Vox Mentis

Try to think of the first thing you remember as Nick

Your head is spinning. Memories are hard to grasp right now. You don't remember anything specific... an airport, maybe.

Do as you did when you were a paramedic; save the emotional fallout when there isn't a life on the line.

Assess the situation with your restored knowledge. Is there really any saving Eliot?

How about you remember the bullshit you had to go through getting into the town? I mean sure you could probably just scrape by with getting to Menindee or even Mildura in time but with helicopters falling out the sky around you and the authorities lying in wait on the roads? Forget about it. What could you possibly do? Strap the word to the roof and paint "don't harm us" on the van? Would that even work?

First things first though stop the bleeding.

These dannies were made for walking
and that's just what he'll do
someday this danny is gonna
walk all over you

MASH A SYRINGE OF ADRENALINE IN ELIOT'S BUTT

Behind you, Eliot coughs. You think, That guy has lost a lot of blood. You blink. For some reason, you haven’t attended to Eliot’s gunshot wound. You're letting him bleed out, apparently. You feel bewildered. Why had you let Eliot go so long?

You climb back through the van and manhandle Eliot into the bed. Eliot groans. That's a positive sign. Well. It's a sign. You ransack the shelves for a scalpel, surgical gloves, dressing, and saline, all of which are in their assigned places, roll Eliot on his side, stick the scalpel between your teeth, and force Eliot’s knee up and his arm over. You cut away the shirt and there it is, an exit wound, big as your hand, pink and torn and oozing blood. You're appalled at yourself. Timely first aid would have saved this guy’s life. All you can do now is compress and close anything that looks like it's fountaining blood.

You insert a finger into Eliot’s lower intestine and gently lift. There is a sucking noise, a glunk, and a small sea of Eliot flows onto the back of your hand, which is bad, about the worst thing you could see, because that means Eliot has holes. To locate the source you have to force four fingers in there, and Eliot makes a terrible sound. You do what you can. It's not much but maybe enough. You begin to dress the wound.

As you do, memories burst in your head like popping corn. Tiny, irrelevant things. The look on a girl’s face. The smell of earth in the morning. But they are coming. Squeezing past whatever barrier was erected in your head. Something important comes to you, and you pause.

Eliot breathes. He's unconscious. His face is gray. The problem is too much of Eliot is spread across two different vehicles. Eliot is on your shirt and his coat and on the floor of two different vehicles. He's about a hair’s breadth away from hypovolemic shock and there's nothing you can do about that. You look out the back of the van at the emergency room. Twenty feet from a hospital that's full of blood product, and every pack will be black and hard as stone.

You lean forward. “Eliot.” You twist Eliot’s ear. This is extremely painful, if you do it properly. “Eliot, you motherfucker.”

Eliot groans.

“Eliot.” You put your lips to Eliot’s ear. “Eliot.”

“Uh,” Eliot says.

“What’s your blood type?”

~

You open your eyes. There's a ceiling. Tiled. A false ceiling: the kind that has pipes and wiring snaking through it. You don’t know where you are, or when.
You hear a crack. You tense. Your abdomen hurts. There's a lot of pain in your body. You try to raise your head and your vision swims. You see pale blue walls and a cracked ceiling. A corded phone implanted into one wall. Chairs, a bedside table. A bed, for that matter, in which you are lying. The air smells of dust.

Oh, Christ, you think. I’m in Broken Hill.

You explore your surroundings with your hands. Something tugs on your arm, which turns out to be a tube. You're attached to something. You lever yourself up your pillow, inch by inch, and see a hat stand, draped with tubing and three bags. One of the bags bulges with clear fluid, one has dark fluid, and one appears to have contained dark fluid until recently but is now mostly empty. You feel bewildered, because you don’t remember any of this.

A second crack. This time you identify it as a gunshot. A rifle. Your thoughts begin to order themselves. You drove to Broken Hill with the Exception, Nick. A farmer shot you. When you realized the wound was fatal, you told Nick to leave you. But Nick didn’t want to. It was one of those frustrating situations where you needed to convince Nick of something but couldn’t, because the guy is an exception. Also, stupidly stubborn. You passed out before this was really resolved. It seems that in the meantime, Nick has saved your life.

