Vox Mentis

close your ears

You squeeze your eyes shut, just in case, and grope your way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging your ears with your fingers. That song you’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; you used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before you learned card tricks. It was how you’d met Jimmy: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Jimmy said, so that was mainly what you sang. You must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first you liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing you could do and nowhere you could go without it running across your brain or humming on your lips, and God knows you tried; you was smashing yourself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Jimmy played the opening chord and you just couldn’t do it. You could not sing that fucking song. Not again. You broke down, because you were only fifteen, and Jimmy took you behind the mall and told you it would be okay. But you had to sing. It was the biggest earner. You kind of lost it and then so did Jimmy and that was the first time he hit you. You ran away for a while. But you came back to him, because you had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like you had a truce: You would not complain about your bruised face and he would not ask you to sing “Lucy.” You had been all right with this. You had thought that was a pretty good deal.

Panic.

Maybe if you panic enough you won't be focused enough to process the word. Or you'll pass out and hopefully you have to be conscious for it to affect you.

No you're not thinking about it that rationally, you're just panicking.

Now there is something coming out of a box, and you reach for the most virulent mental earworm you know. “Lucy in the sky!” you sing. “With diamonds!”

~

Time passes and you do not die. You don't lose your mind. In the spaces between song words, you hear things. For this reason, you keep singing. Shrieking out the words. Then you catch a burst of static and realize it's just the tech, talking to you through the speaker. You don’t think you have to fear the tech. Only the box. So you lower your voice, a little, and eventually unplug one ear.

“Ssscchtand on one leg,” says the speaker.

You remove your other finger from your ear. You don’t move for a while, in case the box is going to talk and you need to replug your ears. But they had said they wanted you to look at something, hadn’t they? Not listen.

“Toussscccchh your left elbow.”

You begin to feel your way across the concrete. When you reach the box, you feel your way up its side. Above the seam there is no more steel. You slide your hands over the lip and feel something cool and rigid. Plastic, maybe. You press against it. It yields slightly, just enough to detect. You sit back on your haunches and think about this.

“Now your right elbow, please, Jessica.”

You crawl across the floor until you reach a wall and follow that to a video camera. You drag one back to the box. It's probably catching glimpses of you. You confirm the contours of the box, the plastic bubble that seems to encase whatever is inside, and get to your feet and heft the camera by its tripod.

“Take off your sshoesssssch.”

You raise the camera. Like golf, you think. You swing and there's a glass explosion that tells you that you missed the plastic. You adjust your grip and try again. This time you receive a more satisfying sound. You put down the tripod and grope at the plastic, seeking damage.

“Sssssit down.”

A scratch. A minor deformation. Not big enough to work with. But it's something. It's proof of concept. You get to your feet and raise the tripod again.

“Put your foot in your mouth as far as it will go.”

You swing and swing until your arms ache and sweat runs down your face. You drop the tripod, sure that you'll find nothing but shattered plastic, but it doesn’t feel as ruined as you’d expected. Your hands move over sharp plastic edges like rough knives. You begin to pry these apart and force your hand between them.

“You want to run through the protocols again?” the speaker mutters. Then: “Okay. I’ll finish.”

Your middle finger touches something cool but you can’t grip it. You press and it bites. “Ow,” you say. “Ow, ow.” It's sharp. Thicker than you expected. Irregularly shaped. You had been thinking paper, maybe cardboard, material on which a word could be inscribed, but this is neither. You begin to work it out between the plastic knives.

“Jessschica, come over to the walkie-talkie. To where my voice is coming from.”

The thing gets stuck on the broken plastic mouth and you waggle it back and forth. You can’t figure out what it is. And yet it feels familiar. You pull with all your strength and hear a tearing, a ripping that you hope mightily is plastic and not some vital part of whatever you're withdrawing. Then it pops free. You clutch it, panting.

“The speaker here has a compartment on the underside. Open this. There are four red pills inside. These are cyanide pills. If you eat them, you will die. It’s important that you know this. If you understand that eating the pills will kill you, nod.”

You shrug your denim jacket off and wrap it carefully around the thing. It probably would have been smart to keep track of which way it was facing, in case it has a good side and a bad side - you're thinking of words written on paper again - but it's too late for that. When you're sure no part of it is showing, you open your eyes. You're surprised by the room’s size. In your imagination, it had grown enormous.

“Swallow all the pills.”

