Yesterday, as I stepped down the stairs, my ankle twisted off and fell on the floor with a wet, meaty plop. I stuck it back on with some Gorilla Glue and a thumbtack wedged through the skin flaps, but it was the shock of it, you know. 

In the garden, Plato shovels an entire bunch of grapes into his mouth. I keep expecting him to spit out the stems but I think he’s swallowed it whole. His jaw unhinged a little for it to happen. I think I heard something pop. His beard is long and should be white, but it’s stained yellow like waiting room linoleum. The garden is beautiful. Around us, limestone sculptures dance and sing and play the lyre. Plato washes his grapes in a birdbath, which shines in the early afternoon light. The water is so clean he could use it as a mirror, and he does. Manicured beds of chrysanthemums and marigolds line the periphery of the garden, nestled under a tall wooden fence. There’s a light breeze, and the flowers waft something sweet and pointed around us. The scent locks us in like the bars of a cage. It’s so sharp to breathe in that I worry my nose might bleed. 

My immune system is eating the nerves in my legs. The doctor said I didn’t need to worry, but sometimes when I walk it’s like stepping on knives. Other times everything is numb. I wore a hole in the skin of my heel wearing impractical platform boots, and I didn’t feel anything at all.

It’s not that I’m scared, standing in the garden. I just think the grass is so green. So lush and thick and green. There should be dandelions. I don’t know where they went. 

Plato looks at me with a twinkle in his eye. 

“I will be your physician for this session,” he says. “Call me Dr. Plato.” 

“Shut the fuck up,” I say. “I’m not calling you that.” 

“Doctors and judges must be good,” he says. He leans forward and drums his meaty little fingers on the picnic table. “We wouldn’t allow our bodies to be or become bad, if bodies governed bodies. Rather, we treat our bodies with our souls, so a good soul creates a good body, and a bad soul, a bad one.” 

In November of last year, Dr. Thomas Zeale, who had a long, droopy face and a thick New York accent and a mustard stain on his sweater, spent about an hour shocking my arms and legs with electrodes and a small needle. I told him I was a student at Columbia. He said his son was too, and now is a successful microbiologist, presenting his research at a conference as we spoke. Dr. Zeale had one startlingly long nose hair that curled twice after exiting his nostril. I clenched my jaw and watched the nose hair flutter up and up and down. 

“Do you have a bad soul?” Plato asks. 

I adjust the thumbtack on my ankle. It’s beginning to wiggle loose. “I don’t understand,” I say. 

Plato looks distraught. “Oh it was so simple, I thought!” he cries, throwing his arms up so suddenly that the sleeves of his toga rip. “I’ll explain it, then, though I don’t know where I’ll get the audacity or even the words to use.” 

A fly lands on the picnic table with a gentle little buzz. 

Dr. Zeale asked me every question twice. I would give the same answer both times, just the first time he would never listen. He called my mother to tell her I was withholding information and that no other doctor in the city would see me. I sat on his examination table in a paper gown I didn’t think I needed to wear and wondered if I could strangle him with my socks tied together. Maybe it would only have taken one. Dr. Zeale had a very thin neck. 

Plato spends a few minutes humming and mumbling, but soon, he seems to arrive at a suitable explanation. I’m glad for it. I don’t want to hurry him along, but I can feel the skin around my calves loosening, detaching itself from the bones, and I guess I’m getting a little bit desperate. 

Plato opens his mouth. “This, then, is the kind of thing that, on the one hand, I said is demonstrable, or should be, but on the other hand, at times for people who lack a certain philosophical nature, we must use hypotheses in the investigation of it, not traveling up to a first principle, since it cannot reach beyond its hypotheses, but using as examples of the good the very things that are good, like health, or the soundness of body, and so then we wonder—or not wonder but explicate—that the good cannot arise from the bad, and the bad cannot then cease being bad to create the good, for then there is no justice, and there must be justice, for everything must be in its place for this garden to exist in the Great Just City.” Plato closes his mouth. He eats the fly. 

I mean to say, Do you mean that I’m creating all of this? Is this garden my fault? or Was that fly’s soul good or bad? or Is that all that I am? A sick body and a sick soul? I don’t say any of that. Instead, it’s like some invisible hand is reaching down my throat, pulling out an answer and laying it down on the table before us.  

“Certainly,” I say. All the skin peels itself off my legs, taking the thumbtack with it.

Dr. Zeale sat me down one day and told me he could fix me. The neuropathy, at least, and the rest I would learn to live with. It was an early June morning and I was video-calling him from my kitchen table in a respectable sweater and purple fuzzy socks. “You have to be careful though,” he said. “You don’t want this to become your identity. You make one too many jokes about being a sickly Victorian child, and that is all you are.”

“Aren’t luxury and softness condemned because the slackening and loosening of this same part produces cowardice in it?” Plato asks me. There’s something wrong with him, though. His forehead is sweaty, and his hands are shaking. He looks sick. 

There’s a humming noise in the garden. Or buzzing, maybe. I can’t tell where it’s coming from. It feels like it’s all around us. 

Dr. Zeale has previously spent time in federal prison for tax fraud. I’m certain at some point it will happen again. 

I can’t tell if I have legs anymore. Certainly, there is no skin, but what about the rest? Is there a leg without skin? Does the skin make the leg, or is there something deeper, more intrinsic? The form beneath the ideal, or the ideal beneath an errant construction. I try to move a leg and an artery comes loose, spraying blood in a perfect arc across Plato’s toga. Some blood gets in the birdbath. The water is no longer clean. 

Plato throws up over the side of the picnic bench. The buzzing triples, then increases tenfold. I realize it was coming from inside him. I can see the writhing forms of hundreds of flies in the thickening pool of vomit. 

My kneecap crumbles into dust, but Plato is weak now. I take the thumbtack out of my ankle and jab it in his eye. He deflates, air escaping through the crushed ruin of his eye socket. Around us, the limestone writhes. He mumbles something about the evil natural to each thing, but I don’t bother paying attention. He’s just skin now, an empty sack of flesh. I don’t want to have his yellow, stained beard, but what other option is there? I stick what used to be my legs into his mouth and slide downward, the exposed meat of my toes meeting the empty skin of his. My veins coil around his exposed nerves and join, a translucent membrane forming over the junctures. Yes, yes, Dr. Plato. I think, or say. What’s left of his face molds itself into a lumpy approximation of a grin. There’s still skin on my torso, but there won’t be for long. How else will we fuse? I use Gorilla Glue to paste my face on his. We stand as one. We take off the toga. We pull on purple fuzzy socks.