Sigmund Freud does not necessarily believe everything Lou Andreas-Salome says when she describes the women she has seen in her endless expeditions, but the doctor nonetheless continues listening to this beautiful aging woman with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other friend of his. In the lives of psychoanalysts there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon — if we can overcome each small barrier — know and understand the truths of the human mind, but somehow there is still a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, when the odor of histories and presents appears in tangible forms, mocking us with their absent information, all the integral pieces withheld from us, and if only they had the knowledge to tell us, we would have had the fullest picture, the most complete understanding, but instead, we are left with this void that comes only when the sun sets and the fear of bullets and war and defeat rise. And yet, with this emptiness comes a firm acknowledgment of all we have done, of all we have helped, those women and men destined to their banal lives of obsession, who beseech our protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is in this desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our prescription, that the triumph over enemy minds has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Lou Andreas’s accounts was Sigmund Freud able to discern, through the words and obsessions destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.

The woman down the hall isn’t dead, but her apartment is a mausoleum. If viewed aerially, it is clusters of polka dots. Flip it landscape and her apartment is filled with statues in her image, one for every year of her adult life. This is something she began decades ago, back when she still had dreams of being a student at some fancy art design school or another. Her creations are antipodal to originality — they’re mere facsimiles of herself — but she’s accurate. Each pore on her face is there, each vein along her leg, each thread of limping hair.

The woman down the hall never made it into art school, but if she had, her senior thesis might have been a variant of this very project. Each year, on her birthday, she buys a large block of marble or wood or clay, large enough for her to stand in, wide enough. And so she begins with a chisel, a new version of herself, life-scaled and nude. She is always nude. It takes her three-quarters of the year to complete herself, and by the time it is finished, her body has already changed. Here there is this new abrasion, that new haircut, that new sag.

Once a year, the woman down the hall invites us into her room for the unveiling of her new statue. We wind our way through all these manifestations, a garden of women, all paying some sort of homage to her, waiting for her to die so they alone can remain the original.

The woman down the hall smears eyeliner over and around her lids, fluorescent like tropical fishies. It’s her trademark, her small way to ensure that she will float to the top of all men’s memories.

The women down the hall are lovers. We don’t judge, but they are often loud in their affection, and they are new ones. We do not like it when their love infests our sleep, when we are roused by ghastly moans. We are so easily frightened, and by the time we distinguish pleasure from despair, we are unable to fall asleep again from too rapidly our thudding hearts. We are workers. We can’t spend our nights restless lest we become as inefficient with our time as those women down the hall.

Those women down the hall only moved in weeks ago, and already, they disrupt us all. We are not unkind here. We have tolerated many inconsiderate tenants, and we have reasoned our way with them, but those women down the hall, they don’t care about us. Those women, they are a nuisance. They arrive late in the night and their laughter festers our beds like fleas. Their joy is passionate, and their happiness is without wane.

We do not know what to do about these women down the hall. We have altered their room to be alternately frigid and searing, but they easily combatted this by removing their clothes and creating friction with their skins. We have released opossum into their room, but they roasted the flesh for sustenance, the hide for hide, the tail for strap. We are quickly resorting to more drastic measures that we are ashamed to admit, so we do not admit to them, but every night, their love slaps us awake and we are tired. We are tired beyond morality.

Although the woman down the hall is not old, she forgets everything. Yesterday, she left her glasses in the foyer and unable to see, tumbled down two flights of stairs. She broke nearly six bones. Two weeks ago, it slipped her head to turn off her oven and her entire kitchen went ablaze. Then, poor dear, she forgot the number to the emergency fire department — nonemergency she had committed to memory, it’s true — so she dialed her pediatrician who promptly came to her rescue, not that there was much he could do to salvage the wreck of her apartment.

We ask the woman down the hall why her memory is so shoddy.

She says, “It is the way it needs to be. It is simply the way it needs to be.”

We ask her what she means.

She says, “Something, this is the better way.”

Then, she turns and retreats into the burnt hole that is her home.

The woman down the hall is desirous. She has the appearance of all women who are at once desirous and unfulfilled. Her skin is persistently blotched with flushed hives and her pants are so tight that she moans when she walks.

Usually, she is a soft woman. She speaks and eats without opening her mouth. Every movement is delicate and graceful. She is a fallen operatic heroine.

But the woman down the hall changes twice a year. She becomes a woman who desires desire for recreation.

This woman who is generally subdued and generous, for these few days every six months is excitable and aggressive. Her accelerated speech is an extended onomatopoeia. There are no distinct words. Her gestures knock large abrasions into the wall. And her sex stinks of daffodils and pumpkin spice. It is a mixture she alone has created to catch a suitable fix. It is a technique that never fails.

For centuries, the woman down the hall has been desirous, and for centuries, she has been fulfilled. She is beautiful in her satisfaction.

For a while, we were concerned for her, this young woman down the hall. For a while, we thought she was too much a child to live alone — she could scarcely be a nymphet, if you believe in that sort of thing, which we personally prefer not to. For a while, we brought her food and drink, cobbler and casseroles, but then we saw that she was not so innocent. She is not so young either, this girl down the hall.

One day, we saw marks on the meatiest part of her arms. The next day, we saw lines of dried blood along her wrists. The day thereafter she smiled and her front teeth held fissures.

We grabbed her by her shoulders, a place where surely she had no pain but she winced all the same the same wince of struggle and harm, and we demanded to know who had caused her such violence, such deformation. We said we would make he who hurt her hurt forever. We would damage them permanently. We promised her this, twice we avowed. We told her that she need not be frightened, that we would help her.

But she said nothing. She said nothing and slept for days and days, and when we saw her once again, she was changed, colors faded.

If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you where she went to college, what her roommate’s name was, how they had the exact same majors and minor. She will tell you that she did not graduate at the top of her class, but she was a solid student all the same. She will tell you about all her sorority sisters, tri-delt! their wild parties, how at one of them she managed to kiss three boys she crushed on, in one night! She will tell you about her first college boyfriend, Ben, how she was such a bitch to him because he liked her more than she liked him. She will tell you about the asshole fratboy who raped her and then she will tell you how she’s never told anyone else about it, not even her best friend, her roommate. She will confess all this to you, and then she will tell you about her favorite Professor, how he wore mismatching socks and smoked a pipe as soon as he walked out of the classroom. She will tell you how this reminded her of her father, who also smokes a pipe, and maybe she will laugh and say how she doesn’t even like her father because he’s a jerk but no, don’t get the wrong idea. She loves her father, she really does. She’s not the type of girl to not love her own father! She will tell you that in all reality, she didn’t even like his class, that she can’t remember a single lecture he gave, that she doesn’t even know which department he taught in. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you about all her college projects, study groups, late night writing sessions at the local diner, smoking way too many cigarettes and drinking enough coffee and eating enough addies to keep her awake for days. She will tell you about the crush, the one guy she never got. She’ll tell you his name was Josh and he had long curly brown hair and the longest eyelashes, like ever. She’ll go on about how he was Vice President of Feminist Voices and she was just a freshman and he was a junior and what happened when they happened to cross eyes, whew. She’ll tell you about the serenity in his eyes and how real it was and that made her happy and jealous and angry all at once. She’ll say this earnestly. She’ll say that everyone else around her had flustered and overwhelmed eyes but not Josh. Never. She’ll tell you about this time he wore a skirt into Stats. The woman down the hall will tell you how she was so shy that she’s never even had a whole conversation with Josh, she was always choking out words if she was talking to him. She will tell you that in the end, after all her anxiety and dreaming, he probably — to this very day — has no idea who she is, but she’ll tell you that she’s fine with it, that she’s happy now, that every few months she’ll check in on him on Facebook, never friending him, just taking a quick peek. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you the most minute of details about all her memories of her college experience, her first time away from home, it changed her forever, just like in the movies, it’s the one place that’s made her who she is today, but all of her stories are lies. She never went to college.

The truth of it is that the woman down the hall went away and her life was forever altered, just like she’d swear up and out, but she didn’t go to college, no matter how much she insists, because all of it, every single bit of it, is a lie that she embroidered into her memory, into fact.

The woman down the hall is never home, and when she is, she pounds the wooden floors with her hammer shoes, galloping here and there in constant battle with some voice in her Bluetooth. We wish it didn’t sound like a carpenter’s shop up there when she is home, but we respect the reserved anger in her voice, the steady metronomic clop of her step.

She is the woman that all women want to be. She is what they desire. She is strong and powerful. She is rich.

She is lonely.

Rather than sleep, she computes this or that argument until it rests itself resolved, but once this or that mess has been untangled, the woman down the hall finds some other flaw and starts pacing anew.

The woman down the hall doesn’t have any wrinkles. She’s older than this very building and she doesn’t have a single wrinkle at all. Her hair is the same buoyant blonde that it was when she was seventeen. Her stomach is lined with muscular ripple. She’s a total babe, and we all wish she would stay like this forever.

The woman down the hall is a piece of silk. Rather than walk, she flutters in variable patterns. When there is wind, her bones become fluid and she stretches. Often, when we seek her most, she is difficult to see. We look for slight shifts in sunlight and shadow, and there, right there, we catch the arc of her back, and then, just like that, she has sifted away again.

