Vox Mentis

Whatever the fuck you like, it's not like Plath's going to remember it if you don't want her to

“Horrible,” you say.

“I mean, we’re seeing bodies in the streets. Around the hospital, especially.” She gazes out hopefully. “Maybe it’ll burn down.”

You consider this. It is rather important that the bareword not be lost to fire. That would be a serious inconvenience. But you are also interested in letting this scenario play out to its fullest, in order to gain maximum information from it. “Please don’t let the hospital burn down.”

“I’ll monitor it. You know, we could send people in now. Stop this before it gets worse.”

“No.”

“It’s just... there are eighteen thousand people down there.”

“If Eliot couldn’t stop it, it can’t be stopped.”

Plath nods, unconvinced.

Reprimand her for showing levity in a situation like this, there are people dying down there and she is at least partly responsible for it.

“It is a great tragedy,” you make yourself say. You overlook this sometimes: the need to display empathy.

You circle the town. You watch toy vehicles run down tiny figures, plow into matchbox buildings. Sometimes there is a lull and the little shapes head for the hospital, and then it begins again.

“I think we’ve found Eliot,” Plath says. She mutters into her other headset for a few moments. “On a road a couple miles out of town. He’s not moving. What do you want to do?”

“Take me there, please,” you say.

“I can send a team.”

Plath has been doing this lately: implying that you might not know what you want. It concerns you a little, because it means she doesn’t think you are acting rationally, and you need her to think you rational for at least a while longer. “Thank you, but no.”

The chopper tilts. You watch a dozen small tragedies play out below before they are obscured by the towering wall of soil and rock that marks the quarry’s boundary. Dust blows around you. Plath unstraps and pulls open the door. You hesitate, because you're wearing your Ferragamos, winged patent leather that will never be the same after contact with this land. But you have no other shoes. You step out.

Plath points, mouthing words you can’t hear over the thundering of the blades, clawing at her hair. You begin to walk, placing your feet carefully on the treacherous sandy earth. You are tempted to abandon the whole idea now. You are upset with yourself for forgetting about your shoes. But you are committed: You can’t change your mind now without risking revealing something about yourself.

Plath catches up with you. She's wearing a perfectly charming pair of Louboutins but clomping along as if they are galoshes. Plath doesn’t mind ruining shoes, apparently. You didn’t know that about her. It changes a great deal.

You reach the road. The chopper has risen into the air and its spotlight helpfully swings right, so you begin to trudge in that direction. Plath fiddles with an earpiece. “Still no sign of Woolf,” she says. “I assume she’s still kill-on-sight?”

“Oh, yes,” you say. “And I expect this to be quite a lot easier to accomplish, now that she no longer has the word.”

“If she no longer has it. She could be in the hospital still, for all we know.” Plath bends to one knee. You keep walking. When Plath catches you again, her strappy heels dangle from one hand. “I should not have worn these shoes.”

“No,” you say.

“I bet she’s in there,” Plath says. “Compromising people as they come in.”

“Please don’t assume that,” you say, because that is all you need, Woolf slipping away while everyone watches the hospital. You are quite certain Elise is nowhere near, because you instructed her not to be. She deployed the word and left, so that once this is all over, you can recover it.

“Is that...?” Plath says, trailing off as the spotlight shifts and makes speculation unnecessary. Across the road lies a car; before that is Eliot. You can’t tell whether he is alive or dead. “Jesus, she’s killed him. Woolf killed Eliot.”

You approach to within a few feet. Eliot’s coat flaps in the chopper’s downdraft. You study his face. After a moment, Eliot blinks. “No,” you say. “Compromised, I believe.” You feel your skin crawl. An emotional reaction. Odd. But it is unnerving to behold: Eliot, disabled. Of all the poets, if you were to select the most difficult to compromise in the field, you would choose Eliot. You did choose Eliot.

“We need some people down here right away,” Plath tells her radio. “Eliot’s catatonic.”

