It was a humid July morning that Maeve looked in a coffee shop window and saw Hugo Erkmen. She rarely walked around this part of Tribeca on Saturday or any other day, but there was no denying the man inside was Hugo—Hugo plus fourteen years and one writhing boy.

They met the first time at a college party. Maeve had formed a band with classmates who, like her, didn’t get into RISD. Someone at the party dragged Hugo over: “This dude got into RISD and turned them down.” Maeve laughed and said “Go away.” Hugo said he was accepted into RISD and everywhere because of his father. He was at Harvard because his father died while doing fieldwork on their payroll.

They met again four years later at a coffee house in Harvard Square. “Are you that girl who didn’t get into RISD?” he came to her table to ask. “Still!” she replied. She had a new band called Rickrack and was known for singing crazy loud. She was also known as being a blast to drink with when she wasn’t depressed. He was a video artist and photographer and said that he, too, was “sometimes” depressed, though she didn’t believe him because he was all times rich.

His father was an art conservator at the Strauss Center who died seven years before from falling off a crane in what he called Persia. His sister died as a teenager a few years before that from a disease that started with a bug bite when the family was living in Byrsa. Julia, Hugo’s mother, never got over either death and went to see psychics in California once a month to learn when she would connect with Ismet’s ghost. As a first date, Hugo invited Maeve to one of his mother’s swish dinner parties on Mount Auburn Street. “Your mother reminds me of a Renaissance painting,” she told him, “one of the women crying outside Jesus’s tomb.” “She’s the reason I’m depressed,” he said.

Maeve fell madly in love with Ismet’s son. He was working on a video project about his aesthetic idol, the Czech photographer Josef Sudek; she was recording an album in Lynn. She wrote a song about him that got a lot of college radio airplay. They got engaged a year later.

And then one day came the pain. It was defined as neurological, affecting her neck, shoulders, arms and legs. The symptoms enveloped like the sonic wall of an airport runway. It wielded its thousand knives and made her limp, tired, devoid of appetite. The sun made everything worse. Months of tests told nothing. Because of the time and place, the doctors would not prescribe opioids (though her widowed father in Cleveland was always trying to give her decade-old painkillers). She’d been on antidepressants on and off since high school, but the more complex combinations did nothing to stop the pain, only blunted whatever remained of her life force while making her fat.

Hugo’s reaction was to run away. He’d received a grant to work on his Sudek installation project in New York, at a warehouse in Long Island City. He convinced his mother to allow Maeve to live for free in a studio apartment she’d purchased for him and had been renting to a grad student. It was on Garden Street, near Mount Auburn Cemetery, and was oddly shaped, like an arrowhead where the building came to a point. It had windows on all sides, but it was just one room. It was even smaller when filled with all of Hugo’s art and photography books—one pillar alone on Sudek, and in languages Hugo couldn’t even read.

The pain of realizing that Hugo wasn’t ever coming back was nothing compared to the pain of the pain. Maeve imagined it as a schizophrenic anarchist hiding in the fissures of her brain, waiting to manically erupt, using a dagger-like spade to savagely dig up unmapped regions at the base of her skull. He also set fires that lashed and roared down every nerve, filling every dendrite with torrid flame, only to suddenly retreat, leaving the smolder of his carnage throbbing—an echo Maeve could hear in her ears for hours.

The world became paralyzed into still life. Her old hectic times receded from memory. She quit her day job at the law firm, quit the band, quit her friends. All she could manage was singing in the subway on a few overcast days. She looked terrible; the pain was aging her. She could barely carry a guitar on her back. People leaving dollars in the case asked if she had a place to stay, as if she were homeless.

She spent most of her time indoors because of the sun. She was a recluse in a tiny pointed box where seasons had no meaning. People would ask, “How do you pass the time in here?” She’d been given all kinds of books on meditation and tried to teach herself to be still in herself. Though she stayed out from under it, the sun was an obsession. It poured into the windows in the late afternoon, smothering the room in gold. She sat under a black umbrella on the sofa and tried to meditate while watching the rays move across the wood floor. Sometimes when the sun struck directly on the pillar of the Sudek books, there was a special kind of pain, a Hugo kind of pain.