The Great Freud’s methods flourished, and although there were others who disagreed, his ideas moved their way into even the most remote provinces. As such, it was as though Freud possessed an entire envoy, who would return periodically, to the International Psychoanalytic Congress, to tell of their lessons and struggles, and in those cold halls of sterility Freud strolled, listening to their long reports. The ambassadors were Persians, Armenians, Germans, Syrians, Copts, Turkomans; the doctor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through those objective foreign eyes and ears could their knowledge manifest existence to Freud. In languages incomprehensible to Freud, the envoys related information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque, dense stridor emerged the histories of women and men, suffering with unknown ailments, forced to walk in patterns, bound by head and back aches, plagued with unrest. All of this, the Great Freud listened to with passing interest. But when Lou Andreas made her report, a different communication was established between herself and the doctor. Newly arrived but not totally ignorant of the language of psychoanalysis, Lou Andreas could express herself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings and hootings, or with objects she took from her purse — ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes — which she arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the patients to which Freud had sent her, the ingenious Russian improvised pantomimes that the doctor had to interpret: one woman who would only allow keys to sit in doors in the vertical position, another who could not leave her home without powder smeared across her eyes, a third who could love but only with frigidity. The Great Freud deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the women Andreas saw remained uncertain; he never knew whether his student wished to enact what her patient had experienced in reality, a dream designed through fantasy, their parents’ occupations, the prophecy of an astrologer, or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure and obvious as it might be, everything Lou Andreas displayed had the power of emblems, which once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In Freud’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each patient, the words evoked in Lou Andreas’s stories.

As the seasons passed and her missions continued, Lou Andreas mastered the psychoanalytic language and the national idioms and tribal dialects. Now her accounts were the most precise and detailed that the Great Freud could wish and there was no questions or curiosity which they did not satisfy. And yet each piece of information about a patient recalled to the doctor’s mind that first gesture or object with which Andreas had designated the patient. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Freud thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.

“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Andreas, “shall I at least possess all knowledge of the human mind?”

And the Russian answered, “My friend, do not believe it. On that day, you will be an emblem among emblems.”

Lou Andreas was no ordinary woman. She was simultaneously a woman, a wife, a friend, a daughter, a writer, a psychoanalyst, an observer, etc. She is the writer of over a dozen books, and yet what is remembered of her is her role as lover, student, and devastator. She is measured by the yardsticks of the men she slept with, the ones she loved, her closest friends. She is known as the woman who renamed Rilke from Rene to Rainer because Rene was simply too feminine. She is woman who left Friedrich Nietzsche, and although not quite the cause of his insanity, something close. She is the woman who at fifty, redefined herself as a psychoanalyst and began a lifelong friendship with Sigmund Freud, who studied with him, but she is more than all this. She is an explorer, a renovator, an artist, but her legacy is that this one unimaginable woman was paramour to these three incredible men. Lou Andreas-Salome should be in our memory so much more, but what are all these women — all these women living right down the hall — if not mere extensions of the men they sleep with?

The woman down the hall is writing her memoir. She has been ever since she was a child. Every evening, beginning age five, Christmas Day, she has written a roughly one page, first person account of her day. She includes snaps of conversations, the minutia of day-to-day life, the arguments and resolutions. She writes down as much as she can remember because even then, even when she was still a child, she had notions of greatness and the acceptance that one day, she would not be able to remember things so clearly.

The woman down the hall eats. She eats and eats and it is repulsive how she forklifts food into that cave of her mouth. She is a monster, never fulfilled.

The woman down the hall reads: A rough patch of road may have left you feeling as though nothing good is going to happen to you again, Aries. You got used to setbacks, disappointments, and maybe even betrayals that made you feel like the powers that be weren’t particularly interested in your happiness. And all of this was probably happening despite your diligent efforts to make things better. But there is no connection to recent events and what you can expect in the future. In fact, good things are coming in abundance. You are capable of great things now, and many blessings are on their way to you.

“Yes,” the woman down the hall says, pumping her fist to a raised knee.

The woman down the hall used to be beautiful, but now when she looks at herself, she is repulsed, and when she sees some young trick of a girl walk down the street, she catcalls warnings, hurls dirty names at them. Sometimes she is ashamed of herself for doing this, but mostly, she sees it as an act of altruism, as if she were imparting some kind of knowledge on them that might save them from becoming — her.

The woman down the hall used to be homeless, but that was long before she moved in here with us. She is so mystical to us, this one particular woman down the hall. We want to ask her a zillion questions about her life, about how she came to us, but each time we begin to ask, we become lost because there are so many new questions that emerge and demand immediate attention. We are exhausted before she has exchanged one word.

Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome did not see each other often. It was something similar to the great kings of the past demanding their minions to travel to the far edges of their lands to report the wealth and beauty of their kingdoms. After years of exploration, these men would return and tell the great kings stories filled with mountains and adventure, but despite what these men saw during their travels, their stories would remain the same. Even if they had seen nothing but burnt deserts so desolate that even cacti hid below the surface of sand or prairies with blank fields of fading grass, they would return to their kings and narrate tales of the fabulous technological advances or the fantastic riches — seen in the form of emerald or ruby statues of the king — of the land. The great kings would sit back, and in their old age and inability to discern truth from fiction, they would be sufficiently satisfied. But what Freud and Andreas lacked in physical interaction, they supplemented with tender but simultaneously cutting letters. And so the Great Freud was able to remain consistently close to his sometimes friend and sometimes student.

There was a kindness in their letters, a familiarity where familiarity did not exist. Such was the nature of their relationship, with Lou Andreas asking about Freud’s family and Freud relating the distant friendship between his son and her lover, perhaps hoping that Andreas would relay an offer to bond the two men. But there was something distinctive about their relationship, one that seemed to exceed that of friends or colleagues. There was a knowledge there. There was an understanding.

“The other psychoanalysts warn me of hysterics and obsessions, dreams and desires, or else they inform me of their newly discovered theories of this or that, asking for suggestions or solutions. And you?” the Great Freud asked Lou Andreas, “you have equally difficult patients and ideas and yet you can tell me only the thoughts that come to an old man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your work?”

“It is evening. I imagine that we are both seated on the steps in front of our homes — you in front of yours, me in front of mine — sitting simultaneously together and apart. There is a slight breeze,” Lou Andreas answered. “Whatever the distance my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point, even if instead of this one place I envision the war your sons will survive, the trenches and mud, the rain and the desire to drown instead of fight and that slight breeze carries with it the stench of death from this muddy estuary.”

“My gaze is that of a man meditating, lost in thought — I admit it. But yours?”

The Russian knew that when Freud became vexed with her, the doctor wanted to follow more clearly a private train of thought, so Lou’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Freud’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, reclining on their respective couches, eyes half-closed, breathing.

It was times like these that Lou Andreas believed most strongly in narcissism, not Freud’s understanding of the word, which varied from her own definition, but it was times like these that proved Andreas the superior psychoanalyst for her comprehension and understanding of self and others.

“There is a girl,” Lou Andreas tells Freud, “who I cannot seem to understand because she was so exceedingly normal, without fault or flaw, until she became sick with scarlet fever two years ago. Before then, she was a happy child, without care or concern for the world around her, except that she put constant attention to ensuring that her parents were satisfied. Then, she became sick, and since then, she has not slept. She will remain awake for weeks because she knows that once she sleeps for longer than one hour, the nightmares will begin and shortly thereafter, she will scream herself awake.”

Freud responds, or imagines responding, something relating to masturbation.

“She has told me,” the Russian tells, or imagines telling, the doctor, “that there is a strong correlation between beauty and death. This is, perhaps, the most perplexing facet of her case, and it is not what she says but that she must think this. Indeed, she is a beautiful girl, even without sleep, and people often praise her for her beauty.”

Freud responds in long soliloquies, offering her advice, but she does not hear. Lou Andreas tells the great doctor about her patient but she does not wait to hear his response. She does not need to hear his response.

An Introduction

There’s a woman sleeping down the hall. Her hair isn’t golden or flaxen or any of those perfectly descriptive words. Her nose isn’t slight or bold. Her lips aren’t full, but they are also not lacking. Her cheekbones are not defined or flat, but her eyes. Her eyes are full of gray.

She isn’t particularly striking in any way. Which is why she doesn’t threaten me. She doesn’t frighten me. I am not scared.

This woman sleeping down the hall from me, from us, she has slept for days and days and still will not emerge. She has snored and ground her teeth, and this disrupts our nights. They even manage to disrupt our days, and it is for this reason that I need to kill her.

Now.

While she is sleeping.

Because lord only knows how long this woman can sleep.

She must have little more than blistered gums by now. It’s that sound of bone scraping against bone. It’s not just a sound, but it’s really happening. This woman sleeping, she must have a burden that nestles like a bird, and hungry, it scrapes and scrapes and she must have nothing left in her mouth but the bloody remnants of that secret, whatever that secret may be.

I have never killed a woman, but I have often wondered how I would do it. Now, I wonder if her neck, which is not slender or thick, would be easy to grasp or if my large hands would simply slip from smooth skin. But of course I imagine that her skin would not be particularly smooth or rough. It is simply her way.

But I am not sympathetic. She disturbs me, and this is something I do not allow.

Once, when I was old, I knocked on a door because it was snowing. Because it was cold, I was wearing nothing but tatters and fragments, and when the door opened, I asked to enter. I was very old back then and could barely walk and yet somehow, I managed to travel quite a far distance simply to knock on this door. When the door opened and a maliciously smiling girl appeared, I found myself suddenly energized. Her eyes were fire, and looking at me, I was warm.

To the small girl I said, “It’s cold out here, outside.”

