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A Prayer for Which No Words Exist - part three
🕑 Added 2021-03-06 03:51:00 +0000 UTC
[image by Pulkit Kamal]
This will be the last unlocked installment of this book; subsequent posts will be locked to supporters at the $1 level, which is the only level. So if you like this and you’d like to support what I do and you aren’t already doing so, there’s that.
(And if you‘re coming to this fresh, let me strongly encourage you to follow the tag back to part the first and acquaint yourself with the AO3 tags/warnings.)
12
Time is a muddy puddle. It’s tainted with gasoline, swirling iridescent, color bleeding into color. But the seeker can count and he counts three more rounds before it finally ends.
In that end he’s curled on his side, heaving breath, and he doesn’t move when he hears a footstep beside him. A shadow is looming over him and for a thick, lurching instant he believes that he has indeed failed in some way, run through all three strikes, and what follows will be a much more up-close-and-personal kind of pain.
A soft clunk by his head. He looks up and blinks at the bowl in front of him.
“Eat.”
He’s not hungry. His stomach feels as though it’s very far away from him. But he’s been given a command and he manages to raise himself enough to peer into the bowl, although not to pick it up.
More dry cereal. No spoon.
The guide crouches and regards him—the seeker catches a glimpse of a cool, evaluating gaze. “No, you don’t get a spoon. Not this time.” Pause. “This is another thing you should get used to.”
The seeker turns, looks fully up at him. Not entirely certain what he’s expecting or hoping to see. His brain is mushy, confused, scrabbling to make sense of what’s around him now that the pain is not the whole of the world, but beneath that confusion he does grasp a little of what this must be: not merely pain but more of what his complete denial of control gestures toward. A bowl of food on the floor without utensils signifies something not particularly subtle.
Light cuff against the side of his head and his arms give out. The top of his head collides with the bowl as he falls and nearly upsets it. The dry bran flakes rustle like crisp leaves.
Running out into the forest. Running barefoot, the leaf-twig crunch beneath his heels. Too loud. He’ll be heard. He won’t be able to escape.
“Eat,” says the guide, his tone edged with warning. “I’m making an allowance here because I know it’s harder for you to move just now but you’re close to strike two.”
The seeker pushes up again. Reaches out, picks up some flakes between his fingers, brings them trembling to his mouth. He does it again. The cereal reminds him of how dry his mouth is and he struggles to swallow. He comes so near to asking for water before he stops himself.
He eats. He does as he’s been told.
The guide rocks back on his heels and sits down crosslegged, hands loose in his lap and his head slightly cocked, watching him with what feels like keen interest. “Didn’t occur to me that you’d use your hands.” Another pause. “I might adjust that next time. For now you can.”
The seeker looks up at him again, brushing crumbs off his lips. The implication. Not only eating on the floor, not only eating without utensils. Putting his face right in the bowl and eating like—
“I imagine you’re thirsty,” the guide continues. “We’ll take address that once the bowl is empty. And I do mean I want it empty. If you’re going to stay alive you need to stay fed, whether or not you feel like eating.”
Silence then. Silence except for the crunch as the seeker eats, which is tremendously loud in his own head, his heels pounding across the floor of his skull, blundering into the darkness. Everything here is shadow. The room feels cavernous. The lantern seems to be miles away.
“You must have more questions,” the guide murmurs. “You must have a lot of them. It must be so hard for you, not being able to ask them. Are you the kind of man who asks a lot of questions? Honestly, I didn’t get that sense when I met you. If anything you came off as... reticent. But you’re doing well so far.”
A touch at his shoulder. Fingertips through the thin cloth of his shirt. They skate over him, back to upper arm, spread into a palm. Gentle pressure. A shiver that he succeeds in repressing. It may not be putting on a brave face. It may not be bravado. He might not know what it is.
“Day one. A lot of people fuck up on day one but it isn’t actually the hardest. You’ll see. I’m not exactly easing you into things, but I’ve always been a believer in the idea of leaping into the pool rather than creeping in bit by bit.” The hand hasn’t left him. Fingers combing into his hair. There’s no trace of affection in the touch; if anything it’s as evaluating as his gaze was, as if he’s probing for lice. The seeker wrestles back the mounting urge to shrug him off. He’s certain that it wouldn’t be taken well.
“There will be a time when you get to ask more questions. But you need to have faith. This is all about faith. Faith in the process. Faith in me.” He exhales slowly. “And I need to have faith in you. I can punish you from here to eternity and back but in the end the only one who has the power to decide whether or not my faith is justified is you.”
The last few flakes rattle at the bottom of the bowl. He didn’t expect so much talking. The silence lulled him and now he’s disoriented by all these words. Perhaps that’s part of the point. Perhaps every feature of this is by design.
