Vox Mentis

We made a great decision

Make sure you didn't break anything that wasn't already broken, like our decision-making process

sit still until your senses come back to you!

Isn't control a wonderful thing? Groggily crawl away.

You do a quick self-check for broken bones or ruptured organs. Headlights pull up slowly behind you, and you see Eliot's coat move to the approaching vehicle. Your nose is bleeding - maybe broken. You're not in much pain, but that's probably the adrenaline talking. The ringing in your ears fades away and you're able to hear Eliot talking to the driver of the approaching vehicle.

"Fifty," the driver is saying. "I don't know what you want-"

Eliot says, "Do you love your family?"

"Of course I do, man, please don't kill me, I have two girls and I love them so much-"

"I won't kill you if you tell me this," says Eliot. "Why did you do it?"

"Is this about...?" says the driver. "Oh, Jesus, forgive me, I did it because I had to."

"Geerit dessilick noton davary," Eliot says. "More police are coming. Take this gun. Shoot cars. Run away from cops."

You've opened your car door as quietly as you could and lowered yourself to the pavement. You're attempting to crawl away. You see the driver take Eliot's gun and step out of his truck. Eliot looks up and begins to walk toward you.

"No..." you say.

Eliot seizes your arm and drags you up. Your head drains of blood. "Walk," he says. He drags you past crumpled police cars and dead cops, pools of blood emanating from their bodies.

Eliot tucks your arms behind your back and you struggle a bit, but you're weakened from your crash and Eliot's grip is like iron. "You're not a good guy," you say. "You say you are, but you're not."

"I don't believe I ever said I was a good guy."

"You could have used your words on those cops. You just killed them."

"They were compromised. They were calling you in. There was no time. I did what I did to protect you."

"You could have tried." Eliot says nothing.

Lash out, violently!

You're not in a position to hurt him, so you lash out the only way you can. "You're just as bad as Woolf."

Eliot stops, turns you to face him. His eyes are cold. "I will take a lot of shit from you, but I will not be compared to Woolf."

"She-"

"Shut up. The worst thing I have ever done is allow Woolf to become what she is. I will wear responsibility for everything she does, from Broken Hill until the day I put her in the ground. But we aren't the same. Not even close."

"You kill people."

"Yes, I kill people, when the alternative is worse. That's the world. That's the reason you're still alive."

You look away.

"Now you and I are going to steal a car, and catch a plane, and we are going to Broken Hill."

~

You become promiscuous. It's not planned. It's because there's nothing else to do. You think of yourself as promiscuous rather than easy because you're in charge. If a boy comes into the clothes store where you work and has a look in his eye that means he's heard about you, you play dumb and sell him new khaki pants. But if - and it doesn't happen often, only sometimes - there's a boy with curly hair and dark eyes and he's genuinely shopping, then something inside you yearns. You walk over and say can I help you, and if the boy is orbited by a badly permed blonde, which he usually is, you recommend shirts and eye him while his girlfriend browses skirts. And he looks back there's always something there. When the girl decides to try something on, you walk directly to him and kiss him like a predator. And he kisses you back, every time. "How's it going?" you call, your eyes on the boy, and the girl says something about fit around the shoulders and color and do they have it without the bows. You don't always take it further than that: twice the girl comes out early and the boy walks out of the store on loose legs, throwing you glances. But twice you do. The last time, the boy was accompanied by a black-eyed girl who doesn't even answer when you come over and say hello, and you like the look of this boy, he's friendly and dumb and plays football, so you not only invade his pants while his girls is behind a change room door but keeps going when she comes out again. You watch the boy's face as the girl revolves about the store, fascinated, because he looks so scared but doesn't stop you. The girl inspects dresses and makes a catty comment about the decade in which she believes one of them belongs, and the boy grunts. You walk behind the counter. He looks at you like he can't believe you're abandoning him. Like he thinks you have a plan to help him out or something. But you don't care about that. The interesting part is over, as far as you're concerned. The boy stands rooted there for a few seconds, then blurts a bunch of mostly unrelated words, the spillage from two or three trains of thought that have just collided. The girl doesn't even look up. "Okay," she says, turning over a fluffy hooded jacket.

This is probably not what Eliot had meant when he told you to work hard and discipline yourself. But you're a million miles from everywhere, doing an otherwise excellent job of concealing the fact that you're the most skilled practitioner of persuasion ever to grace this dustbowl, and you need something. You can't have muscles and not flex them.

You'd slept two nights in a bus station before realizing the town was full of empty houses; you only had to break in and make yourself at home. You found a job at Tangled Threads, Broken Hill's hippest clothing store for young and old and anyone else interested in one level of fashion above denim and wife-beaters, and it paid cash, which meant you could rent something with electricity. It's all simpler than you had imagined. You even bought a battered old car. Which is a little risky, because you don't dare attempt to acquire a driver's license, but the town has only two cops, both from sets you understand well, and you were really sick of the bus.

You're "the American girl". Your story is you've come to connect with the earth - a ludicrous idea, patently false to anyone watches how you squint at the sun, hug yourself against the wind, grimace at dirt, but seriously, why else would you come here? How long are you staying? people ask, leaning across a counter to marvel at you, this person who has left America to come here, here, even as every other local youth with half a brain flees at the earliest opportunity. The older ones, who've lost the ability to imagine life elsewhere, or maybe never had it, seem to view you as the first of many, as if you're the harbinger of a hip new fad sweeping the globe, where young people in big cities sweat and save and dream of one day traveling to connect in Broken Hill, and give the town a future. You tell them I think maybe a year, because you don't want to give false hope and can't bear the thought that it might be longer.

But a year passes and then another and there you are on your twenty-first birthday, watching senseless Australian television in a four-bedroom house with hardly any furniture. You sometimes wonder if the organization exists. Whether you'd just imagined it. Sometimes, when the door jangles open at Tangled Threads, you think for a second it's Eliot, come to tell you it's okay, it's over, you can come home. But it never happens. It's just day after day of waiting. So you can take control of a good-looking boy now and again. You can do that.

~

One night after closing, you walk to the rear parking lot and find a group of girls in short skirts and fur-lined jackets waiting for you. One hops off the hood of a car as you approach, the dirty-blond girlfriend of the football player, and you realize you have a problem. You turn to flee to the store but two more girls are blocking your path. You hold up your hands. "I don't have any money."

"Not interested in your money, bitch," says the girl, letting something drop from her hand. A metal chain. You feel despair, not so much for yourself but for the girl and Broken Hill, Australia, because a chain is ridiculous. If you pulled that shit in San Francisco, you'd get yourself shot. "You know who I am?"

"I think you came into the store one time." The girls encircle you. Five in total. No other weapons in sight. "If you want to return something, we open at nine."

"I don't want to return something, you slut."

"And it's not a store," says a girl who's thin as a dead tree. "It's a shop."

What do you do?