The child looked just beyond me. She barely bothered to notice that my lips were once again beginning to chatter, and although I wanted nothing more than to push her down and run towards the flickering fire behind her, I smiled the kindest smile I could.

She said nothing.

To the small girl, I repeated, “It’s cold out here, outside.” I said, “Dear child, won’t you let me into your house? It’s quite warm in there I can tell. From your eyes, I can tell that there is warmth tucked directly behind you, if only you’d let me come in.”

The child continued to look beyond me. I was certain that she did not flinch when I began to speak. This, I am quite sure, is no small feat because it has been a great while since I have had the pleasure to engage in oral hygiene. It is nothing personal. There is, in fact, little more that I would like than to be able to wrap some floss around my fingers.

I looked at this small girl with her vacant face, her eyes passionate about something entirely not me. I wanted to kill her. I wanted her to let me into her home so that I could do so without the neighbors noticing.

Once again, I tried, “I am an old lady, dear child. Can you not see that I am shaking, even now as I speak I cannot stop my teeth from banging violently together?” I extended my hand towards her.

I reached and I reached, and I was certain that eventually, either my limbs would extend no further or I would be able to touch her, but my hand kept moving forward and we never did intersect. Nor did she move. It was the strangest thing, how this child avoided my touch, a touch that we both knew would be lethal.

And my arm, by this point of acknowledgement, must have been nearly four feet long. It was a piece of salt-water taffy, only not so sweet or edible.

Finally, when my arm had reached its limit, the girl looked to me and said, “Old lady, you may enter my home, but only if you take out all of your teeth and both of your eyes. Then, you must peel away the nails from your fingers. When all of this is done, knock once again on my door, and I will come outside and strip you of your impure rags and bring you into a warm stew of bath, and there, I will clean you with my own small hands. After you are clean, I will set you by the warmest fire, and there, we will feast.”

I looked at this girl. There was nothing left in her eyes, but she did not avoid my gaze. So I began, one tooth at a time.

It is true that the little bird had lost nearly half of its left wing after the dog had had her pleasure with it. The man did all that he could to salvage the small bits of cartilage, pressing chunks of loose flesh back into the bone, hoping it would stick like putty if only he applied enough pressure for a long enough period of time.

He drove. He drove knowing that it wasn’t safe for him to be driving while holding a dying bird in his lap, pellets of muscle staining his pants, but he was careful, and he knew that if he waited, the bird would not survive. For this, he was a kind man. It would be impossible to not think he was a kind man when he did, after all, leave his car running when he reached the animal hospital to ensure that the bird received prompt attention. Some would call this stupid, a man abandoning his vehicle like that, but those more foolish would call it kindness, but it matters little how he is judged because he did, after all, leave his car running and in doing so, it was stolen, but by then, the bird had been stabilized, and he cared more for the bird’s health than a money-eating car.

It’s true that the car was stolen, that he in fact had stolen it because it wasn’t but earlier that day that some louse left his car unlocked with the key still in the ignition. This man, this kind man who saved the poor bird, out of dumb luck stumbled across this car, this car that clearly belonged to someone else, but not caring much, perhaps because of intoxication, he got in and drove away.

We’re not going to call it karma or fate or any of these words, but it is impossible to deny that there is some kind of cycle involved because the moment he walked into his house, still intoxicated, although that may be too kind of a description, he saw blood drizzled in chaotic trails. Out of curiosity, he followed these movements, which he alone could see. We have seen the house and the blood and sure as shit there’s no way he could’ve seen any kind of pattern, and yet, somehow he did, and after he followed the trail to its end, he saw the dog and the bird. He’s certain that at some point there was a struggle, perhaps even a war, but by the time he saw it, there were bits of dull bone protruding from this mass of flab and dirty feathers. The dog tossed it up and caught it. She tossed it up again and caught it midair. The man puked in his hand. Then, he called the dog, “Here Killer. Here boy.” The dog’s name wasn’t Killer. The dog wasn’t his. This wasn’t his house. But the dog came anyways. The dog came and dropped the bird on his feet. The dog wasn’t even a boy.

This is when the miracle happened, when the inebriated man picked up the pulsating carcass and crammed his own fingers over the missing pockets of organs and skin. The bird, recognizing a strange kindness, continued to breathe. This was perhaps all the little bird could do.

So the man jumped into the car that was not his and drove with the little bird dissolving in his lap to the animal hospital where the second miracle happened and the bird survived.

It was certain that the bird had only one functional wing and that the dog that damaged many of the little bird’s nerve endings, although which ones in particular weren’t quite clear. The man, now quite sober, agreed to care for the bird, which he’d become certain was some type of savior.

After eight hours of surgery and after he waited for another two hours for news that the bird had survived the anesthetic and all else, the man finally went outside, and he didn’t even bother looking for the car, as he was sure that it had been stolen and if it wasn’t, he certainly didn’t have any respect left for a car that sat outside for ten hours with the keys still in the ignition that couldn’t be stolen. He walked the many, many miles necessary to reach his own home, his real home.

He was tired, but he didn’t rest. He went inside and immediately began building a birdhouse. It had once been a bonding father-son activity, although he could hardly remember if it was between him and his father or him and his son, but his hands knew where to hammer, where to hold without instruction. And so he built and he built with great vigor until the house was complete. A two-story mansion designed specifically for a bird missing a wing. Everything was slightly off, on this diagonal skewer, and the man, satisfied, slept. He slept for what must have been days and days and he never emerged, not even to go to the restroom, and it was not until the animal hospital called for him three days later that he finally woke, completely refreshed.

The man got into his own car and drove. He drove until he arrived and picked up his little bird, his own little bird. He was happy to see it standing, although the dog had almost lopped off a sizable portion of the bird’s left leg. The man reminded himself to account for this in the birdhouse.

Joyous, the man drove home, eager to show the little bird his new palace.

So I began one tooth at a time, and without anesthetic, it was difficult and bloody. My fingers became pliers, and they twisted and pulled with strength even I did not know I possessed. Perhaps it was out of desperation or out of coldness, but my fingers were chisels and pick-axes, and I performed the most skilled operations until all of my teeth were gone. Even my wisdom teeth which had been so firmly nestled in the nerves running along my throat that dentists and surgeons alike were too frightened to remove them.

I took out all of my teeth, even the ones that had not yet formed, and I put them in a small pail for the little girl to inspect. They jingled a pretty melody, which I wanted to whistle but could scarcely manage a piddle of a sound without my teeth.

I took a swig of something that burned my throat, and it stung the corridors of my gums, but I didn’t mind because there was some sort of numbing agent contained in it so I took a few more swigs until swigs became gulps and I was firmly intoxicated.

Intoxicated, I hastily plunged my icicle fingers into the sockets of my eyes and scooped them into the pail.

Without eyes, my hearing suddenly became muted, but I could feel vibrations in the ground with great accuracy. I could feel the little girl’s little feet stomping down the stairs, skipping through the hallway, and pausing only briefly to unlatch and unlock and open the front door.

She did not invite me into her house, but this time, I did not wait for an invitation.

For a woman to sleep days and days, she must be very tired. Or sick. Or perhaps both. For a woman to grind her teeth with such earnestness, she must be very guilty. Or sick. Or perhaps both.

I know that I should have sympathy for her. I know that women like her should be cared for and loved, but it is impossible for me to do so when she annoys me, and it is not just me. We are all annoyed. Her presence bothers us.

Only last night, we met in the tearoom, and although we had neither called a meeting nor extended invitations, everyone promptly arrived as though we knew the time had come for us to make a decision. Only last night, we all sat in the tearoom in solemn silence for minutes and minutes. We all closed our eyes, breathing in her grinding teeth and mucous-filled snores. I admit that I wanted to speak. I wanted to be the first to propose murder, but I restrained myself. It isn’t proper for a lady to speak first, even if she is the designated killer. So I waited. I waited and waited, until the woman beside me inhaled a sigh and the entire room bounced with all the anger and frustration that had been muted for so long.

It is very difficult to order an overzealous crowd, but I sang a sweet song and they became enamored with the melody. One at a time, they stopped their screams to soak in the message of death, the calling for murder, and even though I created the song as I sang, we sang in unison, in perfect harmony, and that’s how I knew the decision was unanimous.

The princess was very beautiful. This much cannot be disputed. She was so beautiful that her lips were veiled and her eyes shaded and every inch of her skin shrouded with spiderweb curtains. It is said that this princess was so beautiful that any being who saw her would weep until they were sick with dehydration and even then, they could not stop crying.

Now this was a time before medical sophistications like diagnosis and needles so these people and goats and rabbits and lice were doomed to die. For a while, the king’s cavalry tried to transport the more important people, like dukes and dames, to nearby sources of water, but submersion did little other than iron out wrinkled skin, but the discovery of the Fountain of Youth is an entirely different tale. Of course, even this mystical, magical fountain could not save these dukes and dames, but they looked young and particularly pretty, even while rotting.

Only no one suspected the princess for quite a while, at least not publicly. Even after the King and Queen and all the princes and princesses and dukes and dames and ladies and sires were dead, no one wanted to implicate the baby princess. That, they figured, would practically be sacrimonarchal, which was practically sacrilegious, and no one wanted God’s scorning. So the young princess continued to kill all the people who came to care for her, for simply looking at her was a death sentence, and it was only after she had unknowingly caused the death of her entire kingdom and adjacent kingdoms that a young knight suggested that perhaps she was to blame.

