The television in the waiting room was playing another murder. This time, it was a good one. The CEO of a healthcare company was shot point-blank outside a 7/11 in New York. The setting outside a convenience store was, if anything, narratively satisfying. Everyone could agree on that.
The TV was mounted high on the wall. Katie curved her spine to look up from where she sat. Suddenly, she became aware of herself and corrected her posture. Her frame groaned in protest, her spin resisting the new, unnatural alignment. Katie watched the camera pan over the speck of pavement where the murder had occurred and thought again about buying one of those little posture corrector things that would stick to the back of her neck and buzz when she held herself wrong.
“Katie Jameson?” asked the receptionist suddenly. Katie jolted up her spine in an impossibly straighter line and nodded.
The receptionist smiled. “You can come on in.”
The physiotherapist’s office was decorated with cheesy posters and many kinds of skeletons. There was a large table right in the middle, padded for a person to lie down on. It was cold, and Leah pulled her sleeves up over her knuckles as she walked in. She felt her shoulders hunch further.
“Dr. Varda will be one minute,” said the receptionist before leaving. Katie sat on a very uncomfortable plastic chair that hurt parts of her butt she had not been aware existed. She stared at a poster of a glowing orange man clutching his lower back and grimacing. Below it said: PAIN IS YOUR BODY TRYING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING.
“Katie?” Dr. Varda entered. She was a slim woman with her hair pulled back into a bun and flawless skin. “Hi. Let’s take a look.”
She made Katie stand. She made Katie fold her body in the middle and try to touch her toes. She made Katie walk one way across the room, then another. She made Katie stand in front of her. Then she asked, “Have you ever been in a car accident?”
Katie had not been in a car accident. But for years, her posture had been trying to hide something, with her shoulders curved inward like hands trying to protect a flame. Now she sat at a desk all day scrolling through Instagram and pretending to work. Her shoulders ached. Her spine ached. She could not stand for long periods, and when she jogged to catch the streetcar, she became out of breath. She knew she was bent out of shape. Her spine, which she had been holding upright, sagged a bit as she answered the perfectly formed woman in front of her. “No. No accident.”
She wanted to be better.
*
Lee sat very tensely, even by her standards, and she was always tense one way or another. This was mostly due to the lovely woman sitting to her immediate left. The bus rocked back and forth, inching slowly through the same traffic as it did every Monday morning, dragging Lee ever closer to her own private purgatory on the 11th floor of an ugly concrete building.
As Lee tried very hard to squeeze herself as far right as she could, wondering passively if the woman next to her was doing the same, a single phrase cycled through her mind.
Comfort is a hell of a drug.
With a wink and a smile at the end of their session, her therapist had inadvertently given her something to think about. Granted, that’s what he was paid to do. Nevertheless, his cheeky grin was one of about five or so faces that cycled through her thoughts and made any sort of appearance in her day-to-day life these days. Unfortunately, the other four were her mother, a pair of coworkers who idly chatted about nonsense throughout the day, and a college friend.
A particularly sharp turn nudged Lee into the woman harder than she would have liked. The bus turned clumsily onto a side road which was, thankfully, empty. Lee tuned her thoughts out and the passionate ranting of the podcaster in her ears back in.
Ripe Banana — she called herself — was going off about some crime statistic to do with 7/11s.
“I mean it’s crazy!” she went on, “apparently 7/11 is not only the most popular destination for armed robberies, it’s also the most popular for CEO murders! What’s the likelihood of that?!”
Lee sighed, making brief eye contact with a tall man across the empty aisle before turning to stare at something less interesting.
“Now the inscriptions… the inscriptions in the casings are what make this really interesting.”
The bus came to a complete stop. A pair in the back got off, wandering towards the community center standing just off the beaten path. A single woman got on with a beep through the ticket machine.
“I mean, everyone’s having a hard time, you know, it’s that kind of atmosphere now, everyone is struggling, but some people have said that’s no reason to kill the guy.”
The newcomer’s face lit up at the sight of the tall man opposite Lee.
“On the other hand, if someone contributes to so much suffering and hardship… I’m not saying he deserves to die, I’m just saying whoever did it probably had a good reason!”
The woman dropped into the empty seat next to the tall man, who grinned at her in turn.
“People aren’t just committing murders because they’re simply bored or lonely… There’s usually an underlying cause, you know?”
She began to tell him something, probably funny, with her arm resting on his with a level of casualty that would make Israel jealous. In a way Lee couldn’t begin to imagine without an immediate retraction and apology, even with that college friend.
*
After her appointment, Dr. Varda gave Katie many different exercises to do at home.
“This won’t work unless you do the work by yourself, too,” the physiotherapist said, smiling gently in a way that made Katie feel like she was in trouble.
In one of the exercises, she lay on the ground on her stomach and grabbed her ankles, pulling herself into a position like a bow. For her next exercise, she stood at a doorway, put her arms on either side and stepped forward, feeling the tug in her shoulders. Dr. Varda told her to get resistance bands, which were long plastic things Katie had never heard of. Right after her appointment, Katie went and bought some. They were twenty dollars and hot pink. Katie liked the feeling of pulling them apart, of feeling them oppose her actions.
