On one particularly sweltering afternoon, Marream and I sought shelter from the heat at the Museum of Modern Art, where we saw an exhibit called The Clock by Christian Marclay. It was a 24-hour montage of time-related movie clips, masterfully synchronized and edited to display the actual time, both “a cinematic tour-de-force and a functioning timepiece.” 

The film had no beginning and no end, and ran on an endless loop, a visual measure of time. 

I was fascinated. It was, to my mind, a masterpiece, perfectly executed, but Marream was more discerning and difficult to impress, rarely taken by intellectual art. 

I argued that it wasn’t intellectual; for me, it was primal. I had always felt that somehow I was caught in a spell, suspended in time. As a child, I sat at the kitchen table, watching the clock for the moment I was supposed to let myself out of the house and go meet the school bus, but all three clocks in the kitchen showed a different time, so I never knew what the actual time was.

I was obsessed with time and its passage, the tragic loss of innocence, the incessant march of the living towards the grave. Time was, to my mind, the great tragedy of every man, woman, and child, and I was constantly aware that everything I had (my mother, my brother, my thick head of hair) would someday be lost. I believed the great tragedy of life would be to lose what we already had: health, youth, strength, beauty, love. Marream, though, never believed she would not have those things in the first place. For Marream, the tragedy of life was an irrevocable loneliness, a searing isolation, the unspeakable truth that she would always be alone and would never be truly known or truly be loved. 

Although we sat side-by-side in the dim little viewing room, watching the same hours pass by on the screen, we were not in the same place. 

* * *

Time works in mysterious ways. Years can pass while your circumstances arrange themselves in a fixed, stable reality; until an unseen hand flips a cosmic switch, and everything shifts overnight. For me, the summer of 2012 was a season of rapid and radical change. The first domino fell, and the rest followed, one after another, though I can’t now remember exactly how the pieces were arranged before they toppled—just that the whole structure of my life and belief system came crashing down and was quickly replaced by a new reality. Now, everything blurs together in a grand sweep of change. One revelation quickly followed another. Memory upon memory. Event after event. An endless series of rituals. 

That summer was not measured in days, weeks, and hours—but in ceremony.

With Cher, there was always another crystal programmed to enhance my vibration, always another ritual task to be completed. She said I wasn’t ready for what was coming—and to prepare, I would have to steady my energy field, raise my vibration, and pass a series of tests that I, as a novice, was unable to deduce.  I was a professional student in the final months of my doctoral degree, but I was unprepared for this particular series of exams. The tests were unclear, arcane, and not labeled as such, and it seemed only Cher could accurately detect them and assess my performance. 

It was as if she had charged me with a series of mystical labors. If Cher told me to do something,  I did it. Most of the tasks assigned were mysterious: bathe in colored, perfumed waters, meditate on the flawed center of an amethyst crystal, wrap an apple in seven $100 bills, and leave it on her threshold. Other tasks were mundane. Cher insisted, for example, that to move forward with my life, I would first have to get my paperwork in order, which involved navigating the bureaucratic world. Over several weeks, I visited the Social Security Administration,  applied for a copy of my birth certificate, and made several trips to the DMV to get my New York State driver’s license and vehicle registration.

The Brooklyn Department of Motor Vehicles was a chaotic public office located on the third floor of the Atlantic Terminal shopping mall. It was a cavernous, fluorescent atrium with dozens of ticketing windows and hundreds of uncomfortable chairs, bolted to the ground and wrapped in plastic. People milled about in limbo as a computerized voice cheerfully announced ticket numbers: “Now serving ticket #173 to counter 39.”

I followed the lines that snaked through the lobby, paying whatever tolls were demanded by the guardians of the gateways.

After an hour of shuffling back and forth from one line to another, I settled into a chair in the waiting area. Against the other wall was a little girl, sitting on her father’s lap. I watched through the corner of my eye as the man showed the child a magic trick. It was a sleight of hand operation in which he made a chain of red silk handkerchiefs appear and disappear. The child laughed, caught up in the illusion, but I could see the string up the man’s sleeve. I felt dizzy, a sinking feeling as if I had been there before. I’ve been here before, I thought to myself, I’ve been here before. I was sure that the magician and the child were an ominous sign of something—I wasn’t sure what. Everything seemed like a clue in a mystery I was unraveling, but I was losing the thread of reality. I saw signs everywhere, but I didn’t know if they were real, and, if they were real, I didn’t know where they pointed. 

I was reliant entirely on Cher to decode and decipher the signs, to tell me what to do. Under her tutelage, I was claiming my autonomy, one piece of paper at a time. I was taking steps—baby steps—to own my identity, but it was as though my real self was stuffed so deeply within the skinny persona I wore on the streets that I still barely knew who I was. 