So this young knight, being the bravest of young men, volunteered to care for the princess, and after he traveled for weeks to reach her, he knocked on the palace door and used a thick blanket to cover his eyes. He begged the princess to drape a curtain or several curtains over her head until not a single bit of skin was exposed. The princess complained of the excessive heat under all the cloth, but the young knight would hear nothing of it. He said, “Lovely princess, I am immune to your sweet words, but I am not strong enough to survive your beauty, and so I beg you. If you wish to eat today and tomorrow and for the remainder of your life, please, cover your entire body. Do not let even the slightest amount of skin reach my eyes.”

He reached to open the palace door. He knew that she was lethal and yet he desired to see the face that had killed more than a thousand men. He dropped the thick blanket covering his eyes and he began to weep until there was nothing left to him but bone.

He loved for the little bird. He cared for her. He chewed her food for her and drizzled slowly it into her little beak. Most of the time, the bird spit it back in his eye, but he was not offended. He loved the little bird.

Life was wonderful for this small family unit for days. He would often crawl into her birdhouse and spoon her when the nights were coldest.

Then, on the fifth day of their harmonious union, she fell out of a second story window and broke her neck.

Or maybe she didn’t fall. Maybe she jumped.

To the old haggard of a woman, I said, “Old haggard of a woman, you have almost done as I have asked. You have taken your eyes out and pulled out all of your teeth, but I still see a shard of shining white in your mouth, your mouth which is fowl with blood and stink. I find you disgusting, but I can ascertain that you have indeed attempted to do as I have told you. I am a kind girl, old woman, and I will fulfill my end of the bargain, even though you did not. I will pity you with my kindness.”

The old woman smiled and her mouth brimmed with slime.

She was not an uncaring or cold princess and she, being lonely for so long, took the young knight in her arms and connected her lips to his. She transferred as much of her spit into his mouth as she could. She did this until her throat was coarse. The knight stopped weeping, but it was still quite clear that he was dying.

The princess ran to the fountain and scooped water out by the handful and ran to the knight and fed it to him. Slowly, he gained color. Slowly, he gained strength. And the princess continued her running from knight to fountain, which was no small journey, but she was determined to save him, her last hope for a friend.

It took many years for the young knight to fully recover, but it mattered not because he had consumed nothing but fountain water so he looked as youthful as the day he knocked on the palace door, and the princess, she had legs and hands of pure muscle from her many trips from fountain to knight. She was certainly kind and caring, but she was not smart, and for this reason alone, once the knight was strong enough to walk, he slapped her once across the face for not dragging his lithe body to fountain, thereby saving nearly a decade of running, then he kissed her and returned all the sour spit she had so altruistically given him nearly forty years earlier.

He took a vow that day. He swore that never again would he save another being. In fact, he swore destruction on the world. It was his sole mission to kill all things sweet and kind.

That is how he came to reside with us.

They did not live happily after, but they did live together — he constantly reminding her how stupid she was for lack of education and she ever reminding him that though she may be dumb, she saved his life. In many ways, theirs was a peaceful union, and if nothing else, they were by far the most handsome and youthful rulers in the entire world, although none could actually see her.

But after centuries of rule, the young princess became quite bored with the young knight. She looked at him and said, “Darling, I’ve become bored with you.”

He said, “And I with you. I can’t believe there was once a time when your beauty killed men. Now, you’re so average.”

He said this without thinking, and she knew this instantaneously. So did he.

There was not a pause. She did it without hesitation.

She dropped her veil and her shades, and all of her clothes fell off of her body, and he began to wail.

And that is how she came to reside with us. That is how she came to snore and grind her pretty teeth all day and all night.

The old woman smiled and her mouth was slimy, which I hate. I hate slime. I hate things that shine. But as quickly as she smiled, her mouth opened widely, as if she wanted to swallow me in one fell swoop, but then her eyes caught the empty holes where eyes once were directly behind me. Thousands of them. I hate to brag, but many beggars have come to knock on my door and I offer them a warm bath and company and they in turn remove their teeth and eyes and once they enter my home and I remove their slime, they no longer live. I do not kill them. They simply stop living.

This old woman though, she was different. I had a kinship to her. I felt a warmth that I have not felt since my dear brother stopped living. So I said, “Old woman, here are your teeth and your eyes. Screw them back into place, but only if you promise to live with me for ever after here and play with me every day. Old woman, I make you this offer, but you must not try to eat me. You must play with me and all my dead old beggar men.”

The old woman smiled and hungrily grabbed for her teeth. She sharpened the roots into thumbtacks and put them all back into her mouth. “Now, dear girl,” she said, “do you have any floss?”

This woman sleeping down the hall, it is my duty to kill her. It is true that I live in a house filled with murderers and evildoers, and it is true that we take turns torturing our guests, and when there are no guests, we play games such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit to pass time. We are a family, and I have never killed a woman. Before I was an adolescent, I had seen scores of beggar men die, and I mounted their dead heads on my wall for decoration, but I did this only because my parents left me with no paintings when they deserted me.

But now I must do what I must do, and I wish to do it without an audience, so if you please.

The woman down the hall is the woman you have dreamt about for years and years. She is the woman you are always chasing, the one who always escapes even after you tackle the soft cloth of her dress. She removes her shoes to remain soundless, save for her heavy breath, which to this day, you remember. You don’t want this, but this is what you have. You are infatuated with this woman down the hall, and even though she is real, you will never catch her. Even though she lives right down the hall, you will never see her when you are awake. She will evade you, always managing to slip away when you desire her most.

The woman down the hall has a shallow voice, and if sound were a box, hers would be covered in the tiniest sliver of coating.

Only yesterday, the woman down the hall took all of our marbles. She did not trade them, as any decent woman would. No, she stole them, and we let her. We let her take all our marbles like we’d never played marbles before in our whole entire pathetic lives.

The woman down the hall received an oracle that told her that the fetus she was not yet carrying would one day grow to kill her husband and violently rape her. The oracle then said that she would bear another son — at once son and grandson — who would avenge his grandfather’s murder by slaying her husband-son during the act of fornication.

At this, the woman down the hall laughed and laughed until her teeth fell out one at a time. She looked at the fortuneteller, the oracle, and asked, Now who will love me? You fool!

The fortuneteller said nothing but closed her eyes. And the woman’s teeth grew back, each one as painful as the first emergence of bone drilling its way through all that fleshy, pink gum.

Lou Andreas-Salome did not think of narcissism as a self-obsession where one removes self from all others in an attempt to differentiate, to display superiority. Instead, she understood it to be the moment where a person — almost in confusion — sees a dissolution of self, when self dissolves into its surroundings, a simultaneity of self and everything else. This accounted for silent dialogues between herself and the doctor. This accounted for the way heroes believe they cannot be killed, the way all those boys went to war, cramming their bodies into trenches to allow themselves to sink fully into the mud.

Sigmund Freud had noticed that Lou Andreas’s women resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each woman Lou described to him, the Great Freud’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the woman piece by piece, he reconstructed her in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.

Lou, meanwhile, continued reporting on these women who live down the hall, but the doctor was no longer listening.

Freud interrupted her: “From now on, I shall describe women and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a woman with perpetual hair, often exposed to painful sunlight, in a city without war. Now I shall list some of her wonders: glassine eyes with pupils as deep as cathedrals so people can imagine their lives through death in those vast dark spaces and return just as quickly as they became entrenched; fingers long as palm trees that can play the harp with their fronds in the wind; skin as taut as a marble tablecloth, set with foods and beverages also composed of marble.”

“Your mind, doctor, has been wandering,” Lou responds, or he imagines her responding. “This is precisely the woman I was telling you about before you interrupted me.”

“You know her? Who is she? What is her name?”

“She has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing her to you: from the number of imaginable women we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With women, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Women, like dreams, are made of desires, and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

“I have neither desires nor fears,” Freud declared, or imagined declaring, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.”

“Women also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a woman’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer she gives to a question of yours.”

“Or the question she asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”

The woman down the hall is beautiful and she has been told so for as long as she can remember. She has been told that her beauty is mythic, is untouchable, is godly. The woman down the hall didn’t want to believe any of it.

The woman down the hall, when she was just a girl, was told that although she herself was not destined for greatness, the man she married would be.

She was told this many times a day, until she could time it to the setting and rising of the moon.

But the signs were all wrong for this woman down the hall. She never achieved greatness, nor did she ever marry, and so maybe her beauty isn’t as fatal as it once was. She will die alone, of this we are convinced.

The woman down the hall is a whore. At least we think she’s a whore. That is not meant to be an insult. It is simply her profession. She entertains men of all types at all hours. We hear her moans crack through our walls, her deep sighs.

She is a pretty woman, and we don’t know why she chooses to live her life this way. Surely she must be attractive enough to find herself a nice man to provide for her so that she wouldn’t have to do this anymore. Surely one of her Johns could fit that bill. Her Johns are not disgusting men. They all wear suits and ties, have styled hair, and trimmed nails. They never have slime under their nails. Most often, her Johns are good-looking men, and we wonder why she never has repeat customers. Surely she must be good because she has a steady stream of clientele, but they never come back. Or at least we believe that they never come back.

We try not to judge the woman down the hall, but it is hard. It’s impossible to understand why she lives this way, this woman who is never short on wealthy men with their clean-lined suits. All we can think of is that she must be a little thin on morals, that somehow, this is what she wants, this lonesome existence.

