Flashlight

by Susan Choi

Anne was, at least until recently, beautiful enough to turn heads; she’d known it, and been careful with the framing of her beauty,

The town had briefly turned itself inside out for her—she’d grasped what it was to belong there, to step out her door without feeling the atmosphere flinch in alarm. For a blessed instant she’d forgotten her body. She’d viewed the abundance for sale at the market with the same appraising calm she’d once trained on the cold cuts at the German-style deli at home. She’d again been a housewife and mother. She’d repossessed her minor powers.

At first she saw herself as a bug in a jar. Then one day the jar was gone.

When Louisa hated her mother, it was because the thought of her caused so much pain. When she hated her father, it was because she was conscious of emulating his remoteness.

A man who is, if not exactly tender toward her, very careful and watchful. This is how he shows love, she believes. She also will try to show love, by not showing surprise at his solicitousness.

Any loss of mental control is distasteful to him, distaste his constant emanation toward her, the only way he reaches toward her at all, this ethereal negative touch.

When is night coldest and darkest? Logic tells us, midway between sunset and sunrise. Poetry tells us, just before the dawn. Experience has no opinion. The bulb-bewitched insects have given up killing themselves for the night. Nothing stirs but the irregular wind and the unseen ocean hissing and slapping its coils. The ocean, drowned in darkness on the far side of the street, sounds louder and seems nearer for being invisible. It is this amplification that at last detaches Anne’s helplessness from herself. Empathetic speculation does not accumulate gradually. It electrifies with revelation.

The rest of his life he intended to spend reading books. It

It was the kind of box that had long since ceased being a container and transformed instead into an enigmatic solid it would have caused Anne more effort to throw away than to ignore.

The drawer next to the fridge, she must have said, through the membrane of this scent of the past closing over her face. For a moment she could barely breathe through it, or perhaps she had stilled her own breath trying not to dispel it.

She remembered, as she hadn’t in years,

that for all of their time in Japan she had believed that her symptoms were psychosomatic. That it was all a mental failing of hers, an unconscious willed weakness so powerful that no conscious imploring of hers could unseat it. Please, she remembered begging herself, on those long afternoons on the uncomfortable, too-short, rat-scratchy Japanese sofa. Please, just get your fucking feet on the floor, and get your fucking legs and your butt up above them, and walk, just get up! Just get up! She had thought she was crazy. So had everyone. The Japanese docto...

about the symptoms she’d already had before they’d taken the trip, about the bouts of loss of feeling in her fingers and toes, about tripping and falling in the middle of a flat pavement because her feet had suddenly forgotten what it meant to find the ground. It hadn’t been until after Serk died, and she and Louisa were living with Gerald and Dina, that the neurological specialist at Cedars-Sinai had seated himself on the exam-room footstool and, taking Anne’s two useless feet in his hands, asked, “Can...

Not her fault, then, if her nerves could be considered not-her—and what else could they be, those shredded nebulae whose feeble glow reached Anne’s imagination across light-years of the void of her ailing insides? Anne had sobbed into her hands while the poor doctor, whose experience of suffering to that point had left him unprepared for such a moment, struggled to put on Anne’s socks. He hadn’t realized that her tears weren’t of despair but of relief. It wasn’t in her head. She hadn’t made it all up. She was not a hysteric but the vic...

dismantling her own sewing machine and lubricating all the parts and reassembling them so that they meshed and made stitches again, so that when her body’s rebellion was finally explained in such tangible terms it marked a break with her previous life as complete and uncrossable as the abyss the doctor explained lay between her nerve endings. Continuity between the new Anne and the old one was no more possible than communi...

Perhaps no one but Anne, who had lived with him and tried for so long, could understand how impossible Serk made it to know the least thing about him.

A constant wretched privacy had radiated from him, more powerful and more wretched the nearer you got. Anne surprised herself with this new insight, that Serk’s bristling fortress had also pinioned him like a prison. Had he hated her for having come near? Or for not having come near enough?

she was incapable of sharing a room. Her superior refinement, as she wanted to view it, was in fact a rigid hypersensitivity.

For Louisa’s mother, the story’s moral was that the good always lose by their efforts.

took a train and ferry and train that eventually brought her to Paris, to a filthy terminus where she stood paralyzed before a wall map of the Métro, three years of college French dead on her tongue except for parlez-vous Anglais.

She wasn’t a runner, she wasn’t a physical person of any kind, her body generally felt more like an antagonist than an ally, but it was as though her mind, that strange little capsule she thought comprised her whole existence, had broken apart like an egg so her body could revel in the sensation of the hard pavement shocking her bones, the sweat between her breasts and under her arms and in the roots of her hair, the glances of barely engaged passersby mere flares of color at the edges of her vision.

Love is, perhaps, the sensation of expertise that erupts out of nowhere, and as time goes on accumulates enough soil at its feet to be standing on something.

it didn’t matter, Louisa didn’t know, she understood that her value relied in large part on her continued not-knowing. And she, in turn, became adept at rewarding not-knowing in her mother. In this way she retrained her mother to stop asking such questions as when would Louisa return to the US, or when would she go back to college, or when at least would she visit—rewarding only the humblest inquiries with any reply.

So Anne did what Louisa had been nagging her to do for several years already, and “downsized” to one of those so-called assisted living places—“assisted dying” is what Walt would say. The truth was, though it had been perhaps the worst move of her life, when it was finally over Anne did feel a bit of what Louisa, always lecturing, had scold-promised her she would feel. Not “relief,” but at least a dumb numbness. A passive plopping-down and not-thinking. She liked that the new place was so small she’d had to jettison half her belongings and cram the rest so tightly together that normal

Now all the indescribable hard work Anne had put in, days spent just getting one box of books unpacked into a bookshelf, weeks spent corralling a single slippery haystack of paper into the regimentation of hanging files—no one who had not spent hours in her company understood how long it took Anne to perform even the lightweight tasks to which she was limited, how each separate book, each handful of paper, had to be cajoled into place by hands and arms that were starting to insist on their own cajoling, after decades of uncomplaining compensation for those bum legs and feet—had been erased at a stroke.

Anne’s tiny apartment, which she had filled to her satisfaction to the brim, overflowed on all sides. More boxes: a murder of boxes. Boxes Anne had never in her worst nightmares feared seeing again, let alone unpacking. Though the boxes were “only” paper—“That’s all,” Tobias had reassured her, somehow not understanding, as Anne did, that a single box of paper was like ten boxes of anything else—it might