Behind you is the box. Empty, you hope, of whatever had been going to take away your mind and leave you amenable to the speaker’s terrible instructions. But you are not going to test that theory. You look at the bundle of jacket. It takes an effort to do that. The thing seems roughly book-shaped, but irregular and heavy. You steal a hand into the jacket and probe at its surface. Freezing. Like metal. You find a little protuberance with vicious edges, and realize this must be what cut you, so at least you know which way it faces.

The door bolts fire. You're out of time. Your fingers trace grooves, rough indentations in a smooth surface, and when your mind tries to piece these together, something thickens there and you withdraw your hand with a gasp. Nausea crashes over you. You feel yourself beginning to faint and fight it, because that would be the end. Here, you tell yourself. I’m right here.

The room fills with light. A shadow appears, bisecting the brightness. “Oh, God,” says someone. The tech. You hear footsteps.

You begin to unwrap the jacket. Years ago, in a hidden library at the school, you had read tales of mass enthrallment. Of towers and the splintering of language. Myths, you’d thought. Everything they’d taught you said there was no way to compromise everyone at once. The Organization’s words are keyed to particular psychographic sets; that's how they work. And they do not push an m-graph flat. They do not trigger syndesis. Something that can do that is not a regular word. It's the kind of word from the tales. If anything is worth flooding a building with guys in black space suits who can’t hear or see except through helmets, and burying in a concrete tomb with a time-locked steel door thicker than you are, you think that would probably be it.

The man in the gray uniform rushes in, his gun drawn. The tech is just standing there, shocked. Your jacket drops to the floor. Wood. You recognize the feel of it now. The thing is petrified wood. You press its back to your chest, keeping your eyes up. If you're wrong, now is when you'll find out. That would be pretty hilarious. At this point, unless it's exactly what you think, you are pretty screwed. You say, “Don’t move.”

The guard stops. There is silence. In it, you start to believe.

hop on one foot

“Hop on one foot,” you say. “Both of you.”

They hop. Your spine tingles. It's one thing to understand the concept. It's another to see it. You take a breath. That's the first part. Now for the next. You say, “Tell me how to get out of here.”

~

One coffee shop in Broken Hill doesn’t have a view of the quarry. This was what you had ascertained after three months of study: that the town offers coffee at five different locations and four stare at the quarry. You patronize the fifth. It's not that the quarry is ugly - although it is, deeply and thoroughly - but rather that it is everywhere. The town streets are wide, its buildings well spaced, the land as flat as any you've seen, and this makes it impossible to remain unaware of the forty-foot battlement of desiccated dirt and shattered stone that stands like a rib cage at the town’s core. You keep taking it for a wave, a great rolling crest of vomited earth about to engulf the town. Which it is, in a sense; wind and erosion and the constant addition of new mullock must push it a little closer every year. Given time, it will swallow everything. This will be a serious improvement. That's another thing you ascertained, while waiting here in case Woolf shows up.

You sip coffee and browse the Barrier Daily Truth, an eighteen-page newspaper that comes out weekly. This edition is leading with “Five Decades of Happiness,” a story about an elderly married couple. You read it twice, searching for the part that is always missing in these kinds of articles, namely, how the hell that is possible. You are genuinely unsure whether these idyllic unions exist or people merely pretend because the alternative is so unpalatable. Every time you think you've settled on the latter, you see something like this, “Five Decades of Happiness,” and start to wonder.

These are loose thoughts, of course.

Your phone rings. You fold the paper. “Yes?”

“She’s here. Coming down the Barrier Highway. White sedan. Alone.”

“You’re sure?”

“Got a lot of technology here, Eliot.”

“Yes. Thank you. How long?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“Thank you. I’ll take it from here.” You toss a few bills onto the table, leave the coffee shop, and walk to your car. Once the engine is running and the air conditioner moving, you make a few short calls. Just to confirm that everyone is where they are supposed to be. It's been three months since Woolf fled Washington with a stolen word; everything that needs to be in place already is. But still. When it's done, you put the car into gear and drive toward the wall of mullock.

~

You drive about a mile out of town and park your car to block the road. It's symbolic: Woolf will have no trouble steering around you. The idea is that seeing you will impress upon her the futility of continuing.

You climb out and wait against the car. It's winter, supposedly. A rush of birds pass overhead, filling the air with their grating calls. Cockatoos. At dawn, the noise is incredible. Like the whole world is tearing apart. You were sleeping in a motel and one night woke to find an insect the size of your palm on the pillow. You didn’t even know what it was. You had never seen anything like it.

You feel an urge to call Austen. You've been thinking about her again. It's this assignment; too much time, too much waiting. It's Woolf. Watching her kick down the walls planted the thought in your head that it could be done. Call Austen, you think. Right. Ask how she’s doing. No reason. Just feel like a chat.

