Vox Mentis

don't you [Eliot] need to sleep at some point. that seems like a start

"Don't you need to sleep or something?"

Eliot raises his cup of coffee and drinks. "Nothing a cup of joe can't fix."

This all kind of seems like it hinges on you figuring out what you've forgotten-- you can't fight what you don't know. What would be the best way of tackling that? Scalpels and brain surgery aside.

Ask if maybe Eliot can try to use his word-magic stuff to undo the word-magic stuff that made you forget about whatever happened. The worst that can happen is that it just doesn't work, right?

"So I need to figure out what I've forgotten, right?"

"Oh, yes," says Eliot. "That's why they're after you. You're the key to an object of biblical power. And when I say biblical, I mean literally from the Bible."

You rub your face. Every time Eliot speaks, you feel like you know less. "Can't you just use your word magic to undo whatever word magic was done to make me forget?"

"Can't. Despite having a pretty good handle on your set, the 'word magic', as you so elegantly put it, seems to have no effect on you. You'll recall when we told you to hop on one foot back at the airport. So it's unlikely that words were what caused you to forget. Or if it was, it's beyond even a bareword."

The waitress arrives to refill Eliot's coffee. She's young and pink cheeked. Her name tag says SARAH. She seems to be in awe of Eliot, although you don't know why. "Thank you, Sarah," says Eliot, and she flushes.

"Okay, so no sleeping, we can't figure out what I've forgotten, and you don't want to leave until we know where we're going, is that about right?"

"Yes," Eliot agrees. "That's about right."

You slump back in your seat. "Then what are we going to do?"

"I believe our only option is confrontation. Specifically, the kind of confrontation that leaves them dead and us alive."

It's simple - we kill the bad guy. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

"Okay," you say. "This sounds like a plan."

"It's not. It's a goal."

"Jesus!" you say. "Talking to you is like herding cats."

"The problem is that Woolf and I are evenly matched, but she is excellently resourced and supported by skilled poets, while I have nothing and no one but you, and you're not very useful. That's not a personal commentary. It's a statement of fact. The people in the car earlier almost drove away before I stepped in. So I'm finding it hard to imagine any scenario wherein we confront Woolf and survive. It also means our enemies will continue to pursue us rapidly and relentlessly, since we represent little danger. It's more or less the same problem that those of us who left the organization have faced for some time. Our enemies have a bareword and we don't."

"You said that before. What is that?"

"The word that killed Broken Hill," Eliot says. "They have that."

"And it's a bareword."

"Yes."

"Which is what?"

"Useful." He gazes at you. "Hence our attempt to lift it from your brain. Still a good plan, if it's in there. I'm sure you'd rather us not kill you in the extraction, though."

"You wanted it to use? I thought you wanted my immunity. You said you wanted to stop it."

"Mmm," says Eliot. "Some untruths were told, in the interests of acquiring your compliance. I was actually somewhat concerned at the time that you might use the word against me."

"But I don't remember it."

"No."

"If I did..."

"Oh, things would be different."

"Woolf wouldn't be chasing us?"

"She would," Eliot says, "but more cautiously."

You look out the window, at snow and clouds like granite. You can't imagine living in dirt and desert. "I really don't remember anything about Broken Hill."

"Well," Eliot says. He drains his coffee. "That's a shame." The waitress, Sarah, descends on the two of you, refilling his cup. "Aren't you a peach," Eliot says.

"Are you from the East Coast?" She reddens. "It's just, your accent."

"You're right!" Eliot says. "Well, I am. He's from Australia."

"Really," Sarah says, looking at you in a new way. "I'd love to travel, one day."

"Oh, you should," Eliot says. "The world is closer than you think."

This isn't a very optimistic situation, and you aren't a very optimistic person.

Maybe it's just time to start naming places you wanted to see before you die.