You hear footsteps. You lie still until you're sure they're approaching, then begin to feel around for a weapon. As you see it, there are two plausible scenarios. In one, Nick has driven away with the bareword, as you instructed, and the footsteps belong to someone from the Organization, coming to kill you. In the other, they belong to Nick, who was too cowardly to leave, and instead is hanging around hoping you'll wake up and tell him what to do. Either way, you feel the need to shoot someone.

The deadliest object you can see is the hat stand, which could possibly serve as a club. You tug at the covers to free your legs. You haven’t progressed very far with this when a man appears in the doorway. The man has a rifle slung over his shoulder and for a second you don’t recognize him.

“Lie down,” Nick says. He crosses the room and peers out the window.

You sink into the pillow, crushed by the weight of your own bitter disappointment. You shouldn’t have expected any different. Nick has done nothing you have asked of him from the moment you met. You were foolish to think he might start now just because everything depends on it. You pluck at the blanket. “We... leave. Now.”

Nick ignores you. He's looking at something outside. You can’t tell what.

“Listen, you... fuck,” you say. “Woolf... is coming.” You try to say more, but it degenerates into coughing. When you open your eyes, Nick is holding a cup of water. You take it. There's something different about Nick’s manner. The reason you didn’t recognize Nick before: Nick is different somehow. You have the odd, discombobulating thought: That isn’t Nick Parsons.

The Nick-person watches you drink without expression. When you finish, he says, “Lie down.”

“Have to-”

“You’re about to pass out again,” says the Nick-person. “Lie down.”

You feel the truth of this but fight it anyway. “Woolf.”

“You mean Elise. Elise Jackson.”

Oh, God, you think.

“Don’t think you mentioned that. You talked a lot about Woolf. But you never mentioned that I knew her. Knew her pretty well, as it turns out.”

“I... can... explain.”

“Yeah,” says Nick. “You’ll explain. But first, you’re going to sleep.” He hefts the rifle. “I need to shoot some guys.”

What guys? you try to say. But unconsciousness gets you first.

~

You fall into sleep, but not far. You remember a phone ringing in the dark. It was a while ago. But you were lying down, like this, feeling Broken Hill all around you.

~

You open your eyes and see curtains. A bedside clock. Hotel, you remember. I’m in a bed, in a hotel, in Sydney. The phone rings and rings but you don’t move in case it dissolves, revealing that you are back on that road, your face in the dirt, lying still.

You pick up the phone. “Your wake-up call, Mr. Eliot. It’s four thirty.”

“Thank you.” You place the receiver back on the cradle, carefully, and it does not dissolve. You rise and draw back the curtains. Beyond is the city: the famous Sydney Opera House wreathed in light; behind that, the hulking steel bridge. A few boats on the bay, lights bobbing. These things are comforting to you, the water, the steel, because they prove it's not three weeks ago, when Broken Hill died around you.

You shower and dress. A newspaper lies outside your hotel room door and you step over it. Downstairs, a limo idles for you, the bellhop already moving to open its door. The city’s winding streets slide by, tinted dark, then the bay, as you cross the bridge and navigate the zoo. On a narrow road, dark waves lap at rocks. The limousine finally draws to a halt beside a set of steep steps and the driver indicates that you should ascend them.

At the top is a colonial house. There's a terra-cotta plaza, lit by a dozen craftily concealed garden lights, with a small ornate table and chairs, and on one of these is Thoreau.

“Before you come any closer,” Thoreau says, “take a look at the water.”

You turn to look. The bay is a black mirror; you're not sure what you're supposed to notice. You turn back to Thoreau.

“It’s good to see you.” Thoreau has risen silently while your back was turned and is now coming at you with a hand outstretched. You take it. As always, Thoreau is about as readable as a wooden fence. Within the Organization, there is conjecture as to whether he’s had cosmetic surgery to paralyze his face. You tend to think yes, because you know Thoreau has a personal surgeon, but occasionally you see a contracting procerus or occipitofrontalis and doubt yourself. “How are you?”

