Scatterheart

Ever since she was a little girl, she had a recurring dream, at seemingly no premeditated intervals. As a youth, for the longest time, she was unable to determine when she had had the dream for the first time. It would be much later, after she came of age, that the woman realised the dream’s first, and quite theatrical emergence coincided with her mother’s death, or rather with the night before her then-thirty four year old mother passed away.

Another curious characteristic of the dream is that she was not all too convinced that it was only a dream; or a dream at all. While she routinely woke from it covered in her own sweat, with trembling hands and a palpitating heart, which could all well define the ordeal as a nightmare, it was not so much of a dream as much as it was a repeating concept which evolved and devolved, climaxed and plummeted, each time it appeared. It was like an ever-changing theatrical setting, a narrative with the same performers and story but varying stage instalments.

The notion of it was simple — it always, unmistakably, involved the woman getting lost somewhere. But, it wasn’t that she had lost her direction, or that she found herself in an unknown area. She had not been carelessly wandering and then suddenly realised she had no idea where she had wound up. The concept was somewhat more complex than that, namely, she would get lost in the places she knew like the back of her hand, for the one reason that, in her varying long absence, the arrangement of the said place would have been turned upside down. Whether it was the village in which she was born and raised, or the intricate web of streets of the city neighbourhood in which she lived today, the houses, buildings, streets, mounds and alleys would rearrange themselves, change name or direction in such a way that once she, in her dream, would start to return to whence she thought she had come, she would find herself in a horrifyingly new and alien environment, one that would make her heart pound and her ears ring as panic would set in. She would not be able to recognise a thing.

And no matter how much she would try to figure the puzzle out, to find her way out of the novel labyrinth and make it back to wherever she called home, she would be unable to do so and would spend an undetermined amount of time agonising over her situation, all until something would disturb her in her sleep and she would wake up distraught and confused about her surroundings and yet overwhelmed with a new sense of appreciation for her present address.

Another interesting part of the dream was an addition which first appeared when she was well in her teens. She never learned much about this addition. All she knew was that it was a black-clad figure of an unidentifiable gender (admittedly, something in her told her it was in fact a woman) impossible to discern, recognise or memorise. She was quite sure that in her dream she saw, understood and experienced much more than that but each time she woke up, tremoring, she would only know that she had seen the persona somewhere and sometimes in the duration of the dream and that would be as much as she would be able to process before either going back to sleep or dragging herself out of the bed, more tired than she had been when she went to sleep.

Just recently, in the wake of her second independent exhibition — a big step in the life of a young artist — she attempted to paint the figure which appeared to her many times over. She had been toying with the idea for a while, yet was never able to translate the images from her head onto the canvas. And once she finally set herself to do it, try as she might nothing fruitful would come out as for a whole year, the dream did not appear. She painted and painted, a single idea stretched on a number of canvases. She tried to place the figure from her dreams in various settings, yet no matter how many attempts she made a sense of completion remained unattainable. She was about to give up on the idea when, miraculously, last night she was reminded of the shadowy figure while attempting to escape a labyrinthine set of streets in the centre of the city. Now that the dream was less than sixteen hours old, she was in her gallery, after closing time, trying to complete one of the paintings that she had been going back to for months — however, though a layman’s uneducated eye may consider the painting done, she knew it was not; and she wondered if her assistant would notice as well.

“Miss? We should close and go home. It’s getting late. You should get some sleep before tomorrow’s exhibition.”

Her assistant, standing right outside the room in which she was not allowed in for the past several months, spoke slowly and carefully, but the painter could not move from her chair just yet. She was silent and motionless, observing her latest work. Shrouded in a grey matter, the dark figure adorned the canvas giving off a feeling that there was still something missing, a crucial piece she’d been lacking to bless the work with a sense of completion. But, she did not know what it was. Even today, when her nightmare was fresh, it was incomplete. Whatever was missing had gone unnoticed; it had not even been seen when it was there and thus faced with insouciance it decided it was best to slowly disappear.

