Vox Mentis

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Thanks so much for the fanart, Akumu! I'm going to put it in the initial post :)

wow it's amazing how quick you can get over someone. don't even take the breakfast just jet

A ride, you think. He's gone for a ride. He departed on some mode of transport to an unnamed destination for unknown reasons for an indeterminate length of time. You're glad he explained that.

You look around the room while deciding what to do. There's a photo of the dog on the TV. It's the only really personal thing you can see, so you pick it up. A big dog. A man’s dog.

You have a sudden, appalling flash of perspective. He's waiting for you to leave. That's what the note means. You drop the photo and go to look for your clothes.

Remember back to your schooling, to Maslow. You've been sitting at fulfillment of basic needs ever since you got established in Broken Hill, and you've been flailing about for some fulfillment of psychological needs. You don't care about Danny any more than you cared about those boys in the shop, you're just trying to fill a hole that the Academy left. Wildly, without purpose.

What did Thoreau say, that you're all offense and no defense? It's because you have no control, no mastery of the self. And there's probably no expectation that you ever will. This isn't more training, this is an armory. You've been put in a dark locker to gather dust until a weapon is needed. You might be pulled out now and again to destroy something, but you'll always go back in the locker at the end of the day.

Use this brief moment on the next tier of the pyramid to center yourself and figure out a god-damned plan. You are never going to be an agent of the Organization. What is your goal?

What is your goal? What do you want? What do [you want? The Organization obviously couldn't give two fucks about you and your goals. Nobody ever really cared about what you want.

But hell, it seems like you've been cut loose. Now there's just you, and you alone. Just you and your goal. And what is your goal?

You think you might have had a taste of that goal last night.

Maybe last night was just about trying to fill a hole the Academy left. Maybe it was just reckless and without purpose. But while fulfilling that basic need, you discovered something more; something you never had before. Just because it didn't have purpose doesn't mean it couldn't have purpose. Something real. And you want that.

You want that.

Fuck Danny's ride. You get what you want.

~

There's a joke, or riddle, that goes like this: A woman meets a man at her mother’s funeral. They hit it off, but the woman never gets the man’s name, and after, she can’t find him. A few days later, she murders her sister. You're supposed to figure out why. But if you do, it means you're a psychopath, because the reason is that the woman wants to meet the man again. You think about this a few times over the next few days, when you find yourself fantasizing about staging a medical emergency.

You finally drive out to his house. It's dark and you get lost on the dusty roads and you almost go home a dozen times. Because it's one thing to sleep with him. It's another to go back. What you're doing feels dangerous. Like sailing off the edge of the world. But sometimes that's what it takes to achieve goals, you think.

Eventually, you trundle up the long driveway. The house lights are on but you leave the engine idling, because you still aren’t sure you should be here. Or, rather, you know, but want to anyway. The front door opens. He comes out, shielding his eyes. When he sees you, he smiles. That decides it. You get out of the car. “Is this a bad time?” You're being polite.

“Nope,” he says.

“I thought I’d come see you.”

“Glad you did.”

You hang by the car.

“Come in,” he says, and you do.

~

Three months later you move in. You're effectively living there anyway. You suggest it during the credits for an Australian comedy that he loves and you're starting to hate less and less. “I should move in,” you say. Maybe it's not a suggestion. But that's how you mean it. You use persuasion techniques on Danny sometimes, but nothing he can’t break. You like it that way; trying to manipulate him and failing. If you had his words, it'd be different. There'd be no challenge at all.

You cook for him. You actually crack eggs and fry them up and carry them to him on a tray. When you lie in the crook of his arm, you feel safe. He takes you riding. He has dirt bikes, a garage full of them, and the two of you go bouncing across the countryside. He teaches you how to hold a rifle so it doesn’t bruise your shoulder, how much to allow for the tug of gravity on a bullet over distance. When the night is clear, you and Danny sit on the back porch, drinking and talking as the sun dissolves into earth. Before this, you'd only ever viewed the sky as hostile. He makes you notice the raw beauty in it, the power in the blasted earth and skeletal trees. How it's all there for a reason. Even the snakes, which you'll never stop being terrified about - they're everywhere you leas expect them, like deadly ropes - you come to see less as belligerent and more as aggressively protective, like you. You'd lived in Broken Hill for two years and never understood it.