In the distance, a siren wails. It feels like a song, like the word calling to you. It is waiting. You need only collect it. You stand very still, studying your own reaction, because there is no mistaking that you want it.

“Thoreau?” says Plath.

Your mouth feels dry. A slight tingling in your palms. You had considered many outcomes for this day, but not the possibility that you would be moved.

“We’re going to want to move. We’ve got emergency services inbound from two directions.”

“A moment,” you say. You close your eyes. You can perceive the danger now, the crevice that swallowed those who came before you. And you can see what needs to be done. You open your eyes and turn to Plath. To your surprise, she is in the process of snapping a heel from her shoe.

You aren’t yourself; she sees something on your face. “It broke,” she explains. She tosses the heel into the night. You hear it land. Plath begins to wedge her feet back into her butchered Louboutins. “Ridiculous things.”

When you are away from here, you decide, and safely back at the hotel, you will visit Plath. You will enter her room and wake her gently and make her fuck her shoes. These Louboutins. It will serve a dual purpose, testing your ability to remain unaroused and teaching Plath proper respect for good footwear.

“I can’t understand what motivated Woolf to do all this,” Plath says. Men in black jog out of the darkness and begin to heft Eliot.

“We may never know,” you say.

~

You run down the main street, leaving the hospital, the emergency room, and many, many people who need medical attention. You had tried to help. You had stayed long enough to bandage the jugular of Maureen Stamper, who tried to scratch your eyes out as you worked. You had seen Ian Cho from Surgery cut three more jugulars with a scalpel, moving methodically from one person to the next, his eyes carefully judging each attack. You had seen Kevin Fowler, a twenty-year cop, bring in a kid with a bleeding head and draw his revolver and execute that kid right there on the floor.

That was when you decided to leave. What you were doing, stabilizing these people, that wasn’t helping them. That was only delaying. You stood and Fowler turned to you. The only reason you had not died then, under Fowler’s calm, unsmiling eyes, was that Cho chose that moment to step behind the cop and delicately draw the scalpel from left to right. Fowler gurgled and Cho plucked the revolver from him with his long surgeon’s fingers and turned it over, testing its weight.

Then you left. You're running, because all you can think is Elise. There is chaos outside but you run through it. You find her vomiting over the rail of a traffic bridge. You catch her by the arm and haul her around. Her face is ashen, her pupils dilated, like a junkie’s; for a moment, you barely recognize her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I did it. I did it.” She wraps her arms around her head and moans.

“We have to get out of here.” You're trying to think of vehicles. Something off-road. If you can get back to the house, you could take the bikes. “People are going crazy.”

“It’s the word!” she screams. She gets to her feet and takes two steps back toward the hospital, then veers around, clutching her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“El,” you say. But you know what she's talking about. That ridiculous piece of wood, with the black symbol, that she waved at you back at the house like it was a magical talisman. Like it could command you to obey her. You saw it in the ER with a piece of paper tacked to it that said KILL EVERYONE. At the time, it wasn't the strangest thing in the room. “Your word? It works?”

“I can’t stop it,” she says. “He won’t let me.”

You leave her and run back toward the hospital. You are still a hundred yards away when you see the two police cruisers parked outside. People claw and reach, spilling over the cars, filling the air with cries. You had intended to go in there and get that piece of wood, hack it into a million pieces, but that is clearly going to be very dangerous. You hesitate at the intersection. A car purrs behind you and your brain finally registers this as a danger and you throw yourself out of its way. It blows by close enough to tug at your clothes and hit one person, then another, and crashes into one of the police cruisers. Its engine revs. You can see the driver tugging at the shifter, trying to get the car into gear. A cop comes out of the ER and jogs up to the driver and shoots him through the window.

You notice a figure approaching you from the side of the hospital, carrying a cleaver. You recognize the someone as an orderly. And the cleaver is not actually a cleaver; it just looks like it. It's a bone saw. “Jack?” You say, wondering how, exactly, you're supposed to tell the difference between a person carrying a bone saw for self-defense and one who wants to saw you open with it.

What do you do?