, down a long cliff. He parked the car on a cement strip above the ocean. I could see the white line of the curling breakers below us.

“You ain’t what I planned on,” the man said.

I had let the skirt bunch up around my knees. My legs looked long and white. I turned my ankle toward the light, slowly.

“I can be what you want,” I said. The words seemed odd to my ears. I had no idea where they came from. I felt my nipples stiffen.

“You ain’t Chinese.” The man laughed. “Come to Frisco, I want a real Chinese whore.” The man looked down at the water. “Or a real secretary. High-heeled shoes and all kinds of leg.”

I flexed my ankle in the darkness. I was disappointing this man, this stranger. I was filled with a sense of failure.

“You shy?”

He was pulling me across the seat toward him. I let myself be pulled. My head rested on his lap. I felt him stir under me. Not certain what to do, I patted him gently, the way one does when reassuring a child.

The man arched himself toward me, toward my mouth. He had unbuttoned himself. He steered his hard cock toward my face. I opened my mouth. I could taste the man as I drove back across the bridge alone, could still feel his thick white fluid filling my tongue and lungs. It was like clams and sawdust, some kind of white glue. I shivered.

Gerald was sitting in his same position at the kitchen table. He was reading Rollo May. He did not look at me.

Heat burned the city. The day felt thick and old even early in the morning. June struggled to become July. Everything seemed out of focus, too liquid and burdensome.

Gerald began playing the guitar. He only played scales. He played the same scales over and over. He had been playing the same scales since May.

Gerald realized that the mind contained a musical component. The parallels between music and mathematics staggered him. Notes and numbers. Harmonies and equations. Language and sound. I had already slept with the bartender at work by then. That had been different. He had an apartment. I had lain in bed with him. He had kissed me. He had not seemed disappointed.

“You hate my guitar, don’t you?” Gerald asked, not looking at me. His fingers kept moving on the strings. His fingers had become calloused, cut with deep black grooves at the tips.

“Don’t you understand?” Gerald was staring at me now. “Pulsars are simply another type of flute. The universe is an orchestra.”

It was late afternoon. Gerald had sat on his straw mat in front of the television since early morning. Now he watched old black-and-white movies, grainy from age, about radiation monsters and magnetic monsters that looked like vacuum cleaners. Giant reptiles stepped over miniature cardboard Londons and Tokyos, breathing fire like mythological dragons. An American town was held in the hypnotic grip of aliens, things hatched from eggs or born from large seed pods.

“It’s a metaphor,” Gerald said. “Science fiction is our modern mythology. It’s industrial man’s creation myth.”

I would lie in the thick heat half listening to the birth and death of monsters in the living room. The voices seemed muted and scratchy, like the poor old grainy prints. Always, in the end, a gleeful but subdued and momentarily humbled population smiled from the ruins of London or Chicago while the monster burned, while the monster was reduced to a big puddle of ash, while the monster was chained or hacked or drowned.

“It’s an allegory about human nature,” Gerald said. “Don’t you understand the importance of this?”

It was Freudian, of course. It was Jungian. It had to do with the musical scales he was playing. It was night. I wasn’t working. I had already slept with the history graduate student who lived in the apartment directly below ours.

Somewhere, Kirk stared into what looked like a small flashlight. “Are they intelligent?” he asked.

Somewhere, Spock stared into what appeared to be a fancy toothbrush. “They do seem to have a highly organized, efficient system of government. They have roads, monuments, scientific institutions, peace, prosperity, compassion, justice.”

“Yes, but are they intelligent?” Kirk asked. “Have they got motels and car washes? Do they have Pepsi and credit ratings?”

“You hate my playing the guitar,” Gerald accused.

He was watching television. Two men with walkie-talkies gestured wildly in the direction of a smoking ruin. Over the top of the rubble an immense humanoid head appeared. The mouth opened and a stream of fire engulfed the men with the walkie-talkies. The ground made a kind of sucking sound.

“You hate it when I have fun,” Gerald said, not looking at me.

I walked over to his straw mat then. Gently, I pried the guitar from his lap. I walked into the hallway and swung the guitar at the doorjamb like a baseball bat. I beat the wood against the wall until the strings popped out and the guitar was simply a collection of wooden splinters.

Gerald began to cry. That’s when I got the knife. I stabbed the brown Naugahyde sofa. Then I tore the white guts from the three oversized pillows Gerald always said we never needed.

“You’re crazy,” Gerald screamed. His pale gray eyes widened.

Suddenly, as if released from a terrible burden, he sprang awake. He was packing. We didn’t have any suitcases. I was lying down in bed again, with the knife on the sheet next to my thigh. Gerald was running through the house, throwing his clothing and books into pillowcases. There were bits of feathers everywhere, on his shirt, on the floor, on my hands.

“I’ll never trust you after this,” he screamed from the hallway. He had four pillowcases in his hands. “I wouldn’t trust you to sleep in the same house. Ever.”

September came suddenly. In one day the interminable thick summer disappeared. It was cold. It rained. Even the trees in the yard below me, even the cars slowly casting their white headlights into the darkness, looked cold. Night had icy fingers. A black wind blew off the bay. I would run my fingertips across my breasts. Nothing lived inside. Inside was gray space, gray tiled corridors, narrow and dark, all straight and all leading absolutely nowhere.

Gerald returned for his mail. I didn’t know where he was living. He refused to tell me. He still had a key to the apartment. Sometimes I would return from work and find another sign that Gerald had been there — a new patch of emptiness in the bookcase, a new slot in a closet where camping gear had once been folded.

When Gerald entered the apartment he was stiff and silent. His eyes darted back to the edges of the room, as if looking for threatening omens. He refused to share a pot of tea with me. I could feel him staring at me, searching for the correct nomenclature. Why, of course. A new category. Barefoot I was a small dark thing, a subspecies not reaching his chin. I was a kind of spider woman, dark and less than human, spinning threads through his torso, his pale chest.

He had come for his letters, and only his letters. He crossed the room carefully, as if the floor was filled with land mines. He avoided the bookcase shadows, the dark accusing glance of old titles, the lying threads of some other life. He stood in the doorway detached and tense, tearing his envelopes open. They were secret documents now consumed on the far side of the room, then folded and shoved into his pockets. He was gathering momentum.

“I wish I’d never met you,” he said. “You’ve ruined my life. You tried to kill me.”

His eyes were very dark. His big square hands with the new black ridges cut in his fingers by the guitar strings seemed to flap angrily at his side.

“I wish you were dead. I wish somebody would kill you,” Gerald said. He was standing near the door. I stood on the far side of the room. Not even our shadows collided.

Gerald turned back once. He looked as if he wanted his fingerprints back and the drops of water from the shower. Then he opened the door. He shut the door. I never saw him again.

That year I would be twenty-one. Winter engulfed me. I committed to memory the periphery, the red enamel walls, the piece of overgrown yard below, the orange globes of streetlamps on Shattuck Avenue and the tiny balcony where I had once fed blue jays and where I stood now, in the wind-driven rain, letting the night pick at my face.

There was the matter of hard evidence. I knew I would never order the pieces. In time, the foundations would rot and the facts would grow wings and float through me. Gerald was gone. I would never understand. Gerald had been the student. I had studied him.