I am so glad when their footsteps fade away. The fires within actually quiet a little. The fat man might abandon his post to make tea.
I get up, and for a moment I fill with hideous hope. But no. The entire left side of my body is still ablaze. The right side is in painful spasm. All the muscles in my right leg still concrete. The fists in my back have multiplied. The fist behind my knee is so tight that I can’t straighten my leg at all, can only limp. My foot is still being crushed by an invisible weight. I think of telling Mark this at our next session. But would he believe me through the wall of his certitude?
Our ultimate goal, Mark will say during a session, often while stabbing needles into my lower back and thigh, is centralization. To move the awareness （he means my pain） from the distal places （he means my leg） and return it to its original source （he means my back）。
The distal places, I murmur. Sounds poetic.
Mark appears confused by this word, poetic.
You could think of it like that, I guess. He shrugs but looks suspicious. As though this way of thinking is part of my problem.
From the bottle marked Take one as needed for pain, I take two. From the bottle marked Take one as needed for muscle stiffness, I take three. I look down into the dusty bowels of the plastic orange pill jar, and I briefly consider taking all of them. Throwing the window back open. Falling to the floor. Lying there and letting the snow fall and fall on my face. Pressing my hand to my chest until the pounding of my heart slows and then stops. Joe, the custodian, possibly finding me in the morning. I’ll be beautifully blue. He will grieve. Will he grieve? I picture him weeping into his broomstick. Didn’t a fairy-tale heroine die this way?
I take a well-squeezed tube of gel that contains some dubious mountain herb that one of the polo-shirted, one of the lab-coated, one of the blue-scrubbed, said I might try, that is useless. You could try it, they all say with a shrug and a Cheshire cat grin. I rub it all over my back and thigh and I tell myself it does something. I can feel it doing something. Can’t I?
Yes.
Surely it’s doing something.
CHAPTER 2
WHEN I GET to the theater, they’re already sitting on the stage as they were in my daymare. Legs swinging over the edge. Faces shining but unreadable. Mutinous? Maybe. Hard to tell. Still, they’re here. They each appear to be holding a copy of All’s Well （my director’s cut）—that’s something. They haven’t torched them in a communal burning. Yet. That’s something too. Third rehearsal. They have already formed vague alliances in accordance with the social hierarchy and are sitting in their respective clumps. Not smiling. Not frowning. Waiting. Just staring with their young eyes that think they see. Briana sits in the center, my soulless leading actress, my Helen, who doesn’t deserve at all to play Helen. Beside her is Trevor, her boyfriend, who is playing Bertram. And of course there’s Ellie in the corner. My gray-fleshed, gray-eyed favorite. My dark mouse of a soul. Last year she played the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. This year, she plays the ailing King, though she would be the perfect Helen. The rest of the students to me are a sea, a dull and untalented sea, and have been cast accordingly. They stare at me, their glazed eyes registering my decrepitude, their open mouths yawning in my face.
My leg stiffens. I smile. “Hello, all,” I say.
They murmur hello back. Their smallness, their radiant faces, their youth, usually move me a little. So adorable, really. Today though, I only feel fear.
Have you ever directed a play before? the dean asked in the interview.
Oh, yes, I lied, nodding. Shakespeare. Brecht. Chekhov. Beckett, obviously. Lots of Beckett.
They look at me now. Waiting, I realize, for me to speak. Because there are things I say, apparently, aren’t there things I say? That light them up? That sway them? I have forgotten these things that I say. Tonight even more is required, I can tell. A stirring up of morale. They’ve read the play a few times now, the play I have chosen over the play they wanted. And there are hurt feelings. There is incomprehension. Ms. Fitch, we don’t understand. Why? Why are you making us do this play?
I feel cold sweat down my back, and my right leg seizes up even more. I become terribly aware of my limp, my hunched hobble. I lean against the table. I try to smile more warmly. I’m their friend, yes? Remember? I imagine the student evaluation: It’s clear that Ms. Fitch is trying her best, but she’s really disorganized and loses control of group discussion a lot. I feel we would get more out of the experience if she were more like a real director.
“And how is everyone?” I ask. Trying for a soft voice, for brightness. This fails. I am met with only dead-eyed faces. So I switch gears. I try for a certain mysteriousness. I make a fog machine of my expression, a hard line of my mouth. But I’m a bad actress these days. Even they can see that. I don’t convince.