After a moment of hesitation, Marisa proceeded to sit down on the straw loveseat positioned between two chairs. She inspected the magazines on the coffee table but only found French psychoanalysis publications. So she let her eyes wander to the far end of the room, where she could see a door next to a sideboard with a vase of red anthuriums.
The sight of the swollen, shiny, blood-red flowers made her uncomfortable. She averted her gaze to the watercolor hanging right above them, a square canvas displaying a black circle against a white background. She stared at it, intrigued, until Doctor Spitzer emerged from the consulting room and beckoned.
The psychoanalyst was best defined by her eyes: two impenetrable green sparks magnified by thick tortoise-frame glasses. The white of her skin, almost transparent, sprung to life with the fiery hue of straight, short hair. The suit and scarpino shoes were gray. The age, indefinite. The posture revealed vigor. When preceding Marisa in the consultation room, instead of walking, she marched.
There, light-green walls suggested a soothing ambiance for handling the troubles of the psyche. Set against one of them was the divan topped by a painting almost identical to the other in the waiting room, except this one displayed inverted colors—a white circle against a black background. On the divan’s edge, Marisa noticed a small blanket neatly folded and a box of tissues. A sober desk and two caramel leather armchairs filled the remainder of the small room.
Doctor Spitzer sat in one of the armchairs and signaled for Marisa to take the other. She had an astute expression.
“Very well,” she said. “Now you are going to tell me what your problem is, without omitting any thought that may occur to you while you talk. Here everything is important. Do you see that painting?” She pointed to the watercolor above the divan. “What does it show us?”
Marisa reflected for a while. The sphere, she deduced, must have a meaning linked to the mysteries of the human psyche. She studied the image attentively, from top to bottom, from left to right. Then responded with caution: “A white circle.”
Beaming with a smile that combined insight and triumph, Doctor Spitzer shook her head.
“You are mistaken. The image consists of a white circle and also a black square, but most people only perceive what’s on the foreground. If we were to make an analogy, the white circle represents the manifest content of your thoughts. The black background hoards repressed wishes, neurosis, everything that is situated beyond the conscious level. The unconscious, you see, is the fertile ground for symbolisms. That’s how it communicates with the conscious mind. In such a quicksand terrain, for instance, the female sex can be represented by a box. Or a crochet purse.”
“Oh…”
“Now let’s concentrate on the matter at hand. And remember: everything you think or say means something else.”
“Oh…”
Not knowing exactly how to begin her account, Marisa moistened her lips, cleared her throat, fiddled with a strand of hair and started to braid it. In a belated reflex, she hid her crochet purse under the armchair. Doctor Spitzer observed her in vigilant silence while Marisa resisted the urge to join her purse under the armchair.
How to explain the inexplicable? One week had passed since the disturbing events at her college, and she still didn’t understand what happened. Flashes brought to her memory a kaleidoscope of isolated scenes, which she had a hard time piecing together in coherent order… The confusion in the classroom after she had fainted. The mad escape through the campus. Her reflection on the window pane. The man behind the bush. Her mother despairing like in a bad Mexican soap opera. Valentina’s visit that afternoon. The rush to the hospital, where a strong sedative was prescribed to both daughter and mother…
As Marisa described the incident, she relived the details with disturbing clarity. Worst of all were the comments that spread in her college afterwards. Classmates stated no one peered through the window. The college security guard said he saw Marisa running indeed. No man had even remotely chased her.
“So it was all a figment of your imagination,” Doctor Spitzer concluded.
“Apparently, yes. But I could swear… that man looked so real.” Marisa blinked, on the verge of tears. “Do you think I’m crazy, doctor?”
“Be calm. Desperation won’t help, we need to tackle the problem with a rational approach. What triggered the crisis?”
The therapist entwined her fingers and leaned back solemnly, waiting for an answer. Marisa shook her head. She didn’t know what to say. Her mind was spinning, once again peopled with disconnected images.
Dismayed, she clenched her hands.
“I’m scared,” Marisa blurted out.
“Scared of what?”
“Everything.”
“Be more specific.”
Doctor Spitzer then cast a look at Marisa that almost pierced her soul. Marisa sunk in the chair and glanced at the evening sky through the window. She shivered. The night gave her claustrophobia. She would have preferred another time slot, but the psychoanalyst’s schedule was full. Averting her eyes from the window, Marisa tried to reflect and say something that would make sense.
That thing, she explained, had started with a vague discomfort every time she entered an elevator. She became obsessed with the free-falling bodies theory, thinking the elevator would plummet. Her uneasiness then expanded to incorporate overpasses, bridges, cliffs. Now everything merged into one and the same terror. She was afraid of going near windows. Afraid of having a car accident. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of sounds, afraid of silence. An intangible danger lurked wherever she went.
There was nowhere to run. Danger lived within her.
“You‘re afraid of your own emotions and had a panic attack, that’s all,” Doctor Spitzer diagnosed without the slightest hesitation.
“A panic attack?”
“Calm down.”
Calm down? Marisa stared at her in despair.
Doctor Spitzer gave back an unflurried gaze. She checked her golden wristwatch and announced: “Our time is up.”