“There’s a storm coming. You should go home before it hits town,” the assistant speaks again. Her hands fidget as she does. An overwhelming sense of curiosity speaks to her, from the back of her mind, inviting her to step into the room and see what her mentor had been working on so secretly, but before she can give into the temptation, she is startled by the painter’s rushed steps out.

If there was anything the painter detested more than the dream, it was storms. She knew not the origin of this phobia, but whenever any kind of storm was approaching, she could feel a deep sense of doom crawling up her spine. Shivering, she put on her coat while closing the door of the room and signed a ‘thank you’ to her assistant. If she could get to her car within the next fifteen to twenty minutes, she thought, she may be able to evade being left out in the weather.

“Be safe,” the assistant watched the painter go. When she was certain that her mentor had left, the young assistant lingered in the hallway, as her eyes met the closed door of the ‘secret’ room Secret. It was not really so. It was, technically, a workshop. She had been to the room plenty of times in the past thirteen months since she’d been working under the painter, but a few months back, she was unexpectedly asked to not go inside for the ‘time being’. Questions were asked but none received an answer. The assistant knew that the painter had definitely been working on something, and under the presumption she wanted to keep it a total secret before the exhibition, the assistant decided to respect the boundaries with which she had been presented.

However, tonight, she could no longer resist the little voice in her head. She looked around, making sure she truly was alone in the gallery, and then slowly crept into the room. She switched the lights on and was met with a rather bizarre site. There had to have been five canvases, each covered with dark green sheets. The assistant made her way towards one of the canvases and, biting her lip, removed the cover. Upon seeing that the work was unfinished, she moved on to uncovering the next, and then the next, confusing setting deeper and deeper with each motion.

The first canvas featured what may have been a rocky beach, with an unfinished panel of sea in the centre. Somewhere from the sea, a shadowy human-esque figure was emerging, perhaps a swimmer making their way towards the shore. The second canvas only showed a small tree line on each side, and an empty whiteness in the centre. Somewhere behind one of the blurry trees, another figure was hiding, peeking from behind the trunk. The third canvas showed only half of a countryside house, a nearly demolished front yard fence and at the door of the house, an outline of a third figure, blurred. The fourth canvas was just rough outlines of a cityscape, without any figures.

The fifth canvas seemed to be the freshest, and the most complete. It had nothing but the figure on it. The young assistant stared at the painting, analysing this creature on it. It was unusual to see a work of art of such kind for her mentor was known as an abstract painter focusing on human faces and romance, rather than…whatever this is. It was dark and tall; a woman perhaps. A woman wearing a long, black gown, of no particular model or size. The gown followed the grotesquely thin lines of the figure’s body. The face was unfinished, with nothing but a smirking mouth presented. The young assistant could not help but stare at the smirk but the longer she stared, the more uncomfortable she felt. For a moment, she thought that the figure was smirking at her, that it knew it was being scrutinised by a fresh-out-of-art-school beginner.

She had had enough. Inhaling a sharp breath, the assistant rushed out of the workshop, determined not to look back. The moment she turned her back to the canvases, an irrational feeling of being watched washed over her, but she did her best to ignore it, at least until she was relatively safe in the outside world.

The world outside was as ominous as the work of art, or least it had been so as seen through the lens of the painter who, as soon as she saw thick, dark clouds gathering on the evening sky, shook violently, though not from cold, but from a more primeval emotion — fear.

The woman was certain that she would be able to bear having the dream for a week straight, all seven nights of it, but a thunderstorm was an event she could not handle. Especially more so when she was alone, on the streets, making her way to her car which posed no more sense of security than being out in the open did.

Nevertheless thankful that it did not seem it would rain or snow before she’d make it into the car, the woman marched down the street, trying to hasten her steps without breaking a chant which she could never stop herself from doing ever since she could remember. The chant was of no artistic value; it was a simple act of counting every step she took outdoors, and whispering most of the numbers (those she seemed important) under her breath just so that she would not get confused. As tedious as it sounded, there were two thousand three hundred and sixty five steps between her and her car, but she knew very well that such a distance was covered quickly when she put her mind to it.

