Vox Mentis

SpoilerShow

While the butlers were entertaining, a house cannot have more than one. What exactly a butler does varies, but the job title means that they are the chief of all the other manservant, and that they are trusted enough to manage the wine cellar.

Ahh, yeah, unfortunately I neglected my research on butler heirarchy. Ten Poet Points™ to anyone who can come up with a good justification for the butler swarm.

are these idiots for real

yeah seriously you can't just play it like, why hello fellow member of the vast shadowy secret conspiracy society, would you please tell me everything you know and your future plans?

that's exactly why you should tell them the whole truth. they'll never believe you

“I do not have the word,” you say. “And if you must know, Virginia Woolf is absolutely alive, in possession of the word, and on her way to kill us all."

Goethe and de Castro narrow their eyes.

"Now, I am terribly sorry, but I will not be able to attend our meeting after all. Something unavoidable has come up.”

~

If Woolf is coming to you, she's almost certainly bringing the word. Every disaster is an opportunity.

You take a chopper cross-town and set down on the DC office helipad. This occupies thirteen minutes. In the meantime, you attempt to coordinate people via your phone. This proves difficult because every few seconds it wants to tell you about an incoming message, which requires a tap to dismiss, and by the time the building is in sight this is what you are spending the majority of your time doing, tapping to return your phone to a useful state. When a computer server becomes so busy acknowledging incoming requests that it has no time to respond to them, it is called a Denial of Service attack, a DoS. You are being DoSed. You surrender and put your phone away.

Freed from the helicopter, you consider the elevator but opt for the flexibility of stairs. One flight later, you emerge into tastefully muted lighting. Your assistant rises from her desk, mouth opening, full of messages. “Not now, thank you, Frances,” you say, and close the double doors behind you. The lights brighten in response to your presence. This month, your office is a paean to eighteenth-century feudal Japan: paper dividers, low, simple furniture. On the wall behind your desk a samurai sword hangs under lights. You chose none of this; it is periodically redecorated in a random style, to avoid betraying personal aesthetics. You plant yourself behind your desk and tap the keyboard to wake your screens.

Your predecessor hadn’t used a computer. At the time, they had been considered secretarial tools. Hard to imagine now. Your displays fill with red boxes. Now that the computer’s thresholds have triggered, it is vomiting up sightings from days ago, even weeks, made newly plausible by more recent data. A voiceprint from a hotel in Istanbul. A woman with matching facial characteristics in Vancouver. You inspect the picture: sunglasses, hat, nothing you would bet on, but the computer likes the cheekbones. A taxicab security photo, grainy and desaturated, from a route that corresponds with what the computer is figuring out about Woolf’s movements. That was Seattle, yesterday. The notification boxes are a moving stream but you manage to snag one with a recent time stamp. It is from the building’s security system. Its confidence level is ninety-nine percent. Woolf is outside, right now.

Your office has a balcony. You are mildly tempted to go out and peer over the railing, see if you can pick her out. But that would be risky. That is, possibly, what Woolf wants you to do. There could be a sniping issue. The fact is, as much as you believed you understand Woolf, she has been missing for a year and you have no idea how she has changed.

Your phone chimes. You feel rising excitement and wait until it is gone. “Yes?”

“I’m so terribly sorry. But there are so many people who wish to speak to you, and they’re saying quite alarming things.”

“Is one of those people Frost?” The poet responsible for building security. You spoke to him from the chopper, in between phone notifications, and asked him to execute certain important, long-planned orders. Specifically, Frost is to fill the lobby with Environmentally Quarantined Personnel, men and women with black suits and guns who see the world through a computer-filtered display and hear nothing but white-listed words. These proved insufficient to retrieve the word from Broken Hill - the teams sent in had rather spectacularly killed each other - but that means nothing, because you deliberately engineered it. You are fairly confident that they can stop Woolf.

“No, I haven’t heard from Frost.”

“I’ll speak to Frost,” you say. “No one else.” You close the speaker. Red boxes continue to slide down your monitors. You see the word LOBBY. You lean back in your chair.

So she’s entered the building. If all is proceeding as you instructed, Woolf will currently be on the floor, her hands bound in plastic, electrical tape being spread across her mouth. She will be lifted up and borne to a windowless cell. Then Frost will call.