“I was briefly paralyzed three weeks ago,” you say. “Since then, I’ve been fine.”

Thoreau gestures to a seat. “No lingering effects?”

“Not since sunrise on the second day.”

“As she instructed. Fascinating. To be honest, I remain shocked that a poet of your caliber could succumb to it.”

“‘It.’” You sit. “Let’s call it what it is. A bareword.”

“Apparently so.”

“You’ll excuse me,” you say, “but I’m feeling somewhat put upon.”

“How so?”

“You sent me to Broken Hill without telling me what I was dealing with.”

“I believe I told you it was high-testing.”

“There’s high-testing,” you say, “and then there’s that thing.”

There is silence. “Well,” says Thoreau, “obviously its efficacy took us by surprise.”

A woman appears and begins to generate tea and coffee. You wait. When she leaves, you say, “Are we going to talk plainly?”

Thoreau spreads his palms.

“You arrived in Broken Hill within hours. Clearly, you were nearby. Clearly, information has been kept from me. I want to know why. Because I’m having trouble understanding what I did to deserve less trust than Plath.”

“What was it like?”

“What was what like?” you say, although you know.

“Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light.”

“It was like being fucked in the brain.”

“I wonder if you can be more specific.”

“You had this thing in DC. I’m sure you have plenty of data from those poor fucks you put through the labs.”

“Some. But I wish to hear it from you.”

You look out at the black water. “Regular compromise feels like sharing the cockpit. Like there’s someone else in there with you, flipping switches behind your back. This gave me no sensation of being able to regain control. None at all. It felt like being worn. By something primal.”

Moments pass. “Well,” says Thoreau. “For that I apologize. It was not my intention to sacrifice you. Indeed, I selected you precisely because I consider you my most able colleague, and most likely to stop her. As for why I kept my whereabouts from you, I confess that was insurance against the possibility that Woolf would turn you against me. A selfish decision. But I have no wish to square off against you, Eliot. The very idea terrifies me.”

You let this pass. In the distance, an animal, unidentifiable, makes a very Australian sound. “So we have a bareword.”

“The first in eight hundred years,” Thoreau says. “It’s rather exciting.”

“Where is it now?”

Thoreau shrugs slightly. “Where she left it.”

“Pardon me?”

“We haven’t recovered it,” Thoreau says. “It’s still in the hospital somewhere, apparently.”

“Apparently?”

“Local authorities have sent in several teams, none of which have made it out. I presume it’s the word that’s killing them.”

You take a moment to compose yourself. “It’s surprising to me that you haven’t taken all necessary steps to recover it. I cannot express how surprising that is.”

“Mmm,” says Thoreau. He gazes into the darkness awhile. “Let me ask you a question. If the word is so powerful, why did those who wielded it fall? For they did fall; the stories are united on that. In every case, the appearance of a bareword is followed by a Babel event, in which rulers are overthrown and a common tongue abandoned. In modern terms, it would be like losing English. Imagine the sum total of our organization’s work, gone. Our entire vocabulary wiped out. And yet apparently this has happened. Apparently it happens following each discovery of a bareword, without fail. Is that not curious?”

“All empires fall, eventually.”

“But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires. Power corrupts, as the saying goes, and the bareword, Eliot, is not only absolute power, but worse: It is unearned. I need do nothing to possess it other than pick it up. This troubles me. I ask myself: If I seize the bareword, do I remain as I am? Or does it corrupt me?”

“I have no idea,” you say. “But I’m pretty certain we can’t leave it in the fucking desert.”

Thoreau is silent.

You lean forward. “Bring it back home. Seal it up. Christ, sink it in concrete. Bury it for another eight hundred years.”

Thoreau glances away.

“We don’t need it,” Eliot says. “Unless you have an urge to build a tower.”

“There is another issue. Woolf escaped.”

