Katie Kitamura

He was a man entirely without morals,

I said that I could see that, he had the moral flexibility that I thought was surely common to many defense lawyers.

bored by the recitation of his own crimes,

looked at the people gathered in the museum lobby, dressed in designer brands and playing ostentatiously with their smartphones.

This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world. The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation.

They no longer seemed like the well-adjusted individuals I had met upon my arrival, instead they were marked by alarming fissures, levels of dissociation that I did not think could be sustainable.