As she slept I read an article about novelist Kathy Acker and the alternative therapies she sought for her cancer in Mexico. I could hear the dogs in the kennel howling through the wall, the whine of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and the fly that had avoided my multiple assassination attempts. Only time was killed. I began trying to translate the Spanish words on the wall-mounted fire extinguisher. I noticed a small icon hanging on the wall by the door and I walked over to it. At first I thought it was the Virgin of Guadalupe, the local variation on Mary. But no, the cloaked woman in this image was being pierced by an angel holding a flaming arrow. I racked my memory, trying to recall which saint it was. When it finally came to me I whispered: Teresa of Ávila.

Teresa of Ávila was a mystical cloistered Carmelite nun who had an ecstatic religious encounter with an angel who pierced her heart with a flaming arrow. This piercing is referred to as the instant of transverberation, a moment of juncture between earth and heaven, a moment in which the mortal and divine realms were unified and the glory of God was revealed to her. It was an instant captured in marble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, the saint’s head thrown back in ecstasy in the throes of a supreme Bataillean limit-experience, her body limp, the angel above and astride her, ready to plunge his arrow back into her, again and again. She described this experience in almost orgasmic terms in her writings:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.

As I looked at the painted icon on the clinic room wall, I heard Gia’s groggy voice behind me: “I feel just like her.”

I turned around and smiled. Her lids were heavy and I thought for a moment she might drift back to sleep.

And then she murmured: “A surged-out trannie Teresa.”