When there were one thousand two hundred and twelve steps left to go, the woman stopped, pressing her jaws tightly together as a single lightning flashed over the sky, illuminating the road ahead of her. One of the street lights flickered, then went off for a couple of seconds, only to turn itself back on. A tremor passed through her entire body but she moved forward again and listed around thirteen more steps before ominous groans of thunder resonated from the horizon. The storm was not as close as she feared it to be, not yet at least, so she continued to move, feeling joyful when she got to an intersection a couple of streets away from the lot where she had parked her car hours ago.

Looking up, she saw a large, rectangle-shaped digital clock installed on the building of a small shopping mall, showing that midnight had struck thirty-four seconds earlier, and that the temperature outside measured barely above five degrees Celsius. The clock seemed to have stopped, however, for the digits never showed any number of seconds than thirty-four. While she was waiting, her heart jumped up to her throat when another lightning struck. This one was slower and more menacing as it slithered from behind the hills, vein-shaped, and swept across the sky, tearing it in half with its magnificent glow. The painter’s eyes were fixated on the light which brought her nothing but terror and she watched the vein unfurl, illuminate the world in a palette of orange and then shrivel, returning to whence it came.

The traffic light switched to green and, as though she were set on autopilot, the woman’s legs marched forth, hurrying to the parking lot before she was aware of the movement. She felt an unprovoked sense of relief when she crossed the section and entered a less lit and narrower alley, between the mall and a housing development. This felt like a secure, final path to the parking lot. But just when she thought one thousand seventy five and I’m there the thunder struck, louder than before and she froze on her feet, much against her will. A sudden thought occurred to her.

Something was gone.

At the same moment the thunder groaned, something disappeared — it was snatched away from the world, from her, the universe itself. She likened the feeling she had to the one which overwhelmed her as she observed her latest painting and agonised over what it needed to be completed. The same thing which was gone there had now been gone out here. A pivotal piece of the puzzle, she thought, which created the world she knew was now no longer there and for a moment, despite her fear of getting stuck in the incoming storm, she forgot how to move. The whole notion of walking, one leg in front of the other, became alien to her.

The moment, however, passed. After an undetermined amount of time, she felt herself moving again, more determined than ever to get to her goal. But, as she reached the parking lot, her appeasement quickly dwindled when she realised something was wrong there as well. Nothing should have been wrong. The same cars which she had seen while leaving the lot were there, minus one which must have been off with whoever owned it. She looked around and found nothing particularly distressing and yet as she made her way through the automobile maize, a feeling in her gut threatened to make her sick. Subconsciously, she made even more haste when she thought she was close to her vehicle but once the painter stopped, thinking her car was right there, she learned that a whole other vehicle had taken its place.

To say that she knew the lot like the back of her hand would be an understatement and yet the car she found was not the one she needed. Assuredly, it did occur to her that someone might have stolen it in the meanwhile, but her alarm would have warned anyone close by to see what was happening, thus likely preventing the crime from happening and scaring the potential culprit away. And even if the crime was not stopped, the painter was sure word of it would have reached her before leaving the gallery. So, the car had to be there somewhere and yet…It wasn’t. She began to walk around, committing each vehicle to memory, going left and right, up and down between the rows but none of the cars was her own. Wrong colour, wrong model, wrong maker.

It was on the third try back to the spot where she came to first that she realised her heart pounded and her ears rung in the same way they always had in her dream.

No. This isn’t real.

Had she fallen asleep in the studio and was now having a reprise, less than a day later than the last time she dreamed of this?

It could not be. That simply could not be.

Frantic and hysterical, she continued her search, now running around but time stretched on, minutes passed and her chest hurt and she could still not see it. It was gone. It, and whatever piece of the puzzle, they had all gone simultaneously leaving her behind, alone in the open with an incoming storm.