Every morning when Katie woke up, she went immediately to the floor and did her exercises. First, stretching, then following a Yoga video on Youtube. She started running, which hurt her feet tremendously, but was benign enough that it didn’t intimidate her. After she ran, her body ached but in a good way — in a way that was warranted, that had purpose.
Most people, when they bent themselves in half, were able to touch their toes. Katie could only come to about her knees. Each day at the end of her exercises, she stretched down and convinced herself that she was getting closer, that her fingertips were falling just a little bit lower.
In the evenings, Katie called her mom on the phone. Her mother’s voice was always tinny and far-away sounding; Katie clung to it like a life raft.
“You’re eating well?” her mother always asked. Always Katie said yes. It was becoming more and more true.
“I’m still doing the exercises,” Katie told her. “Nearly everyday.”
There was a stall. Then: “That’s real good, Katie. That’s important.”
“I know,” Katie said, feeling her throat closing up a little. She thought of her mother, who spent nearly all day in bed. Whose bones hardened everyday. Who used to be able to touch her toes, and now could not get up from bed without the help of a home nurse.
“I know it’s important, mom,” Katie repeated. “I’m gonna make sure I keep on top of it.”
*
Lee sat opposite her therapist, trying not to squirm under his unrelenting gaze. Eye contact was not her forte, and he knew it.
“How was your week?”
“Eventful!” She lied, “Did you hear about that murder?”
“That’s not really what I was looking to hear about, but yes, I have heard.”
She was squirming.
“Tell me, Lee. We spoke last session about your day-to-day, and you agreed with me, if I recall, that you could be and want to do better for yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“And have you? Done better, I mean, by your own standards, have you been better…? You wanted to go to that bar on Church Street?”
“No money,” she shrugged. “No money to leave my house with,” she tried again, injecting rotting humour into the sentence.
“Fair enough.” He tried a sympathetic smile, but it came off wrong. Lee knew he made thrice her salary. “And beyond that? Have you tried anything new at all?”
“Yep.” Lee willed her knee to quit bouncing. “I walked into a protest the other day. Well, yesterday.” She looked up at him, mentally begging him to say something, anything at all. If he weren’t her therapist, he would find her so incredibly dull.
“You know, that CEO, Thomas Bryerson, was killed. It was for him… well, not for him, for him. Just about… it all.”
“And how did you feel there?”
Lee finally managed to still herself, unwittingly. Her gaze shifted to a generic image of a forest clearing hung up on the wall.
“I felt—”
He leaned forward, just barely.
“I told you about that Christian summer camp, right?” He nodded with a fleeting look of recognition. “Well, I felt like that. I felt like a singer in a choir. Like it didn’t matter what my convictions were or who I am or how much I understand what I’m screaming about, just that I’m there, and I’m doing something important and right… even if it makes no big difference.”
Privately, Lee thought of the small horde of people, apparently her age, that had formed a half-baked conga line, arms interlinked, across the intersection every time the light turned red. She thought of the young boy with the shiny metal pot, dollar store sticker still attached, and his stick, up on the shoulders of various people, whacking the thing to the rhythm of chants she sometimes couldn’t make out fully.
*
Katie decided that she needed real exercise, not just running, so she Googled the gym closest to her. It was at a community centre. It was small-ish but had all the machines, or at least what she presumed to be all the machines. She stood in the centre of them all. A wrinkly old man in purple shorts asked kindly if she needed any help, but she shook her head and hurried over to the treadmill.
After a few weeks, she was able to do her squats and exercises in front of the mirror. She bought little 5-pound weights and brought those with her. She went almost every day and started seeing the same people — especially the nice old man — who smiled at her each time, but she never said hi to any of them. She fell into a spell when she entered the gym, where she forced herself to look only at the exercise that was in front of her.
Sometimes at the gym, she watched the muted TV they had in the corner. More protests were happening, some of them in her city. She watched footage of people carrying a huge banner that said NOT FREE UNTIL WE ARE ALL FREE. She thought about joining one of those protests. She thought about how those people’s arms must hurt from carrying those banners for that long.
She could feel a change happening. When she carried herself, it was easier. She was lighter but more grounded. She could run longer and longer without getting out of breath. Her back still ached sometimes at night, but it was not the dull, constant pain she had become accustomed to.
She could feel her sinew loosening, pulling apart, her shoulders dropping away from her chin. When she walked away from the gym, with her hot pink resistance bands in her hot pink bag, she didn’t have to remember to hold herself upright: she just did it naturally. And she felt, more and more, like she wanted other people to witness this change in her. That she wanted to be able to show people: Look. Look. See? I’m getting better.
*
Lee sat perfectly still, trying her level best not to smile. This was, after all, no laughing matter. The woman on the screen was dying, quite tragically, too. If Lee was keeping track of things correctly, it was her brother who had killed her. Or her lover. Who knows. Who cares? She wasn’t really there for the movie.
This, apparently, was a monthly occurrence. The community center held little movie nights every second Thursday of the month, and better yet, they were free. Somewhere to her left sat a woman – Katie – who had formally introduced herself to Lee less than two hours ago. They had both only seen old flyers for the movie night, unaware it had been postponed by an hour that day. A happy coincidence by all accounts, though. As it turns out, from Katie’s account, the community center had more yet to offer. The occasional Scrabble night, a sketchy gym for relatively cheap, and better yet, a free weekly yoga session hosted by a nice old lady sat to Lee’s right.
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