“Whoa,” Greta said. “Hello.”
OM:?So, suppose someone has been gang-raped at gunpoint and can’t seem to pull themselves together, stop drinking, return to work, or find meaning in their lives, would you tell them to just “get over themselves”？
FEW:?Well, there is a hierarchy, isn’t there?
OM:?I don’t think so.
FEW:?If you didn’t think there was, you wouldn’t have used that example. You would have said, “Suppose someone has been molested by a neighbor” or “neglected by their mother” or “bullied all their lives.” But there is a hierarchy. Trauma people don’t like to hear that. To them, all trauma matters.
OM:?Where would you place your trauma on the hierarchy?
FEW:?All I’m saying is that trauma doesn’t get you a lifelong get-out-of-jail-free card. It also doesn’t necessarily confer wisdom, or the right to pontificate, which I realize I’m doing right now.
OM:?Well. I’m willing to concede that life handles some people more roughly than it does others, and that you do have a choice in how you deal with it. You can decide what you want to do with it, but not until after you address it, which—I’m sorry to say—involves talking about it, for as long as it takes, identifying fears and triggers—
FEW:?Triggers. God. This is why I’m not crazy about therapy. I really hate the language.
OM:?Do you have nightmares?
FEW:?What?
OM:?Do you have night terrors or trouble sleeping?
FEW:?I have bad dreams occasionally, like any other human being.
OM:?Do you consider yourself an addict?
FEW:?No.
OM:?Do you drink or use drugs?
FEW:?I’m not an addict, Om, and it’s not because I’m in denial. Nice try.
OM:?If “trauma” isn’t a word you use, what do you call what happened to you?
FEW:?I call it what it is—a beating.
“Yikes,” Greta said.
OM:?You were assaulted.
FEW:?I took a beating, yes.
OM:?How has the… beating affected your relationships?
FEW:?It hasn’t. I’m here because I don’t have orgasms.
“Oh?” Greta said.
OM:?Did that start after the beating, or before?
FEW:?I’ve never had an orgasm in my life, even by myself.
“Come again?” Greta said.
FEW:?Here’s the funny part: I’m twenty-eight.
OM:?Age is just a number.
FEW:?I’m married. I’ve been married for six years.
OM:?Marriage doesn’t necessarily guarantee satisfying—
FEW:?I’m also a gynecologist.
“Is this a joke?” Greta said.
OM:?Are you married to a man?
FEW:?Yes.
OM:?Does he know you’re here?
FEW:?This was his idea.
OM:?Would you describe your marriage as low-sex or sexless?
FEW:?I would describe it as mostly hand jobs and blow jobs.
OM:?How does that feel to you?
FEW:?It feels like a chore, but I also feel better afterward. It’s sort of like walking the dog and drinking wheatgrass at the same time.
OM:?You have a dog?
“You have a dog?” Greta repeated. “Really, Om?”
Greta glanced at her own dog, Pi?on, a black-and-white Jack Russell. Pi?on was licking the door—again. She paused the audio, noted the time, and removed her headphones. She was due for a break anyway.
“Pi?on,” Greta said. “No licking, goddammit.”
He ignored her. His eyelids fluttered. He seemed to be in a trance. Greta threw a slipper at him, but it fell short.
The door, along with all the walls in Greta’s room, as well as the ceiling, was covered in many layers of ancient lead paint. The paint had been chipping for a hundred years. Whenever a truck rattled by outside, flecks of paint would fall onto the floor or the furniture or in many cases Greta’s pillow as she lay sleeping. The cheerful blue and yellow flecks showed up easily in her long hair and on her bright white sheets. Sometimes she wondered if she was suffering from lead poisoning, hence her decreased IQ and increasingly dumb dreams, but supposedly the paint would have to be falling directly into her mouth, which it wasn’t. It was falling directly into Pi?on’s mouth, however, and he only weighed nineteen pounds.
“Show me your tongue,” said Greta.
He paused, tongue still on the door, and looked the other way. He liked to pretend not to know if she was speaking to him or some other dog, but he was the only dog here. He thought he could wear the door down by licking it to death, which was what he did to tennis balls, licking the woolly nap for forty-five minutes before skinning it with his nubby jujube teeth and then licking the hollow rubber core until all the air went out of it and the ball was officially dead. Rats were easier and less time-consuming than tennis balls. He’d killed over a dozen so far—big, fat country rats—along with mice, woodchucks, baby rabbits.
She let him out of the house and listened for her other housemates. Only a faint buzzing came from the basement. She descended the stairs carefully in her socks, watching where she stepped. Her housemates had started dying soon after she moved in. Sometimes they were only half-dead and twitching on the floor, and she’d step on them by accident, which was of course upsetting. She’d never thought of them as individuals, but now that they were dying, she made sure to look at each one. Such hairy bodies! Such oddly shaped eyes! Sometimes they died in pairs and seemed to be holding hands. She found them everywhere, on windowsills and countertops, in cups and drawers. Last week she’d found one in her hairbrush.
Her housemates were sixty thousand honeybees. And one human named Sabine, who was still alive and smoking a cigarette. No, she wasn’t French. She loved smoking, however, and butter. She also knew a few things about wine, had superior taste in art and bed linens, worked as little as possible, and would snort a line of cocaine or pop a few pills if you put them in front of her but stayed away from hallucinogens. An empty nester in her midfifties, Sabine was newly divorced and single. Rather than join a dating site, she’d purchased the ancient Dutch farmhouse in which she and Greta now lived. The house sat on twelve acres and was surrounded by fruit and dairy farms. Although it felt like the edge of nowhere, they were only a one-cigarette drive from town.
Greta had heard the house described as “the Fight Club house with comfy furniture,” but it was a century and a half older and way more beautiful. Dutch, not Victorian. Built by wealthy fur traders in 1737, the house had been uninhabited for over a hundred years. No, it wasn’t haunted. Its only amenities, however, were electricity and running water, and it was completely uninsulated.
From a distance, the brick exterior looked sturdy and no-nonsense. Inside, however, it was all-nonsense—albeit beautiful nonsense: crumbling plaster walls; layers of peeling wallpaper you could count like the rings on a tree; large windows with cracked or missing panes; wide Dutch doors with original hardware; wide pine plank flooring with gaps between the boards, which made for easy eavesdropping; and an enormous fireplace in the kitchen with an iron crane for hearth cooking. Sabine lived on the top floor, Greta lived on the first floor in what used to be the living room, and the bees lived in the kitchen, which was in the basement.
Greta suspected the fur traders had owned slaves, and that the slaves had lived in the little room off the kitchen, where Sabine now grew marijuana and where Greta sometimes double-checked for ghosts. She never saw any, but perhaps Pi?on did? The black fur on his face had turned a stark and sudden white about a week after they moved in. Shock, presumably, from seeing the souls of dead slaves, or （more likely） finding himself in the Hudson Valley after living in California all his life. Many more of Greta’s hairs had turned white, as well, and Sabine had a white streak on the left side of her head, which she claimed had been given to her by the devil.