Vox Mentis

After this, you feel strange. People come and go, soldiers and poets, and sometimes they stop to speak to you but you don’t hear them. When they begin to package Eliot, you walk to the front of the burger place and sit at a table. Occasionally someone walks by but for the most part you're alone. You begin to cry. You don’t understand why, because you had wanted Eliot dead. You had wanted that very clearly. But there is grief coming out of you anyway, spilling from your compartments, and you're reminded that not all of your wants are yours.
A shadow falls beside you. You look up to see who is stupid enough to disturb you in this moment, and see Thoreau.

He rights a fallen chair and composes himself into it. He's wearing a beautiful dark gray suit and his hair looks fresh and bright. He's wearing sunglasses but he removes these and sets them on the table, and behind them his eyes are flat.

“Oh,” you say. You feel stupid. Of course Thoreau is here. You should have realized that.

“Congratulations.” He surveys the line of dust-blown buildings across the road. “You see now why I wanted you, specifically, on Eliot.”

You don’t reply.

“Persuasion stems from understanding. We compel others by learning who they are and turning it against them. All this, the chasing, the guns...” He gestures vaguely. “These are details. What Eliot could not escape was the fact that I understood him better than he understood himself.” Plath hovers at the edge of your senses. Thoreau says, “A glass of water, please. Let’s make it two.”

Once Plath has gone, Thoreau shrugs his jacket and passes it to Masters, who's standing like he's planted there. “I have been visiting delegates. Not all of them agree with my new direction for the Organization. Some tried to move against me. Expected, of course. Futile, since I understand them. We attempt to conceal ourselves, Elise, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found. Every poet, sooner or later, discovers this: that within perfect walls, there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.” Plath arrives with two glasses, of a kind you recognize from years before, and sets them on the table.

“I feel bad about Eliot.”

“Yes, well,” says Thoreau. “Some kind of suppressed emotional overflow, I would imagine.”

“And I’m remembering things.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“I came out of the ER. Through that door.” You point. “I went that way. People were killing each other. Because of the word. Danny came after me. He knew what I’d done. But he saved me anyway.”

“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this,” says Thoreau. “It’s irrelevant.”

“I’m not talking to you.”

A figure is walking toward you, coming from the direction of the hospital. In the heat haze, it could be anyone. But you have a feeling.

“Danny,” you say.