by Lily Hoang
We wouldn’t mind so much if she were nicer, but she isn’t. She’s an old hag with a stained mud voice. She comes into a room and falls and yells at us. She accuses us of moving things around, and even after we insist that we haven’t, that we wouldn’t, she picks up anything she can reach and with strange accuracy, hits us repeatedly until we are the ones with broken bones and bruised organs.
The woman down the hall, the old bitch, we hope she dies. We hate her, and there are times when we want to move the couch just one centimeter to the left or right. We want to put metal spikes where rugs should be and blackberry bushes into the elevator. We want to see her suffer, but it isn’t right. We aren’t people to discriminate, even against insufferable old women, even if we do hate her. We don’t want to, you see. We don’t. It isn’t right, but she makes it more and more impossible every day.
Women & Names 1
A cut. Not a trim, but a cut. A simple cut. And then, it is different. It’s all different.
The woman down the hall has cut her hair. We used to call her Barbie, back when she looked like Barbie with all that hair, all blonde and everywhere. We thought her head was a bonfire of blonde, there was simply so much of it. We used to snicker when she walked by, bleach swallowing the whole room, but it wasn’t bleached, no, hers was natural and it illuminated dark rooms with adequate reading light. When she walked by, we would imagine ourselves under all that weight, the way it must have hurt her neck and given her migraines. When she walked by, fresh from the shower, beads of water still translucent along the bend of her slight curls, we would want to yell, to stop her, for surely, she would catch pneumonia going out like that. It would kill us if she were sick. We couldn’t handle it.
But that was before. That was when she was Barbie, back when she still had hair, back when her skin was perfectly cooked and tender, back when she wore mini-skirts, ball gowns, and drove a pink Corvette. But that’s not the way things are now, and even though we watch her with interest, we hate her. We hate her for taking away our joy.
~
The Great Freud has dreamed of a woman; he describes her to Lou Andreas:
“When she wakes in the morning, she brushes cleans her teeth while facing north, and it is from this direction that she derives her arrivals and departures for her day. She is a woman who believes in neither fate nor free will. She has a beauty that could blind a man, if only her wit were not so toxic, and her limbs are fixtures to be arranged on whim. Her farewells take place in silence, but with tears and malicious grins. She is constantly cold and wears a shawl over her head. She has many lovers and her only husband she will not touch.
“Set out, explore every corner and crevice, and seek this woman,” Sigmund Freud tells to Lou. “Then come back and tell me if my dream corresponds to reality.”
“Forgive me, my friend, there is no doubt that sooner or later, I will leave you in search of this woman,” Lou Andreas tells him, “but I shall not come back to tell you about her. The woman you seek has one simple secret: she knows only beginnings and can never understand endings.”
~
There were times when Lou Andreas would visit Sigmund Freud in his home, and the two great minds would sit in quiet, conversing in mimicries of chess games. Their eyes would suddenly flare, then subside, then go gray with calm. These were the times they most appreciated each other, when nothing was required or expected.
This was not the norm though. Most often, when the two psychoanalysts intersected in space, there would be idle talk of family and work, one asking the other about spouse or child or lover. One would tell elaborate fictions about so and so who met with so and so and admired him greatly, while the other would respond with admonitions of so and so who should have responded with more respect when meeting with so and so, and these were the times when they both felt that all of this could be condensed into a dream fabric, but neither would let go for long enough for sleep to come.
Thin Women 5
The woman down the hall is too much. She speaks and we laugh and we laugh until we have burned all the calories we’ve consumed that day. She tells a story, and we are hysterical. She sings a little jig and we vomit everywhere. She makes us sick she is so funny. She will be the death of us, this woman. Already, we are skeletons because of her, and there is nothing we can even do about it but laugh and laugh some more.
Trading Women 4
The woman down the hall is particularly susceptible to love falling. This is a term we’ve created particularly for her. Her problem, you see, has less to do with the frequency with which she falls in love, which is often, but rather, her problem is her ability to maintain living — here we mean day to day activities, not physical health, although we’ll get to that soon enough — once she is, in fact, in love. What is worse perhaps than her deteriorating hygiene and tendency to forget clothing when she’s in love is what happens when that love begins to dissolve. We do not mean a break up or a divorce. No, the woman down the hall hasn’t the nerves for that much concentrated emotion. Generally, the objects of her affection are inanimate, although sometimes they move. Sometimes, they’re even human, but she is one of those beautiful souls who can love anything, and thus, you see, her downfall.
The woman down the hall, you see, once she sees a pretty flower, one full of bloom and bees, loves it and loves it deeply, but there isn’t a flower in existence that can live forever, and the moment it begins to change, the woman down the hall cannot stand it. There is an intensity about her that frightens us, even as we speak this. In those moments when love begins to wane, the woman down the hall dies and she dies suddenly, passionately, with fervor.