He finishes what’s in the bowl and lays his head down with a faint groan. His legs are stiff; he’s not confident that he could stand on them if he tried. This should possibly trouble him more than he does. What will happen when he’s commanded to stand? Because surely he will be. He doubts he’s going to be permitted to stay here until he feels ready to move on his own. He’ll have to stand and walk to—
He shies away from the next image that comes to him, vivid as a vision of the future.
The hand is withdrawn. The sound of the guide getting to his feet. Clink of the bowl as it’s picked up and footsteps receding. The sound of running water. The guide returning, soft shuffle. He’s not wearing shoes; the seeker didn’t notice that until now. Somehow that’s a point of connection. The slightest equalizer.
Later he will identify this as another premonition of things to come.
The bowl is set down by his head. Without being prompted he lifts himself once more and this time he doesn’t bother with his hand; his thirst is sudden and cell-quakingly violent, and he plunges his face into the bowl and slurps the water down. The cold of it shocks his throat and aches in his chest but he doesn’t stop. It’s bizarre that he’s so thirsty. It’s as if he’s run miles.
He can feel the guide watching him. Part of him resents it deeply, a sliver of shame like a splinter working into the pad of his thumb. He was prepared, on the most academic level, to accept the prospect of being hurt, but what’s happening to him now that the pain is fading is something he didn’t see coming.
Should have.
Too soon, the bowl is removed, and he whimpers, trying to follow it, chin dripping. Soft laugh. He grits his teeth and wipes at his face. The urge to say something acid and sullen is almost more than he can bear.
The grip on the back of his neck is abrupt but far too brusque to be genuinely cruel. He shoves himself up when he’s yanked, straightens one leg as he goes, and whines as muscles and tendons protest. No, he’s not at all confident that he can walk, but once again that image comes to him and he sees it, himself crawling across the floor on his hands and knees, and the thought of that makes him quail with dread in ways that have nothing to do with humiliation.
The grip shifts to his shoulder, his upper arm. Pulling him firmly upward. “I’ll help you. You can do it.” Huff of a laugh. He gets one foot under him, weight settles on his knee, pain flares and he moans. “You better do it. This is one of those things you don’t get any say in.”
He manages. Somehow he manages and as he staggers there’s a solid body against his side, an arm around his shoulder, steps coaxing his own steps, half carrying and half leading him forward. The lantern is getting dimmer, shadows falling around him, and for reasons he can’t hope to articulate, this is comforting to him. As if he’ll be safer inside them. As if something won’t be able to see him and therefore won’t be able to cause him any more pain.
As if something won’t be able to see him and therefore won’t be able to follow him.
He’s being lowered. Softness under him—he understands what it is and feels distant wonder, that it’s so soft when mere hours before the mattress was uncomfortably thin and hard. He lies down and curls onto his side, draws up his legs, breathes.
“You need to sleep,” says a low voice from the dark. “Sleep is one of the most important things.“ The seeker doesn’t need to see the smile to detect it. “Not necessarily for the reasons you’d expect.”
The whisper of feet moving away. The seeker blinks; he’s facing the open bedroom door, and through it he can just make out the glow of the lantern from the living room.
Didn’t he just wake up? Wasn’t he just in bed? How can he already be so tired?
No. No, it was hours. It was hours and hours. Uncountable. When they covered the windows they blocked out the time. Without time there are no straight lines, only an endless fractal flow that loops perpetually back and back on itself, turning in meaningless spirals.
He floats.
13
The blade trails over his chest. The blade is the sharpness of a shadow thrown by brilliant light. The light vanishes and the blade is blunted. The blade slides through him and opens a tear in the world through which he slips. The tear bleeds darkness and into the darkness he wanders, the crunch of the leaves under his bare feet, the whisper of the trees over his head. The whisper of someone following close behind him. Even the darkness won’t conceal him but somehow he isn’t afraid.
The breeze is a hand passing through his hair with gentle detachment. He’s never in his life been touched with such a total and complete lack of affection. Hatred and anger are closer, because hatred and anger require passion.
But this is the sort of carefully composed detachment that might hide something in its darkness.
He doesn’t try to run but he doesn’t slow down.
He does look back. He’s mildly surprised to discover that although the darkness is opaque, he can see. The cabin is not far behind him. There’s no light in the windows; there’s only an even deeper darkness.
Whispers all around him. He understands that this darkness is not night. He understands that this darkness is older, that its roots go down and down and pierce the heart of the world. It feeds on the blood it finds there. The pitch through which he swims is an engorged muscle, working with his own body.
He feels no fear. Heavy in his chest like a fist of lead is only a terrible despairing loss.