Tears brimmed in her eyes. It had to be there, she thought, it could not have just vanished. But the more she searched the more alien the cars around her felt. It was like she could not ingrain any of them in her memory anymore and those that she did were now wiped out clean from her memory. When it came to the parking lot, her mind was now a tabula rasa.

Please.

During the last attempt of her search, the woman had gone to another part of the lot where she simply knew there was no way she could have left her vehicle, and yet she felt it did not hurt to try. If the place had truly rearranged itself like things and venues did in her dream, then checking every corner made as much sense as checking where she knew she had left it. But, before she was done skimming the whole area, a thunder struck again and scared her into letting out a small, short-lived scream and dropping her keys. When she reached for the keys, she choked on a sob, but quickly wiped her tears away and got up.

When she looked ahead her eyes landed on that which gave her a surreal feeling of peace. And terror, somewhere in the back of her soul.

She let out her breath, smiled, and squeezed her keys tightly. Her thumb pressed the unlock button unintentionally and a pair of lights flashed from somewhere. There was a beep too. A short, familiar beep close to her heart.

“You’re here,” she whispered, eyes focused on what she was seeing. “I’ve been waiting.”

The feeling of his hands on her skin still permeated her soul, hours later. As she sat alone, by the bar of a small street-corner night bar, having a smoke and a glass of wine, she did not have to close her eyes to relive the memory. With eyes wide open, her overactive imagination could conjure the very same feeling she had had when the crude skin of his fingers, marked with hills and valleys of his labour, scraped her own skin, leaving behind tingling sensations of fear at having given away control and acceptance of the fact that not pulling all the strings did not feel at all as horrid as she had imagined it would. Instinctively she caressed her neck and thought that he was still there, and that her fingers were his, and the hairs at the back of her neck stood up as, for an infinitesimal moment, she thought she could still feel his husky breath against her mouth, tickling her tightening lips. She saw his eyes too, glowing chocolate brown orbs fixated on hers, a look of determination set within their bottomless pits as he towered above her.

To let go…to let herself go, at a moment like that, she thought was the most appropriate decision she had made in a while. A loss of control, it turned out, especially in the hands and arms of another was what she needed to get a sense of liberation.

And to think it had all begun with his mother, and her mother. Looking up at a small, square shaped digital clock above the bar, she noted that midnight was about to strike and she realised she could not remember the last time she let herself be outside this late. Changes permeated the entire day, it seemed.

“Another drink?” the bar tender asked, already holding the bottle of wine she had selected from their fine collection.

“Yes, thank you,” she nodded, holding the glass out for him.

It had begun with their mothers, in a small, windowless grey room. Her brain was tricking her now, making her think the room was well-lit and white, but she knew well that the illumination came from the LEDs hung on the ceiling above them. One of the LEDs made a strange sound every now and then, as though a fly or a mosquito had been lured into it and then got fried, but it was winter. There were no tiny, flying insects minding their miniature business.

The interior was decorated with little furniture; only a square shaped table and two chrome chairs. Then there were the closed doors, leading nowhere. Nowhere for him, but a plethora of options for her. Sitting across from each other, she wondered if he too dwelt on an ambiguous sense of telepathy which had formed between them. This had been just their second meeting and yet, all she had to do was pay closer attention to his hands, or the way his mouth twitched to the side when he was in deep thought, and she would be able to guess what words would come next. He did not have to do much either; a long, deep stare into her eyes and she felt herself not just scrutinised, but stripped naked, piece by piece, all down to her bones, and to her soul. He read her as she read him. And where others saw turpitude in his orbs, she was able to look past it but not enough so as to feel unaffected by his scrutiny.

During that second meeting, about half an hour in, she told him a story about her mother.

“My mother liked to dance,” she began her narrative. “When I think about it, most memories I have of her involve dancing in one way or another, or the idea of it. She loved records too. We weren’t a wealthy family but money was always put aside for her interests. She had a whole shelf of them, too. Chet Baker, Johnny Rivers. But, her favourite was Leonard Cohen. You know Cohen, don’t you?”

