Vox Mentis

do you even have a choice at this point?

You really don't have any choice. You don’t want to compromise him. You've never wanted to do that: reach into the essence of who he is and change it. But you knew it might be necessary, and planned accordingly. “Aorce fashal mollicsin namming. Get dressed and start packing.”

He screws up his face. “What?”

You blink. Did you mix up his set? Surely not. You know him completely. “Aorce fashal mollicsin namming. Get dressed.”

“You sound fucking crazy.”

You slide off the bed, unnerved. Danny’s personality is unusual. He's close to the edge of his set. But you can’t have misjudged him that badly. You're not new at this. You're not new to him.

Go grab the word first, at any rate

You run to the hallway and find your satchel. You withdraw the bareword from it and hold it waist-high. You turn and his eyes move to it and he grimaces. You feel further unsettled, because you haven’t seen anyone react like that.

“Do everything I say.” You don't say ever, because you love him.

He looks at you. His expression is wrong. He isn't compromised. He looks at you like he’s never seen you before.

“El,” he says. “I have a shift. Why don’t you chill out until I get back.”

You have the bareword facing the right way, don’t you? You resist a tremendous urge to look down. Did it break? Is it covered somehow? You run your fingers over its grooves and nausea rises in your brain. It's there. “Danny,” you say. “Danny.”

He scoops up his pants. “El, you need to get out of my way.”

“Look at this. Do what I tell you.”

He pushes past you.

“Danny!”

He grabs his work bag from the living room and heads for the front door, buttoning his shirt. You run to cut him off and thrust out the word. His eyes flick to it and away. “El. Please. Get out of the way.”

You lower the word. You can’t believe what is happening. You thought you’d planned for everything. Immune? And yet a part of you isn’t completely surprised. You know he resists persuasion. That's why you like him.

“El. I’m serious.”

“Don’t you love me?”

“El.”

“Danny? Don’t you love me? If you love me, come with me. Trust me and come.”

His eyes shift. The thought bubbles in your brain, breaking into awareness: He doesn’t love you. Not like you love him.

“I’m going to work,” he says.

You raise the word. “Love me!” You know it's useless but do it anyway. “Love me!”

He pushes you aside. Your back hits the wall and your breath escapes in a rush. He goes down the steps and by the time you go after him, he's climbing into the van. You run and keep running as he shifts into reverse, thinking - what? To throw yourself under it? Something. But he shifts gears and the tires tear at the dirt and he drives away, leaving you in the dust, naked, with your stupid, powerless word.

~

You gather your clothes. You find your shirt crumpled under the bed and your underpants in the sheets. You go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and begin to dress yourself. You don’t know what to do. But you can’t stay.

You leave the house and climb into your car. You put the satchel with the word on the passenger seat. You put your hands on the wheel. You feel stunned in some important part of your brain, stunned as in estoner, the French root that also means astonished, a word used to describe sorcery. As if you are acting outside of yourself.

You turn the key, put the car into gear. You don’t look in the rear mirror so you won’t have to see the house disappear. When you reach the place where the road splits, the town in one direction, everything else in the other, you turn the car on Broken Hill and drive away. A green sign goes by that says ADELAIDE 508 and you can’t stop shaking. You slow down to be sure of staying on the road. You can taste loss in the back of your throat so badly that you could vomit. You can’t believe you're driving away.

You glance in the rearview mirror and see Thoreau. You shriek and brake. The car slews off the road and is enveloped in dust. There is no one. You just imagined Thoreau for a second. You begin to drive again, shaken, but keep glancing in the mirror and the feeling grows that you're forgetting something. Or remembering, rather. You think you're leaving Broken Hill in terrible danger, and Danny, too, because of Thoreau. Because Thoreau had planned something.

You swing the car around. The tires slide in loose gravel but then you're pointed back at the town and you feel steadier. The closer you draw, the surer you feel that you're doing the right thing. You can feel the presence of Thoreau. He is coalescing. You can almost smell him in the car. Around you are moving parts in a terrible machine, coming to smash Broken Hill flat. You push the needle and the car flies along the dirt road.

You aren't too late. You could find Danny and warn him. Persuade him. You don’t know how but you know it can be done. The first buildings crawl around the mullock wall and you perceive a hammer above them, a great and unspeakable force that is falling, falling. Thoreau drinking tea. The image flashes into your mind from nowhere. Thoreau with a teacup, looking at you. Fear spikes in your heart. You don’t know where that came from.

You blow through the town and leave the car halfway up a curb and run to the emergency room. Danny’s paramedic van isn’t there but you burst in anyway. The room is familiar and you feel safer. You touch your satchel for reassurance. You go to the reception desk, which is staffed by an older man with thinning hair and glasses. He's worked there forever, although you don’t know why; he's permanently irritable. He always makes you feel as if you're bothering him. You say, “I need to find Danny.”

He looks down his nose. You're coming off as a little crazy. You look like a woman who has spent months on a container ship and slept in the desert and left a man catatonic by the side of the road and and been abandoned and is afraid of invisible hammers. “He’s in the field.”

“Where?”

He continues to eye you. “The field.” He gestures nonspecifically.

“Archie,” says a nurse, emerging from the corridor. “We’re still looking for that second defib unit.”

The receptionist turns. You lean across the counter and catch his shirt. “Excuse me,” you say. “It is extremely important that I locate Danny right this second.”

He looks at you and you realize this is familiar to him: girls coming to the desk and saying, Where’s Danny, I need to see him. You're merely the latest. “Please let go of me, Elise.”

“No,” you say. You can feel Thoreau coming up behind you. “Tell me where he is.”

“Security,” says the nurse.

You reach inside your satchel and as your fingers touch the word’s cold wood you abruptly remember where you saw Thoreau drinking tea. It was in your DC apartment. You had been back awhile, at least a few months, and he had come to you. That was why you’d never felt alone. Because he was there. He sat opposite you and sipped tea and told you things. At the end, before he left, he said, Remember none of this until you next leave Broken Hill.

A tall boy comes and stands behind you. The security guard. He doesn’t grab you right away because you know each other pretty well. You used to chat with him while waiting for Danny. He plays football. But you can’t concentrate on him because there are awful memories breaking free in your mind, surfacing in your consciousness like bloated corpses.

I wish to establish exactly what it is we have found, Thoreau had told you.

The receptionist slides a pen and paper across the counter.

There are certain forms of testing that one can really only conduct... shall we say...

“Leave him a note.” He doesn't look completely unsympathetic. “I’ll make sure he gets it.”

...live.