“As purses, handbags, shoes—even as heads on walls. Or as roadkill, unless it’s a fox or something we haven’t seen a hundred times before. The mind renders them as setting. But now I saw them everywhere—an ongoing, everyday exhibit of dead animals and their parts. A horror show. A vast extermination of lives and minds.”

Does analysis colonize you? Subject matter become the subject. Truth or cult.

As my illness progressed, over time, I would see also the complexity of what we took for granted in our landscapes and hidden lines of connection would attach to me until moving through the world was like being wrapped in chains. But it was the links, the chains, that made you free. Once you saw it all, you could never go back. Everything was alive. Overwhelming. I was overwhelmed eventually. Overcome.

Silvina wrote that even through the poisoned landscape, we must love it. We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive.

How did I not see the damage for so long?

[36]

Husband and daughter—glad to see me, in their separate ways. Husband with the long, all-encompassing hug. Daughter with a wave from the kitchen, where she was having breakfast cereal for early dinner, some weird perk of it being a school holiday or a lenient dad. The relatives had left in my absence. The house had a reassuring silence to it. I could find almost no trace of their former presence.

“Held down the fort?” I said.

“Fortress secure,” he replied, hands on my shoulders as he regarded me closely, as if looking for contamination. Had I slept with anyone? I felt a pang of guilt. That I could never stop that thought in him.

“Glad to be back,” I said.

“Conference good?”

“Boring. I went to bed early both nights.” Which was true, as far as it went. Still drunk, trying to hide it with breath mints and a considered precision to my movements.

“Got some good intel?”

That word again, like a trap.

I shrugged, taking off my shoes. “Nothing earth-shattering. The usual.” I had Silvina’s apartment, 3215 Avalon Boulevard, burning a hole in my head, distracting me. Tomorrow I would investigate. The office wouldn’t expect me in right away.

He followed me up to the bedroom, helping me with the suitcase, even though he knew I liked to carry it up the stairs, just to feel it in my calves.

As I was unpacking, he turned to me and said, “Listen, there’s something I have to show you.” The tone felt urgent, even if I was already on alert.