Chapter 22

22

All About You

In the past, individuals with CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain) were treated no better than people at circus freak shows. One of the best-documented cases was Czech immigrant Edward H. Gibson, a vaudeville performer known as the Human Pincushion. In 1932, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease recorded his pain-defying stunts where he would invite audience members on stage to skewer him with fifty to sixty pins "anywhere but the abdomen and groin."

Sometimes Eva could relate to poor old Edward H. Gibson, a mutant on show. Soon after her diagnosis, she was a global news story too. The New Yorker profiled her, speculating that cases similar to hers had died in terrible circumstances, of frostbite and heat stroke, hemorrhages and heart attacks without feeling a single thing. One TV channel asked if Eva would like to appear on their show so the audience could watch as she placed her hand in a flame or, failing that, consume a bowl of Scottish bonnet chilis live. This was a different sort of freak show, but it was made clear to her that, for the sake of her art career, she'd be foolish to refuse.

The night before I see Nate again, I sleep fitfully, my dreams spiked with nameless demons. I walk on eggshells at home, the atmosphere curdled because Amira and Tony are getting on badly, shouting at one another or grimly silent. Reluctant to take sides, I stay out of it, inwardly tormented about where my loyalty should lie. I wake too early, brittle and frayed. As I walk along the avenue to his house, the river glistens in the spring sunlight. There's a charge in the air, the energy of one season erasing another.

"Hey," says Nate, answering the door. He is unshaven, relaxed, in a T-shirt and jogging pants. His tone is neutral, neither warm nor distant, impossible to read. It's as if the other evening has never happened. He's clearly unphased by it. Was he ever going to mention Columbia?

Inside his study, the air is dark and cool and airless. I sit at his desk, glance up at the whiteboard that hangs above it, the row of handwritten chapter summaries on there. Our scrawled notes still colonize one wall, his cursive black loops and mine, neat block letters in red:

More of E's experience of pain here? Footnote to pain research? N's childhood? E everything has changed. Now doubt splinters my mind, longing on one side, mistrust on the other.

Kath's expression had said it all as she confirmed his move to Columbia, launching himself in New York with Priya on hand to support him. Maybe Nate did lie about Priya's affair with Eva to cover up for their own. I glance back up at our notes, shake my head in quiet disbelief. How easily I had been won over by him, his puppet, reducing his marriage to a fiction spread over thirty index cards. How inexorably his secrets, and now mine too, are pushing us apart, the accumulation of all the unsaids ruling out the potential for there to have ever been anything genuine.

Yet here we still are, back down the rabbit hole instead, where it is easier to self-deceive. I cling to these final hours of the memoir because they've become something else for me. A place to retreat and hide, from myself as well as him.

Nate reads and I try to edit, my mind skittering from one barbed anxiety to another. It's getting crowded, all these unspoken words piling up, threatening to erupt. I've avoided everyone's calls since I met Kath, including Tony's. He texts instead, always when I'm at Algos House, as if he has a sixth sense I'm here. His messages are increasingly urgent, paranoid. He despises Nate, wants me out of Algos House for good.

Don't hang out there. Seriously, Anna. The guy's dangerous. Finish up and get out. He's a fucking NARCISSIST!!!

I manage to reply something while Nate makes coffee, but he won't be appeased.

Everyone's a narcissist. LOL

Why don't you ever listen to me, A. Do you want this to play out like last time?

Like last time.

I stare at the screen, my lungs freeze, air sucked from the room. Nothing could play out that badly again. Surely.

"Are you okay, Anna?" Nate's voice springs from the silence. He stands behind me, hands me a mug over my shoulder. There's clear concern in his gaze.

"Sure. Just work hassling me."

I drop my phone in my bag. Eyes back to the screen. Engage. Somehow the day takes shape. I push the outside world away, delete and rewrite, discuss and confer and, by late afternoon, we're almost done. He reads and I watch the knot of muscle work in his jaw as he chews the end of his pen, his eyes critical, reproving.

If the two types of loss are expected and traumatic, mine was undoubtedly the latter. Exactly a year ago my grief was all-consuming, but in writing this book something has shifted.

I see clearly now that I can never step back to how I used to be, only walk a different path. Finally, I have embraced that simple truth, as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus put it: "All is flux, nothing stays still." I have finally processed that everything shall pass, the pain and the pleasure.

One of the many gifts of writing has been to find meaning in the unbearable; to contain it in words has been a huge comfort.

Spring has arrived a little late this year. I can taste it, elemental and fresh. The cherry trees are already shedding, turning the pavements into carpets of confetti, sun piercing the branches and, for the first time in months, I no longer see only darkness ahead. I cannot forget Eva. She is part of me. She'll be with me, somewhere, somehow, in the next chapter of my life. But there's no turning back, I'm ready to step into the light.

"A little bit florid?" he says, finally. "Too—"

"Emotional, corny?"

I scan the words, assume his voice, his dispassionate tone, in my head as I read them silently.

"I see what you mean, but I still think it's good to be reflective, offer that sense of emotional growth, light at the end of the tunnel."

He leans back, arms crossed, staring the screen down. "Okay, well, I can always have a final reread tomorrow."

"No more rereads. I need to send this to Priya in two weeks. Any amendments have to happen now if we want to wrap it up."

"You're right. Let's do it. I'm going with your instinct. It's not exactly me, but I'm happy if you are."

"Sure? I can always change—"

"No. All good." He leaps up, strides to the wall of index cards and scores through the final one. I get up too and we stand back to admire our work. "We're there, Anna."

"Well, not quite," I remind him. "We still have to work together on the final edit."

"Sure, but we've crossed the finishing line." He looks at me and I can't help breaking into a smile. Should we shake hands, embrace? Knowing what has come before, of course we do neither.

Quickly I sit back down again, save it onto a new Google document so we can both work on it remotely over the next two weeks. I copy it to my own email address, just in case, and press Send while Nate checks his phone. He glances across at me, his expression lightens. There's a brightness in his eyes and somehow he looks years younger.

"Come on," he says. "I reckon this deserves a celebration, don't you?"