5. The Number One
Fortunately, June was coming to a close. Marco needed a vacation. Needed to disappear. His mood had been awful, and not even the long sessions at the gym helped. When he wasn’t lifting the weight of the world along with the training gear, he’d burrow in downtown shops until he lost track of time. Searching and searching—for what, he didn’t know. That nervous energy found no escape. With great difficulty Marco dissimulated his state of mind. At school, Belvedere threw small talk to establish a male complicity that didn’t interest him in the least. He actually felt like punching the director in the face: Celeste, the rejected librarian, now wept in the corners. It was heartbreaking.
Earlier that day, when he had joined her in the cafeteria, Marco made an innocent comment about the weather. It looked like it was going to rain. That’s all. Celeste nodded, then suddenly poured a deluge of tears into her coffee mug. She feigned to have a mote in her eye and he, pretending to believe it, offered a napkin to dry her face.
Marco hated playing the fool. Besides, women’s tears always made him nervous, with their flood of indecipherable emotions. Not to mention the accusations. It was no coincidence the ancient Greeks had created a female archetype associated with the instability of waters: Aphrodite, conceived in the ocean foam, the goddess of Love and mother of Fear, beautiful and seductive, unpredictable and willful—and probably a crybaby too.
At the sight of the sobbing librarian, Marco thought of Marisa. Of that rainy afternoon, the car pervaded with vetiver, her face marked by weeping, the textbooks spreading on the floor… before things changed. In the cadence of memories, the recollection also stemmed somewhere inside his chest.
It had been a long time since he felt that void. He needed to see her. As soon as he arrived home, Marco grabbed his cell phone and placed the call. While it rang and rang, he could hardly keep his imp
atience at bay. He hung up at the first words of the automatic reply.
Pensive, Marco swung by his office and approached the bookcase to retrieve one of the copies he was currently reading (Coldness and Cruelty, a complex study by Gilles Deleuze on the works of Sacher-Masoch, which he was determined to finish). Then he changed his mind and took the first thing that came into his hands, opening it at random: “We are two abysses—a well staring at the sky.” He issued a faint laugh. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. Thanks for the irony, Universe.
Marco pulled out another title without looking. Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche. Good, philosophy never failed to relax him: “If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Now this was getting just ridiculous, thought Marco. And then he dropped the book, which landed on the chair with a resigned rustle.
Reaching for his cell phone, he tried her number again. This time, on the second ring, she answered breathless. He went straight to the point.
“Can you come here?”
There was an imperceptible pause on the other end.
“When?”
“Tonight. The usual time.”
“I can’t. It’s my mom’s birthday, and there’s no way I’ll be able to escape it… Tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow, then.”
New pause. When she spoke, her voice faltered slightly.
“Did you plan anything?” she probed.
“Not yet. How about a surprise?”
“I love surprises, Marco.”
“There you go. I’ll do something special for you.”
“I can’t wait.”
At those words, Marco smiled and glanced absent-mindedly at the urban landscape outside the window. His tension began to ease.
She, on the other hand, let out a contrived laugh. She wanted to show him she had everything under control. Sensing Marco’s smile, she wondered what he had in mind and restrained the wish to be with him in that very moment.
“I’ll stop by tomorrow night, then,” she said in a nonchalant tone. “I need to take care of a few things, but I think I can make it on time…”
As soon as he ended the call, Marco became agitated again. She no longer filled the void. Before, it was different. But was it really? Perhaps he couldn’t see. Perhaps he didn’t want to. Marco closed his eyes. No, he didn’t want to see. He still hoped. He ignored the fact that she had started to fade. Not even her name visited his thought now. It was simply “she.”
Marco felt guilty. He decided to make up to her and concentrated on the plans for the following evening. After all, he had promised a surprise, right? Marco went to the kitchen, seized the die from the counter and sat at the table, fixing his eyes on the ivory cube for inspiration. A classic piece indeed, he thought. It must be worth far more than the ridiculous sum he had paid. Marco wondered why that relic cost so little. He wasn’t superstitious but could swear the die sometimes pulled pranks on him. It had been like that from the beginning. In a plastic city with a plastic lover.
He and his friend Jeff had flown to Las Vegas for the weekend. It would be his first and last visit to the city. He wasn’t impressed with what he saw—a shiny trap lulled day and night by the howling of jackpot. In the first evening the two headed for a casino after dinner. At eleven o’clock, they decided to return to the hotel but got lost. They entered a narrow gallery with bars and fast-food restaurants, planning to take a shortcut; the gallery, however, had no exit. What they found in the other end was an antique shop. In its window, between an old camera and a china teapot, Marco saw the die.
The place was open, and they entered a dim room covered in walnut bookcases darkened by time. It smelled of old paper with a faint trace of camphor. No one showed up to assist them, so they inspected the shelves populated with objects representing various decades, from vintage atlases to statuettes of Baroque angels. Marco clapped his hands and called out without a response. After a few minutes, he couldn’t resist and picked up the die from the display.
“That’s on sale,” informed a voice at his back.
He spun around to face a woman with very white skin and very black eyes and hair. She wore a dark, long dress with sleeves down to her wrists that didn’t match the July heat. She drew closer, limping slightly.