You look out the window again. Maybe you should start working through your bucket list. See the world. Go skydiving. Or at least indoor skydiving. You feel tempted to rise, toss your napkin on the table, and walk out. Just walk on down the road, snow falling in your hair, until something happens. One way or the other. At least it would be doing something. Something stupid, most likely. But something.

"Now that necklace is truly beautiful," Eliot says. "Did you make it?"

"It's my grandmother," says the waitress. A carved piece of wood, a woman in profile. A relief, is that what it's called? The woman looks stern. "I carved it from a photo."

"I think you're very talented," Eliot says. "Sarah, I apologize, but would you give me a few minutes? I've just thought of something I need to discuss with my colleague."

"Oh, sure. No problem." She leaves.

Go to the last place they'd expect — Broken Hill.

"Why don't we just go right to Broken Hill," you say. "That way they-"

"Fuck me," Eliot says. "The fucking necklace." You wait. That seems to be the best course of action whenever Eliot says something you don't understand. "We're going to Broken Hill."

"Oh," you say, surprised that one of your suggestions is actually being taken seriously. "Right. Um, why though?"

"We thought she got it out. But she didn't. She made a copy."

You wait.

"Fuck!" Eliot says. "We need to move." He rises.

~

The chopper sits above the road, billowing snow, making the power lines dance. Below them sits a small plane. It's been abandoned; you can see the steps hanging out of its side. The pilot's voice crackles through her headphones. He's sitting right next to her, but it sounds like he's dialing in from Mars. "You want to set down?"

She shakes her head. The pilot pulls back on the stick. The world below drops away. They fly over snowfields that are like a million brilliant daggers, and she turns away, because it hurts the star in her eye. She has a little supernova searing her retina. That's how it feels. It never really goes away but it's always worse in the light. Anyplace she can see the sun. Sometimes she thinks she can see it: a little white hole in the world.

"Two minutes," says the pilot. "We have a diner. Center of town. We've encircled but haven't approached. How do you want to do this?"

"Safely," she says. "Have them sweep it, please."

The pilot nods. She hears him passing on the instruction: Sweep it; we're staying airborne. The town emerges as a smudge on the snowscape. It has one road in and one road out, perhaps a dozen buildings. As they hover, she watches black cars rocket up from each directions and disgorge tiny figures. They move from building to building, gesturing and sometimes stopping to consult each other. The chances of them finding Eliot and the exception here are a thousand to one. But she has to be careful. The thing to remember is that all the power in the world doesn't stop a bullet. She'd been taught chess at the school, years ago, and the point was that the pieces differed only in terms of their attacking power. They're all equally easy to kill. Capture. It's called capturing. The lesson was that you should be cautious about deploying your most powerful pieces, because it only requires one dumb pawn to take them down.

The pilot gets the signal and begins to settle the chopper toward the street. She watches the town tilt toward her through the bubble windshield. Now's your chance, Eliot, I'm just sitting here. Eliot is a bishop, she figures, prone to sneaky long-range attacks, and more mobile than you expect. She's never liked bishops.

"We're green," says the pilot. She unbuckles. A young man with long hair, Rosenberg, opens the door and offers her his hand, which she finds kind of insulting and ignores. The chopper's blades pull at her hair. She studies the street, trying to sense trace elements of Eliot.

"Diner's clear," says Rosenberg. "I'm guessing they acquired a car here, maybe a couple hours ago. Three proles inside, setted and compromised, instructed to obey. We haven't questioned them."

"Thank you," she says. "I'll take it from here."

She makes for the low diner. A few poets move toward her and Rosenberg waves them away. Inside, behind the counter, is a young, scared waitress in a green apron. In a booth is a red-cheeked man she presumes is a farmer. A skinny guy in big glasses is manning a table. The door wheezes closed behind you. The man with glasses rises unsteadily from his table. "I ain't cooperating with the government. You want to-"

"Sit down, shut up." He drops into his seat. She points at the waitress. "You come here."

The waitress jerks forward, clutching a notepad. Her eyes are huge.