Heavy in his hand is a gun.
14
The rough shake startles him so badly that he nearly rolls off the cot. As before, the flashlight is harsh and blinding; he throws up a hand to shield himself but it forces between his fingers and outlines the edges in bloody red. It comes to him that the light is being held inches from his face—far closer than it needs to be.
“Get up.” Another shake, nearly a blow against his shoulder. “We need to continue.”
Continue. His legs twinge as he moves them and he remembers: the floor, the kneeling, the trackless slippage of time. The food and the water in bowls, being fed like an animal. Words that he can’t recall with any clarity and therefore can’t discern the significance of. What was he told?
He remembers at the table. He remembers that part.
Three strikes only. He’s already used one.
He wrestles himself upright and sits, blinking, working his legs and establishing that he will indeed be able to stand on them. They throw gently but he believes it’ll be possible, and as he swings them off the bed and gets up the guide lights the lantern on the bedside table.
Behind the guide’s shape is a softer glow from the main room. Another lantern. The guide gestures at the one he’s just lit.
“Take that to the bathroom. Do whatever you need to do. Then come out. I’ll be at the table.” He turns. “You have ten minutes. I’ll be waiting.”
The seeker remains where he is as the guide walks away, staring stupidly after him. Ten minutes? He’s lost all track of time. How is he supposed to know what ten minutes are?
He can count. It won’t be perfect but he can keep a rough idea. It’s better than nothing. He picks up the lantern and walks on uncomfortably stiff legs to the bathroom.
Like before, he methodically goes about doing what he needs to do. Counts under his breath the whole time. The broken mirror is gone. He pauses, staring at where it was, considering—breaking in the count as he does so. He hasn’t been told to brush his teeth; was it implied? Should he not? Will the guide be able to tell? His mouth feels disgusting. In the end he contents himself with rinsing it out—freezes just as he finishes, because there’s no way the guide won’t hear the water running. He’s been instructed to only drink when given permission. Did he actually drink any? He wasn’t paying attention.
He squeezes his eyes shut. Too late now.
He turns and bends to pick up the lantern from where he’s placed it near the door—and freezes again, staring at what he can’t believe he missed until now.
Small black bag in the corner. Rather like a stereotypical doctor’s bag.
There is something about it that he doesn’t like the look of.
He swallows. The dryness makes his throat click. Leave it alone, he whispers from the depths of himself. Leave it alone. If you touch it he’ll know. If you open it he’ll know. He’ll detect the slightest change in it and whatever its contents are and of course you’ll be the only possible suspect. And you may have just burned through your second strike with the water.
He crouches and with slightly trembling fingers he unzips the bag.
The zipper is very loud. He only just manages to keep back a scared yelp. It has to be audible from the main room. No way it wasn’t. He jerks his head up and gazes wide-eyed at the closed door; any second now the guide will smash it open and seize him by the hair and—
And what?
No sound from the other room. The door doesn’t budge.
He peers into the bag.
The lantern is a couple feet away and its angle provides poor illumination, and the illumination it does provide is weird and seems to shift even though the seeker isn’t touching anything in the bag itself. Suddenly he doesn’t want to. Suddenly he wants to cringe backward, rub the feel of the smooth cool leather and the roughness of the zipper off his hands as if he’s touched a slug. He can’t see much in there but what he can see is bad.
A set of surgical needles, a bottle of something he can’t identify, a syringe.
It makes sense that the guide would have brought medical supplies. It should even be comforting; if he’s going to be put through anything physically painful, anything potentially damaging, he should be able to receive at least a minimal level of care. Infection might be an issue. Any number of other things. This should reassure him.
Needles. Another gleam of plastic-wrapped metal further down that he doesn’t want to examine. He carefully zips up the bag and wipes his hands on his pants, and has the absurd thought that he should try to remove any fingerprints he might have left.
He remembers the count. The count which he lost an uncountable length of time ago.
He scoops up the lantern and hurries out.
15
The guide is seated at the table, bent over the notebook again and scratching busily away. He doesn’t look up as the seeker approaches, but he raises a hand, palm outward in a stop gesture. The seeker stops, his hands loose at his sides, and waits.
What is he writing? From where the seeker is standing he can’t make any of it out. His curiosity is intense. Along with the curiosity comes a conviction that if he could sneak a peek at it, if he could read even a few pages, a great many things might become clear to him.
“The water was running,” the guide says, casually, and the seeker’s gut plummets toward the floor. “Why was that?”
If you lie, he will know.
“I was rinsing my mouth”
“Were you?” The guide still doesn’t look up. “I didn’t say you could do that. Did you swallow any?”
You said to do what I needed to do, he suddenly wants to protest. You didn’t say it didn’t include that. I need to do all kinds of things. It’s not fair, if we’re going to do this it has to be fair.
