The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy Page A

voice.
    She was awake after a long nap and calling for me. I looked toward the shadows and the woman was gone.
    I sat alone in the plaza and a large moth—maybe the brother of the moth that had tried so hard to reach the light and die—flew out of the darkness, hurled itself at the dim flame of the Coleman lantern, bounced off the glass, and returned to the night. I stood up, unwilling to sit still any longer. I did not want to remember. I walked out toward the Temple of the Seven Dolls, looking for Zuhuy-kak.
    The monte was never silent. As I walked, the brush rustled around me with the soft careful movements of small animals. Insects sang and I could sometimes hear the chittering of bats overhead. Harmless sounds—I was accustomed to the monte at night. I passed Salvador's hut and followed the trail that wound through the ancient ruins.
    I heard a rustling sound, like skirts against the grass, and looked behind me. Just the wind.
    A pompous young doctor at the nuthouse had explained to me that I was having difficulty distinguishing my fantasies from reality. "You just object because I won't recognize your reality,"
    I said to him. "I have no problems recognizing my own reality."
    The doctor was a little older than I was at the time, maybe twenty-nine or thirty years old. He was crew-cut, clean shaven, well-scrubbed, and his office smelled of shaving soap. "I don't see the difference.
    There's only one reality."
    "That's your opinion." My wrists were still wrapped with white surgical gauze from wrist to elbow. The gashes had almost healed, but my arms were still stiff and sore. I crossed my arms across my chest defiantly. "I don't like your reality. I don't like my husband's reality either, but he won't let me change it."
    The young doctor frowned. "You must cooperate, Betty," he said, looking genuinely concerned. "I want to help."
    "My name is Elizabeth."
    "Your husband calls you Betty."
    "My husband is a fool. He doesn't know my name. My husband wants to kill me."
    The young doctor protested that my husband cared very much for me, my husband wanted to protect me. The young doctor did not understand that there are shades of reality. Metaphor is reality once removed. I said that Robert wanted to kill me. Really, he wanted me to be quiet and compliant, as good as dead. He was not evil, but he did not understand what I needed to live. He wanted me to be dead to the world. When I saw the walls of the ward closing in, that was a kind of truth too. The world I lived in was small and getting smaller.

The young doctor believed in only one reality, the one in which young doctors are in charge and patients are very grateful. He would never admit to a reality in which spirits of the past prowl the streets of Los Angeles. That would not fit; that would not do. The doctor was a young fool then; probably an old fool now.
    By the Spanish church I smoked a cigarette and listened for the sound of footsteps on the path. Nothing.
    I was alone. I fingered the bandage that covered the claw marks where the tree branch had raked my skin.
    My wrist ached, and the feeling brought back memories. My daughter slept nearby and that brought back memories too.
    Sometimes, memories of my attempt at suicide return to me, unbidden and unwelcome. The scent of the aftershave that Robert favored, the wet warmth of steam rising from a newly drawn bath, the touch of cold glass to the skin of my inner wrist—these things recall the time that I locked the flimsy door to the bathroom, turned on the hot water so that it thundered into the tub. The rumble of the water covered the crash of breaking glass when I shattered a drinking tumbler in the sink. I did not like the thought of slicing my skin with a razor blade, cold metal against my skin. I held a long thin shard of sharp-edged glass in my hand and smiled; this was better, more appropriate.
    It hurt, I remember that, but mixed with the pain was a sense of anticipation. I stood on the edge of something