Last year, at the onset of an episode so bad you ended up having to switch medications, you went to the Getty. You love the Getty. If a museum could be your boyfriend, if you could run away with and marry a museum, the Getty with its sharp angled jaw would be second to none. Your flesh-and-blood boyfriend had lately left (bad communication), but that isn’t what cracked you, you aren’t that kind of woman. Or maybe you work hard not to be that kind of woman. The seasons going; the chemical sea change of the brain; maybe the sudden emptiness of your apartment; maybe the sudden fullness of it, when you woke up with Maura’s spiny, pale body—like the hollow shell a sea urchin leaves when it dies—snuggled up to your side, her toddler face snuffling into your neck, companionate, inseparable; maybe the small boy who tumbled off the play structure at your school and then sat bleeding quietly on your office couch while he waited for the ambulance, a seismic fault line opened in his skull. One way or another, you were wrung out; like someone had broken your bones open and scraped out all the marrow.

When you want to feel something, an art museum is good for you, but it is very bad when you’re sitting there inside it like a smooth shelled egg and you still can’t feel anything. There was a little sculpture of the archangel Michael casting the fallen angels out of heaven, which you spent a long time walking around and bending over, studying the details. Not of Michael, an avenging baby in his flowing robe, but the funnel of hell-bound devils beneath him: a mass of grotesque faces and warped limbs, stumped shoulders, twisted necks. What kinds of art do you love and not want to love? Martyrings, beheading scenes, those still lifes of dead animals draped over tables, their fur lax, their glass eyes open. Sometimes a severed arm is as close as you can get to feeling real, the imagined thrill of pain. The sensation of being meat.

* * *

There are twelve essays in the collection. You count them; don’t read them yet. They have titles like “In Loco Parentis,” “Death and the Maiden.” Sometimes you must have to wonder who your mother thinks she is.

Maura is around. Two or three more incarnations of her pass, more rapid-fire than you’ve ever become used to, but otherwise uneventfully. She moves things in your pantry while you sleep, uses your shampoo to run herself a bubble bath and leaves the bathroom floor wet. She puts your books facedown on the kitchen table so their spines bend.