it seemed wrong to sit alone drinking beer after beer. But at six, when the neighbor left, I kept drinking cold beer and staring at the walls.
In that old apartment, the water heater grumbled, the refrigerator hummed, the floor creaked for no discernible reason. When I listened closely to the refrigerator, I could hear voices, like distant cocktail-party conversation.
After the neighbor left, I became aware that I was not alone. Very slowly, I became conscious of the woman who sat across the table in the seat that the neighbor had vacated. She was watching me. The light in the kitchen was dim—I had not turned on the overhead lamp and the orange light of the setting sun was filtered through smears of dirt on the kitchen window. The woman's face was in the shadows; I could not make it out.
I returned her stare for a moment, wondering vaguely how she had come to be there. "Want a beer?" I asked her.
She shook her head.
"So what do you think I should do? Run away? Or stay here and take care of the child?"
I had told the neighbor woman that I was thinking about leaving Robert. She had laughed at me and said that after a few months out on my own I would come running home.
The woman whose face I could not see did not laugh.
"Run away."
Did she speak or was it the rumble of the water heater? The shadows had never spoken to me before.
There was a coldness in my stomach. I felt ill from the beer, dizzy with the heat. "I can't leave the child."
I strained to see the woman's face, but she was hidden in the shadows. "Why are you hiding?" I asked her. "Talk to me. What can I do?"
"Run away." There again, I heard the whisper.
"I can't leave. There must be something else I can do. There must be."
She looked down at her hands and lifted them above the edge of the table to show me what she held.
Across her open palms, laid like an offering on an altar, was a knife, a sharp blade chipped from obsidian and glinting in the dim light.
Somewhere in the distance, far away, I heard a child cry out, and I started. I recognized Diane's voice.
She was awake after a long nap and calling for me. I looked toward the shadows and the woman was gone.
I sat alone in the plaza and a large moth—maybe the brother of the moth that had tried so hard to reach the light and die—flew out of the darkness, hurled itself at the dim flame of the Coleman lantern, bounced off the glass, and returned to the night. I stood up, unwilling to sit still any longer. I did not want to remember. I walked out toward the Temple of the Seven Dolls, looking for Zuhuy-kak.
The monte was never silent. As I walked, the brush rustled around me with the soft careful movements of small animals. Insects sang and I could sometimes hear the chittering of bats overhead. Harmless sounds—I was accustomed to the monte at night. I passed Salvador's hut and followed the trail that wound through the ancient ruins.
I heard a rustling sound, like skirts against the grass, and looked behind me. Just the wind.
A pompous young doctor at the nuthouse had explained to me that I was having difficulty distinguishing my fantasies from reality. "You just object because I won't recognize your reality,"
I said to him. "I have no problems recognizing my own reality."
The doctor was a little older than I was at the time, maybe twenty-nine or thirty years old. He was crew-cut, clean shaven, well-scrubbed, and his office smelled of shaving soap. "I don't see the difference.
There's only one reality."
"That's your opinion." My wrists were still wrapped with white surgical gauze from wrist to elbow. The gashes had almost healed, but my arms were still stiff and sore. I crossed my arms across my chest defiantly. "I don't like your reality. I don't like my husband's reality either, but he won't let me change it."
The young doctor frowned. "You must cooperate, Betty," he said, looking genuinely concerned. "I want to help."
"My name is Elizabeth."
"Your husband calls you Betty."
"My husband is a fool. He doesn't know my name. My husband wants to kill me."
The young doctor protested that my husband cared very much for me, my husband wanted to protect me. The young doctor did not understand that there are shades of reality. Metaphor is reality once removed. I said