"Two men. One tall. You know who I'm talking about?"

The waitress' head bobs.

"Tell me everything you saw and heard."

The waitress begins to talk. A minute later, the farmer begins to fish a cell phone from his jeans pocket. He's trying to be surreptitious, but his wide checked shirt telegraphs every twitch. She finds it fascinating. Does he think she's blind? She lets him go awhile, until he gets the phone out and opens its lid as carefully as if it contains an engagement ring. Then she says, "Put your hand in your mouth."

"And I poured him another refill," says the waitress. "He was real nice and we got to talking and I asked if he was from L.A. or New York or somewhere like that, and he said yes, he'd been all over, he'd seen fireworks in London and riots in Berlin, and I should go, he said. He said the world was closer than I imagined. Those were his words." The farmer begins to gag. "And then he wanted to talk to his friend, the Australian, and after he asked if he could borrow a car. I said sure, and gave him the keys to my car, and I felt bad, because I hadn't cleaned it for like a year and I wished I had something nicer. I thought-"

"I don't care what you thought."

"I asked where he might be going and he said where did I recommend, and I said anywhere but here, and he smiled at that. Then we talked about places I had been, and I said when I was a girl my mom once took me to El Paso, just the two of us, and-"

"Right," she says. "Stop." She ponders. The farmer makes a sound like gwargghh and throws up around his hand. He's wedged the whole thing in there. She wouldn't have thought that was possible. She watches him twitch and gag. She should tell him to take that out. There's no benefit in a dead farmer. "Did you hear talk of towns? States? Airports?"

"No."

"You have no idea where he's going?"

"Wherever he wants," says the waitress. "A man like that."

"Yeah," she says. "Okay." Outside, her people will have gleaned which direction Eliot had gone, east or west. With the registration information, they'll locate the car within a few hours. It will be abandoned, of course, at a gas station, or on a side street, but that will be the start of a new trail. The fact is Eliot can't keep moving forever. He can't move faster than the net she can draw around him. Nothing personal, Eliot, she thinks. She wants to shoot him. As in, do it personally. She feels quite strongly about that. Also, before she does it, she wants a few minutes to talk things over. That's probably a pipe dream. It's hard to imagine circumstances in which she'll be able to capture Eliot without killing him. But if she does, she'd like to tell him that she appreciates the guidance he'd given her, in the beginning. She wants to say, I wouldn't be who I am without you, Eliot, and have him see she means it.

The farmer jerks. His head hits the table. Vomit drips to the floor. "Take..." she says, but it's too late. She'd meant to tell him to take out his hand. But she'd forgotten. Or something like that. Hey, Elise, you know what stars do? They eat. They burn everything around until there's nothing left. Then they start eating light. You realize that's what you're doing, right? Eating everything?

She looks at the waitress. The sensible thing to do here is to kill her. The girl has exchanged words with Eliot; she's potentially loaded with instructions. The possibility is small but there's no sense in taking chances.

It's not getting any better, is it? I mean, that's been obvious for a while now, right? That the star isn't going anywhere?

"Forget we were here," she tells the waitress. "That guy choked on his breakfast and you couldn't save him." She turns to leave. "But you tried as hard as you could."

~

You drive until dark, stopping only to eat and persuade people to change vehicles. You don't want to watch but can't help it. At first, the people who Eliot approaches look guarded. Then Eliot says something and their faces break into a smile. Like they don't want to but can't help it. It's fascinating how much they change in that moment. From stranger-person to friend-person. They show a completely different face. And then a minute later their expression changes again, becoming intimate and unarranged, and you turn away, because watching that feels wrong.

Embedded in a pink Mini, a bobbling plastic cat on the dashboard, you say, "So we have a plan now?"

"Yes." Eliot jiggles the gearshift. He's not happy with fifth. You offered to drive, but Eliot had refused. You're beginning to think Eliot doesn't sleep at all.

"Do I get to hear it?"