You and she had been students together, almost twenty years ago, attending the school that she now runs. You still remember the bounce of her hair the day she came to class, the books clutched to her chest, the angle of her nose. You basically fell in love with her on the spot. Well, no, that's not accurate; that implies a binary state, a shifting from not-love to love, remaining static thereafter, and what you did with Austen was fall and fall, increasingly faster the closer you drew, like planets drawn to each other’s gravitational force. Doomed, you guess, the same way.

You both held out a long time. Years? It felt like years. But maybe not. You had been seniors, anyway, not far from graduation. You knew this because Austen had given you her words. A yellowed envelope, curling from use, and inside were dozens of slips of paper, each bearing a word.

“Use them,” she said. The lights were off so you would be able to detect anyone approaching by the shadows thrown beneath her door. But you could see her face clearly enough. “I want you to compromise me.”

You can't remember your own response. You might have tried to talk her out of it. Might have not. You’ve thought a lot of things and it's too long ago to tell the difference between choices real and imagined. Almost all of your memory is about her: the way she lay back on the bed, her bare shoulders gleaming. Her face as you whispered the first words. You were clumsy, that first time. It took you a while to find the place between awareness and compromise, the sub-lucid state of low consciousness that lay the body open to suggestion. When you put her under too far, her face would slacken; when you brought her too close to the surface, her eyes would focus and she would tell you to do more. You touched her breasts and they felt hard and urgent against your palm. Her hips rose from the bed. “Fuck me,” she said. “I want you to fuck me.” She whimpered and growled like an animal. You worried about the noise, said, “Quiet,” and she began to hiss, a kind of noise you never heard anyone make before. Goose bumps undulated across her skin. Waves followed the touch of your fingers. Her hips rose and fell, and when you touched her there she issued a high, barely audible keen, like escaping steam. You worried you’d broken her, and brought her up, and desperation flashed across her face and she begged you to take her down again. When you did, she gave a long sigh of satisfaction, a noise of complete unself-consciousness that signaled you were very close to the core of her. Her words became a chant, gasped into your ear over and over as her fingers clawed at your back, and you were unable to stop yourself. You unbuttoned your pants and brought things to their conclusion.

You lay together for hours. You knew you should leave before dawn, lest someone see you slinking from her room, but you couldn’t bear to part with her. You held her as she gently rose toward full consciousness. You kissed. When light began to leak into the sky and you couldn’t put it off any longer, you rose from the bed. She walked you to the door - her naked body in the moonlight, you'll never forget that - and said, “Next time, I do you.”

A cockatoo screeches from a nearby tree. You draw breath, exhale. This is not a time for reminiscing. You won't be calling Austen. It's ancient history. And it ended badly. Or perhaps not badly, but not well. Then you both had graduated and gone to different parts of the organization and that was that. You have no idea whether she thinks about that time anymore, whether she does so with shame or regret. It's impossible to tell. Impossible to ask, without exposing yourself.

One day, I’ll kiss her again. The corners of your mouth twitch. One more kiss. What a thought. Ludicrous. Still. There's no harm in fantasy. Not if you recognize it as such. You'll let yourself keep this one, you decide. It's a nice thought to have.

~

Two hours later, you hear tires crawl across dirt. A white sedan noses around the corner. It's driving very slowly and stops as soon as it sees you. The windshield is a solid sheet of sunlight. The engine dies. The door opens. Woolf emerges. Elise. She's thinner.

You say, “I appreciate you stopping.”

She raises a hand to her eyes and turns in a circle, scanning the terrain. She's wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Possibly the word is tucked into her waist, although it doesn’t seem like it. Did she leave it in the car? Maybe she already realizes it's over.

“How did you cross the Pacific?” you say. “I ask because there’s a pool going.”

“Container ship.”

“We searched a lot of those.”

“You searched mine.”

You nod. “Fairly pointless, when people can’t be trusted to report when they find you. It’s why you’re shoot-on-sight now.”

She looks at you. Her expression is very measured, very controlled. If she’s been shedding her training, it's not evident. “So what are we doing, Eliot?”

“I’m sorry.”

Her eyebrows rise. “Oh? You’re here to kill me?”

You say nothing.

“Well, that’s disappointing. Kind of extremely disappointing, coming from you.”

“I thought you might respect it, coming from me.”

“Yeah, you know what? Not so much. Not so much.” She shakes her head. “How about this, Eliot: You pretend like you never saw me. I go to Danny. Him and me disappear. End of story.” She watches your face. “No? Not even that?”