It is true that we have witnessed her death more than two hundred million times, and we must admit that we never tire of it. The spectacle of the crash cart and CPR, the sirens and fireworks of light, the immediacy, it never wears thin. Of course, there are those times when the woman down the hall doesn’t make it, that they cannot revive her no matter how hard they try, and in those moments, we die a little bit too, but we survive if only because we know that tomorrow, she will be back, right where she was the day before and the day before and the day before, falling in love and dying over and over again.
Women & Eyes 3
The woman down the hall makes voodoo dolls. She puts black turtle beans in the slots where eyes should be, and when she gets angry, she takes a little needle, a needle with the thinnest point, and she scrapes all the glue from the seams until the small black bean falls like Rapunzel’s hair all the way down to the dusty floor.
Women & Names 2
The woman down the hall does not have a name. And why should she? Sometimes when we call her Clinger. Other days: Leech. She’s got this scar that runs along the side of her nose, from the ridge all the way to the crease of her smile, when she smiles, which she doesn’t, because even a smile doesn’t make her pretty. She’s ugly and she knows and we know and no one says a thing to her, not because she’s hideous. Because she’s an annoyance to our whole corporeal.
Women & the Dead 1
The woman down the hall is a replacement, and she is fine with this. We didn’t think she would be fine with it, and yet, somehow, she is. We thought that she of all women, being as spectacular as she is, would have difficulty accepting that she is simply a replacement, a place holder for the original.
But the woman down the hall has always been a replacement. She was conceived as a replacement, a new baby girl to make up for the mistakes her older sister had made, a better version perhaps, or simply another version to live in the space her sister used to occupy. The woman down the hall, when she got older, became the replacement lover. She slept with men whose wives’ vaginas would no longer whet with want. Sometimes, she would ask her lovers to call her by their wives’ names, but even asshole men can’t stoop to that low level so more often than not, they stuck a gag in her mouth. The woman down the hall didn’t mind that either. In her head, she would imagine these lovers moaning their wives’ names while fucking
her, as if that could be a source for her pride, her benevolently loaning her body to salvage sexless marriages.
This is the way the woman down the hall lived for decades, maybe even centuries. She came to us as a replacement. She begged us to call her by the previous renter’s name, and so we did. We called her the woman down the hall, but now, suddenly, things are shifting with her. She’s no longer the same. We see her walking up the hall, and we say hello to her, this woman down the hall, and she looks perplexed. Her face wrinkles and frowns, and then, she says it. She tells us, “I’m in love,” and we don’t know what to do. For so long, this woman down the hall has lived off the discarded trash of others. We look at her, and we say, “Woman down the hall, what will you do?”
But the truth of it is that the woman down the hall is in love, but even in her love, she’s replacing someone else. She’s just another version of a woman her man already loves, and the woman down the hall, she doesn’t even know how to react. She’s been a replacement her entire life, and now, suddenly, she’s sick of it. She doesn’t want to be a replacement. She wants to be the woman this man loves. She wants to be the original, but she can’t change.
“From now on, I’ll describe the women to you,” Freud had said, “and in your journeys you will see if they exist.”
But the women visited by Lou Andreas-Salome were always different from those thought of by the doctor.
“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model woman from which all possible women can be deduced,” Freud said. “She contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the women that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probably combinations.”
“I have also thought of a model woman from which I deduce all the others,” Lou answered. “She is a woman made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, and contradictions. If such a woman is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we can increase the possibility that the woman really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the women who, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve women too probable to be real.”
~
Lou Andreas describes a woman, cell by cell.
“But which is the cell that makes the woman?”
“The woman is not made by one cell or another,” Lou answers, “but by the accumulation of muscle, bone, body they create.”
Sigmund Freud remains silent, reflecting. Then, he adds: “Why do you speak to me of cells? It is only the woman that matters to me.”
Andreas answers: “Without cells there is no woman.”
Trading Women 5
The woman down the hall used to be called Miss, sometimes, Missy, and then there came the day when she asked us to call her Missus. Funny, we call her Miss Missus, which we pronounce: Miss miss us, noun verb direct object. We are objects to her subject.
Women & Eyes 4
The woman down the hall can see through walls. It’s true. She’s like a bionic woman or something, we’re not really sure. We only know that she can, and she thinks it’s a curse. She says she’s a freak for it, but we think it’s cool. We wish we were superheroes like her, but she doesn’t use her power for anything. Sometimes, we even wish that she wouldn’t be a superhero at all, that she’d be a supervillain because she’s hot and we’d want to see her in some black leather or even rubber.
The woman down the hall can see through walls, and she doesn’t do a damned thing with it at all. No, she wears thick, black, pirate patches over her eyes, pretends she’s blind, and we can’t respect that. We think it’s a waste so when we know she’s coming, we move things around. We cleverly swap a futon with a folding chair just so we can watch her fall. We think to ourselves, If this woman can see through walls, she can see through that little eye-patch, but she falls for it every time.