"Like you suggested: We go to Broken Hill. Then we get the bareword, and use it to defeat our enemies."

"It's just sitting there? In Broken Hill?"

"That's my theory."

"You're not sure?"

"No."

"What, no one thought to check? You didn't swing by, see if there's this, what, Bible-grade weapon lying around?"

"It wasn't quite as simple as swinging by. After Woolf, anyone who swung by didn't swing out again."

"But we're going in."

"Yes." Eliot glances at you. "You'll be fine."

"When you say we are going in..."

"I mean you. Since I'm not immune."

You watch the car pass a family sedan. A happy dog looks at you and you feel jealous. "What if you're wrong and I'm not immune?"

"Well, that would be bad. But let's not get hung up on every little thing that might go wrong. I'm not saying the plan is foolproof. I'm saying it's preferable to driving aimlessly until our luck runs out."

"Then what happens? I give you the word?"

"No. You must not speak it around me, show it to me, or describe it even in general terms. I can't emphasize this enough."

"Are you serious?"

"Look at me," Eliot says. "If you get this thing and drop so much as a hint about what it looks like, I will feed you your own fingers. Do you believe me?"

"Yes." You pass through a town advertising a beet festival from three years ago. "I still don't understand how it's a word. Words can't kill people."

"Sure they can. Words kill people all the time." He wrestles the gearshift. "Granted, this one is more direct about it."

"What makes this one special?"

"Well, that's difficult to explain without referencing some fairly advanced linguistics and neurochemistry."

"Give me an analogy."

"There's a tree in a park. A tree you want to cut down, for some reason. You phone the city and ask which department you need to contact and which forms you need to fill out. Your application goes to a committee, which decides whether it amkes a good case, and if so, they send out a guy to cut down the tree. That's the brain's regular decision-making process. What I do, the 'word magic' as you call it, is I bribe the committee. It's the same process. But I'm neutralizing the parts that can say no. With me so far?"

"Yes."

"All right. What's in Broken Hill is a bareword. A bareword, in this analogy, is me getting out my chainsaw and cutting down the tree."

You wait.

"It's a separate pathway to the same outcome. I don't use the committee. I skip it. Does that make sense?"

"It does for trees."

"It's no different. You see a hot stove, you consciously decide to stay clear of it. But if you stumble onto it, you'll jerk back without conscious thought."

"So it's the difference between a voluntary action and a reflex," you say.

"Yes."

"Why didn't you just say that?"

"Because that's not an analogy. That's exactly what fucking happens. You asked for an analogy."

"Okay," you say. "Although I still don't understand how a reflex can be triggered by a word."

"Words aren't just sounds or shapes. They're meaning. That's what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning. When you learn English, you train your brain to react in a particular way to particular sounds. As it turns out, the protocol can be hacked."

"Can you teach me?"

"What?"

"What you do. The word magic."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it's complicated."

"It doesn't look complicated."

"Well," Eliot says, "it is."

"I don't see why you couldn't teach me a little."

"We don't have time to train you into a competent poet. If we did, it still wouldn't work, because you're not naturally compelling. If you were, I still wouldn't, because you have very little discipline, and we've learned recently that giving immensely powerful words to people with self-control issues is a very bad idea."

"I'm not naturally compelling?"

Eliot glances at you. "Not really, no."

"I'm compelling."

"You're the only known exception to a bareword," says Eliot. "Hang your hat on that."

You're silent. "What makes me immune?"

"Your brain doesn't process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea."

"I have a superior brain?"

"Uh," Eliot says. "I wouldn't go that far."

"I can resist persuasion; sounds like an improvement to me."

"I once had a coffee machine that wouldn't add milk no matter how I pressed the buttons. It wasn't better. It was just broken."

"I'm not broken. Who are you to say I'm broken?"

Eliot says nothing.

"It's evolution," you say. "You guys have been preying on us for who knows how long and I evolved a defense."

"What was your girlfriend's name?"