You fold your hands and wait. A new red box slides up your screen. POI POSSIBLE SIGHTING: WOOLF, VIRGINIA. SECOND FLOOR. You look at this awhile, trying to imagine circumstances in which Security might have decided to take Woolf up rather than down. You reach for the speaker. By the time you get the handset to your ear, a new notification has arrived. THIRD FLOOR. Is there a delay on these? A few seconds? It has never mattered before.

“Frances, would you mind putting the floor into lockdown?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And please attempt to reach Frost.”

“Right away.”

Your screen blanks. The lights go out. Part of the lockdown. Nothing to be concerned about. You wait. Your breathing is steady. You feel no emotion. Minutes pass. The lights come on.

You press for the speaker. “Frances, why has the lockdown lifted?”

“I don’t know. I’m finding out.”

Noise in the background. Quite loud; you can almost feel its low echoes through the door. “Who else is there?”

“It’s... how can I help you?”

A female voice speaks. Indistinct; you can’t identify it. The phone clicks off. You slowly put it down.

You recognized Woolf’s natural aptitude for attack very early on. It would have been disappointing if she fell to Frost and the soldiers. You would have missed your chance to test yourself. Of course, there is the real possibility that she is about to walk in here and destroy you. That is a concern.

These are feelings. You don’t need them. You will prevail or you will not.

You steady your breathing and begin to pray. O God, be with me and guide my hand. Let me transcend this petty flesh and become Your holy instrument. Warmth spreads through your body. Your relationship with God is your greatest resource. It has allowed you to become who you are. So many promising colleagues have fallen to temptation. They managed their physiological needs, eating and breathing and fucking deliberately and on schedule, taking care to remain in control at all times, but their social needs - their basic human desire to love, to belong, and be loved - these were simply suppressed, because there was no safe way to indulge them. And yet they are named needs for a reason. The human animal craves intimacy at a biological level, relentlessly, insistent. You've seen many promising careers derailed by surrenders to intimacy: people who whispered confessions to whores, people whose minds lingered on having children. On such small betrayals are psyches unraveled. You have unraveled several yourself.

You had struggled in your early years. It seems vaguely amusing now. Infantile. But you remember the loneliness. The way your body reacted when a woman smiled at you, the surge of desire it evoked to join with her, not merely in a physical sense but beyond that, to confide and be understood. It had been almost overwhelming. Then you discovered God.

It had been terribly alarming. The very idea, a poet succumbing to religion! You were shocked at yourself. But the feeling was undeniable and grew week by week. You could no longer believe you were alone. You began to see the divine in everything, from the circumvoluted fall of a leaf to the fortuitous arrival of an elevator. Occasionally, when the sterility of your job pressed close, you felt the presence of God like a figure in the room. God was with you. God loved you. It was ridiculous, but there it was.

It was a tumor, of course. Oligodendroglioma, a cancerous growth in an area associated with feelings of enlightenment. The feelings it aroused could be reproduced through electrical stimulation. It wasn’t fatal, but it would need to be removed, your surgeon told you, as you looked over the black-and-white scans, because it would continue to grow. Over time, there would be less and less of you and more of the tumor. Your brain was being eaten by God.

You left the clinic in fine spirits. You had no intention of removing the tumor. It was the perfect solution to your dilemma: how to feed your body’s desire for intimacy. You were - are - delusional, of course. There is no higher presence filling you with love, connecting you to all things. It only feels that way. But that is fine. That is ideal. You would not trust a God outside your head.

~

The door opens and a woman steps through. She is wearing a long white coat that reaches the floor. The hem is spattered black with liquid that might be mud or dirt or might be Frost. She has white gloves. A necklace, something on it that twists and hurts to look at. You close your eyes. You reach into your diaphragm for your strongest voice. “Vartix ventor mannit wissik! Do not move!”

There is silence. “Ow,” says Woolf. “That kind of hurt.”

You grope for your desk drawer.

“Credit to you, Thoreau. I spent a long time preparing for you to say those words. And I still felt them.”

You get the drawer open. Your fingers close on a gun. You raise it and squeeze the trigger. You keep firing until the clip is empty. Then you drop it to the carpet and listen.

“Still here.”

There is a sword on the wall behind you. Three hundred years old, but it can cut. You have no training. But that might not matter, if she comes close enough. She might think it is decorative, until too late.

“So I’m here to kill you,” she says, “just in case there was any doubt.”

You breathe. You require a few moments to calm yourself. “Elise.”

“Woolf,” she says. “Woolf, now.”