The first time he shoots a kangaroo, you cry. You know he hunts them, that they're vermin, but the sight of the brown fur in the dust, the oddly human lips peeled back from small teeth, is too much. “They’re pests,” he says. “Eat anything that grows.”

“Still,” you say.

He sets the rifle against the bike. “You know the story about the kangaroo?”

“What story?”

“The aboriginals' story.” He looks out over the desert. “There was a girl, Kyeema. She was clever, good with a spear. Eyes that could spot a kookaburra a kilometer away. One day, she stole a sling. The sling was supposed to belong to the whole tribe, but Kyeema hid it in a pouch. When the tribe discovered the sling was missing, they became very angry, and the elder asked Kyeema if she’d taken it. And she said no. So the elder put magic on the ground, and the ground began to get hot. The elder said, ‘Are your feet warm, Kyeema?’ That was the magic. Only someone who lied would feel the heat. She said no, her feet were fine. But soon she couldn’t stand it, so she began to hop from one foot to the other. And then she jumped. The elder said, ‘Why are you jumping, Kyeema?’ and she said, ‘I like to jump. I will always jump.’ And she did; she jumped everywhere for the rest of her days, because she was too stubborn to give up the sling. Her feet grew long and tough, and she was the first kangaroo.”

“That makes it worse,” you say. “Now it feels personal.” You look at poor Kyeema.

“But she’s a thief,” says Danny.

~

He doesn’t talk. That is, he doesn’t talk without a specific purpose. You find this unnerving. It makes you wonder what he's not saying. At first you probe him relentlessly, asking about politics, putting unlikely hypotheticals to him about your relationship over dinner. One night, just as he's drifting off, you say, “Who do you think is smarter, you or me?”

You are a person who needs to know things. You don't want to guess what's in his head. You want to hear him say it. This is how you avoid surprises. One day you find an odd contraption in his shed, a tangle of frayed rope and petrified wood, and march it to him where he's repairing a fence post, three hundred yards away. “What’s this?”

He glances at it. “Mobile.”

“What does that mean?” You shake it. Dust falls. It looks about a million years old. Each section of petrified wood has a dark mark on it, and some of the marks look strange.

“It’s a mobile,” he says. “For babies.”

You sit in the dirt. “You need to talk more. This, ‘it’s a mobile,’ isn’t enough for me. Understand?” No, you see. “Why do you have a mobile? Where did it come from? What are these marks? What do you think about it?”

He sits up.

“I’m not used to people who don’t talk,” you say. “It’s honestly freaking me out.”

He pulls you toward him, which you resist, for a moment. His arms around you, the smell of his sweat spoiling your judgment, he says, “You think I need to say something to make it real.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I think.”

He composes his thoughts, taking his time. “My father was a miner. Back when the mines were bigger. When he found something interesting down there, he brought it home. He made that mobile for me before I was born. I found it when I went through his stuff after he died. Decided to keep it in case I ever need it. I think it’s a good mobile.”

“Okay,” you say. “Thank you, that’s all I needed, was that so hard?”

He begins to kiss you. Things deteriorate. But later you think about what he said. About not needing to say something to make it real. This contradicts what you've been taught. The brain uses language to frame concepts: it employs words to identify and organize its own chemical soup. A person’s tongue even determines how they think, to a degree, due to the subtle logical pathways that are created between concepts represented by similar-looking or -sounding words. So, yes, words do make things real, in at least one important way. But they're also just symbols. They're labels, not the things they label. You don’t need words to feel. You decide he has a point. But it feels so strange.