When we try to volley conversation with her, her voice is too hoarse from all that moaning and we resent that. We try our best not to judge her morality, if only she could find the decency to preserve her voice for us.

The woman down the hall runs a small shop of sorts. We aren’t sure what she sells, but we see all types come and go. We see them leave with little bags with her name stenciled on the side. Usually, there are lovely velvet ribbons that seal these bags with stitched kisses so that we cannot see what is inside.

But once, because we were bored, we bombarded one of her customers with affection until she dropped her little bag in surprise, but once we were safe from view, we could not bring ourselves to open it. Instead, we brought it down to the woman down the hall, and we knocked on her wooden door. We told her that the nice lady must have dropped it when she left, but the woman down the hall is not one to be conned. No, the woman down the hall saw through our tricks and schemes. She snatched up the bag and crumbled the ribbons and slammed that thick door without even saying thank you.

The woman down the hall is blind, and we’re not discriminators, no, we’re not haters. We like her blindness. It isn’t her blindness that bothers us. We try not to point it out, to showcase her difference, but this woman down the hall, she wears her blindness like beaten pride. She walks into the room and stumbles on chairs and tables. She trips over rugs that have been in the exact spot for decades. We’ve even made concessions not to move furniture to make it easier for her to remember, but she refuses. She continues to fall, each time more severe, first a simple shuffle, then a twist, until she has broken bones and bruised organs.

We wouldn’t mind so much if she were nicer, but she isn’t. She’s an old hag with a stained mud voice. She comes into a room and falls and yells at us. She accuses us of moving things around, and even after we insist that we haven’t, that we wouldn’t, she picks up anything she can reach and with strange accuracy, hits us repeatedly until we are the ones with broken bones and bruised organs.

The woman down the hall, the old bitch, we hope she dies. We hate her, and there are times when we want to move the couch just one centimeter to the left or right. We want to put metal spikes where rugs should be and blackberry bushes into the elevator. We want to see her suffer, but it isn’t right. We aren’t people to discriminate, even against insufferable old women, even if we do hate her. We don’t want to, you see. We don’t. It isn’t right, but she makes it more and more impossible every day.

A cut. Not a trim, but a cut. A simple cut. And then, it is different. It’s all different.

The woman down the hall has cut her hair. We used to call her Barbie, back when she looked like Barbie with all that hair, all blonde and everywhere. We thought her head was a bonfire of blonde, there was simply so much of it. We used to snicker when she walked by, bleach swallowing the whole room, but it wasn’t bleached, no, hers was natural and it illuminated dark rooms with adequate reading light. When she walked by, we would imagine ourselves under all that weight, the way it must have hurt her neck and given her migraines. When she walked by, fresh from the shower, beads of water still translucent along the bend of her slight curls, we would want to yell, to stop her, for surely, she would catch pneumonia going out like that. It would kill us if she were sick. We couldn’t handle it.

But that was before. That was when she was Barbie, back when she still had hair, back when her skin was perfectly cooked and tender, back when she wore mini-skirts, ball gowns, and drove a pink Corvette. But that’s not the way things are now, and even though we watch her with interest, we hate her. We hate her for taking away our joy.

The Great Freud has dreamed of a woman; he describes her to Lou Andreas:

“When she wakes in the morning, she brushes cleans her teeth while facing north, and it is from this direction that she derives her arrivals and departures for her day. She is a woman who believes in neither fate nor free will. She has a beauty that could blind a man, if only her wit were not so toxic, and her limbs are fixtures to be arranged on whim. Her farewells take place in silence, but with tears and malicious grins. She is constantly cold and wears a shawl over her head. She has many lovers and her only husband she will not touch.

“Set out, explore every corner and crevice, and seek this woman,” Sigmund Freud tells to Lou. “Then come back and tell me if my dream corresponds to reality.”

“Forgive me, my friend, there is no doubt that sooner or later, I will leave you in search of this woman,” Lou Andreas tells him, “but I shall not come back to tell you about her. The woman you seek has one simple secret: she knows only beginnings and can never understand endings.”

There were times when Lou Andreas would visit Sigmund Freud in his home, and the two great minds would sit in quiet, conversing in mimicries of chess games. Their eyes would suddenly flare, then subside, then go gray with calm. These were the times they most appreciated each other, when nothing was required or expected.

This was not the norm though. Most often, when the two psychoanalysts intersected in space, there would be idle talk of family and work, one asking the other about spouse or child or lover. One would tell elaborate fictions about so and so who met with so and so and admired him greatly, while the other would respond with admonitions of so and so who should have responded with more respect when meeting with so and so, and these were the times when they both felt that all of this could be condensed into a dream fabric, but neither would let go for long enough for sleep to come.

The woman down the hall is too much. She speaks and we laugh and we laugh until we have burned all the calories we’ve consumed that day. She tells a story, and we are hysterical. She sings a little jig and we vomit everywhere. She makes us sick she is so funny. She will be the death of us, this woman. Already, we are skeletons because of her, and there is nothing we can even do about it but laugh and laugh some more.

The woman down the hall is particularly susceptible to love falling. This is a term we’ve created particularly for her. Her problem, you see, has less to do with the frequency with which she falls in love, which is often, but rather, her problem is her ability to maintain living — here we mean day to day activities, not physical health, although we’ll get to that soon enough — once she is, in fact, in love. What is worse perhaps than her deteriorating hygiene and tendency to forget clothing when she’s in love is what happens when that love begins to dissolve. We do not mean a break up or a divorce. No, the woman down the hall hasn’t the nerves for that much concentrated emotion. Generally, the objects of her affection are inanimate, although sometimes they move. Sometimes, they’re even human, but she is one of those beautiful souls who can love anything, and thus, you see, her downfall.

The woman down the hall, you see, once she sees a pretty flower, one full of bloom and bees, loves it and loves it deeply, but there isn’t a flower in existence that can live forever, and the moment it begins to change, the woman down the hall cannot stand it. There is an intensity about her that frightens us, even as we speak this. In those moments when love begins to wane, the woman down the hall dies and she dies suddenly, passionately, with fervor.

It is true that we have witnessed her death more than two hundred million times, and we must admit that we never tire of it. The spectacle of the crash cart and CPR, the sirens and fireworks of light, the immediacy, it never wears thin. Of course, there are those times when the woman down the hall doesn’t make it, that they cannot revive her no matter how hard they try, and in those moments, we die a little bit too, but we survive if only because we know that tomorrow, she will be back, right where she was the day before and the day before and the day before, falling in love and dying over and over again.

The woman down the hall makes voodoo dolls. She puts black turtle beans in the slots where eyes should be, and when she gets angry, she takes a little needle, a needle with the thinnest point, and she scrapes all the glue from the seams until the small black bean falls like Rapunzel’s hair all the way down to the dusty floor.

The woman down the hall does not have a name. And why should she? Sometimes when we call her Clinger. Other days: Leech. She’s got this scar that runs along the side of her nose, from the ridge all the way to the crease of her smile, when she smiles, which she doesn’t, because even a smile doesn’t make her pretty. She’s ugly and she knows and we know and no one says a thing to her, not because she’s hideous. Because she’s an annoyance to our whole corporeal.

The woman down the hall is a replacement, and she is fine with this. We didn’t think she would be fine with it, and yet, somehow, she is. We thought that she of all women, being as spectacular as she is, would have difficulty accepting that she is simply a replacement, a place holder for the original.

But the woman down the hall has always been a replacement. She was conceived as a replacement, a new baby girl to make up for the mistakes her older sister had made, a better version perhaps, or simply another version to live in the space her sister used to occupy. The woman down the hall, when she got older, became the replacement lover. She slept with men whose wives’ vaginas would no longer whet with want. Sometimes, she would ask her lovers to call her by their wives’ names, but even asshole men can’t stoop to that low level so more often than not, they stuck a gag in her mouth. The woman down the hall didn’t mind that either. In her head, she would imagine these lovers moaning their wives’ names while fucking her, as if that could be a source for her pride, her benevolently loaning her body to salvage sexless marriages.

This is the way the woman down the hall lived for decades, maybe even centuries. She came to us as a replacement. She begged us to call her by the previous renter’s name, and so we did. We called her the woman down the hall, but now, suddenly, things are shifting with her. She’s no longer the same. We see her walking up the hall, and we say hello to her, this woman down the hall, and she looks perplexed. Her face wrinkles and frowns, and then, she says it. She tells us, “I’m in love,” and we don’t know what to do. For so long, this woman down the hall has lived off the discarded trash of others. We look at her, and we say, “Woman down the hall, what will you do?”

But the truth of it is that the woman down the hall is in love, but even in her love, she’s replacing someone else. She’s just another version of a woman her man already loves, and the woman down the hall, she doesn’t even know how to react. She’s been a replacement her entire life, and now, suddenly, she’s sick of it. She doesn’t want to be a replacement. She wants to be the woman this man loves. She wants to be the original, but she can’t change.

“From now on, I’ll describe the women to you,” Freud had said, “and in your journeys you will see if they exist.”

But the women visited by Lou Andreas-Salome were always different from those thought of by the doctor.

“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model woman from which all possible women can be deduced,” Freud said. “She contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the women that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probably combinations.”

“I have also thought of a model woman from which I deduce all the others,” Lou answered. “She is a woman made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, and contradictions. If such a woman is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we can increase the possibility that the woman really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the women who, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve women too probable to be real.”

Lou Andreas describes a woman, cell by cell.

“But which is the cell that makes the woman?”