Interesting. Has she changed sets? It is possible. She might not have merely improved her defense but managed to alter her base personality in certain important ways. It can be done, with practice. In which case, she would be vulnerable to a different set of words. Yes. She would have rejected her previous self in order to distance herself from what she had done in Broken Hill. You need to figure out what she has become. “How did you get here?”

“Walked, mostly.”

“The lobby was supposed to contain a fairly overwhelming number of security personnel.”

“The goggle guys? Yeah. They’re screened somehow, right? Filtered against compromise.”

“They are supposed to be.”

“They are. But Frost isn’t.”

“Ah,” you say. “So there were no 'goggle guys'.”

“Nope.”

Difficult to read a person you can’t see. The visual cues are so important. But it can be done. You can do it. The important thing is that she is still talking. “I gather you feel wronged by me?”

“You could say that.”

“Well,” you say. “I won’t demean us both by pretending to apologize. But may I point out that killing me will not serve your interests?”

“Actually, I disagree with you there. I mean, I thought about it. Come here with the word, make you run the Organization for me; that would be interesting. And I can’t deny there is a real appeal in turning you into my slave for life. But that’s not an option. I have a little problem, you see. I picked it up in Broken Hill, when you sent me to deploy that kill order. I kind of looked at it. I caught a reflection. It wasn’t enough to compromise me. Not completely. It was backward, you know. And not very clear. But I think a piece of it got in there. I call it my star. That’s what it feels like. A star in my eye. It’s not very nice, Thoreau. It wants me to do bad things. But I figured out a way to control it. I just need to concentrate on killing you. When I do that, the star isn’t so bad. I don’t feel like I need to hurt anyone else. So you see, you dying is kind of a non-negotiable at this point.”

You are fascinated. This part you did not know. “Then what?”

“Excuse me?”

“After you murder me. What then?”

“That’s not really any of your concern.”

“I suppose not,” you say. “Very well. We will save that for later.”

“But there’s not going to be a later, Thoreau. Not for you.”

“Mmm,” you say. You have narrowed her down to a dozen or so sets. You are mildly tempted to run through words for them all, which you can do in about fifteen seconds. That is a last-resort kind of move, though. It would spark an immediate response from her, of whatever kind. You will keep that in your back pocket while you attempt to learn more. “Before we proceed, I feel I must confess something.”

“Oh?” You hear her coat scuff the carpet.

“You are here because of me. There is no part of these events I have not engineered. The most difficult part of the exercise, in fact, was finding excuses as to why I left the bareword in Broken Hill for so long. To be honest, I expected you to move faster. It was becoming untenable. But here you are. Bringing the word back to me, filled with vengeance, according to plan.”

“Really?” she says. “I have to tell you, from where I’m standing, that looks like a really shitty plan.”

“When I came to Broken Hill in the midst of its immolation, I found myself moved. I felt desire. I realized then the danger of the bareword. It would have corrupted me. It would have been my undoing, as unearned power always is, sooner or later. And I have no intention of wasting this life on temporary greatness. What I will do with the word once I’ve taken it from you is leave a mark on this world that will never be erased.”

“You’re not making a hell of a lot of sense, Thoreau.”

You shrug slightly. “Perhaps my motives are beyond your comprehension. But I wish you to know that I do not require words to make you perform my will. You are my puppet regardless. You stand here not because you willed it but because I did. Because defeating the bareword in your hands is the challenge I set myself to prove that I am ready to wield it.”

“Dude, I’m going to kill you,” she says. “I’ve walked through every defense you have. There’s no doubt about that.”

You rise from your chair and spread your arms. You begin to increase your breathing, although she shouldn’t notice that. Set seventy-seven. You are sure of it. It is 220 with more fear and self-doubt. Often paired in families, interestingly: a 220 elder child and a seventy-seven younger sibling. It is plausible that Woolf might slide from one to the other. “Here I am,” you say. “Kill me.”

You hear her approach. There are two wide chairs opposite your desk, reducing the possible space she is occupying to a relatively small cuboid. Close enough to slice a sword through, if you are quick.

“You have no idea how much I want this, Thoreau. I know it’s bad form to say that. That I want. But I do. I want it so much.”

You can hear her breathing. Very close now. You could probably reach across the desk and touch her. You pull air into lungs, preparing to speak the words that will make her yours.

“Hey,” she says. “What’s that word? When the Japanese guys did something bad they’d atone by gutting themselves? You know? Disembowel themselves? What’s that called?”

