The Back Meets the Nose

A female subject—author Emily Nemens, we can assume, writing in the third person—experiences an Achilles tear while running. Not long after, another injury occurs, but why or where exactly, she cannot say. All she knows for sure is that the pain is in her back, that it travels, and that it is chronic, debilitating, and consuming. To cope, she turns to doctors, PTs, ultrasounds, MRIs, injections, ablations, and Nikolai Gogol:

And so, this wincing injury was random, unfair, incomprehensible. Because she read and wrote for a living, she often turned to literature in moments of quandary. In the annals of the Russian greats, she found a helpful beacon. She thought her current situation was not so unlike the start of Gogol’s “The Nose.” The story opens with a barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, waking up from a normal night of drinking. He bickers with his wife and is served a loaf of fresh bread with onions, which he slices into, and “to his astonishment saw something white.” Yakovlevich pokes and prods. “‘Solid!’ he said to himself. ‘What could it be?’” The reader may recognize this foreign object as the story’s eponymous nose. It belongs to a client of his, one collegiate assessor Kovalyov; even in a loaf of rye, Yakovlevich recognizes its contours. His wife is certain the appearance is Yakovlevich’s own fault—he is mindless in his work, slapdash and forceful. “I have already heard from three people that you jerk their noses about so much when shaving that it’s a wonder they stay in place.” Yakovlevich makes a plan to drop the nose into the river from St. Isaac’s Bridge. Something this awful must be solved quickly. Does he think of Kovalyov, the nose’s owner, as he hatches his plan? He does not. She, the runner, did not think of Kovalyov either, not right away, just the strangeness of something so sudden as an unexplained rip in her body’s functioning. The extended metaphor would come in time, with extended injury. For now, she still believed quick solutions existed. Yakovlevich and his convenient bridge.