“The woman is not made by one cell or another,” Lou answers, “but by the accumulation of muscle, bone, body they create.”

Sigmund Freud remains silent, reflecting. Then, he adds: “Why do you speak to me of cells? It is only the woman that matters to me.”

Andreas answers: “Without cells there is no woman.”

The woman down the hall used to be called Miss, sometimes, Missy, and then there came the day when she asked us to call her Missus. Funny, we call her Miss Missus, which we pronounce: Miss miss us, noun verb direct object. We are objects to her subject.

The woman down the hall can see through walls. It’s true. She’s like a bionic woman or something, we’re not really sure. We only know that she can, and she thinks it’s a curse. She says she’s a freak for it, but we think it’s cool. We wish we were superheroes like her, but she doesn’t use her power for anything. Sometimes, we even wish that she wouldn’t be a superhero at all, that she’d be a supervillain because she’s hot and we’d want to see her in some black leather or even rubber.

The woman down the hall can see through walls, and she doesn’t do a damned thing with it at all. No, she wears thick, black, pirate patches over her eyes, pretends she’s blind, and we can’t respect that. We think it’s a waste so when we know she’s coming, we move things around. We cleverly swap a futon with a folding chair just so we can watch her fall. We think to ourselves, If this woman can see through walls, she can see through that little eye-patch, but she falls for it every time.

Sometimes, we think she’s just entertaining us when she trips because it’s so half-hearted. Her movement is air.

The truth of it is that we rarely learn the names of the women down the hall. We are all the same woman. We are none of those women. And so we are a perfect group of women, every single one of us living right down the hall from one another, from you, from me. Won’t you come in for a cup of tea with honey and fresh cream?

Don’t be scared now, but the woman down the hall, she isn’t really alive. In fact, she’s not even a little bit alive, but no one moves her. No one lives with her, and her apartment is occupied, with her body, her corpse, that smell. The woman down the hall used to be called Alice, but now that she is dead, we don’t feel right using her name. We do it from time to time, on accident, which causes in us great flushing.

See, Alice has been dead for a decade and someone still pays the rent and someone asked the landlady not to disturb, do NOT disturb says her door, right over the number. The mailman has this place memorized and manages to cram the pages in. We imagine it is just her dead body in there, and an accruing mound of flyers and coupons. It would be much cheaper to buy her a coffin and just put her in the ground already, burn her up, but someone insists on keeping her there, in that room.

We do not know how she is posed, if she is lying down or sitting, how rigor mortis has weighted, gravity. Sometimes, we like to imagine walking in there, the stink and maggots, seeing her body, how much meat would remain, where bone would shine.

We don’t know what happened with her, what her story is exactly. We pretend to know, but even when she was alive, she was never one of us, keeping to loneliness. We don’t know, but we are sure it must be something sinister and her body’s well-being is important to us, not because we have reverence for the dead but because we care. We want good things, moral things, in our building at least, our homes.

But then we think maybe this is what Alice wanted, dead Alice, and we convince ourselves this truth, and so it wouldn’t be right to disturb her.

We sit guard by her door.

The stink of decomposition makes its way through the crack of her door.

On hot days, we can smell it in the garden.

On cold days, whiffs halt us in the foyer.

We are diligent in guarding her door though, just to make sure no one interrupts.

We learn to ignore the smell. Because this must be what she wants.

The woman down the hall can fly. No, really, it’s true. The woman down the hall is a ghost and several times a year, we see her pass through our brick walls and float out into the sky. She tells us that she goes out on a quest, an odyssey, but she never mentions what it is that she’s looking for, but we know it must be something that is very high up because once she leaves the weight of gravity behind, she wanders up higher and higher until she is a freckle on the moon’s smiling face.

In times of need, Freud gave Lou Andreas patients. One young woman in particular confounded the Great Freud. This girl had a savage fear of flora. Whereas she could withstand — and even enjoy — the most toxic of insects crawling over her skin, the moment a blade of grass or the most perfect flower came near her, she would wail, unable to be comforted until the plant-life were removed and the scent of it erased. Even if there were no discernable smell, she would argue that there was, but this was barely translatable considering the pitch of her screams.

Freud asked, or imaged himself asking, “In all your travels and experiences, did you ever happen to see another woman resembling this one?” Freud, while asking this, imagined the girl and her pristine smile, the clarity in her speech, and how quickly this transformed on the introduction of a plant. Before giving her to Lou, he had attempted to trick her with a recreation of a flower, made of silk and the finest scents, and she played with the false flower as though it were a doll.

“No,” Lou answered, “I should never have imagined a woman like this could exist.”

The doctor tried to peer into her eyes. The Russian lowered her gaze, or imagined herself lowering her gaze. Freud remained silent for the whole day.

After sunset, on the terraces of his home, Lou Andreas-Salome expounded to the doctor the results of her missions. As a rule, the Great Freud concluded his day savoring these tales with half-closed eyes until his first yawn indicated his necessity for rest. As quickly as his first yawn appeared, the old man would retreat to his bed. But this time Freud seemed unwilling to give in to weariness. “Tell me of another woman,” he insisted.

“There is a woman down the hall who has skin that flutters like loose rags,” Lou begins saying, enumerating her names and customs and wares. Her repository could be called inexhaustible, but now she was the one who had to give in. Dawn had broken when she said: “Doctor, now I have told you about all the women I know.”

“There is still one of which you never speak.”

Lou Andreas bowed her head.

“Yourself,” Freud said.

Lou smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”

The doctor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”

And Andreas said: “Every time I describe a woman I am saying something about myself.”

“When I ask you about other women, I want to hear about them. And about you when I ask you about yourself.”

“To distinguish the other women’s qualities, I must speak of a first woman that remains implicit. For me, it is myself.”

“You should then begin each tale of your women from the departure of self, describing yourself as you are, all of you, not omitting any truth as you acknowledge it.”

Outside, the morning sun was brutal. Even though they both wanted some relief, there was little hope from the early light.

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Andreas said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing myself all at once, if I speak of myself. Or perhaps, speaking of other women, I have already lost myself, little by little.”

“It seems as though you’ve been speaking of nothing but memory.”

“It always seemed to me: since our body must play for us a double role, since it is just as much ‘we ourselves’ as also at the same time the immediate piece of external reality, to which we are in the most various ways forced to adjust ourselves in exactly the same fashion as to all the rest of the external world — for this reason it can only accompany us a little way along the road of our narcissistic behavior.”

When Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas first began corresponding, he asked her for an image of her likeness in the form of a photograph. The Great Freud asked in the meekest manner, but Lou Andreas could hardly decline his offer. When she did provide him with her photograph, she prefaced it with the acknowledgement that although the picture captured her image, there was no connection between the still figure encased in sepia and herself. In that way, there would always remain permutations of self, never the same woman, the perpetual shape-shifter.

There is always mucous dripping from the eyes of the woman down the hall. It grosses us out. We wish she would go to the doctor and get it fixed. We tell her, “Woman, go to the doctor! Let him fix your eyes!”

She says, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”

The woman down the hall is not old. In fact, she’s a good looking woman, nice body, strong features, except for that yellowish mucous that will not dry from her face. We have seen it travel down her face, past the soft curves of her breasts, and all the way to the cup of her knees. It’s disgusting. It’s repulsive.

We tell her, “Woman, you are not such an ugly woman. There is no reason for you to be so alone, so hideous with your lonely eyes.”

She says, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”

The woman down the hall often tells us stories about where her eyes have been, how if only we had lived the life these poor, old eyes had lived, we would understand. She tells us elaborate stories about how she came to own these eyes, how they did not always belong to her, that she can remember a time when she was not so blessed and afflicted. She says that they were a gift, but we can’t imagine such a thing being a present. We can’t think of how one would wrap something so moist and spherical.

So we tell her this. We call bullshit on her story and the woman down the hall, she uses her fingers to scoop an eye out from her socket and there, right there underneath that mucous eye, there’s another eye! Under one set of her eyes, she has another. And somehow, we’re surprised when she tells us again, for the five thousandth time, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”

The woman down the hall dreams of Dora. Every night, when she closes her eyes, she becomes a frightened girl, lying on that infamous couch, which is actually just an old leather thing like you’d find in any old house. The woman down the hall dreams Dora’s dreams. They’re not especially spectacular. In fact, she does not even know they are Dora’s dreams. She thinks they are her own, only in the dreamscape, her name becomes Dora. Sometimes, on accident, she calls herself Dora, because it is easy to become confused. Because even when banal, Dora has a vastly more exciting consciousness than reality.

“I find it pleasurable,” the woman down the hall tells us, and our intestines roll abrupt somersaults and backflips. We’re sure we’re going to either throw up or drool. Somehow, all at once, we’re disgusted and turned on. It shouldn’t be this way. It’s not right, but there is something truly compelling about her and all her perky smiles filled with sunrays and butterflies and that cold metal room with those old cold cocks and that she finds pleasure in it, well, that’s not our fault at all.

The day that man appropriated the woman down the hall as his object, the sky dropped tornadoes onto our heads to tell us to help her, but we did not understand the message. Then, the oceans filled our lungs with salty water until we could not breath, but even then, we could not get it. Finally, the earth shook the word HELP in big, bold letters, and we ran. We ran with legs we did not have, legs of clean muscle, and we arrived to her screams. Then, we punched with arms we did not have, arms of passion, and we threw that man away from her body, our friend, our woman who lives right down the hall from us. She laid there, legs apart, and a cyclone funneled him away forever. We didn’t care to turn and watch him fly out.