You close your eyes. It's unprofessional but you need to do it. “How is that possible?”

“She’s quite resourceful,” Thoreau says. “As I believe you know.”

“The newspapers said nobody made it out alive.”

“Surely you didn’t trust them.”

“Where is she?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no idea?”

“As I said,” says Thoreau, “resourceful. She managed to get someone out, too.”

“Who?”

“Presumably, the man she went back for.”

“Danny?”

“Yes, that name sounds familiar.”

“So let me get this straight,” you say. “There’s a bareword in Broken Hill. The whereabouts of the poet who used it to kill eighteen thousand people remain unknown. Am I missing anything?”

“No,” says Thoreau. “I believe that’s everything.”

“I feel I must be missing something,” you say, “since this situation is insane.”

Thoreau is silent.

“The bareword must be recovered. Woolf must be neutralized. Surely you see that this is indisputable.”

Thoreau tests his tea. “Yes. You are correct, of course. It shall be done.”

For some reason, you don't believe him. “I’ll find Woolf.”

“Actually, you will return to DC. Your flight is booked. You depart this afternoon.”

You shake your head. “I want to stay.”

“How are you, Eliot?”

“You already asked me.”

“I ask again, because this is the second time in our conversation that you have used the word want. Were you a third-year student, I would be appalled.”

“I’ll rephrase. It’s important to neutralize Woolf and I’m the best we have.”

“But how are you?” Thoreau’s eyes hold yours. “She has shaken you. I see it plainly. Was it the bareword? No. Something else. You were always too close to her. You developed affection. Why, I have no idea. But it clouded your judgment then and continues to do so now. You feel betrayed. You are infected with the desire to atone for your failure to stop her in Broken Hill.”

“That’s how you see what happened? As my failure?”

“Of course not. I speak of how you see it.” Thoreau gazes across the bay, to where soft fingers of sunlight edge over forested hills. “A tragedy like this, we all blame ourselves.”

Do we, you think. “I strongly believe I should stay.”

“That is why you cannot.” The sun blooms along the tree line of the far hill, throwing spears into the bay. “Ah,” says Thoreau. “Here we are. Watch.”

A menagerie of animal voices rise to greet the light, hooting and cawing. Where sunlight touches it, the water flares bright blue. It takes you a moment to realize that the glittering isn’t a visual effect: The waters are moving.

“Kingfish,” says Thoreau. “The light draws the plankton, the plankton draws smaller fish. The minnows draw the kingfish. More precisely, the kingfish are already there, waiting, since they are intelligent enough to perceive patterns and draw inferences.”

You don’t respond.

Thoreau sighs. “Stay. Search this country for Woolf, if that is what’s required to regain control of your conscience.”

You turn these words over. You can’t tell whether they are a kindness or a threat. But there is no denying how you feel. “Thank you,” you say.

~

You sense light. At first you think it's the sunlight on the bay. Then you open your eyes. The light is coming through windows. Between the windows stands Nick. Nick with a rifle. The walls are a pale hospital blue. You are in Broken Hill.

“Morning,” says Nick.

“What,” you say. “Time. Is it.” You begin to extract yourself from the sheets.

“You’re going to want to stay in that bed.”

“No. Definitely. Not.” You get your legs over the side. This causes some flaring of your vision and a looseness in your head, and you take a few moments to sit quietly, eyes closed. When you open them, Nick is pointing the rifle at something outside. You remember the noise you heard before: crack. “What are you doing?”

Nick doesn’t answer. He's holding that rifle very naturally, you notice. The barrel follows whatever Nick is tracking in a smooth line, like an extension of his body. Then it jerks. Nick steps back against the wall, pulling back the rifle’s bolt and reloading it with a cartridge from his jeans. “It’s about six in the morning.”

You feel disbelief. If that was true, Woolf would be here already. The town would be flooded with proses, or EQPs, or poets, or all three. It can’t be morning because you're still alive. “We have to leave.”

“We’re not going anywhere, Eliot.”