You don’t answer.

“Seppuku,” she says. “I think that’s it.”

Doubt enters your mind. She is a seventy-seven, yes?

“I’ve been planning this awhile, Thoreau. Consider that.”

You consider. “Linnak torsef sahallin laide!” You turn. Your hands close on wood. You draw the blade from the scabbard. “Scream!” This is to locate her. To provide a signal that you have analyzed her correctly. You lunge across the desk and swipe the blade horizontally. It cuts nothing but air, and you overbalance.

“Not even close,” she says, from somewhere near the doorway.

You steady yourself, bringing up the blade. How foolish. You are disappointed in yourself. It was that garbage about her name: Woolf, now. The purest bullshit, and you had bought it. She is Elise, of course. She always will be.
You move around the desk toward the sound of her voice, holding the blade flat, prepared for a stroke. You think you hear something and jab speculatively. You turn in a slow half circle.

“This way,” she says from the corridor.

You feel your way to the doorway. In the corridor are strange whisperings. The vents? You feel surrounded. She has plans for you, apparently.

“There are people here.” Her voice floats ahead of you. “Just so you know.”

You take two steps and stumble over a chair. You feel the toe of your right shoe bend in a way that suggests a permanent crease and feel grief.

“So I have a proposition for you, Thoreau. You can open your eyes, look at this thing I’ve got around my neck, and follow my instructions to disembowel yourself. This way, nobody gets killed but you. Or you can stand there swinging that oversized butter knife while I send your own people against you. What do you say?”

You run at her. Someone grabs your arms. You slash the blade at your aggressor and there is a gasp and the hands fall back. You thrust the sword out again and feel it puncture something. Weight pulls at the blade and you retreat before you can lose it. Something thumps against the carpet.

“Congratulations,” Woolf says. “You killed your secretary.”

You swivel toward her voice, panting. The corridor is full of people. You can sense them. They are standing silently, waiting for your approach. To reach her you will need to kill them all.

“So, no surprise,” she says. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”

She is still a 220. She has practiced her defense. But you can find a way in. There is always something. A hidden desire or secret shame. With that, you can unravel her.

You explore air with the sword tip. “You were never going to be one of us. Eliot thought you could learn to discipline yourself. But the idea was laughable. You could never learn to discipline your excesses.”

“I don’t know, Thoreau. You may not be giving me enough credit there.”

You swivel toward her voice. “Do you really think you can hide your mind from me?” You swing the blade. The tip glances against something and you scramble forward, slipping and sliding, get the blade into something, and push.

“Yecck,” says Elise. “That was Frost.”

Perhaps she is unsettled by violence. “Vartix ventor mannit wissik! Scream!”

There is a pause. No screaming. “So you figured out I haven’t really changed. Congratulations. Not going to help you.”

“I can practically feel your emotions,” you say. “You radiate them. Tell me something, Elise. Why do you want me dead so much?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I think it’s because you need to blame me. You need to believe that what you did in Broken Hill was my fault.”

“It was.”

“But a part of you knows the truth. That if you had tried harder, you could have stopped it.”

“Goddamn it, Thoreau. You’re persistent. I’ll give you that. But I didn’t come here to listen to this. I was going to make you apologize of your own free will, but you know what, screw it. Open your fucking eyes.”

“You tell yourself you had no choice but you don’t believe it. That is why you desire me dead. You hope to kill a part of yourself.”

“Grab him,” she says, to whom, you don’t know. “Hold him down. Force open his eyes.”

You raise the sword. “Who killed that boy at the Academy? Was that me? He was the first to pay for the mistake of loving you with his life. But not the last.” Hands pluck at you. You flail with the sword. “Did I make you a killer, or were you already?”

“Shut up!”

“Vartix ventor mannit wissik! You killed your lover! Scream!” Hands grip you. “Vartix ventor mannit wissik!, you deserve to be punished, you deserve to die for what you did! Vartix ventor mannit wissik!, scream, you evil bitch!”

A weight of bodies bear you to the ground. Fingers grope at your face. Above this, a thin sound: a keening wail, like escaping steam.

“Vartix ventor mannit wissik,” you say. “Elise, lie down and sleep!”

Your eyelids are dragged up. You see faces you recognize, their expressions intent and focused. You know their sets but nothing you can say will dissuade them from holding you down. You can work around that. You can convince them to release you once their duty is done. Because between the seething bodies, you see a prone figure, sprawled on the carpet, her white coat gently rising and falling. Your heart sings, because it is over, and you have won.