“It’s a handmade replica of a two-thousand-year old Roman die used as an oracle. Elephant ivory. A great piece. Notice that each dot contains a spiral, a symbol of life’s mysteries, which are formed in circles: the planets and their orbits, the cycles of creation, destruction and re-creation. Time itself is a spiral that twists between present, past and future.”
“Interesting. So it’s used for divination games,” said Marco.
“In principle, yes. But the second die is missing from the set and the oracle turns out incomplete. Sometimes that generates strange results.”
At those words, Marco thought of Lorena and tried to ignore the twinge in his chest. He gave a smile that mocked itself. An incomplete die for an incomplete man. It should serve him right.
They arrived at the hotel a half-hour later, Jeff empty-handed and Marco with a small box wrapped in green paper. They both felt tired but made a stop at the lobby bar. Amid the reds of soft upholstery and curtains, the patrons’ discreet voices mixed with the playback of big band classics. The room smelled of alcohol and sleepless nights. The two of them lodged at the ebony counter, ordering whiskey for a toast. It wasn’t long before she came by—spiraling the night, spiraling time.
Marco felt the spiral of vertigo and pushed her away from his thoughts. The preparations for that evening entailed his attention. He concentrated, shook his hands and tossed the die. It seemed to float in slow motion, describing a mortal leap that propelled it toward the edge of the table. A few more fractions of an inch, and it would have fallen onto the floor. When Marco saw the result, he reached out to roll the die again. He stopped with his hand in midair.
The rule was to accept the result established by whichever number turned up first. That was the beauty of the game.
Marco stared at the lone dark circle on the surface of the white square.
He rolled the die again.
6. White Circle, Black Square
Marisa saw Doctor Spitzer on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in the evenings. On Fridays, as she digested the sessions of the week, she wouldn’t go out: her head kept stewing. What about those emotions she feared so much? She thought of the unconscious’ black canvas, then tried to focus on her own emotions. All she could think of was a white canvas, just like the one in the therapist’s waiting room. An immaculate white canvas. Or maybe (following Doctor Spitzer’s reasoning) it was a canvas whitened by the veil of fear: a white square concealing the black square of the unconscious. A white square somehow blackened because it dissimulated. It could hence be interpreted as a black square that masked the white square that masked the black square…
All that thinking was giving Marisa a headache.
And she hadn’t even gotten to the circles yet.
She would lie on the divan and talk about her mother, remember her father, draw recollections from the dusty drawers of memory. Doctor Spitzer wrote and wrote in her little black notebook—until, in the end of June, Marisa had a cathartic dream, a true watershed in her treatment that was torrentially interpreted by the dexterous psychoanalyst.
“It’s a full moon night,” narrated Marisa. “I’m following a firefly in the woods. I come to a white house on a lake surrounded by pine trees. The windows are boarded up, but the door is unlocked. I go inside… and soon find myself in a dark corridor with many doors… I try to reach the first door, and the hallway starts stretching…”
She moistened dried-out lips. Inside her chest, her heart shrank.
“Suddenly the door is right before me and a cave-like voice calls… Marisa! I flee, frightened, to the second door. It gapes open, and
I enter a room with a clear crystal tank… The door squeaks behind me and a black cat appears. It meows… and instantly the tank breaks into a thousand pieces. Among the shards, I find a scrap of paper with a weird equation… V1² = V2² ± 2 g.h - ∞… The paper expands in my hands until it becomes a sliding door…”
With a shiver, Marisa interrupted herself. She didn’t like to remember that part of the dream. Doctor Spitzer mumbled it was interesting and, without lifting her eyes from the notepad, pressed her to continue. Marisa sighed and complied: “Then I realized… that was the formula for calculating the speed of my own falling body. I heard the physics teacher summon me with his cave-like voice: Marisa, the experiment is about to begin! Get in the elevator right now… The door slid to the side and I… I got in…”
“Then what?”
The door closed at once. Inside it felt cold and the air was a mist. Like a Holy Grail wrapped in a halo of moonlight, a bouquet of anthuriums floated in the middle of the elevator. She reached out to grab it and, as soon as her hands touched it, the light wavered. The shadows detached from the walls, towered up to the ceiling and formed a circle. Marisa frantically pressed the button to open the door until it popped out and rolled at her feet… Darkness grew deeper. Terror overwhelmed her, she despaired. Suddenly, Sérgio emerged from the ring of shadows. Marisa’s first instinct was to back off… Then she changed her mind. Oblivious to the shadows and her own fear, she raised the anthuriums and landed them on the ex-boyfriend.
By the time Marisa woke up, she had destroyed the whole bouquet on his head.
Doctor Spitzer wanted to learn more about Sérgio. Marisa told her the two of them had met at a party. It was love at first sight. He seemed perfect: dark and tall, expansive, affectionate, a business management student. They had plans to marry once Sérgio graduated, and her mother was quite fond of him. Until Marisa caught him with the diving instructor. It had been one of the most dreadful experiences in her whole life. Sérgio was spending the weekend in the countryside, at a friend’s bachelor party. He would be back in the early evening on Sunday.
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