“We-” you begin, but Nick raises the rifle very quickly, and you fall silent. Nick’s body becomes completely still. The rifle jerks. You say, “Please tell me what you think you’re doing.”

“Shooting guys.”

“What guys?”

“Proses, I guess.”

“You’re shooting proses,” you say. “I see. When it’s a guy in a chopper and I ask you to shoot him, you hesitate. But now you’re shooting proses.”

Nick moves from one window to the other.

“There isn’t a limited supply,” you say. “If you haven’t figured that out. She’ll send as many as it takes.”

“Who? Elise?”

Oh, yes, you think. Nick has remembered. That's why he's handling a rifle like he’s used it all his life: because he has. “What do you think you’re doing, Nick?”

“Danny.”

“What?”

“My name is Danny Walker.”

“Right,” you say. “Of course, my mistake - what the fuck are you doing, Danny?”

“Waiting.”

“Waiting for...” Your mind reels. “For her?” Nick, or Danny, or whoever he is, doesn’t answer. But clearly yes. Clearly he has a terrible, ill-informed notion of the situation, which was going to get you both killed. It's your fault, of course. Like everything else. “She isn’t who you think.”

“Is she Elise Jackson?”

“Yes,” you say, “Woolf is Elise Jackson. But-”

“You understand why I have a problem with that. The whole thing with you wanting to kill her.”

“Are you aware you’re acting like a different person? As in, a completely different person?”

“I remembered.”

“Okay,” you say, “but I regret to inform you that what you’re remembering is no longer valid, because when you changed, so did she. She is no longer the girl you used to hang with in Broken Hill and share milk shakes and ride kangaroos or whatever the fuck. Now she kills people. She is coming to kill us.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why would I lie about this?”

“Jane.”

You search for the words. “You think that’s why I hate Woolf? Because of Montana?”

Danny shrugs.

“Well, fuck!” you say. “You got me! Since she made me shoot the woman I loved, I’ve been carrying a grudge! Jesus fucking Christ!” You drag a hand across your brow. Danny regards you expressionlessly, and this absurdity, the stillness of the man you know as Nick Parsons while you rage, is not lost on you. You were a poet, once. “There is the little fact that Woolf was a murderous bitch who was hunting us both even before that.”

“You lied to me.”

“What was I supposed to do? You’re the only exception! I didn’t have the option of finding one who hadn’t slept with her. Nick, I get that you’re pissed. I do. But look at yourself. The instant you found out she used to be Elise, you gave up. I’m sorry I lied to you. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have to stop Woolf. We have to. What can I say to convince you?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to sit there and wait until she gets here.”

You sink into the bed. It's pointless. Every technique you know, useless, because Danny cannot be persuaded.

“What happened to her?”

“When?”

“After Broken Hill.”

You look at the ceiling. “She disappeared. I searched for months.”

“Then?”

“Then,” you say, “she came back.”

~

You catch the train to Blacktown and wander the streets until you find the Army Disposals store you read about the previous day. It's big, almost a warehouse, its aisles packed with quasi- and wannabe-military gear, camo netting hung across the ceiling. You squeeze between bikers and bushies and young men with large, clearly defined chips on large, clearly defined shoulders, occasionally picking up a bottle or knife or pack that seems interesting. In aisle three, a bearded man in jeans and a light T-shirt approaches you and offers assistance.

“Yes,” you say. “I’m looking for a camouflage tarpaulin that can be made into a tent.”

“Desert or bush?”

“Desert,” you say, pleased to have skipped the oh-ho-and-what-do-you-need-that-fors.

“We have tarps and we have camo netting. You can throw one over the other.”

“I want a single product, if there is one.”

“You’ll be carrying it?”

“Yes,” you say. “Exactly.”

“Then may I recommend a space bag?”

“What’s that?”

“A lightweight sleeping bag, foil interior, waterproof canvas exterior. Little mesh part on the face you can open for ventilation without letting in the bugs. Folds up to nothing. Very new. Hard to acquire, as they’re still in service.”

“How hard?”

“Two thousand dollars.”