I knew I liked to read, that I fancied myself a writer, and that I wanted to teach. I was nice, pleasant. I got along well with everyone because I listened well and rarely said what I was thinking—but the truth was that I wanted to be beyond nice. I wanted to be a true artist. And if I couldn’t be a real artist, then I at least wanted to be real.

I liked Cher because she was a real woman. While I was an overgrown adolescent, stringing words into pretty arrangements, making up stories, and writing them down, Cher was a mother of three. A businesswoman. A wife, a daughter-in-law. She cooked elaborate dinners on a hot plate and convection oven for the dozen in-laws who crowded into her office. She cleaned assiduously, and the hems of her garments were often stained with bleach. She dressed modestly, and her nails were always done. She was quick to laugh and quick to anger and spoke with an air of authority. She seemed to know what to do in any circumstance. Cher had the answers for everything, and I did whatever she told me to do. 

Once my paperwork was in order, Cher began coaching me for the market. I was preparing for a second-round interview for a full-time academic position at the College of New Rochelle. This interview would be a one-on-one conversation with the Dean of the School of New Resources at the main campus in Westchester County. 

Cher studied my CV and nodded with approval. “Very good,” she said. “This is good. You already.” She said, “Now all you have to do is dress like a teacher. You have to play the part.” 

Cher selected my outfit for the interview: a white blouse, black pencil skirt, and black pumps. I wore tiny silver hoops in my ears and my thick hair neatly arranged in a bun, and though I always drove with the windows down, I was determined not to mess up my hair, so I kept the car cool and closed as I drove up the BQE to the Bruckner Expressway to New Rochelle. 

The interview was conducted in a private residence that had been converted into college offices. Cubical walls divided the living room, and an air conditioning unit rattled noisily in the window. I arrived twenty minutes early and took a seat among the other candidates, discreetly assessing their attire and posture. I glanced down at my shoes and a knowing came over me: the job was mine for the taking. This was my job. 

I felt as if the clock had been reset, as if something cosmic had been put in motion. 

I took a seat and crossed my legs at the ankles.  I was well-heeled and well-prepared, but I was not prepared at all. I was foolish, ignorant. I stood at the threshold of the great fabricating machine of America’s educational system, which teaches us our place in the world: who is the student and who is the teacher. There I was: my father’s daughter—all costumed in professional attire, preparing to enter the fray. My doctorate was all but complete, but my education had not yet begun. 

The dean came to the door and said my name. He was disarmingly handsome and dressed in a perfectly tailored three-piece suit with a purple pocket square. I looked him in the eye and walked with confidence into his office. 

* * *

“Now,” Cher said, turning back to me. She smoothed her long black skirt over her legs and wrapped her flimsy modal cardigan more tightly over her stomach and breasts. “How was the interview?”

“Good,” I said definitively. “It went well.” 

“Very good!” She exclaimed. “I told you so you would be working again very soon! Now, what else do you have going on this week?”

“Not much,” I said.

“You’re a young woman,” she said, “You must be up to something.” 

“I have to do some edits,” I said, looking away.

“For what?” Cher asked. 

“Just edits,” I groaned. 

“What edits?” She pressed. 

“Final edits,” my explanation was clipped. “For my dissertation.”

“What does that mean?” Cher was not a lettered person.

“Proofreading,” I said. “Formatting.” I paused and leaned in. “Do you have a cigarette?” 

Cher reached into her drawer and withdrew two Marlboro lights. She held them both between the index and ring finger of her right hand. 

“Doesn’t sound too bad to me,” she observed, pointing the cigarettes in my direction. I reached for one, but Cher withdrew it towards her ample breasts. I hadn’t touched my dissertation in weeks, not since I first met Cher and these strange memories began to arise and sweep over me like nausea, like a sickness. When I thought about it—one hundred and fifty pages of poems and confessions coded in stylized images of sexual violence—and riddled with only God knew how many errors and typos—I felt sick, overwhelmed.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“There are a few footnotes and references I’m not sure about,” I admitted—omitting that I had reservations about the ramifications of the entire project. 

Cher, thankfully, was not concerned about the technicalities.

“Well, you have to do it,” she said. “And you have to do it right.” She leaned over and handed me a cigarette, striking a match which she dropped into a glass ashtray.

“So stop thinking about—and just do it already.”

“Well,” I said, taking a drag from the cigarette, as smoke wafted through the tiny parlor. “What are you going to do with my ring?” 

It had been two weeks since I had taken the diamond ring off my finger—the ring my father had given me—the diamond ring with the platinum filagree setting, offset with sapphires—the ring I had worn continuously for eight years—the ring I had never taken off the ring finger of my left hand until it disappeared into Cher’s drawer. 

