Act 1, Scene 1

What's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.
— ANTONIO, The Tempest, 2.1.253

Fade in.

Pain in her eyes is the first sensation.

Too bright. Too bright.

Waves of disorientation swell and roll underneath her. She squeezes her eyes shut and waits for the buckling to subside. When the surface firms, she forces her stiff eyelids to roll up over blistered pupils and wills her vision to track. As the shapes in front of her stabilize and come into focus, she realizes she is lying on a bathroom floor.

That much she can tell.

She is up close and personal with one of the squat porcelain knobs that cover the bolts at the bottom of a toilet — the ones that never stay on, though this one looks as though it's never come off. A halo of rust barnacles grows solid around its rim. The side of her face is sticking to the door, and when she tries to shift her jaw back and forth, the skin stretches and pulls. There are oatmeal-like clumps in her mouth, and it's hard to breathe; her nostrils are packed tight. She spits out what she can and pulls her head — ever so gently — from the door. There is a soft rubber-soled sucking sound. The movement sends her head spinning, and she grabs the toilet seat. Body and mind seem to connect, and even through her clogged nose, she smells a foul odor rising up like a fog from the bathroom door. She gags, the muscles in her stomach and buttocks cramping spasmodically. The misery of it jolts her to her feet. Before she can faint, she blindly pushes herself out of the bathroom and away from the smell.

She moves from one room into another. The stink lessens, but she has brought much of it with her. Finding a kitchen sink with a plastic tub full of dirty dishes, she fumbles with the knobs and gets a stream of water going, rubbing her face while digging into her nostrils with her fingernails. She washes out her mouth and, when most of the slime is gone, leans under the faucet and drinks. She straightens up, and the maneuver sends her head whirling away from her again. She sinks down to the door, and the ceiling above her fades out.

When she wakes up, cold and clammy and in the dim light of fading day, it takes her a while to realize that the sink is over- dowing and that she is soaked through. It's easier to stand up this time, though she has to hold on to the rim of the sink. The knobs ripple slightly when she reaches out to turn them off. She pulls some dingy-looking towels from the handle of the refrigerator and throws them on the door to sop up the water.

It's hard to think. She has never felt so sick in her life — not even after that wedding banquet, when she drank an entire bottle of champagne after coming off three months of strenuous dieting. Her husband and their three-year-old son had left to take the babysitter home, and her daughter, who was almost a year old and very mobile, stayed with her. She thought she was just Fine, but suddenly the champagne hit her stomach and her head with a double-impact punch. She vaguely remembered her daughter coming into the bathroom as she was draped over the toilet bowl, but when she woke up later almost delirious on the cold door, she had no idea how long she had been passed out or where her daughter was.

That was a picnic compared with this.

Her heart races and it hurts to breathe deeply. Her body shakes, and she feels an anxiousness that threatens to over- whelm her. Her clothes are stuck hard to her like an old- fashioned corn plaster bandage, and her hair is stiff with caked vomit. The only thing she can think of is to shower, and to shower means going back into that cesspool of a bathroom. But she can't think of anything else. She knows she doesn't know where she is or how she got there, but these questions will have to be deferred for the moment.

She walks deliberately, one foot placed slowly in front of the other as if on a tightrope, back through the only open door, into a bedroom. She grabs the scrunched-up bedspread at the foot of the mattress and throws it on the door of the bathroom. It will have to do for now.

She yanks aside the mildew-spotted shower curtain to re- veal the small, sliding window above the tiled wall. Stepping into the bathtub and breathing through her mouth, she opens the window as wide as it will go, letting in a slight breeze. She turns on the water and, hardly waiting for it to get lukewarm, twists the handle to redirect the stream to the showerhead. The bong that is slamming from side to side in her head crescendos, and the pain that is dashing across her forehead forces her eyes shut. She strips off her clothes and leaves them at the other end of the tub, the sodden mess sending rivulets of murky water running toward the drain.

She wets her clumpy hair and washes it with some shampoo, its perfumed smell almost turning her stomach again. She manages to get through two rinses before the thin veneer of her strength sloughs down the drain. Turning the water off, she steps onto the bedspread and wraps slightly crusty but thickly woven towels around her torso and her hair.

She heads straight for the bed in the next room and lies down, the towels still around her. It is almost dark. The vertigo settles slowly, and this time she falls asleep.

When she awakens, there is morning light, but she has a sense that she has slept a long time, perhaps through another entire day. Her body is dead weight, that sensation that comes with sleeping so deeply and in one position for too long. It takes all her strength to break the inertia and sit up, her body aching as if it has been clipped and spun up over the hood of a car. She touches her head, and feels that her hair is dry, but her scalp is thick with layers of sweat. Her mouth is dried out almost to cracking, and her stomach feels as though it has dropped down into the base of her spine. Her head still throbs, but her mind is beginning to clear — it's time to Fnd out exactly what's going on.

She gets up, and the towels unravel around her, remaining on the bed. She looks down the length of her body and is hit with another attack of vertigo, so strong that she has to sit down on the edge of the bed. She doesn't want to move — ever again — but she makes herself slowly stretch out her arms and hands in front of her.

They are not hers.

The arms are pale, thin but shapely, the long fingers tipped with ragged nails. Dancer's hands — even she can make them pirouette like butterflies. She looks down, and the almost non- existent breasts with the very dark nipples are not hers. The flat — nay, concave — stomach, the thin thighs, the knees, are not hers. She stumbles into the bathroom, closes the medicine cabinet door, and stares at the reflection in the mirror.

The face, the hair, the eyes, are not hers.

This is not Katharine.

Courtesy of Warner Books

Excerpted from This Body © Copyright 2012 by Laurel Doud. Reprinted with permission by Warner Books. All rights reserved.