Losing an arm in the Great War didn’t stop Sudek’s photographic nocturns on the streets of Prague, shooting eerie scenes at twilight. He was the master of light and shadows, and when World War II began, he sheltered in place, beginning an obsessive study of his world from the point of view of the glass pane of his studio window—out into the fog, the mist, the surrealistically shaped trees and hidden mysteries of the enclosed garden, and back inside to the still lives on his window ledge. Hugo wanted to show the world Sudek’s brilliance, how all existence could be captured through one blurry window.

Often as she sat in pain, a silence overcame her that did not even seem of this world; it was the silence of a visible star that had burned out and died billions of years before. It was this silence that convinced her one terribly hot and humid night in August to kill herself in Julia Erkmen’s studio apartment. Why not? She’d been there almost a year and the pain seemed worse. She still couldn’t get disability. Her sister and her father sent money, but it mostly rested on Julia to keep Maeve alive, and that wasn’t going to last. She couldn’t rely on a bottle of pills because they often didn’t work; she would have to hang herself the next day or the one after.

The next day, Julia Erkmen showed up at the door unannounced. She had with her a short woman of about the same age. “This is Eva Fischmann,” she said. “She’s been doing tarot spreads for me. I thought this might help you.”

Maeve was startled and could think of nothing to say. She assumed that Julia was going to make some kind of move with the studio and this was to alleviate her guilt. What better time to exit stage left?

“Eva’s mother is a Holocaust survivor,” said Julia.

Maeve looked at the woman skeptically. “Weren’t the Nazis into tarot cards?”

“Astrology,” said Eva as she practically shoved Maeve out of the way with her body. “The Nazis were into astrology.”

The place was a mess, a hovel. Julia looked about in horror. Maeve cleared from the dining table a laptop and speakers and piles of books. The three of them sat at Maeve’s table as Eva shuffled and reshuffled her deck.

“If you shuffle so much,” said Maeve, “don’t the cards come back to their original positions?”

“You like Josef Sudek?” Eva asked, nodding at the stack of books.

“My son is a Sudek scholar,” said Julia proudly. “Those are his books.”

Eva continued looking at Maeve: “You like him?”

The last thing in the world she wanted to talk about was Hugo’s idol. “I used to like him.”

“Why not now?”

“Because I’m in fucking pain that’s why not now.”

“He had one arm, Sudek, but made wonderful pictures of Prague.”

“Prague is a very beautiful city,” said Julia.

“I’m ready for the Hanged Man,” said Maeve.

“There are no bad cards,” said Eva, “only bad people.”

“This is a complex spread,” said Julia, her eyes riveted to Eva’s hand pressing down each overturned card. It looked to Maeve like half the deck had been placed in some specific and meaningless scheme.

She pointed at The Sun. “I hate that card.”

Eva frowned. “Everyone wants The Sun.”

“Not me.”

“This,” said Eva, pointing at the Death card, “is what they hate.”

“You just said there were no bad cards.”

“There aren’t. But people believe what they will.”

“Tell me what you see in a single word. I don’t have life categories.”

“Death is what I see.”

Maeve smiled. “At least it’s the end of the pain.”

“Death is a beginning,” said Eva. “One pain ends and another begins.”

Julia was obviously unhappy about this turn of events.

Eva tapped on the card that said The Fool. “See where he is in relation to Death?”

“What is he, the Joker card?”

“The Fool is you.”

“I thought the Joker was the wild card. It comes in and upsets everything but doesn’t stick around for the rest of the story.”

“You are making your own rules.”

“I’m in pain right now and am tolerating this. I can do what I want.”

“You should look at those books,” she said of the Sudek stack. “Art like that is like a tarot deck, though you can’t so easily shuffle.”

When they left, Maeve was angry. She supposed she was angry at Eva for insinuating that Josef Sudek with one arm was stronger than Maeve with the pain of a thousand knives. She started on the pillar, opening each book just to see. And what she saw was that she did not understand him at all when she wrote a song about Hugo called “From the Window of My Studio.” Her song was airheaded and stupid. Suddenly she saw the person who wrote that song and others as a complete stranger, foreign to everything she had become. She saw that person as a tiny white dot in an old photograph of a public park. She looked at the Sudek books on a continuous loop, and the images conjured a place outside of time, like a secret room in a dream. They made her feel part of something eternal. Even if she might kill herself at some later date, she thought, she couldn’t do it in that studio.