If you protest, the strikes won’t matter. He will hurt you. And if you lie, he will know.
“I don’t know,” he says softly.
Long silence. The guide doesn’t stop writing. The seeker clenches his jaw. He’s braced, he realizes, every muscle rigid in assumed self-defense. For a blow, for something worse—he doesn’t yet know the full extent of what might be done to him and once more the increasingly muted sane part of him wails that this is madness, that he’s crazy for not resisting, that he’s crazy for going along with any of it.
At last the guide clears his throat. There’s a glass of water at his left hand and he picks it up, takes a huge swallow, and the seeker understands that he’s being taunted.
“At least you’re honest.” Pause. “You took a good bit longer than ten minutes. I know you don’t have anything to help you with that,” he adds, “but you’re going to have to find a way to estimate time, because you’re going to run into that again. That’s a strike. You have one left.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “The water I’ll let slide this time. Mostly because you were honest. But don’t do it again.”
The rush of pathetic relief the seeker feels is disgusting.
The guide stops writing and turns to him, arm along the chair’s back. He takes another swallow of water. Does nothing for a moment. Then, with another twitch of his lips, he holds out the glass.
“Go ahead. Finish it.”
There’s about a third left. The seeker takes it without hesitating and gulps it down. He might have hesitated, someone else could have done so, but while he doesn’t know that he’d consider this precisely fair, he does intuit that at least for now, there will be no traps.
The guide talked about faith. Faith and betrayal don’t work well together.
He finishes the water, wipes his mouth on his hand and returns the glass. The guide takes it without a word and gestures at the floor, not far from where the seeker was made to kneel—
The day before? He has no way of knowing.
“We’re going to do something a little different,” says the guide. “I don’t want you on your knees. You ever done squats before?”
The seeker nods.
“This is going to be a little like that. Walk over there and bend your knees, lean slightly forward. Like you’re in the middle of sitting down.”
The seeker is already beginning to understand. He’s beginning to understand and his thighs are quivering in apprehension, in anticipation of what’s coming. It’s going to be bad. It’s going to be worse than before.
He bends.
“Good. Arms out in front of you. Hold it like that.”
He does as he’s told.
The guide goes back to his writing.
Almost immediately the burn in the seeker’s thighs begins. Before long it’s creeping up his spinal cord, lower back to mid to upper, but the worst of it is moving down into his knees. Yesterday was a swelling lump of an ache; this is different. This is being crushed into the ground by his own weight, a terrible sensation of compression. He bites his lips to keep back his whimper.
He can’t hold this. He simply can’t hold it. There’s no way. It’s not a question of wanting to or not wanting to; he is physically not capable. And time, time is not blurring and flowing back in on itself. Time is grinding to a halt and he’s locked into a single interminable Now.
“You can sit down,” says the guide absently, and the seeker crumples with a loud whine.
The relief is instant and shocking. When he was on his knees his breaks hurt almost as much as when he was up, but now the sheer lack of pain is almost a sexual level of pleasure. His whine bleeds into a moan as he slumps to the side and braces himself up on his hands, his head loose between his shoulders. He doesn’t think it has ever in his life felt so good to no longer be doing something.
“You didn’t expect that, did you?” The guide’s low voice has an amused lilt. “You didn’t expect any part of this to feel good. I know I gave you the impression that it wouldn’t. That’s not the case, though. The pain,” he continues, “is important. But if pain is all you have, sooner or later the pain won’t mean anything anymore.”
The seeker raises his head. The guide is leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees and his eyes glittering pools of ink. The blackness seems to be eating up the whites.
“If you do what I say,” the guide murmurs, “you’ll find that plenty of things don’t have to hurt at all. Some things... They can even be pleasurable for you.”
The seeker looks away toward the door, although he no longer sees the door itself and no longer comprehends what it might mean. Those eyes are abruptly impossible to meet. They’re drilling into him, into his head. They seem to whisper, he thinks, with slick, inky voices of their own.
Another period of silence. The guide doesn’t move.
“Get back up.”
The seeker exhales and does.
16
He manages four more rounds before he falls.
As his legs buckle, he thinks of how he once read about the infinite degrees of infinity that exist between numbers. He struggled with the concept at the time but now it snaps into perfect clarity: the stuff of the universe can be pared finer and finer, slivers all the way down, numbers between the numbers between the numbers—not a single fluid progression but an endless series of instants spiraling outward and inward to fractal infinity.
He falls but not all at once. He falls but not in a smooth flow of time. His fall is made up of infinity upon infinity, each temporal particle a crystalline snapshot and all of them fitting together into the solved puzzle that is his body hitting the floor.