~

You go to the eighth floor, where burly men in gray uniforms are pulling up the carpet. “What the fuck?”

“Ah, Eliot,” says Thoreau. He has a white cloth and is mopping sweat from the back of his neck. His shirt is wet beneath the armpits. You've never seen Thoreau so much as breathing quickly, so this is disconcerting. “We had a little disturbance.”

“The delegates have scattered. They thought you were about to bomb the place.”

“Really?” says Thoreau. “It’s a children’s charity.”

You back out of the way of a man carrying carpet. The walls are lightly spattered. Fine dark droplets like mist. “I’m asking you,” you say, “what the fuck?”

“Woolf came back.”

You say nothing, because surely this is a joke.

“Look,” Thoreau says, indicating a dark patch on the carpet. “That’s Frost.”

“I told you she wasn’t dead.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I asked for more time. Christ, she killed Frost?”

“Essentially,” says Thoreau. “A few others, too.”

“How did she do that?” Thoreau continues patting his neck with the cloth. There is something odd in his manner, a kind of satisfaction, which you don’t understand. Maintenance workers come forward, wanting to get at the carpet on which you're standing. “Get out,” you say. “All of you.”

The men look questioningly at Thoreau, who doesn’t respond. The men slink away, leaving the aroma of cigarettes and carpet glue.

“Did she have it?”

“Yes.”

“She had the word.”

“Just as you predicted,” Thoreau says. “I should have listened to you.”

“Where is she?”

Thoreau says nothing.

“Did you kill her?”

“Fascinating, your priorities,” says Thoreau. “I tell you that the bareword has returned to us and your first question is about her.”

“I have a lot of questions. They’re not necessarily ordered.”

“Ah, Eliot. As I have grown, you have shrunk. I offered to help you after Broken Hill. I gave you a chance to go away and find the man you are supposed to be. But no. You chose to stay. You wanted to pursue her. You actually said those words: you wanted. To make amends for failing to stop her, to beg forgiveness for failing to protect her, I honestly don’t know. I doubt that you do. But what is plain is that she broke you. A sixteen-year-old girl and you let yourself care for her. It was clear from the beginning, but what was a weakness became nothing less than a psychological disintegration. Look at you. You are an echo of who you were.”

“Well,” you say. “How refreshing to have an honest opinion.”

“I have faced the word and won. This is what I have done while you were falling into yourself. The day I realized the bareword could corrupt me, I began to prepare myself to face it. That is why I left the word in Broken Hill, for her to recover.”

“You what?”

“I have no intention of triggering another Babel event. I have worked rather too hard for that. It was only by proving myself worthy of the word that I could trust myself to resist its temptations. And I wish to wield it for such a long time. The thing that I find disappointing about empires, Eliot, is they are so transient. On reflection, it seems that real power would be not to merely rule the world but to mark it.” He shrugs. “Perhaps that’s just me.”

“You’ve become fucking incomprehensible. Woolf could have killed us all.”

He shrugs. “She didn’t.”

“She could have.”

“She set it into a necklace. In order to keep it close, I suppose.” Thoreau reaches into his jacket pocket. You shift your gaze away. “I have it wrapped, Eliot.”

You look. Whatever it is lies beneath a white cloth.

“That you think I need a bareword to compromise you is adorable,” Thoreau says. “Eliot, in your present state, I would barely need words.”

“Where is Woolf?”

“Downstairs. Confined. Sleeping.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“You know that. Eliot. It is time to let go of Woolf. Let me help you.”

You say nothing.

“She is a mass murderer. She killed eighteen thousand people. In the process of which, incidentally, she managed to inflict the word on herself. Caught a reflection in Broken Hill. An accident, I believe. But she is now under instruction to, and I quote, ‘kill everyone.’ How far below the surface that lurks, we can only guess. She has been attempting to resist it by channeling her thoughts toward me. But it is a part of her. It will never go away. She is irredeemable, Eliot. She always was. Accept this. And please do it quickly, because I have a job for you in Syria.”

“I am not going to help you rule the world.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You don’t know me as well as you think.”

“Eliot,” says Thoreau, “if that were true, you wouldn’t need to say it.”