The woman down the hall believes in legacy. She tells us about her mother, who was a fine woman, and her grandmother, who was a complete tramp but lovely nonetheless. She tells us about her great-grandmother, who had broad shoulders, and her great-great-grandmother, who was practically a fairy tale princess.

So the woman down the hall tells us all this, and we’re interested. You see, we want to believe in happy endings, we want to believe in forever, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t. We don’t believe that just because her great-great-grandmother was practically a fairy tale princess that it means that she will have the same fate. We don’t believe in continuity. Instead, we believe she’ll die old and alone. That’s the fate we will all share.

Sigmund describes a woman who could be either his wife or his wife’s sister to Lou Andreas to see if she could differentiate between the two. One woman he refers to with tenderness; the other with patience. Lou does not respond quickly, but when she does, she tells him another story about a woman down the hall.

With frustration, the doctor says, “I’ve told you my rules! I will tell you about a woman and you will tell me if she exists, if my imaginings of woman are true to your experience.”

The Russian responds, “I can tell you about thousands of women, doctor, and each of them will be the very woman you have just described. I can tell you about hundreds of women, and in them, you will see none of your wives, none of the women you love, as a point of differentiation. I can tell you about myself or your wife or your daughter and I can give them different names, but they will only be as I tell them to you. You cannot create women of your own out of the pieces I give you.”

Freud says, “But tell me if they are real. Tell me if the women I speak about are real.”

“When you describe these women, you give me only their characteristics as reflections of yourself, and so yes, Freud, these women are real, given that you yourself are real enough to touch.”

SIGMUND: I don’t know when you have had time to visit all the women you describe to me. It seems to be you have never moved from my side.

LOU: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same smoke and smells, the same silence streaked by the rustling of your wife. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this room, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving through room to room, speaking with women burdened with hysterics.

SIGMUND: I, too, am not sure I am here, sitting beside this fire or eating decadent foods, receiving awards or even speaking with you. I am unsure I stroll in the early evening and I constantly question if my sleep occurs with any regularity, or perhaps I am where my sons are, fighting in dirt with imaginary bullets that kill without reservation.

LOU: Perhaps this conversation exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust in the fields of internal battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in our finest garbs, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions and understandings, to contemplate from a distance.

SIGMUND: Perhaps this dialogue of our is taking place between two hysterics named Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome, as they sift in and out of rubbish heaps, piling up invisible flotsam, scrapes of imaginary nerves, screaming from repressed desires for their fathers and mothers, while drunk on a few sips of poor wine, they see in the distance all the treasure of calmness shine around them.

LOU: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps and this one room of Sigmund Freud’s where we sit. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.

SIGMUND: It is most clear to me that all of this could merely be transference and that these women you describe are manifestations of your homosexual desire for both self and, strangely, me.

LOU: All of this is irrelevant in the face of memory and reality, this accumulation of variations of self, and how you see it as a way for me to seduce you.

That cunt down the hall, we call her cunt. We say it without shame. We say it like it means vagina. And that cunt down the hall, when we call her cunt, her shoulders rise up and swallow her head, and after a little while, they fold back down and her face is all red. Her ears pulse. We could dance to their beat, but that would be rude. It is, after all, our fault that she is a cunt. Before we called her that, this never happened. We made her this way. We made her insecure.

When the woman down the hall lusts for a man, it is like his death. It isn’t her intention, but it can’t be helped. Only yesterday, the woman down the hall saw a man on a bicycle and surely he was attractive enough, but with senses as keen as a mongoose, she stuck her head to the full extension of neck out her window so many stories high to the clouds, and she sniffed. The woman down the hall from so high up caught the brief scent of his sweat, and it was as simple as that.

She memorized the texture of smell, the hint of the dinner he surely ate alone just last night, and when evening breached, the woman down the hall dressed in her most conservative black, and as she approached the restaurant, this man who was on his bicycle earlier that morning couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t resist her charm, her simple laugh, the way she listened to his trivial stories with care, and before he could acknowledge it, he was caught in a love so easy that even breathing became a chore.

The woman down the hall is in love. We can tell that she is in love because her hair becomes branches that extend and entangle. When she is happiest, we can hear the whistle of wind move through her leaves. They sing a sweet melody that sounds like fairy tales.

The woman down the hall speaks in ellipses. It doesn’t seem possible, but she does. The woman down the hall never finishes a thought. She never finishes a sentence.

The woman down the hall is constantly hidden. Most often, her bulbous body exposes her, but she keeps her face obscured. She is not an unattractive woman so we cannot discern why she would hide. If she were ugly, that would be a different matter, but she is not. We cannot understand her.

She is a curious one, this woman down the hall. We often find her huddled in the corners of couches, her entire body lodged between cushions and frame, her eyes connected with a book.

But even though she seems too entranced in her envelopment to speak with us, she knows everything.

She is the Gossip Queen, the securer of truths and exaggerations, and although it is most difficult to find her, once we do, we are well rewarded for our diligence in sighting the cleverest chameleon.

LOU: …Perhaps this room and all we have discussed exist only in the continual expanse of our mind…

SIGMUND: …and however far our troubled enterprises as psychoanalysts and friends may take us, we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade, this conversation of pauses, this evening that is always the same.

LOU: Unless the opposite hypothesis is correct: that those who suffer with dreams and aphonia, neuralgia and transference exist only because we two think of them, here, enclosed among these walls, motionless since time began.

SIGMUND: Unless toil, shouts, sores, stink do not exist; and only this azalea bush.

LOU: Unless the poor, hungry, wounded, dead exist only because we think of them.

SIGMUND: To tell the truth, I never think of them.

LOU: Then they do not exist.

SIGMUND: To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes. Without them we could never remain here, cocooned in the safety of this room.

LOU: Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis must be true: they exist and we do not.

SIGMUND: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.

LOU: And here, in fact, we are.

SIGMUND: But then all these women who live down the hall, where are they?

The Great Freud owns an atlas where all the parts of the empirical mind and the neighboring realms are drawn, neuron by neuron, cell by cell, with folds, memories, fears, sensations. He realizes that from Lou Andreas-Salome’s tales it is pointless to expect news of those places, which for that matter he knows well: how women with hysteria wail in the moments when their control slips furthest away from their skin; how bodies can become islands where the rhinoceros rages, charging, with her murderous horn; how translucent pearl tears appear in moments of epiphany.

Sigmund asks Lou, “When you return from your journeys down the hall, will you repeat to your women the same tales you tell me?”

“I speak and speak,” Lou says, “but the listener retains only the words she is expecting. The description of the women to women you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of women who live down the hall, waiting eagerly outside my door is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by one of these women and put in irons and lace in the same room as a writer of great stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

“At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make women live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”

The Great Freud owns an atlas whose drawing depict the terrestrial woman all at once, a conglomeration of women, one on top of the other, a palimpsest, which seen from the distance, can be only one form, but up close, her contours shift through the translucence of skin. He leafs through the maps before Lou Andreas’s eyes to put her knowledge to the test. The woman recognizes Constantinople in the woman whose hair dominates a long strait, a narrow gulf, and an enclosed sea; she remembers Jerusalem for her set of two hills, of unequal height, facing each other; she has no hesitation in pointing to Samarkand and her gardens.

For other women, she falls back on descriptions handed down by word of mouth, or she guesses on the basis of scant indications: and so Granada, the streaked pearl of the caliphs; Dora, the neat, boreal port; Anna O., black with ebony and white with ivory; Paris, where millions of men come home every day grasping her wand of bread. In colored miniatures the atlas depicts inhabited women of unusual form: an oasis hidden in a fold of the desert from which only palm crests peer out is surely Katherina; coy smile amid quicksands and cows grazing in meadows salted by tided tears can only suggest Franziska; and a palace that instead of rising within a woman’s skin contains within its own skin a woman can only be Anna.

The atlas depicts women which neither Lou nor mothers know exist or where they are, though they cannot be missing among the forms of possible women. For these, too, Lou says a name, no matter which, and suggests a route to reach them. It is known that names of women change as many times as there are foreign languages; and that every woman can be reached through other women, by the most various calls and snickers, by those who speak, write, sing, or remain in the most quiet silent.

“I think you recognize women better on the atlas than when you visit them in person,” the psychoanalyst says to Lou, snapping the volume shut.

And Andreas answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each woman takes to resembling all women, sex can exchange form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades my gender. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”

The Great Freud owns an atlas in which are gathered the maps of all women: those whose feet rest of solid foundations, those which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, those that will exist one day and in whose place now only memory gapes.

Lou Salome leafs through the pages; she recognizes Elizabeth, Nefertiti, Virginia Woolf. She points to the landing at the mouth of Joan of Arc where ships waited for ten years. But thinking of the Greeks, she happened to see next the form Helen and Aphrodite, and from the mixture of those two women a third emerged, which might be called Yulia or Hilary, Sirivamo or Indira, a woman who may gain an empire of knowledge and understanding more vast than the Great Freud’s.

The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the form of the women that do not yet have a form or a name. The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its woman, new women will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of women begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, women in the shape of leaders, thinkers, writers, mothers, friends, humans without shape or borders.

By tomorrow morning, the woman down the hall will be dead. We wish this were some kind of petty prediction, God knows we do, but this is all true. We wish it weren’t because the truth of the matter is that we love the woman down the hall. She is our favorite tenant, but the woman down the hall, she’s cursed with clairvoyance, and she’s known since she was a child. She’s known exactly when she would die.