"What?"

"Melinda, right?" Eliot glances at the dash. "Twenty-four hours, you haven't mentioned her."

"What are you saying? I should be grieving?"

Eliot nods. "That's what I'm saying."

"Who the fuck are... I've been trying to stay alive! People how been driving cow trucks at my body! Forgive me for not taking a minute to cry on your shoulder about my girlfriend!"

"Solid reasons, delivered with much defensiveness."

"You asshole! Jesus! As if you know anything about love! What do you think it is? Brain activity? Neurochemicals?"

"I suspect it's a kind of persuasion."

"So I'm immune to it? That's your theory?"

"The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them. You can't be persuaded. Ergo, you don't feel desire."

"That's bullshit! I loved Melinda!"

"If you say so."

"I'm being lectured about love by a robot! I'm broken? You're broken! Tell me what you think love is! I seriously want to know!"

"Okay," Eliot says. "It's defining yourself through the eyes of another. It's coming to know a human being on a level so intimate that you lose any meaningful distinction between you, and you carry the knowledge that you are insufficient without her every day for twenty years, until she drives an animal transport at you, and you shoot her. It's that."

You watch the road awhile.

"I'm sorry I called you broken," Eliot says.

"Forget it."

"Everyone's broken," Eliot says. "One way or another."

~

You sleep and wake to the windshield filled with a great metal lattice. A bridge, you realize, its steel beams splashed by yellow sodium-vapor streetlights. Eliot has one arm slung over the seat and is reversing around oncoming traffic. A car swings by you, horn blaring. A motorcycle stutters past, the driver yelling unintelligibly. You swing around a corner and Eliot turns off the Mini's engine.

"Traffic camera on the bridge," says Eliot. "Almost drove through it."

You look out at a coffee shop advertising waffles. The street is lined with tall, quaint buildings, most in pastel colors under a dusting of snow. The streetlights are trimmed with iron lacework. No people in sight. It feels late. "Where are we?"

"Grand Forks."

"What are we doing?"

"We're waiting," Eliot says. "Once a little time has passed, we're going to walk across that bridge. One at a time, I think, since I may have aroused suspicion just now. On the other side, we're going to acquire a vehicle and continue to Minneapolis. There we'll take passport photos in subpar lighting conditions and visit the Federal Building on Third Avenue South, which is a designated passport agency, and can issue replacement passports to people who have had theirs stolen, which we will claim has occurred. We will be asked to provide documentation proving, firstly, that we're U.S. citizens, and, secondly, that we are the people named in the first documents. This will occur in a genial, low-pressure interview, as opposed to the front of an airport queue with an official holding out one hand for our papers, so should allow me to compromise our interviewer into accepting our mall booth passport photos. This person will then begin the process of issuing new passports in false names with our photos on them."

"Doesn't that take weeks?"

"No. It takes four hours, if you pay the expedition fee. We will then take a roundabout route to Sydney, balancing the need to arrive before our false documentation is discovered against the need to avoid airports with face-recognition technology. I'm thinking Vancouver and then Seoul, since Korean Air is a good airline for our purposes. No data sharing. Does that answer your question?"

"Yes." You both wait. You yawn. A woman walks by who reminds you of someone but you don't know who.

Eliot opens the door. "Wait ten minutes then walk directly across the bridge. Keep your head down. That's important. No looking up for any reason. Clear?"

"Clear," you say. Eliot climbs out. The door goes clunk. You watch Eliot's beige coat disappear around the coffee shop.

The windows fog. The car fills with cold. You think about Melinda. You'd met her in a pet store. You'd walked past and doubled back and pretended to be interested in puppies. Almost bought one, even. Just because she was selling them. On your second date, you discovered she didn't like animals much. She only liked organizing them. Deciding what they ate. She liked putting them in cages, basically. When Melinda had started dropping marriage hints, about three months in, you had thought of that.

Ten minutes are up. How do you proceed?