He nodded, and she saw it clear in his eyes. A question, lingering. Where’s this leading to?

“She always said his voice reminded her of a lemon mint coated in finest honey.” She paused there, glancing at the crackling light, and then diverted her attention back on him. “There’s this…particular memory I have. I wasn’t older than eight. It was summer, and she hadn’t put her clothes on yet. Just a flowing, summery skirt, and an old bra. She played a song, and it etched into my mind ever since. You could know it too. You’re a fan of the classics, I’ve gathered.”

His brows furrowed slightly and he licked his lips, tipping his head to the side. Fingers drummed against the table, in expectation. “Ever heard of Hank Williams? He’s my favourite,” he tries, eyes inspecting her features. His hands become more nervous, and his impatience rises. He is especially more antagonised when she disregards his comment and just pursues her narrative.

“The song…It goes…it goes just like this,” she pretended to take time to summon the lyrics which she could otherwise recite at any given time of day. “And the night came on, it was very calm, I wanted the night—” she sang, and as she did, halfway there, he joined her, their voices murmuring in unison.

“To go on and on. But she said go back. Go back to the world.” His voice was deeper, yet oddly fitting hers. Like a key and a lock. She had cracked a twisted grin on his face. It stretched his mouth, near-ear-to-ear, giving his usually distant features a bizarre change.

She smiled. “Exactly that song. I remember she played it, in that particular memory, and she took my arms and I took hers and we twirled around the room, following the waves of Cohen’s voice. It was truly magnificent. It’s my fondest memory.”

“What are you trying to say? Or did you want to show off your singing skills?”

“Skills? I have no skills, but if you find talent in what I did, then…I must thank you, mustn’t I?”

She flipped through some files placed neatly on the table in front of her. She could not help but appreciate the bluntness of his conversational skills, but to feel thankful was to tread over thin ice, in high-heeled shoes. Dangerous. Such straight-forwardness was a rarity but she could not…she should not acknowledge it. Not to him at least, not out loud for elevating his ego would bear no fruits in her labour.

“I remembered reading something in the medical files. And I remembered something you told me the last time. You told me your mother liked dancing too. You gave me a very vivid description of an instance in time when she did that.” Her eyes shifted from the paper to him, and she saw a slight change in his demeanour, one which the people behind the walls and the curtains would not be able to detect no matter how much they looked. “But, she wasn’t dancing, was she? You were only five years old back then.”

“I suggest you give that a rest.” His fists were now closed. His eyebrows twitched as he came to realise where she wanted to lead the conversation to.

“A five year old’s memories can be reinterpreted in whatever way one’s self-preserving mind wanted it to.”

“I’m warning you.” His voice raises and his fingers begin to drum harder against the table. The sounded reminded her of someone nailing into an old, wooden box. She noticed his knees bouncing too, the tempo going up and down, less and more agitated with each passing moment.

“She didn’t dance. She hit you.”

The fact cut through the air cold and merciless. It landed hard on his consciousness and changed the light in his eyes, from passively cold and irked, to a burning flame. In a matter of seconds.

“I’m warning you. Stop,” he hissed, as loud as he had ever been in her presence, knees bouncing harder than before, shaking the already rocky table. One knee banged under the table, and it moved to the force of his impact.

“Everything you did to those women… Everyone had found it bizarre but curious that you had recorded them all dancing before doing those things to them. But, it makes sense do—“

She never finished the sentence.

He hurled himself across the table, knocking down the chair on which he had been sitting, and wrapped his hands around her neck. In one way or another, she was the one to blame for the breach of her security, for she had insisted on keeping him uncuffed. Without much time to process what was about to happen and thus act appropriately to get away or take a deeper breath, she was soon left airless and she stared deep into his eyes, which gleamed with determination to squeeze the life out of her, like he had done to another half a dozen women in the preceding months.

