She shook her head dumbly. She should have leaped on him and saved his life, but instead she’d stood stock-still, her hands in the soapy water. He tossed the shirt into the trash and buttoned his lab coat up to his neck, but later, when he went to collect something from the cold-storage locker, Sonia grabbed the shirt and stuck it into her book bag.

Later she took one of her brother Stuart’s razors and cut the Song of Songs out of the Bible to keep, then put the book on Gerri’s desk with a note that said, “I must accept my fate of eternal damnation. You will do detention for thousands of years in the afterlife for failing to rescue my lost soul.”

Sonia 2007

Dickheads and Drunks I Have Known

• 1. Dan Bors, creep, probably not drunk. I go to collect my drugs and he says, You back home, Sonia?
• No, dickhead, this is my doppelgänger. She goes out in public to talk to assholes like you.

So of course everyone in the place turns to stare. Oh, Sonia Kiel’s back in town. Might have known that potty mouth without looking. Couldn’t make it in Boston, could she? Poor Shirley, poor Nathan, having their grown daughter back on their hands again.

Sonia could read the thought balloons over their heads. It was one of the side effects of her illness, or maybe her drugs. People smiled and said one thing, but the thought balloon said the opposite.

Therapists who tried to read Sonia’s thought balloons only ever saw a cloud so dense they couldn’t make out the words. They imagined anger when it was usually sadness or fragility.

• 2. My agent. Molly Pierrot. I’ve tried every gallery in the Northeast, Sonia, but I warned you that the days of big abstract installations are over. And these pieces lack coherence. They’re derivative of Louise Nevelson. Blah, blah, blah.

Sonia couldn’t remember with great clarity what happened next, but she’d been caught on a surveillance tape smashing the front window of the Zivany Sculpture Gallery on Newbury Street with a fire extinguisher and then posing in the show window naked except for a placard that read abstract expressionist going-out-of-business sale, 50¢ or best offer. Her arms and feet were bleeding from where she’d sliced them on the broken plate glass of the gallery window.

Sonia thought her exhibition was witty, but the cops thought it was criminal trespass. Why is it art when Marina Abramović stands naked onstage and cuts herself but criminal trespass and indecent exposure when I do it? Sonia had demanded, first of the arresting officer and then the assistant DA handling emergency warrants that night. No one answered, just a lot of eye-rolling.