Cher got up to open the door to the street and settled back into her chair before responding. 

“I’m holding it for safekeeping,” she said. “Meditating on what is to be done with it, but one thing I know for sure,” here she paused for dramatic effect and extinguished her cigarette. “You must never put that ring on your finger again,” she said. 

I nodded solemnly.

“And besides, I’m not going to do anything,” Cher said. “That is the work that you must do.”

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

“As I’ve told you, the bond must be broken. The ring must be destroyed, but it’s not time for that yet,” she said cryptically. “You’re not ready.”

“I’m ready,” I said, desperate and eager. “Just tell me what I have to do.”

“Not yet,” Cher said. Her voice was a closed door. “This is serious work. Everything must be aligned and in balance—especially your energies.”

* * *

I took Cher’s advice. I sat in my chair, but I couldn’t concentrate. First, I stared at the screen. Then, I stared at the pages I had printed out. I could see them, but I couldn’t see them. The words weren’t fixed in place; the letters were swimming around. I used a red pen to mark up the text: strike a word, add a comma, an arrow to reverse the order of paragraphs, and an asterisk to add three sentences. 

Marream sat across from me, researching literary magazines to which she had already submitted.

I interrupted her work every few minutes to read passages aloud and ask her opinion on phrasing, word order, and rhyme scheme.

Marream was a critical reader, but she thought my editorial process was precious and overblown. “It’s good the way it is,” she said. “Changing things now will make it different, but it won’t make it necessarily better.”

“But there are typos,” I argued.

“Of course, there are typos,” she said. “There are always typos, even in books, even in the New York Times.”

“I have to fix it,” I said.

“It’s fine the way it is.”

“It could be better,” I said.

“It’s already amazing,” she said. 

I didn’t respond. 

She continued, “Look, most of us develop techniques that define our style. Like me, I work with repetition and voice, but you have range. You use different techniques in every project, but the work is still you,” she said. 

“I’m interested in form,” I said, scrutinizing a line. 

“Technique is your technique,” she said. “You choose the technique based on what the project demands.” 

“What if the committee doesn’t approve my revisions?” I asked. “What if they think the work is cliché? I mean these poems rhyme,” I said. “That’s so old-fashioned, out of style.” 

“But they are composed of rhyming images of violence from television shows,” she argued. “No one is doing that. It’s not cliché at all. No one has ever done that. You are doing something new.”

I loved Marream’s work and relished her praise. She could go on for twenty minutes or more, telling how wonderful I was, how good, how beautiful, how gifted a writer. I liked to see myself the way she saw me—though I did not fully trust that reflection. 

“We don’t know what other people are doing,” I argued.

“I’m telling you,” she said.

“The work is good. You’re already done. Just submit.” 

In the context of literature, Marream was primarily concerned with a work’s integrity, its necessity: What compelled it? What was the driving force behind it? How was it executed? And she found that many writers came up short in this regard. The surface of their work was, admittedly, pristine, but there was no pulse behind it; Marream didn’t care for it.

“My dissertation is messy, messier than anything I’ve written.” 

“It’s just raw,” she said. “That’s a good thing. You’re letting go of control. That’s what makes it powerful.” 

Marream was trying to talk me up, but I wanted nothing more than to be in control of my writing. At least then, I’d be in control of something, but everything was fractured, fragmented, kaleidoscopic. 

“I have to fix it,” I said. 

“Just read through it one more time and submit,” she said.

“I have to fix it,” I said again. My voice cracked, and I started to cry. 

But by now, I wasn’t talking about my dissertation—not exactly. The words were spinning around on the page: “The silence is loud / Time glistens. / I listen to the sound of sleep / as it breathes through the walls.” I was, ostensibly, sitting in my apartment at the kitchen table, but I was also somewhere else.

“There’s nothing to fix,” Marream said.  

“I have to fix it,” I said again. 

“It’s already done.”

“I have to stop him,” I said. 

“Stop whom?” Marream was confused. “What are you talking about?”

“My father,” I gasped. “I have to stop him.”

Marream rose from her chair and knelt in front of me. “Christine,” she said, touching my shoulder. “Your father is dead.” 

But I felt as if space and time had been torn open like a curtain, and everything was happening at once. 

“Look at me,” Marream held my shoulders steady. I was shaking—not violently but not without force. “You don’t have to worry. It’s over. You are here now. It’s over.”

But I knew it wasn’t over. Yes, my father was dead, but he was also a ghost standing beside me, and I could hear his voice in my ear. I could feel him whispering inside me. The damage was already done, and, more than that, there were other men like him, men shaped in his image. Everywhere there were children who were suffering, children who couldn’t breathe for fear, children who couldn’t sleep through the night. It was as though I could see the whole suffering world—and I was torn open.