She felt his hands squeeze tight, and though the ordeal could not have lasted longer than ten seconds, in that small pocket of time she felt all that was left for her to do was to let go. And she did. Without trying to break free from the cage around her neck, she relaxed and stared at him defiantly, uncurling her fists which she had been using to try and pry open his squeeze a moment prior. She showed the man a uniquely indifferent smile, which never reached her eyes. It threw him off, for his fingers released the pressure for a moment, his eyes, and accordingly his brain, trying to interpret her reaction in the face of peril. And just then, the door flung open and two police officers grabbed him and pulled him off her, shoving him down onto the floor, on his stomach, to cuff him. Once he was on the ground he looked at her, perplexed. Was she not afraid? Or in pain?

Immediately afterwards, she was hurried out of the room. Someone cursed, someone yelled, and a new comer asked if she were alright.

But, she had never been better.

Presently, when midnight had struck, she was reliving the memory alone in a bar, attempting to silence out the noise around her.

She could not remember well what happened right after. She did recall being in the detective’s office and asking for a smoke. She had told him she was alright and that she just needed a cigarette, to which he obliged, despite the ‘no smoking’ sticker which he himself had plastered on the wall. To respect his own inclinations, he took the liberty to open the window somewhat while she lit the cigarette.

“He won’t get away with anything, will he?” he asked contemptuously.

She breathed out some smoke, watching it dissipate in the air before answering. “We both know well he is capable to stand trial. He knew what he was doing, how and why he was doing it. Detective, you may not be capable of or be inclined to understand his reasoning behind the crimes, but I’ve been working for eight years now. I’ve spent five days a week, eight hours a day, sometimes even more, every week with such people during that time. That’s three hundred and sixty five weeks. Over fifteen hundred days. I know him, and men like him, to the bone.”

“Dr. Park, what on Earth are you insinuating? You of all people are not trying to excuse his behaviour. Unstable or not, you said it yourself. He knew what he was doing. He can’t possibly plea insanity.”

“I’m not excusing him. In my professional opinion, he isn’t eligible for the plea. Did he know what he was doing? Was he aware of the fact he was going to murder them when he strangled them? Assuredly. Did he want them dead? Certainly. Did he know what he did was wrong, though? No. Not at all. In his mind they were not those women. They were his mother, at whose hands he had suffered abuse in the first, most vulnerable five years of his life. Six, nearly. And then he was given away to his grandmother, she showed him some more tough love.” She took another drag of the cigarette. “Could he resist the impulse to kill? I think not. This gets the trial to shaky grounds with the impulse test. However, he’s no psychopath. He hadn’t suffered any psychotic break and went on a months-long spree. You’ve even found evidence of remorse on each of the bodies. And let me tell you something. If he gets a good lawyer, I am afraid they may try to plea insanity anyway.”

The detective rolled his eyes. This woman always made his blood pressure rise. “Many are abused, or bullied, by others and yet they do not turn out to be murderers. You can’t give me this Freudian crap now, Doctor Park. I can’t have him strolling off to a ward, and getting out in a few years’ time. He’ll do it again, you know it. You can’t just list some tests, like it’s a Math exam.”

Dr Park smiled again, and this time her eyes reflected a thought that bubbled up from her deepest memories, uninvited and ironic. She looked away and took another drag of the cigarette, banishing the memory from her teenage-hood away. For now.

“I’m not serving you Freudian anything. For one, Freud isn’t considered all too relevant by many psychiatrists today, but I am sure you are aware of that, detective Lee. Two, he has nothing to do with forensic psychiatry.” The rookie detective had fetched her an ashtray in the meanwhile and now she was turning the cigarette off in it. “Third, he won’t get away with anything. I’m saying his plea stands and even if he did. Just imagine he did get ‘a few years in the psych’. Have you even noticed the yellowness of his eyes? His liver is failing. Severely, I dare say. What makes you think he’ll live another two years’ time?” By the time she was finished, she had put her coat back on.