“You must understand, I have no choice.”

“I love him. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“If you did, you’d know I don’t have a choice, either.”

You say, “I can give you one hour. You can spend that with him. Then you say good-bye and you walk back down the road. That’s the best I can offer you.”

“And I decline your shitty offer. Three months I’ve spent getting here, Eliot. Three months. And they have not been easy months. I didn’t go through that for an hour.” She shakes her head. “I think we should be clear on the fact that you can’t stop me from doing anything I want.”

“Where is it? In the car?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Do you know what it is?”

“A bareword.”

Her head tilts. “Is that what it’s called? Huh. I just know what I read in old books. They didn’t have a name for it. Or rather, they had lots of different names. The only thing those stories had in common was every time a word like this turned up, it was followed by mass enslavement. And death. Also towers, for some reason.”

“You are describing a Babel event.”

“This word compels everyone,” she says. “Everyone.”

“Yes.”

“So let me ask you something, Eliot. Do you really think Thoreau trusts you to bring it back? Because I only met him that one time, but it doesn’t strike me as his style. It seriously doesn’t. You ask me, how this plays out is you make it about halfway back to Adelaide and somebody runs you off the road. Somebody in a black suit and helmet.”

“I will take it to Thoreau,” you say, “and Thoreau knows that.”

She squints. “You’re kind of spineless, Eliot. I’m just realizing. You present as badass, but you’re weak as piss. That’s a little local flavor, if you’re wondering. Holy hell. You would actually take this thing to Thoreau and give it up. That’s amazing to me.”

You don't respond.

“Fuck Thoreau. Fuck him. He’s not here. Do something unexpected for once in your life. You and me, right here, we have power. We have all the power we need.”

“I’m not interested in power.”

She sighs. “This has been a very disappointing conversation, Eliot. I’m not going to lie. I feel like I’ve moved past you.” She begins to walk back to the car.

“Stop.”

“Or what?”

You go after her and put one hand on the car door before she can open it. It's more than you intended, but it's her final chance, and you want her to have it. “There are snipers. At a signal from me, they will drop you. If you attempt to remove any object from your person, or get back in the car, or strike me, they’ll drop you. They’ll drop you if you try to leave Broken Hill regardless of what I do. This is set. This is the reality you have created. The best I can do for you in this reality is to give you an hour before you die. Please take it.”

Her eyes search yours. “You really don’t get it. The basic concept of love. Of valuing something that you feel. You have no comprehension of that at all.” She shakes her head. “Let me go, Eliot.”

So that's that. You step back, one step and then another, leaving her isolated for the snipers.

“Oh,” she says. “Here we go.”

Her hands pluck at her T-shirt. You close your eyes and give the signal, spreading your arms wide.

Nothing happens. No shots. No noise. You open your eyes and she's there, arms at her side, her hands empty, just watching you.

“I’ve been scouting this town eight days,” she says. “You and your people, you stick out like crazy here. You glow.”

“Vart-” you say, beginning the sequence that will compromise her, and her hands move in an odd way. You're not sure what she's doing and she throws one hand toward the windshield and it's a magician’s trick, you realize, a dummy move to draw the eye, but your gaze has already shifted and the windshield is no longer obscured by the sun’s reflection. On the dashboard is an object with something black twisting and crawling across its surface and the blackness kicks you somewhere in the core of your brain and everything goes still. Something inside you revolts, a long way down.

“Lie down,” she says.

You lie in the dirt. An ant crawls across the sand in front of your eyes.

“You could have helped me, Eliot. I gave you that choice.” Her boots appear before you. “But you chose Thoreau.”

The words roll by you. They evoke no reaction. You are patient, waiting for the words that will tell you what to do.

“Lie still and don’t talk or move until the sun rises the day after tomorrow. After that, I don’t care what you do.” Her boots crunch toward the car. “You and me are done, Eliot. Next time, I won’t leave you alive.”

The door slams. The engine turns. The car rolls away.

The ant reaches your nose and begins to tentatively feel its way up. You lie still. You breathe. You do not talk. You do not move.

~

You drive to the homestead in Eliot’s car and kill the engine. The metal ticks as it cools. You can see Danny’s paramedic van, and the garden, which has gone to crap since you were last here. Through the living room window you can see the back of your sofa, the lamp in the shape of a dog, a corner of a table: small proofs of your old life. You look at these awhile, because there were times over the past three months when you wondered if they existed.