Then Julia Erkmen died, three weeks after the tarot reading. She had suffered a mild heart attack during yoga class, checked herself into the hospital, and was found to have Stage IV lung cancer. Maeve didn’t go to the funeral or the burial just across the street. Julia’s executor was blunt in saying he would try to stretch out Maeve’s stay as Hugo decided what to do with the Cambridge properties. The executor admitted that Julia had been planning to sell the studio, but he also made a strange confession: Julia had intended to leave Maeve a small amount of money, but he convinced her to instead leave Maeve arranged funding for genetic profiling at Children’s Hospital, where he sat on the board. “She left Children’s a large bequest because of her daughter’s illness, and I talked her into adding this piece that might help you.”

Maeve was disgusted at this random man manipulating her life, but then it wasn’t her money, so she had the sequencing done. Two months later, she got two pieces of news: she needed to be out of the studio in sixty days, and she had a genetic anomaly in which some T cells were turned off. She was contacted by a clinical doctor in Texas who, for thirteen years, had been working on a rare disease with a bench researcher. They had proposed trying something that was originally a cancer drug on rheumatoid arthritis, and now they proposed using this drug on Maeve. “It’s a crapshoot,” said the doctor.

The crapshoot made Maeve sick for a while but she began to feel better; it took six months for there to be an after, where she felt not great but OK. It was about two years of life that she lost to pain, but in the after, every aspect of existence was different. In the after, music was too loud, everything was an anthem, and there were no more pop songs that mentioned the weather. She was a different person, a normie with a chronic medical condition. She moved to Cleveland for a while and then Chicago and then New York, where she eventually met her husband, a former punk rocker who lived in Prague during the hipster days after the Wall came down. She got two graduate degrees and made a lot of mistakes that made her sad. But she wasn’t depressed like she was in the first part of her life.

She stepped back and flipped up her sunglasses to see that the coffee shop was called Laughing Man, and she realized this was the charity place owned by the actor Hugh Jackman. This knowledge lent a weird drama to seeing the fiancé she hadn’t seen or talked to since the day he left her in pain. He was still well turned out, as if for the world’s benefit. She had Googled him periodically. He went through all kinds of art-adjacent careers that were pure commerce. The last job she remembered was coming up with paint colors for a luxury paint company in Marseille. It said on Instagram that he developed a shade called Harborcoat that celebrities had to put their names on waiting lists to get.

She saw him tap his card and take his cup. He had the sleek, clean, muted-gray profile of someone who was all Harborcoat, the very opposite of Sudek the one-armed packrat, with his dusty studio of curio debris. She saw the boy repeatedly slap away his proffered hand to help hold a pastry on a sheath of parchment. The slapping kid reminded her of a revelation she had in the world of after—that the person Hugo had abandoned was not her but his mother. It wasn’t that he saddled Julia with Maeve; he saddled Maeve with Julia. And he was all clear when she died.

Maeve backed away to stand in front of the place next door as they exited to the street. When her eyes again glimpsed the Laughing Man sign, she felt the jolt of a new revelation—new even after fourteen years. That Hugo, as the Joker, as the wild card in her life, was completely incidental to the central drama.

“Ismet, where’s your phone?” he asked the boy while scrolling through his own. “Where did you leave it?”

Ismet ran back in the store holding his pastry, and through the window she saw him clumsily pick up the phone from the floor, drop it twice, and then after the final grab race back outside to his scrolling father.

As she watched them walk away, she wondered if her twenty-four-year-old self had even fallen in love with him willingly. Maybe that infatuation was his Joker trick to set off a karmic alignment of strangers—his depressed mother, the tarot reader Eva Fischmann, the Erkmen executor Kirby Bonner, the Children’s Hospital sequencers and the Texas doctors, and most of all Josef Sudek—that proved much stronger than a few bad genes. §