The woman down the hall is a hoarder, and her tiny apartment is a labyrinth of boxes and trash. She never emerges from her layer of debris, and yet somehow it grows to consume the edges of the walls and all the empty spaces in between.
The woman down the hall slinks her body over and between, collapsing into the tiniest spaces because that is where she feels safest.
She is a rat, this woman. We imagine her apartment is a three-dimensional maze, and she maniacally rushes through it, chasing the scent of something absolutely delectable.
We have never seen this woman, but we know she is real. At nights when it is quietest, we can hear the shuffle of something moving somewhere, the scrape of her skin against all that trash.
Her apartment stinks of rot. It is a landfill, a dumping ground. It smells of teenaged boys after gym class, that irremovable odor of adrenaline and adolescence. It hovers for yards around her door. For a while, this smell drove our guards away, but we are a diligent kind. We do not waver. Sooner or later, someone will come or go. She is human, and she must eat to survive.
She has been here longer than any of us, longer than the groundskeeper and the landlady, and we hope that somehow she will survive until after we are gone. We would hate to have her myth destroyed for a heart attack or high cholesterol, something mundane. We have invested too much imagination and effort into creating her, this hidden woman, this woman who has forgotten the rest of the world.
Continuous Women 5
The woman down the hall is fat. She’s nothing but a bucket of lard, only larger. Much larger, and she’s got skin that folds over itself, forever hidden. There must be mold and mildew in those pockets of skin and flesh that never see light, and in those pockets, there must live these little creatures who recycle all that perpetual sweat and stink. She is a virtual ecosystem, this gross woman down the hall with all her lard and all her skin and all her stink, and strangely, we want to explore it. We want to claim it as our own, if only we could find an adequate place to stake our flagpole.
Hidden Women 4
The woman down the hall no longer lives here. One — for everything of any note occurs at night — she packed her entire apartment into one small handbag and walked away, leaving a large hole where her home once sat. It was as if she opened her satchel and invited the wallpaper and the siding, the lamps, light fixtures and their ceilings in to leave with her.
The hole gapes at the world outside. The hole where the woman down the hall used to live reveals our most hidden secrets.
Hidden Women 5
Beneath the woman down the hall, there is another woman. She is tucked beneath ruffles of skirt and ebony corset. She is a small woman, this woman beneath another woman, but she is happy.
She tells us, “It is warm where I live but never too hot. I believe it is something akin to your California.”
We tell her that we rarely take note of the weather.
She says, “But one must always be prepared for variant temperatures.”
She tells us this like she knows what it’s like to go outside. This woman who barely has skin covering her because she doesn’t need it, this woman who lives in suffocation tells us how to dress! We scoff.
We say, “Woman, if you care so much about the weather, why do you live inside another woman, hidden away from the world?” We say, “Woman, it’s apparent that it’s been so long since you’ve seen sunlight that your skin has restricted into your muscles, and even your muscles are pale.”
She looks at us.
There is an old photograph hanging above the smaller woman. It is the height of our chests. The sepia bleeds into its boarders.
She continues looking at us. Her transparent face is sad, frustrated.
Her fading face is bored.
Then, she lifts the lady’s skirt and crawls back in.
~ ~ ~
The Great Freud’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised women visited in thought but not yet discovered or found.
Sigmund asks Lou: “You, who go about exploring and seeing things, can you tell me toward which of these futures — these women — the favoring winds are driving us?”
“For these women I could not draw a route on a map or set a date for the arrival. At times all I need is a brief glimpse of possibility, an opening in the midst of an incongruous word, a glimmer of light in a pupil, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect woman, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of strengths unavailable to men and weaknesses that are more subtle reasons to improve than flaws. If I tell you that the woman toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for her can stop. Perhaps while we speak, she is rising, brushing her hair and donning a loose summer dress, within the confines of your empire, you can hunt for her, but she will never appear as you imagine her to be.”
Already the Great Freud was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the women who menace in nightmares and maledictions.
He said: “It is all useless, if the last woman can only be in the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”
And Andreas said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Freud replied: “The woman that exists in this inferno can hardly be expected to see through it; and men are too caught to even look up.”
And Andreas said, calmly: “And that is why we look, door to door, searching for the woman to help guide us through this inferno toward freedom. She is one person, but she is also every woman in your atlas. Every woman.”
The End
About the Author
Lily Hoang is the author of several books, including Changing (the recipient of a PEN Beyond Margins Award). Hoang serves as co-director of Puerto del Sol, Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and Associate Editor at Starcherone Books. She received her M.F.A. in Prose from the University of Notre Dame in 2006.