Lily Hoang: Invisible Women

This is the way the woman down the hall lived for decades, maybe even centuries. She came to us as a replacement. She begged us to call her by the previous renter’s name, and so we did. We called her the woman down the hall, but now, suddenly, things are shifting with her. She’s no longer the same. We see her walking up the hall, and we say hello to her, this woman down the hall, and she looks perplexed. Her face wrinkles and frowns, and then, she says it. She tells us, “I’m in love,” and we don’t know what to do. For so long, this woman down the hall has lived off the discarded trash of others. We look at her, and we say, “Woman down the hall, what will you do?”

But the truth of it is that the woman down the hall is in love, but even in her love, she’s replacing someone else. She’s just another version of a woman her man already loves, and the woman down the hall, she doesn’t even know how to react. She’s been a replacement her entire life, and now, suddenly, she’s sick of it. She doesn’t want to be a replacement. She wants to be the woman this man loves. She wants to be the original, but she can’t change.

“From now on, I’ll describe the women to you,” Freud had said, “and in your journeys you will see if they exist.”

But the women visited by Lou Andreas-Salome were always different from those thought of by the doctor.

“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model woman from which all possible women can be deduced,” Freud said. “She contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the women that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probably combinations.”

“I have also thought of a model woman from which I deduce all the others,” Lou answered. “She is a woman made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, and contradictions. If such a woman is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we can increase the possibility that the woman really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the women who, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve women too probable to be real.”

Lou Andreas describes a woman, cell by cell.

“But which is the cell that makes the woman?”

“The woman is not made by one cell or another,” Lou answers, “but by the accumulation of muscle, bone, body they create.”

Sigmund Freud remains silent, reflecting. Then, he adds: “Why do you speak to me of cells? It is only the woman that matters to me.”

Andreas answers: “Without cells there is no woman.”

The woman down the hall used to be called Miss , sometimes, Missy , and then there came the day when she asked us to call her Missus . Funny, we call her Miss Missus , which we pronounce: Miss miss us, noun verb direct object. We are objects to her subject.

The woman down the hall can see through walls. It’s true. She’s like a bionic woman or something, we’re not really sure. We only know that she can, and she thinks it’s a curse. She says she’s a freak for it, but we think it’s cool. We wish we were superheroes like her, but she doesn’t use her power for anything. Sometimes, we even wish that she wouldn’t be a superhero at all, that she’d be a supervillain because she’s hot and we’d want to see her in some black leather or even rubber.

The woman down the hall can see through walls, and she doesn’t do a damned thing with it at all. No, she wears thick, black, pirate patches over her eyes, pretends she’s blind, and we can’t respect that. We think it’s a waste so when we know she’s coming, we move things around. We cleverly swap a futon with a folding chair just so we can watch her fall. We think to ourselves, If this woman can see through walls, she can see through that little eye-patch, but she falls for it every time.

Sometimes, we think she’s just entertaining us when she trips because it’s so half-hearted. Her movement is air.

The truth of it is that we rarely learn the names of the women down the hall. We are all the same woman. We are none of those women. And so we are a perfect group of women, every single one of us living right down the hall from one another, from you, from me. Won’t you come in for a cup of tea with honey and fresh cream?

Don’t be scared now, but the woman down the hall, she isn’t really alive. In fact, she’s not even a little bit alive, but no one moves her. No one lives with her, and her apartment is occupied , with her body, her corpse, that smell. The woman down the hall used to be called Alice, but now that she is dead, we don’t feel right using her name. We do it from time to time, on accident, which causes in us great flushing.

See, Alice has been dead for a decade and someone still pays the rent and someone asked the landlady not to disturb, do NOT disturb says her door, right over the number. The mailman has this place memorized and manages to cram the pages in. We imagine it is just her dead body in there, and an accruing mound of flyers and coupons. It would be much cheaper to buy her a coffin and just put her in the ground already, burn her up, but someone insists on keeping her there, in that room.

We do not know how she is posed, if she is lying down or sitting, how rigor mortis has weighted, gravity. Sometimes, we like to imagine walking in there, the stink and maggots, seeing her body, how much meat would remain, where bone would shine.

We don’t know what happened with her, what her story is exactly. We pretend to know, but even when she was alive, she was never one of us, keeping to loneliness. We don’t know, but we are sure it must be something sinister and her body’s well-being is important to us, not because we have reverence for the dead but because we care. We want good things, moral things, in our building at least, our homes.

But then we think maybe this is what Alice wanted, dead Alice, and we convince ourselves this truth, and so it wouldn’t be right to disturb her.

We sit guard by her door.

The stink of decomposition makes its way through the crack of her door.

On hot days, we can smell it in the garden.

On cold days, whiffs halt us in the foyer.

We are diligent in guarding her door though, just to make sure no one interrupts.

We learn to ignore the smell. Because this must be what she wants.

The woman down the hall can fly. No, really, it’s true. The woman down the hall is a ghost and several times a year, we see her pass through our brick walls and float out into the sky. She tells us that she goes out on a quest, an odyssey, but she never mentions what it is that she’s looking for, but we know it must be something that is very high up because once she leaves the weight of gravity behind, she wanders up higher and higher until she is a freckle on the moon’s smiling face.

In times of need, Freud gave Lou Andreas patients. One young woman in particular confounded the Great Freud. This girl had a savage fear of flora. Whereas she could withstand — and even enjoy — the most toxic of insects crawling over her skin, the moment a blade of grass or the most perfect flower came near her, she would wail, unable to be comforted until the plant-life were removed and the scent of it erased. Even if there were no discernable smell, she would argue that there was, but this was barely translatable considering the pitch of her screams.