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The woman tells me to remember. "Just try," she prods, holding a flashlight that looks like a pen. She clicks it on and off in an offbeat manner. I try to find a rhythm.
I remember limbs that curved into ninety degree angles, fingers tracing letters onto my skin: G - E - T - O - U - T, small post it notes with a girl's scribbled handwriting. I can remember him like an out of focus photograph, clawing half moons into my skin with his fingernails.
I shake my head. "Nothing." I try to make the world turn white. Maybe I can erase everything.
She asks about the man I was with. She wants to know his name.
I tell her about how much he loved carpenter jeans, how I wrapped my index finger around the loop and pulled him closer, still closer, to me. I tell her about the gallons of milk he drank, how he said it cleansed him. I recount the trip to a tattoo parlor on South Street, how strange he looked face down with his fists clenched.
She says that none of this helps.
She wants to find him, to put the pieces together.
I tell her that he won't come back, not for me. He wouldn't risk getting caught.
I imagine her sitting on the floor of her luxury apartment with scraps of paper from her legal pad spread around her, all the notes she's frantically scribbled the past week, all her theories about why I am not getting better. Her boyfriend or girlfriend opens the door with his or her key (since it is quite late) and smiles at the sight of Dr. Wilma Keyes still in her suit, skirt hiked up around her bare thighs (no stockings by this time) and her left fingers tickling the bottom of a large wine glass filled halfway with a merlot someone gave her last Christmas.
She says that he did terrible things to me. She says I need to get them out of my head, cleanse myself.
I don't feel dirty.
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