He lies there on his side, panting, regarding the whole with dim bemusement. The pain had swelled far beyond the level of mere pain to an overwhelming, searing exhaustion. The pleasure has abandoned him and left only a sensory absence in its place. He blinks at the light of the lantern on the table, and every blink is one of those infinitely fine slices of the universe, and in every single one a black shape the size of the world is closer to him.
He stumbles through the dark. The darkness whispers. The whispers come from that hole in the world. The whispers as the shape lowers itself and the hole draws close. He wonders what will happen when he’s pulled in. He wonders what will happen when he crosses that event horizon.
“Strike three,” whispers the darkness, and for some reason the seeker wants to cry.
Nothing else happens. Infinity spins.
“I won’t say I’m disappointed,” the darkness says quietly. “I’m not. I knew we’d end up here. But I need you to understand something for me. Can you do that?” Fingers in his hair. Faint sting in his scalp as his head is pulled brusquely up. “Do I need to wait?”
He licks his lips. His thighs are smoldering. He imagines his marrow as dying coals. As best he can with the guide gripping his hair, he shakes his head.
“No.”
“Good.” He moans as his head is released and it thumps to the floor. “What I need you to understand is that I’m not looking for a reason to punish you. I’m hoping that you don’t give me a reason. If I want to hurt you, I don’t need that kind of excuse. That’s not what this is about.”
A pause. The guide sits down beside him, and the heat of him is bizarrely intense against the seeker’s bare arm.
“When you don’t do what I say, it’s dangerous. When you disobey me, when you fail, it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for both of us. This isn’t about making me happy or winning some kind of twisted game. This is about keeping us both safe.” He pauses again. There’s a garrote wire of tension in his voice. “It’s going to get more dangerous as we go. It’s going to get harder. I just...” He exhales. “I need you to understand that. I need you to understand what’s at stake.”
The gentle weight of a hand on his side. “If you have something to say, you can speak now.”
The seeker didn’t expect this. He wasn’t prepared. His throat works; his tongue moves limply in his mouth. It can’t have been more than two days. It shouldn’t be so hard to talk. He’s been talking for most of his life.
His life. And the days of it. Hours and minutes and seconds. Infinities pared so fine.
He croaks something. He doesn’t himself know what he’s said. The guide leans closer.
“I’m sorry?”
He sucks in a breath and tries again. This time it’s better. “I don’t understand what’s at stake.”
The guide nods and rakes a hand through his hair. The seeker still can’t see his face but somehow he knows the guide’s mouth is stretching into a wry smile. “That’s difficult to explain if you haven’t experienced it.”
“Try.” He coughs. “Please.”
A long, long silence. Then: “This is where the faith comes in.”
The seeker closes his eyes. This isn’t really more or less than he expected.
“Just know that you’re not trying to please me.” The hand again. On his thigh this time, and it starts to rub very slightly, and he hisses through his teeth as those coals flare red. “You’re trying to please someone. Something. But it’s not me.”
17
There are hot coals in his marrow. There are more coals in his belly and when the bowl is set down near his face and the smell hits his nostrils it’s as if someone poured lighter fluid down his throat. He twitches as more saliva than he thought he had floods his mouth, so much and so hard that the muscles beneath his tongue hurt. He raises his head and squints in the light, again in the moving shadows; he sees a foot, the bowl, something reddish inside it. The smell. He knows the smell.
Tomatoes. Tomato soup. He remembers the cans.
But he sees the red and tomato is not what he thinks of.
“One thing I won’t do,” says the guide from far above him, “is deny you food or water. I don’t get anything out of that kind of weakness. No one does. We need you as strong as possible.”
We.
“But that doesn’t mean you’ll always enjoy the food you get. So eat up.” The foot nudges the bowl closer to him. “Consider this a treat if you like. You definitely didn’t earn it.”
The seeker stares blankly at the bowl. There’s no spoon.
Before when there was cereal he could eat with his fingers. Now that’s impossible and there’s no spoon.
“Think for a second. You’ll get it.”
He doesn’t have to think for more than a second. His head still feels loggy, as if his skull is stuffed with cotton, but it’s clear enough, and he knew they were always going to arrive at this. The moment the bowl was placed on the floor, he knew.
“No, you can’t pick it up. I’m not giving you another option. You eat like this or you don’t eat.” The guide nudges the bowl again. “It’s not really that bad, is it? It’s only me here, and it’s not like I’m going to judge you.”
No, it’s not really that bad. Not after what he’s been put through. It’s embarrassing to be sure, but just now he’s too tired to be overly bothered by embarrassment. Any genuine inclination he had toward resistance, toward fighting for his own dignity, seems increasingly absurd. He’s hungry. It’s that simple.
