Liz Prato
Under the Sheets
They have a stiff neck or a tight back or sore legs from sitting at a desk or carrying their
kids or doing some sort of weekend warrior thing. It’s arthritis or stress or some disease
with lots of syllables or sometimes even the doctor can’t say what it is. He just gives them
a shot or a pill or a shrug, and then, then those people come to see me. It’s not much that
they want—to be pain free. To be able to walk or to work or to sit or to sleep. No dull throbbing,
no sharp shooting, no hot tingling. The opposite of that, which you’d think would be
nothing, but instead, it’s beautiful and white and wide.
These are my clients: He is twenty-three and has Asperger’s and can’t live without his
mom or his dad, and sometimes his body jumps and twitches under my touch but sometimes
he just stays still. She is under five feet tall and over three-hundred pounds and is
some kind of pagan, as far as I can tell, and has a teenage son who leaves black bruises
on her back, bruises that only I can see. They are HIV-positive lovers who buried other
HIV-positive lovers’ ashes in the backyard. Under a tree. She has scars on her wrist, all
horizontal—they were just a cry for help, see?—and she tells me to ignore them, pretend
they aren’t there. He’s scared to be touched because of the way he was touched a long
time ago, but he wants to know how to be touched so he comes to see me. She doesn’t talk
much, just a little about her trips to the warm sunny beach, but she was referred to me by
that therapist who treats people with addictions to drugs and addictions to sex and they
were often beaten and raped, and so her silence strikes me as quite loud. He is forty-one
and once had a thing for thirteen-year-old girls and even though he was younger then, he
was still a man and they were still girls and he carries that around with him every day. Her
younger brother died three weeks ago of the flesh-eating bacteria—people really get that,
you know, this corrosive black disease—and she cries and says she had no idea this would
happen, today. That she would cry. He is seventy-nine and wants more out of life—he
wants to travel and fly-fish and go to dinner with his wife—but he’s got this pain in his
back, sometimes low and sometimes high, and this son with Asperger’s, who will never be
able to take care of himself. He will never be free.
Sometimes my head hurts, bad. There’s a knot in my neck or a pain in my back or
an ache in my legs. Money is scarce and something else is scarce, too, maybe something
bigger than cash. My brother is bipolar—no, no, my dad says, just an alcoholic—and my
mother is dead and my dad insists it’s better to be an alcoholic asshole than medicated
and bipolar and why don’t I call more often and it’s really too bad that I don’t do something
important with my life, like run some big company. And I don’t want to get out of
bed. Actually, I do want out of this bed. I want to run 8 miles and write 40 pages and
make love for an hour but, instead, I stay under the sheets. Dark and still with the drone
of the TV I would stay here all day, but they wait for me. Their desire to be free. They
wait in my office, the one with ambient music and quiet light and flannel sheets decorated
with flowers and clouds and leaves.
They tell me their stories, and sometimes they cry and often they laugh and sometimes
we just talk about movies and books and TV. When we say nothing at all it’s just
my hands and their bodies, muscle and skin and fascia and bone, flush. Floating. My
headache is gone, and so is my brother and father and my mother is there, with me, and
maybe later I’ll run and I’ll write and make love for an hour. But now it’s just me and my
client in this place with ambient tones and quiet light and flowers and clouds and leaves.
It’s just us floating in the space that’s beautiful and white and 
[Read an interview with Liz Prato.]
Prose: Underwater Christ Statue off Key Largo, Mark Theiss/Ultimate Chase/Corbis, 2007 Poetry: Above a Small Swamp (detail), Maud Gatewood, 1992