~

He's a catch, of course. Women stop you in the street to congratulate you. They cackle and wish you all the best. You're going down in Broken Hill folklore as the Girl Who Tamed Danny. There's a history, obviously. A procession of Girls Who Had Not Tamed Danny. But you don't ask about that. Not even when you run into the real estate woman who had been with Danny before, you approaching each other down a grocery store aisle like reluctant jousters. The whole time you're talking, the woman telling you about the benefits of freshly squeezed orange juice versus concentrate, you're thinking: What happened? Because this woman had been with Danny and now she's not, so how had that happened, exactly? How did Danny handle a relationship breakup? Is he cruel? Deceitful? Indifferent? These are questions you want answered. But you don't ask them. You know not to go snooping around for an ending unless you want one.

That's because you've realized what your goal was. You know what is was, and you think you might have accomplished it, maybe. You realize now that until you came to Broken Hill, until now, you've never been happy.

~

You adjust the shade for the millionth time, trying to block the sun that sits low over the road, bellowing anger. “It’s so hot.” You look at Eliot. Eliot doesn’t care. Eliot's been near-silent since Minneapolis, when you accused him of being the same as Woolf. You presume Eliot is stewing, although of course you'll never know, because Eliot is as readable as a brick.

The car jolts over a pothole. You're taking the back way to Broken Hill, riding in a ridiculous purple Valiant, wide and loud, easily thirty years old. No air, of course. Many years ago, the dash had split under the merciless pounding of the sun and begun to ooze yellow foam. The speedometer reads in miles. It's a miracle it has seat belts. You're probably getting three miles to the gallon. You watch leafless trees drift by. After eight hours in an oven made of metal and glass, heat has penetrated every pore of your body. You just want to get out of the car. You just want Eliot to say something. “Have you been out here before?”

No reply. You look out at the baked earth that rolls all the way to the horizon, flat as a plate. You've been out here before. You lived in Broken Hill. Apparently. You don't remember. It's hard to believe you could have forgotten this heat.

“Yes,” says Eliot. It takes you a moment to remember the question.

“Before or after?” Eliot doesn’t respond. “You know. Before or after?” Still nothing. “Or both?” You sigh and began to fiddle with the vents.

“Stop that. You’re not making it better.”

You look at him. “I’m just-”

“Leave the vents alone.”

You sit back. Eliot is definitely pissed. A sign blows by the window, announcing a turnoff for Menindee. “We should get some fuel.” The intersection crawls toward you. “Eliot? Only thirty kilometers. Menindee. Eliot? Do you know how far apart the gas stations are? Seriously, you run out of petrol on a road like this, you die. It happens.”

The intersection slides past. You slouch. You understand that Eliot doesn’t want to stop. The airport was hairy. You made it through Immigration, then a short, grumpy official had emerged from nowhere, asking you both to please step out of the line. You were deposited in a small, windowless room and left for twenty minutes, staring at a security camera. It had seemed increasingly obvious to you that you’d been recognized, but you weren't sure what you should do about that. So you waited. Eventually, the door opened. It was Eliot. People were arguing in the corridor, loud Australian voices. “Are we okay?” you asked, and Eliot didn’t say anything, but the answer was clearly no. You found a cab. You could hear rising police sirens. But then there was nothing since then but a lot of uneventful driving.

Your eyes are closing when there's a flat bang and the car lurches. “What,” you say, thinking pursuit, death. Eliot steers the car onto the shoulder. Dust billows.

“A flat,” says Eliot. He pops open the door.

You sit for a moment before remembering the promise of fresh air and heave yourself from the seat. Your knees pop violently. The air is like fire, but at least it's moving. You stride around the car, swinging your arms. “Oh, yeah,” you say. It feels good to do something.

Eliot drags a spare tire from the trunk. You shield your eyes to study the landscape. There's nothing. Just a vast canyon of air. Your eyes grow restless for something to latch on to.

You hear Eliot grunting with the tire behind the car.

What do you do?