Sometimes, we think she’s just entertaining us when she trips because it’s so half-hearted. Her movement is air.
Women & Names 3
The truth of it is that we rarely learn the names of the women down the hall. We are all the same woman. We are none of those women. And so we are a perfect group of women, every single one of us living right down the hall from one another, from you, from me. Won’t you come in for a cup of tea with honey and fresh cream?
Women & the Dead 2
Don’t be scared now, but the woman down the hall, she isn’t really alive. In fact, she’s not even a little bit alive, but no one moves her. No one lives with her, and her apartment is occupied, with her body, her corpse, that smell. The woman down the hall used to be called Alice, but now that she is dead, we don’t feel right using her name. We do it from time to time, on accident, which causes in us great flushing.
See, Alice has been dead for a decade and someone still pays the rent and someone asked the landlady not to disturb, do NOT disturb says her door, right over the number. The mailman has this place memorized and manages to cram the pages in. We imagine it is just her dead body in there, and an accruing mound of flyers and coupons. It would be much cheaper to buy her a coffin and just put her in the ground already, burn her up, but someone insists on keeping her there, in that room.
We do not know how she is posed, if she is lying down or sitting, how rigor mortis has weighted, gravity. Sometimes, we like to imagine walking in there, the stink and maggots, seeing her body, how much meat would remain, where bone would shine.
We don’t know what happened with her, what her story is exactly. We pretend to know, but even when she was alive, she was never one of us, keeping to loneliness. We don’t know, but we are sure it must be something sinister and her body’s well-being is important to us, not because we have reverence for the dead but because we care. We want good things, moral things, in our building at least, our homes.
But then we think maybe this is what Alice wanted, dead Alice, and we convince ourselves this truth, and so it wouldn’t be right to disturb her.
We sit guard by her door.
The stink of decomposition makes its way through the crack of her door.
On hot days, we can smell it in the garden.
On cold days, whiffs halt us in the foyer.
We are diligent in guarding her door though, just to make sure no one interrupts.
We learn to ignore the smell. Because this must be what she wants.
Women & the Sky 1
The woman down the hall can fly. No, really, it’s true. The woman down the hall is a ghost and several times a year, we see her pass through our brick walls and float out into the sky. She tells us that she goes out on a quest, an odyssey, but she never mentions what it is that she’s looking for, but we know it must be something that is very high up because once she leaves the weight of gravity behind, she wanders up higher and higher until she is a freckle on the moon’s smiling face.
~
In times of need, Freud gave Lou Andreas patients. One young woman in particular confounded the Great Freud. This girl had a savage fear of flora. Whereas she could withstand — and even enjoy — the most toxic of insects crawling over her skin, the moment a blade of grass or the most perfect flower came near her, she would wail, unable to be comforted until the plant-life were removed and the scent of it erased. Even if there were no discernable smell, she would argue that there was, but this was barely translatable considering the pitch of her screams.
Freud asked, or imaged himself asking, “In all your travels and experiences, did you ever happen to see another woman resembling this one?” Freud, while asking this, imagined the girl and her pristine smile, the clarity in her speech, and how quickly this transformed on the introduction of a plant. Before giving her to Lou, he had attempted to trick her with a recreation of a flower, made of silk and the finest scents, and she played with the false flower as though it were a doll.
“No,” Lou answered, “I should
never have imagined a woman like this could exist.”
The doctor tried to peer into her eyes. The Russian lowered her gaze, or imagined herself lowering her gaze. Freud remained silent for the whole day.
After sunset, on the terraces of his home, Lou Andreas-Salome expounded to the doctor the results of her missions. As a rule, the Great Freud concluded his day savoring these tales with half-closed eyes until his first yawn indicated his necessity for rest. As quickly as his first yawn appeared, the old man would retreat to his bed. But this time Freud seemed unwilling to give in to weariness. “Tell me of another woman,” he insisted.
“There is a woman down the hall who has skin that flutters like loose rags,” Lou begins saying, enumerating her names and customs and wares. Her repository could be called inexhaustible, but now she was the one who had to give in. Dawn had broken when she said: “Doctor, now I have told you about all the women I know.”
“There is still one of which you never speak.”
Lou Andreas bowed her head.
“Yourself,” Freud said.
Lou smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”
The doctor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”
And Andreas said: “Every time I describe a woman I am saying something about myself.”
“When I ask you about other women, I want to hear about them. And about you when I ask you about yourself.”
“To distinguish the other women’s qualities, I must speak of a first woman that remains implicit. For me, it is myself.”
“You should then begin each tale of your women from the departure of self, describing yourself as you are, all of you, not omitting any truth as you acknowledge it.”
Outside, the morning sun was brutal. Even though they both wanted some relief, there was little hope from the early light.