“It’s happening everywhere,” I sobbed, strings of spittle stretching like fangs between my upper and lower jaw. I could see it all. “It’s happening everywhere. It’s happening now,” I gasped, looking straight through her. 

I fell to my knees as she held me. 

“It’s happening now—” I whispered, rocking back and forth. “It’s happening now.”

* * *

The morning after I submitted my final dissertation revisions for committee review, Cher called and said, “It’s time.” 

She instructed me to go out and buy a hammer and bring it to her that same afternoon.

“I have a hammer here,” I said, cradling the phone as I rummaged through my little box full of tools.

“No, that won’t work,” she said, “You must bring me a hammer that has never struck a nail.”

This didn’t make sense to me, but I was accustomed to following directions. That afternoon, I told Marream I was going to yoga, but instead, I went to the hardware store. I stood for a long time in the aisle, examining the hammers on the low shelves. I picked them up one by one to test their weight and feel in my hand. The hammer I selected was heavy with a big head and a bigger claw. I took it to the register, paid cash, slipped it into my canvas shoulder bag, and walked exactly one mile through Carroll Gardens to Cher’s ofisa in Brooklyn Heights.

I rang the bell, and Cher opened the door a crack before ushering me inside. “Come in, Sweetie,” she said, opening the door wider, beckoning. “Come in.”

Once we were inside, she lit a candle and drew the curtains. 

“Did you bring it?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, pulling it out of my bag and placing it ceremoniously on the table.

“You are ready?” Cher said. 

I nodded

She drew something I couldn’t quite see out of her drawer and gestured for me to sit on a cushion on the floor. She spread a silk scarf in front of me. On top of that, she placed a round plate of hammered copper, the kind of thing you might set as a charger plate at a banquet dinner.

Then she handed me the tiny black box. 

My hands shook as I opened it. There was my ring—the ring my father had given me—white gold against black velvet. The ring I had worn every day for eight years. The delicate filigree and the four little sapphires, cradling the diamond. 

Everything gleamed. 

“You know what to do,” Cher said. 

I took the ring out of the box and placed it on the metal plate. Then I grasped the hammer in my right hand.

“Whenever you are ready,” she said.

I raised the hammer over my head. 

“Make a wish,” Cher said.

I closed my eyes and prayed for my freedom. 

I brought down the hammer with all my strength. The hammer struck the metal plate forcefully, and the ring bounced, intact, onto the carpet. I tried again. Again and again, I brought down the hammer, but the ring kept dancing away. 

I kept missing the mark. 

I was so close, but I couldn’t finish the job. If I couldn’t destroy the ring, the curse would never be broken, and the bondage would abide. In those eternal moments, I felt like I would never be free. I was so frustrated that I started to cry.  

“Breathe, Sweetie.” Cher brought me a glass of water. She removed the metal plate and placed the ring upright, supported by the loops in the carpet. “Once more,” she said. “Use your left hand.”

I passed the hammer from my right hand into my left, lifted it over my head, and brought it down once more, decisively, with precision. The hammer smashed down on the ring. 

The filagree collapsed, and the sapphires cracked, and the diamond broke free of the setting and bounced twice before settling on the carpet. 

“Look at that!” Cher laughed. “The diamond popped right out!” 

I was sobbing, but I was not finished. Through my tears of frustration, devastation, and relief, I tore the little black box apart with my hands and discovered that it was nothing—just bits of cardboard and velvet held together with glue. 

Cher collected the remnants of the ring, wrapped them in a silk scarf, and put them away out of sight. “You did good,” she said with solemnity. “Very, very good. The bond has been broken.” 

Then, all of a sudden, she was looking past me as if someone was talking to her, as if she could hear something I couldn’t. She listened and nodded, and her lips moved inaudibly.

Then she turned to me and said, “Spirit tells me there’s more.”

“More of what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You tell me,” Cher said. 

I looked at her with suspicion.

“Spirit is never wrong,” she said. “Now you must give me the hammer,” she instructed, extending her hand. 

“No,” I said, pulling away. “It’s mine.”

“There is too much energy in it,” she said. “It must be disposed of properly. Give it here.”

I gazed for a moment at the flat of her palm. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I can do it myself.”

She looked at me evenly; I did not look away. 

“Suit yourself,” she relented. 

I walked out into the street in the summer sunlight and heat. My hands were still shaking as I left the hammer on a nearby stoop. I put it down and could feel a sense of relief, and I realized in that second that I’d been free all along, in full possession of my pain, terrified to let it go, bound only by the invisible chains of my own beliefs.

I did not look over my shoulder as I walked away. 

It was done. 

The spell was broken. 

I was free.