~

You wake and feel for the necklace and it's gone. The world is yellowish. It is six feet by eight. It has a padded bench seat, which you guess doubles as a bed, and carpet you recognize. A thick gray door with a small window in it, obscured by something on the other side. You are in your underwear. Your head feels bruised. No, not your head. Something deeper than that. You sit up. You put a hand to your forehead and close your eyes a moment, because things are very, very bad.

Time passes. You stand. You pace. You grow thirsty. You discover a plastic bucket under the bed-seat, which you guess is for pee. You spend some time breaking off a long, triangular shard, and tuck this into the rear waistband of your underpants. When you position the bucket right, you can’t tell. It seems to you that this room isn’t monitored. Maybe it's unnecessary, when you have a person in a six-by-eight cell with nothing but a bucket. But if you get out of here because the organization isn’t monitoring you, that is going to be really hilarious.
These are positive thoughts. You're not actually getting out. You're just keeping busy until Thoreau turns up.

~

Someone does come, but not Thoreau. At first, you don’t recognize him. He's cut his hair. It's been eight or nine years. But his eyes are the same, and you haven’t forgotten the way they bulged in that fast food restaurant bathroom, when he’d tried to coerce you into a blow job.

You throw out some words, just in case. “Please,” says Lee. The door closes. You catch a glimpse of people out there, who would prove to be obstacles to any attempted flight. Lee gets down on his haunches. It's kind of an odd pose, but it brings his eyes level with yours as you sit on the bench seat. Your skin puckers. You feel the urge to fold your arms, but don’t, because you don’t want to give him anything.

“We write reports, you know,” Lee says. He looks odd, sickly, but that's probably the yellow lights. “When we recruit someone, we send along a little write-up, saying what we think. Yours... well, yours was negative, Elise. I won’t lie. It was extremely negative. I know what you’re thinking: I gave you a bad report because you kicked me in the balls. No. I put that aside, like the professional I am. I gave you a bad report, Elise, because you were actually going to do what I asked. It was a simple test. I used weak words. Starter words. And still you were going to do it. You’re fragile. You have no defense. And people like that don’t last in the organization.” He spreads his hands. “Imagine my surprise when the Academy accepted you. It makes sense now. Now I know you cheated your way in. Eliot taking pity on you. Now, I understand. But at the time, I was amazed. And then they made you Woolf... I took it personally. I don’t mind admitting it. It felt like an insult. I mean, my report was very clear. Candidate shows no aptitude for mental discipline nor the inclination to develop it. Those were my words. Well, look at you now. Just like I predicted. And you know what? How it’s turned out is actually pretty good for me. Now I look like a genius. It took awhile but I finally made it to DC.”

He pauses, as if for a response, but you don’t give him one because you haven’t figured out why he's here. He sighs and straightens, plucking at his pant creases. You aren’t thrilled with the new eyeline.

“So,” Lee says, “as you might have guessed, you’re going to die soon. In fact, as I understand it, the only reason you’re still here is Thoreau has become too busy with a new project to get around to debriefing you yet. When I say debriefing, I mean compromising you and getting you to dump out the contents of your brain, in case there’s anything in there that might be useful to us. Now, this is going to happen. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. But my idea, Elise, was to spare Thoreau some trouble. You see, my being here is a very big opportunity for me. A test, you might say. And if I’m able to go back to Thoreau with the information he wants, well, that would be good.”

He removes his jacket and begins to roll up his shirtsleeves. “Why am I telling you this, since clearly you have no interest in doing what I want? I’ll tell you. It’s because, Elise, I want you to understand how extremely, intensely motivated I am right now.”

You say, “Uh, Lee? The idea that you can compromise me is laughable.”

“Oh, I realize you’re not sixteen anymore. I’m not expecting it to be that easy again. In fact, I hear you’ve been working on your defense pretty hard.” He begins to unbuckle his belt. “The thing is, El, I think, deep down, you’re just the same. I think you’re fragile. You subscribed to the idea that the best defense is a good offense, and it’s served you well, sure, but... here we are.” He pulls his belt free and begins to wind the strap around one hand. “I think once we test that defense, I mean, really put some pressure on it... we might see some cracks. I’m pretty confident about that. Because once a person is under severe physical stress, a lot of the higher brain function falls away. The critical thinking. The learned behaviors.” He taps his forehead. “What am I saying? You know all this. You were in school more recently than me. You know what I’m talking about. And you know I’m not leaving this room without getting what I want. The only question is how hard you’re going to make it.” He lets the belt buckle dangle from his fist. “So,” he says, “how are we doing this?”