He was given so many chances to change his mind.
He pushes up on his hands, lifts his chest slightly off the floor like he’s in half plank position. Arranges his head over the bowl, ducks, drinks. Faintly, over the sound of his own gulping, he hears the guide release a slow breath.
Then he pays no attention to anything else. Everything is the taste and the warmth in his belly, the simple pleasure of it, and coherent thought melts into it and flows down his throat. This is what he has to focus on. This is what he has to be concerned with. And no, no, it’s not so bad at all.
“That’s good,” the guide says quietly. He voice sounds very far away, echoing as though they’re in a cavern. “Like I said, it’s not about pleasing me, but I am pleased. That’s going to make this easier. Probably, anyway.”
They’re only words. In and of themselves they mean nothing.
“You’ve heard the phrase you can’t take it with you? That’s key here. What you want, what you want me to do for you, it’s going to involve you letting go of some things. Some parts of yourself, you can’t take into the place you want to go. They simply won’t fit. Are you a religious man?”
The seeker doesn’t answer. The bowl is half empty. His nose is full of the scent of spiced tomato.
“It’s not important. Not to what we’re doing. But I think it might be a good reference point, you see? What we do is what we know and what we know gives us the language we can use to give names to what we experience. Names are magic. Being able to name a thing gives you power over it.” The guide huffs a laugh. “I know I’m talking a lot. I do this when someone can’t talk back. I talk to myself when I’m alone.”
The guide pauses a moment, and the seeker senses the thought in it. He stops to breathe, raising his head, soup dripping from his chin.
“Christ said that it was as difficult to enter the Kingdom of God as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I read once that it was a reference to a specific thing. Kind of a joke that the people around him would have gotten but which has since been lost. I can’t remember whether or not it was true, but I liked the idea of the joke. It was about a gate in Jerusalem, one that everyone knew about. It was a very small, very low gate. To pass through it, a man had to bend. To bow. He supplicated himself to his own passage.” Hand on the seeker’s head, gentle. Firm. Holding him in place “That’s part of this. That’s what I’m helping you to do. That’s why I’m the guide.”
The bowl is empty. The seeker lifts his head again, breathing hard, and lays it down, staring at the bowl and licking his lips. He can feel the soup already congealing on his lower face.
The guide takes the bowl without a word and returns with water. The seeker drinks. The water is cool and good and he drinks it all, and once more time seems to flow into him along with it.
The bowl is taken away. Firmer grip on his arm, tugging him up; he struggles to his feet without protest, shaking and stumbling a little, and the first step forward he takes flares the burn in his marrow.
The guide doesn’t relent. He pulls him forward, and as the shadows swing crazily in front of them the seeker realizes that the guide is holding the lantern in his other hand. This in itself isn’t surprising, but when they pass into the short hallway, the seeker catches a glimpse of his own shadow dancing along the wall beside him, capering and leaping alongside himself, and he thinks that there’s another world here, very close, barely inches from touching him directly.
What will happen when it does?
The guide stops. The seeker tears his attention away from his shadow and peers at the bathroom door. The guide pushes him inside and follows.
18
The guide releases him and steps back. The seeker stumbles, regains his balance, leans one-handed on the sink. He’s coherent enough to think through a timeline that retains its most rudimentary linearity, can think ahead to hours from now, and knows that his legs by then will likely be too sore and strained to support his weight and carry him along.
That’s a problem for another time.
“Strip.”
The seeker turns, stares blearily at him. He shouldn’t hesitate, can’t hesitate, but the world is muddy and unreliable and he isn’t certain he heard correctly.
“Maybe that was unclear,” the guide says patiently. “I want you to take your clothes off. I know you’re stiff, take whatever time you need, but if I think you’re stalling I’ll make you sorry for it. Remember, your strikes are gone. From now on you’re out.”
The seeker blinks. Why? But he doesn’t ask. His hands are already moving, lifting the hem of his shirt and tugging it up and over his head.
The rest of his clothes follow quickly. He does it with jerky robotism. There’s nothing even perversely erotic about it, and he can’t detect any desire in the guide’s attention or on his face; this is clinical, a task he has to perform, and he feels only a very mild ripple of shame when he kicks away his underwear and stands naked, leaning against the sink again.
The guide nods and steps past him. The seeker turns to watch him, bemused, as he stops in front of the little shower stall and turns on the spray. He steps back and gestures at it.
“Get in.”
His movements clumsy and dull, the seeker does as he’s told.
The water is cold. Freezing. He gasps and stiffens, only just manages to arrest his fall against the slick wall. Every aching muscle is rigid, with shock and with the effort to keep from leaping out from under the spray—the effort made, however, without him intending to make it.