You nod. That you can do. “It’s camouflage?”

“It’s not. But I tell you what, if that’s what you desire, I will sew some camo onto it.”

“Yes!” you say. “That would be terrific.”

He leads you to a counter and processes your deposit. “Call you in two days. Anything else I can help you with?” He sees your hesitation. “If you’re planning to spend any time in the desert, I hope you have a water system.”

“Water isn’t a problem. But I have a concern about snakes.”

“Rightly so.”

“What can I do to keep them away?”

“The general idea is to keep away from them.”

“I have good boots. But....” You gesture. “Is there some kind of electronic device that scares them? Like the ones that keep insects out of your house?” The man begins to look amused, so you guess no. “Anything?”

He scratches his beard. “You can watch where you put your feet.”

“Hmm,” you say.

“And take a stick,” he says.

~

So you're not thrilled with the snake situation, but otherwise things are coming together. The space bag is the final piece in the puzzle; with that, you can begin testing. Which is tempting to skip, but you've uncovered some alarming numbers about sweat-related water loss in the desert, and this isn’t something you want to confirm forty miles from the nearest living human being. Nearest benign human being, that is, since you're working under the assumption that Broken Hill is surrounded by proses, men and women who work in bakeries or gas stations or drive trucks or simply stand at key intersections and will, upon seeing you, become very focused and intent and proceed directly to a phone. Hence the need for a desert crossing. A few months before, when you were coming for Danny, you did it on a dirt bike. In retrospect, it seems wildly risky. But you were impatient. You hurried for him. And it ended so badly. You don’t want to think about that. This time there will be caution. There will be thirty miles of desert traversed by foot, and no one will see you coming because what you're doing is unimaginable.

Once you have the word, you'll begin the next stage of your journey, to DC. When you get there, you will rip out Thoreau’s heart, just like he tore out yours. What happens after that doesn’t matter.

~

You spend a lot of time on trains, reading dictionaries. You wear a hoodie and pull it down, in case of cameras. You can ride all day for two dollars and never be in the same spot for more than a few minutes. The last service is around two, so then you have to find a place to sleep, but that isn’t hard. You've done that before.

Sometimes you nod off on the train. You try not to, because you fear waking up to poets moving through the carriage, no way out, but it's kind of unavoidable. The dictionaries are not very interesting. So when you feel your head drifting toward the glass, the factories or fields passing by outside, you let it happen.

The day after you order your space blanket, you drift awake to find a man sitting opposite, watching you. You're half out of your seat, words forming on your lips, before you realize he isn’t Eliot. He isn’t anybody. You sink back into your seat. Your head is full of terror; it always is, coming out of dreams.

“Sorry,” says the man. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“That’s okay.” You're getting your bearings. The man is about forty, nicely dressed, sweater, a good watch. You talk to such people sometimes, as a precursor to persuading them to give you money.

“That’s a lot of books. Dictionaries?”

You nod.

“Are you a student?”

“Of life,” you say. People like this kind of quippery. It causes them to open up. “I just read them for fun.”

“Dictionaries?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun. That sounds awful.”

“Awful used to mean ‘full of awe.’ The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary.”

He blinks.

“See?” you say. “Fun.”

“That is actually fascinating. What else?”

You look at your notes. You have notes. “Cause has changed. The definition used to be ‘to make something happen.’ Now they’ve added, ‘especially something bad.’”

“They’ve changed cause?”

“They’ve noticed a change. Dictionaries record common usage.”

“I thought it was a panel of professors,” says the man, “at a university somewhere, deciding what words mean.”

You shake your head.

“So it’s bad to cause something now?”

“Yes. And to join causes, probably. Because of semantic leakage.”

“Well,” he says. “You are the most interesting person I’ve met all week.”

“Thanks,” you say, but you're getting a bad feeling. You're regretting this conversation. “My stop is coming up.” You pack your dictionaries into your bag.

“Do you have somewhere to sleep tonight?” You don’t say anything. “I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right. I mean, are you okay? You don’t look okay.”