We remember the very first time we met her. She came to see the open apartment, and when we saw her that very first time and she saw us, she said, “Yes, this is it. This must be it.” And we had no idea what she meant, but it only took us that one meeting, those first few words, and we fell in love with her. We wanted to know more. We wanted her to stay here with us forever so when she told us about her death, we shut off our ears and refused to listen, but the truth remains that by tomorrow morning, she will be dead, and no matter what we do to try to prevent it, we won’t be able to.

We think it would be horrible to know the things she knows, but the woman down the hall is grateful. That’s the kind of woman she is. She’s the kind of woman it would be impossible not to love, and we hate her for all her kindness and understanding. We hate her for her wisdom. We hate her for her mortality.

The woman down the hall does not really exist. She is foam, moving between walls and into our noses and throats. Quite often, we can feel her in our bodies, moving things around. It isn’t an unpleasant feeling and we generally do not even mind. We know that the woman down the hall is trying to help us because that’s what she does. In exchange for a room for her to expand in, she offers us immunity from disease. She enters our mouths and ears and boosts our bodies with her magic.

We often wonder about this woman down the hall, why it is that she is the way she is, and she tells us that we wouldn’t understand, but that if we knew our folktales, she’s in there. She is the shadow that was left behind for our benefit, and whereas we are flattered — no honored — we can’t help but be sad for her, that she must live here, with us, when she belonged to a time so very long ago, a time of folk tales and magic and sublime fairy tales, a time without maps, a time of legends, and that she must endure this, just for us.

The woman down the hall has hair longer than is even possible. Sometimes, we think she is Rapunzel, but we don’t believe in fairy tales so we ignore this possibility. We should note, however, that she lives at the apex of this building, that even though we say she lives down the hall, she really lives up the hall, high up, higher up that we can even see.

We’ve never seen her room, this woman down the hall. We’ve never even seen its door, although we’ve tried. Lord knows we’ve tried. Just the other day, in fact, we took the stairs up to her room — the elevator doesn’t go up that high — but we kept stepping and stepping until we’d stepped for days, and even then, there was no door. Our building isn’t so tall and yet we couldn’t reach it’s top. So we stepped for more days and days until one of us, we’re not sure who, passed out of exhaustion, but still, we forged upward. We hiked our way up until we literally couldn’t go one step further. Then, we rolled bodies into tight balls and bounced our way down. We simply could not have endured all those steps again.

And yet, when we see this woman down the hall who we like to call Rapunzel we do not ask her how she gets into her tower. Instead, we prefer to watch her knit her hair in the lounge. We try to not to disturb her, lest she lose count of her stitches and must begin anew.

The woman down the hall is anonymous. She could be any woman. She looks like every other woman. There is nothing particularly noticeable or unique about her. The woman down the hall is a faceless woman among so many others, another person wandering in a crowd.

We have never seen a woman so plain, so utterly unremarkable. Perhaps this is why we are so interested in her. We try to speak with this woman, but she is so plain that she slips away without us even noticing, and another woman, equally uninteresting, has taken her place. This is not something we notice at first, but there is some small glimmer of difference between the two or three or however many of them there are. We notice only because we watch. We observe her and her other anonymous friends. We are certain we can unlock the truths behind every woman if only we can know one of them.

But they are not really every woman, and they are not truly anonymous. We have learned that they too have names and homes and some of them live right down the hall. Imagine that! These women that we’re only now learning to recognize have lived right down the hall all these years if only we’d bothered to notice.

The woman down the hall, she’s a crazy old loon. She’s not to be trusted. The old crone is the devil, we swear. We’ve never seen anyone so wretched, just for the sake of being wretched. She twists our ears to watch our eyes swell with salty tears, to watch our eyes clench shut for the stinging, to see our noses begin to drip, and she doesn’t stop until our mouths are filled to the brim with snot, and even then, she makes us swallow it in one gulp before she releases us, and we hate her. We’ve never hated anyone so much in our lives.

And yesterday, you won’t even believe this, yesterday, that old bitch down the hall pinched a cloud from the sky and crumpled it into the smallest ball, and that old witch down the hall punched us square in the jaw so hard that our faces broke, and that old woman laughed and laughed.

It was then that we decided that she had to die, that we can’t stand even one more moment of her alive.

So we killed her.

The woman down the hall simply doesn’t know how to shut up. We swear she talks and talks like she doesn’t even need to stop for air, and when we see her, we run. We call her Dragon Woman — infernaled — and it wouldn’t be so bad if she only talked about more interesting things, but she doesn’t. Dragon Woman gabs about the most banal things. She goes on and on about her pewter plates and how she chose pewter, and sometimes, the mere imitation of the sound makes us sick. Sometimes, we hear the word computer and by default, we want to spit up. She’s insufferable, this Dragon Woman with her continuous words. Seeing her, we want to plug up our ears, but even then, her voice has this way of sneaking in, the nasal squeak makes us want to shove a whole box of tissues down her throat.

The woman down the hall is a hoarder, and her tiny apartment is a labyrinth of boxes and trash. She never emerges from her layer of debris, and yet somehow it grows to consume the edges of the walls and all the empty spaces in between.

The woman down the hall slinks her body over and between, collapsing into the tiniest spaces because that is where she feels safest.

She is a rat, this woman. We imagine her apartment is a three-dimensional maze, and she maniacally rushes through it, chasing the scent of something absolutely delectable.

We have never seen this woman, but we know she is real. At nights when it is quietest, we can hear the shuffle of something moving somewhere, the scrape of her skin against all that trash.

Her apartment stinks of rot. It is a landfill, a dumping ground. It smells of teenaged boys after gym class, that irremovable odor of adrenaline and adolescence. It hovers for yards around her door. For a while, this smell drove our guards away, but we are a diligent kind. We do not waver. Sooner or later, someone will come or go. She is human, and she must eat to survive.

She has been here longer than any of us, longer than the groundskeeper and the landlady, and we hope that somehow she will survive until after we are gone. We would hate to have her myth destroyed for a heart attack or high cholesterol, something mundane. We have invested too much imagination and effort into creating her, this hidden woman, this woman who has forgotten the rest of the world.

The woman down the hall is fat. She’s nothing but a bucket of lard, only larger. Much larger, and she’s got skin that folds over itself, forever hidden. There must be mold and mildew in those pockets of skin and flesh that never see light, and in those pockets, there must live these little creatures who recycle all that perpetual sweat and stink. She is a virtual ecosystem, this gross woman down the hall with all her lard and all her skin and all her stink, and strangely, we want to explore it. We want to claim it as our own, if only we could find an adequate place to stake our flagpole.

The woman down the hall no longer lives here. One — for everything of any note occurs at night — she packed her entire apartment into one small handbag and walked away, leaving a large hole where her home once sat. It was as if she opened her satchel and invited the wallpaper and the siding, the lamps, light fixtures and their ceilings in to leave with her.

The hole gapes at the world outside. The hole where the woman down the hall used to live reveals our most hidden secrets.

Beneath the woman down the hall, there is another woman. She is tucked beneath ruffles of skirt and ebony corset. She is a small woman, this woman beneath another woman, but she is happy.

She tells us, “It is warm where I live but never too hot. I believe it is something akin to your California.”

We tell her that we rarely take note of the weather.

She says, “But one must always be prepared for variant temperatures.”

She tells us this like she knows what it’s like to go outside. This woman who barely has skin covering her because she doesn’t need it, this woman who lives in suffocation tells us how to dress! We scoff.

We say, “Woman, if you care so much about the weather, why do you live inside another woman, hidden away from the world?” We say, “Woman, it’s apparent that it’s been so long since you’ve seen sunlight that your skin has restricted into your muscles, and even your muscles are pale.”

She looks at us.

There is an old photograph hanging above the smaller woman. It is the height of our chests. The sepia bleeds into its boarders.

She continues looking at us. Her transparent face is sad, frustrated.

Her fading face is bored.

Then, she lifts the lady’s skirt and crawls back in.

The Great Freud’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised women visited in thought but not yet discovered or found.

Sigmund asks Lou: “You, who go about exploring and seeing things, can you tell me toward which of these futures — these women — the favoring winds are driving us?”

“For these women I could not draw a route on a map or set a date for the arrival. At times all I need is a brief glimpse of possibility, an opening in the midst of an incongruous word, a glimmer of light in a pupil, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect woman, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of strengths unavailable to men and weaknesses that are more subtle reasons to improve than flaws. If I tell you that the woman toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for her can stop. Perhaps while we speak, she is rising, brushing her hair and donning a loose summer dress, within the confines of your empire, you can hunt for her, but she will never appear as you imagine her to be.”

Already the Great Freud was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the women who menace in nightmares and maledictions.

He said: “It is all useless, if the last woman can only be in the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Andreas said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Freud replied: “The woman that exists in this inferno can hardly be expected to see through it; and men are too caught to even look up.”

And Andreas said, calmly: “And that is why we look, door to door, searching for the woman to help guide us through this inferno toward freedom. She is one person, but she is also every woman in your atlas. Every woman.”

The End

Lily Hoang is the author of several books, including Changing (the recipient of a PEN Beyond Margins Award). Hoang serves as co-director of Puerto del Sol, Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and Associate Editor at Starcherone Books. She received her M.F.A. in Prose from the University of Notre Dame in 2006.