Ah, he thinks, look at what a fast learner you are. Look how quickly you’ve learned your own obedience. Look at how total your commitment has become.
Were you always this pliant and spineless? Or is this a new development?
He shivers violently and clenches his jaw and wraps his arms around himself, leaning against the wall. Through the fractured blur of the water, the guide’s form is once again that hole in the world.
Every droplet a frozen instant of infinity. A storm between the storms. Rain within the rain.
“There’s soap on the shelf.” The seeker peers to the side and there it is, an oblong of off-white stained yellowish in the light of the lantern. “Wash yourself.”
The soap is slippery in his hand. It threatens to slither out through his fist and then it does, and something in his gut catches as he watches it fall in slow motion into the suds swirling around the drain. He’s going to have to bend down to get it. He’s going to have to bend down with his thighs and his back the way they are, a body that he no longer feels as though he can rely on. He has to do this because he’s been ordered to wash himself and he’s certain without verifying that the soap must be included in this task.
The guide is silent. The seeker glances at him; he’s sitting on the toilet, the lantern on his knee, watching.
The seeker braces a straining arm against the wall and bends at the waist, moaning at the burning pull in his muscles. But better than bending his legs again. Almost anything would be better than that.
He fails to pick up the soap on the first try. Tries again. This time he gets it and he winches himself upright and leans into the corner, working it into a lather between his hands.
He doesn’t drop it again. He’s not sure how he avoids it but he does. He flows into the gleaming particles of wet, the soapy water streaming down his body, circling and circling around his feet. He’s holding himself up but he must be falling forever, and the glittering black eyes of the guide are the sky above him.
This is not just weariness, and it’s not just pain.
The bite of the cold had receded into the background but now, as he finishes and stands as the last of the soap rinses off him, it returns and raises tiny hard nodules of gooseflesh all up and down his arms, sets his teeth chattering. He curls his arms around his middle and hunches, pulling in shaking breaths, until abruptly the water cuts off.
He pushes weakly away from the corner of the stall. He’s looking vaguely around for a towel. Finding none. The lantern moves, the light shifting, and the grip on his upper arm returns, pulling at him. Leading him, dripping, out onto the floor.
He wobbles and again peers around for a towel. But he’s being pushed toward the open door, the cold following him with the sweep of the air across his wet skin. This time his legs are supporting more of his weight and he totters as he goes as directed—back to his room. The play of light and shadow continues to be dreamlike, surreal, but it’s no longer confusing him.
Possibly he’s in a place somewhere beyond confusion.
He reaches the bed and falls onto it. The sheets cling to his wet skin as he turns and blinks up at the man-shaped abyss looming over him, lantern in hand. He thinks of the ancient philosopher—was it a philosopher? It strikes him as the kind of thing a philosopher might do—who picked up a lantern and went out into a night-cloaked city in search of one honest man. Is he an honest man? Has he been found? Can one, being found, become what the seeker is looking for?
The seeker. Who’s seeking here in this room. Who’s finding.
The thin mattress dips as the guide sits down beside him. The seeker knows that more words are coming and they do.
“I want to tell you about walls.”
His voice is low and soft, softer than the seeker has heard it. There’s something new inside it, partially hidden, standing within the inner shadows. The lantern light is inside both of them, he knows, and it reveals some things while concealing others.
“Not just walls. Barriers of all kinds. You know we’ve put some of them up already. The blackout covers for the windows. I locked the door. We can’t leave. But the walls of this house are not the only walls.”
Cool fingertips against the seeker’s nape. They begin to travel slowly down his spine, pausing at each bump of vertebrae.
“I put some up. I have to break others down. I have to do this carefully. I can’t simply blast them to rubble. I have to dismantle them brick by brick. That involves time, but time is another thing I’m dismantling. Or rather...” He exhales. “I’m enabling its dismantling.”
The guide’s fingers are as light as moth wings. The seeker shivers, just as light.
Light. How did that word get to be a measure of weight? Why do we confer a palpable quality of density to photons? Waves but also particles. Enough of them might crush you. In the darkness he floats, weightless.
Light speed and time dilation. Light and time, together. Light and weight and time. Does that mean the lack of one means the lessening of the other two?
“You have walls inside yourself. Barriers. I have to take those apart. That means destroying a part of you and there’s no way that won’t be painful. But if it happens the right way, you’ll get what you want.”
What I want. Yes.
Again he shivers under that weightless, drifting touch. His voice—carried by thoughtless exhaustion—is the rustle of dry leaves. “Am I going to have to disappear?”
The guide slaps him.