The statement made detective Lee feel morbidly relieved. Perhaps she did make a point. Yet, he was disinclined to admit it out loud. Something about this woman rubbed him the wrong way.

“I guess that solves that,” the younger detective tried to calm the atmosphere down, and he shared a short look with the doctor. “That was an interesting story you told, Dr. Park.”

As she was hanging her bag around her shoulder, she gave him a questioning look.

“About your mother. The dance. Cohen. I myself am his fan,” his smile was welcoming. Unlike his more experienced partner, he was quite positively intrigued by the doctor. He ignored her wedding ring and demonstrated no skills in hiding his interest.

“Oh. Thank you. I made it up,” she said and with a small, short bow left the room, anxious to leave the entire building as soon as she could, leaving both the detectives puzzled and somewhat shocked at the casual nature in which she had admitted to a lie of that sort. Detective Lee thought such cold admittance was not something he’d expect from a psychiatrist, but then again, a part of him was not surprised. It was completely natural for one to feel surprised upon learning that Doctor Park had any family or human connection at all. She always kept herself at bay, and maintained an alien aura around her which made it impossible for anyone to relate her to another creature. Had there not been for the wedding ring, Detective Lee would have been convinced that she lived a life of solitude by choice.

What detective Lee did not know, however, and which was something that she was now mulling over in the bar, was that the story was not entirely a lie. Of course she had a mother, and there was one or two instances when she had seen her cut a rug, but it was Dr. Park who was a Cohen fan, not her mother. And by the time she was eight, her mother had already passed away, as much as a year before that age.

The first hour after midnight tick-tocked on leisurely, and she, affected by the wine, began to feel bored, or tired. Or both. So, she finally paid, picked up her belongings and left the bar heading then towards the lot where she had parked her car. It was barely a hundred metres away from the bar, but the road seemed to have stretched itself in her absence. She walked and walked but the end of the street did not seem to be any closer.

Walking down, she glanced up at the sky a few times and once heard a thunder, and before that saw a pulsating artery of a lightning crack the sky open. Having expected rain, Doctor Park was surprised to see small and crudely shaped flakes of snow start to twirl down from the thick clouds.

When she finally got into her car, she felt relief wash over her. She didn’t drive away immediately, though. She turned the heating on, to a comfortable nineteen degrees Centigrade, turned the radio on, and leaned back against the seat, closing her eyes. The tunes of a familiar song began seconds later, and she curled an ironic lip.

Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women; there’s a shoulder where Death comes to cry, Cohen sang and Park sang with him, all until the second verse was interrupted by a bump against the car window. Dazed, she looked up and saw a pair of hands, bruised or blooded she couldn’t tell the difference at the moment, pressed against the glass, and a frantic person who owned the pair, now starting to thump against the window, perhaps to get in. She called out to Dr Park, this unknown, frantic girl, asking to be saved. Her despair and panic were palpable.

“Save me! Please, open the door, he’s crazy! He’s gone crazy, please help me,” the girl’s voice was muffled by the car window, but Doctor Park could still hear her pleas clearly. Only, she did not move a muscle to do as she was told. She stared at the hands, still thumping, and the trembling figure of the girl pressing against her vehicle. Cohen’s voice now sounded more distant than before.

And before she could actually bring herself to react — Doctor Park, after all, was not an entirely unreasonable person, nor was she callous — another figure emerged from behind the girl. She attempted to fight the figure, having gained confidence from the fact she was no longer alone with the assailant but as soon as he pushed her away, applying considerable force which had the woman fall down onto her behind, the woman’s resolution dissipated. Doctor Park’s heart skipped a beat, and she felt something in her chest convulse as the man offered an apologetic bow and commanded the girl got up and left with him.

Doctor Park was not surprised to see the girl exhibiting what little protest she could conjure before the man dragged her away. She continued to watch, dazed and somewhat afraid, as the song, just like the waves of an ocean, rose and fell, advanced and receded, as all this occurred.

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you;

On a chair with a dead magazine.