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Show Moon -128 Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. These are the words etched on the cover of Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. How does one heal failure? I called you to say Td decided not to marry Mark. You screamed at me all the way from Manila. You screamed, "You failed! You failed!" But you could not know that Td saved myself, something you weren't able to do for yourself. Or maybe that was why you screamed, so unlike you. I'm sure you were sorry later. After Mark, living in the city alone felt dangerous. Now there were his admonitions ringing in her ears: Never emerge from a subway looking lost. Walk with a purpose, even if it's in the wrong direction. Don't stop if someone asks you the time. Wear shoes you can run in. Never look back. Made brilliant-eyed by this hyperalertness, her skin hectic with nervous color, she interviewed well and landed a job doing pasteups at a large ad agency. She found a small rent-controlled apartment uptown on Second Avenue, hoping this would feel safer than she'd felt in the East Village. One morning Joy saw an old woman standing on the edge of the sidewalk outside Joy's apartment, unsure of how to cross a wide patch of ice. Joy offered her arm. The woman shrank away, then looked at Joy more closely, smiled, and accepted her help. She said, "You're the first person approaching me in years who hasn't tried to mug me." At night there were screams and gunshots from Second Avenue and the time-warp sensation of another dimension out there, as if alien spirits hovered outside, clamoring to come in. The plagues of cockroaches were so intense that |