It’s so swift and so hard and so sudden that for a moment he doesn’t register that it’s happened apart from a sense of tremendous impact. A burst of white light explodes behind his eyes. Aha, he thinks, the weight of the light, the density; it’s found me and hit me, we didn’t block it out after all and it forced its way into me. Then the pain follows, crashes into him, and a cry rips out of him and ricochets off the walls.
He knows about nuclear explosions. They happen in stages. First there’s the tremendous flash of light—the pika. What follows is a shockwave of pressure sufficient to utterly destroy a building—the don. After that come the storms of fire, and heat is spreading across his cheek, searing his nerves. The guide has hit him with a nuke-tipped warhead in a tactical strike. As he said: careful.
The seeker is nonplussed. Even a very hard slap surely mustn’t hurt as much as this.
“Please don’t do that again.” The guide’s voice is tense now, low still but no longer soft. He sounds almost anxious. “I’ll have to hurt you worse if you do it again.”
The seeker covers his face with his hands and tightly shuts his eyes. If he can flee into his own darkness, away from the light and the weight and the time.
“But I’ll answer your question. I probably shouldn’t but I will.” The guide is touching him again. A strange thing is happening to the pain: the touch is twisting it, weaving through it, translating it into something that somehow isn’t altogether unpleasant. Painful, yes, but the urge to run from it has eased. “In a way, yes. In a way you’ll have to. That’s all I can say for now.”
His fingers reach the seeker’s tailbone. The seeker feels an abrupt stab of his own anxiety, a sense of exposure he hasn’t felt before, and he flinches away. The guide’s hand doesn’t follow him. But it doesn’t withdraw. It settles on his hip—heavy.
“You need to rest again. It’s going to get more difficult. I’ll wake you when it’s time to continue.” The mattress moves as he rises, and with him moves the light. It recedes, and that’s good. Before, the darkness was alarming. That appears to be over, at least for the present.
But the light pauses in its progress and at the door the guide turns.
“If you can, you should dream.”
The darkness descends on him, and it’s kind and he floats into it and—yes—disappears.
19
The weight in his hands is the most real thing. Everything else is fractured in its reality, unsteady, unreliable. He drifts through the trees with that weight not heavy enough to hold him down.
The weight is the moment he’s never been able to escape from. The weight is cool and slick in his palm and beneath his searching fingers. He’s moving through the dark and that’s along a line, along the right one. He can finally breathe. But he looks down at the outline of what he holds and the fear finds him in a tremendous flash of light, the pika, and seconds later the shockwave of the don rocks his brain. Fear is a nuclear bomb set off by the terrorist of yourself, and you never escape its storm no matter how fast and far you run.
He’s run into the trees, into the darkness of the trees. But the weight reminds him of a different species of darkness, a treacherous darkness that was not what it seemed and within which the fear resided and resides.
He is a twelve-year-old boy and he’s lost everything, and he’s so afraid, and he’s found something terrible that he believed might kill the fear. Instead it’s only made the fear immeasurably worse.
What’s inside that darkness, where it might send him? What’s inside it beside the fear? Is the fear only the door he has to step through?
Where did they go? When the plane hit the ground, where did they go, in that dark? He tried to explain it afterward to the serious adult in her serious office disguised by primary-colored toys and picture books. It wasn’t that he wanted to follow them. He only wanted to not be afraid to follow them. The fear was overwhelming. It paralyzed him. Perhaps if he could walk right up to the cottage door and look inside, he would no longer be afraid.
The serious adult listened, or he believes that she did, but she didn’t understand. No one did. For the first time he heard the term suicidal ideation and he didn’t know what it meant exactly but he knew it was bad. It was an artifact of fear, and fear is the most terrible thing of all.
What he wanted more than anything else was to not be afraid anymore.
The weight is spreading up his arm. Now he worries; now it threatens to slow him down. He should throw it away. That isn’t going to happen. It isn’t going to happen because he’s holding a shard of an infinite instant from which he’ll never escape even as he struggles to float into the kinder and more trustworthy darkness.
He runs his thumb across it. His heartbeat thuds in time with his footfalls. The leaves whisper beneath him, above him, all around him. He looks back and there’s the cottage of darkness. His thumb caresses the slide. His finger slides against the trigger. The cottage’s door opens. A man is standing there, dark against dark. A hole in the world in the shape of a man. A single point of light is a lantern, and as the seeker slows and stops that point of light lengthens into something long and very sharp.
Come here, says the man. Exchange a bullet for a blade.
The seeker’s eyes travel the length of the knife of light. He’s so afraid. He can no longer move.
Come here. The man’s voice is no more than a dry whisper. I wouldn’t put up a wall without a door. Isn’t this what you wanted? Don’t tell me you didn’t know.
In any case we have to keep going. I know you thought we were finished. But we’ve only just begun.