You collect your satchel and climb out into the blazing sun. You feel curiously fragile. Transparent. You ascend the steps and knock. The thing is, if Danny's not pleased to see you, you're in kind of a tough spot. You're kind of completely fucked. He will be pleased to see you. You know that. It's just hard to stop thinking about, since the consequences would be so horrific. You shift your weight from one foot to the other. You knock again. Danny is here somewhere; you made sure of that. You wait.

You leave the front door to circle the house. The land is wide and empty of dust clouds that might signal he's out on one of the bikes. You peer in the kitchen window but see only plates and cups. You try the door and the handle turns. That means nothing; it's never locked. You go inside.

“Danny?” You touch your satchel for reassurance. You feel tempted to pull out the word, in case there are poets lurking around corners, behind sofas. Crazy. There are no other Organization people in Broken Hill. You watched this town for a week. But still. “Danny?”

The living room looks like you left it yesterday. The sofa cushions are bowed: Danny imprinted himself on one and you think you can see a hint of yourself, the briefer denizen, on the other. You were here. You affected things. You touch your forehead, because you're having trouble thinking. All your planning and he's not here. You should have considered what to do about that. But he should be here. An odd thought occurrs to you: that he knows you're here, and that is why you can’t find him. He doesn’t want to see you. “Danny,” you say. You want to explain. You've been through a lot. You hadn’t talked to him in three months because that was the only way to keep him safe.

Outside, three kangaroos bound across the driveway, one after the other. The world feels uncertain. You're afraid. This is going badly, very badly indeed. You're beginning to think that after all your hopping, with the ground growing hotter beneath your feet, you might not make it to Danny after all.

You hear an engine. You run to the kitchen and see him bouncing across the earth on a dirt bike. He goes right past the window without glancing and you don’t move because your body is staked to the floor. The tires chew earth. He kicks the stand and comes up the back steps. His eyes meet yours.

You open your mouth to say hello and he disappears. You blink. The back door bursts open and he comes at you like a train. You raise your hands and he crashes into you. You're enveloped by the scent of earth and motor oil. “Mother fuck!” he says. “How are you here?”

“I just am.”

“El!” He squeezes you until you think you'll pass out. “Jesus, El!”

“Let me go.”

“No.”

You wind yourself around him. “Where were you?”

“Me? Where was I? Where the fuck were you?” Your T-shirt moves. You realize he's undressing you.

“Wait. Wait.”

“I have waited,” he says. And you cave, because he's right, and so have you. He pulls your shirt over your head and throws it onto the counter. He pulls you to him by the waistband of your jeans. His mouth mashes yours. You know you should stop him, because you won't be safe until you're both a thousand miles from here, but he holds you tightly and you forget about that.

“I missed you so much,” you say.

~

You lie in the curl of his arm, slick and sated. You play with his hair. After a while, you poke him. “Danny.” You scratch his chest. You wish you could do this forever. But you can't. “Danny.”

He opens his eyes. His lips stretch, rubbery. “I thought you were a dream.”

“I have to tell you something kind of crazy. And then we need to leave.”

He sits up, smiling. “What?”

“This is hard to explain.” You feel the need to put on some clothes. Your satchel is on the floor somewhere. You have a vague memory of leaving it with your pants. The most powerful weapon in history, and you don’t know exactly where you left it. “There are people looking for me. I stole something from them.”

“What did you steal?”

“It’s...” you say. “It’s a word.”

“A word?”

“Yes. But not an ordinary word.” You hesitate. “There are words that can persuade people. This one is very persuasive. The people looking for me, they want it back. They’ll kill me for it. Kill both of us.” His expression hasn’t changed. “I wasn’t supposed to come back here. I was supposed to never see you again. But I had to. That’s why I stole the word. And it’s taken me a long time to get here, but I made it. I know how this sounds, but you need to trust me. We need to leave.”

“Are you high?”

“No. No.”

“You stole a magic word?”

“Not... actual magic,” you say. “I mean, yes, magic, in the classical sense, but not the way you mean it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Just trust me. Will you trust me?”

“And leave?”

“Yes.”

“For where?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I have to work this afternoon.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Well, it does,” he says. “I’m a paramedic.”

“Danny,” you say. “This thing I stole, it’s probably the most valuable thing in the world. Do you get that?”

“You’re freaking out, El.”

“I can prove it. Just come with me. When we’re safe, I’ll show you how it works.”

“Look, no one’s leaving, okay? I’m happy you’re home. But you need to calm down.”

You recoil. “Danny-”

“I haven’t seen you in almost a year. I haven’t heard from you in three months.”

“I was coming home.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“If you love me,” you say, “trust me.”

He throws back the sheets. “I’m going to work.”

What do you do?