(folie à plusieurs; therapy)
If you listen closely, you can hear.
Here - in this place, the cave of horrors. Her fingers catch hold and catch nothing, and her thoughts drift like fireflies in the night sky. They light her way, the other burning suns in their towers. Their souls shattered lamps for her to follow, drawn as a moth to the scorching heat of their fire. She can’t remember if she hears screaming anymore, if the sounds of their fear are voiced or only echoing from mind to mind.
“What do you hear,” they ask her. As if she could categorize, quantify. As if it was that simple. She laughs, and it sounds like crying.
“I hear you.”
At rest, the average adult human heart beats between sixty and a hundred times per minute. Their lungs expand and contract between twelve and twenty times in the same span. If she shuts her eyes, she can hear it, the beating of their hearts, the whisper of their breath. They’re at rest, in chairs too hard and hard on the back. Back. It’s been a long day.
He smiles - he, singular, in the third person - and his eyes flick to the clock. The minutes pass at a rate of sixty seconds per, seconds defined precisely as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state caesium 133 atom. “What do you mean by that?”
Her hand clenches, forms a fist. She sets it on her lap, very gently, like rocking a baby, doesn’t look up. His eyes are black holes, and if she lets him in too long, she’ll be sucked through and forever gone. She tilts her head upwards and away, watching the cameras, the eyes in the walls. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try to help me understand, River -“
“You don’t feed us.” The plural, first person. Accusatory, her verbs thrown like knives. His throat is bare and vulnerable to attack (it’s okay to think about killing, River; we teach efficiency in this course). Her fist unclenches but it’s still sharp, still dangerous.
He misunderstands. Her words bounce off him harmlessly, ballistics falling and failing. “If you’re unsatisfied with your meals, you can always -“
“We aren’t full!”
All through the Academy, the students are crying out in agony, their need for need. It pounds in her head, it pounds in the halls. Eating them inside out, pulsating and contorting in their stomachs, rejecting traditional forms of sustenance. “You’ve pulled out our hearts!” The doctor (my brother is a doctor) yells, calls for back-up, she’s clawing at her stomach, has to - rip them out with her fingernails. “They’re eating us!”
She falls back and she cries, and everyone cries with her, and the sun rises, and the sun falls, but they never see it because there’s never any light. There’s just blackness, all and forever, a sucking black hole holding them in, their masses adding to its gravitational pull and binding them together and together. It takes more energy to achieve exit velocity. They hold her arms but she kicks like she’s been told and they break, little dolls scattering.
And it hurts.
There’s an empty girl shape in the world and it’s called River; and it’s called Celia and Thyme and Nathan and Summer and every name in-between and every name beyond, and it hurts because they’re in there, they all are, and they will never be full or fully alive. A needle breaks her skin and they muffle her screams so she doesn’t disturb the other patients who are screaming just as loud as she.
She aims a kick and stumbles and the force of her motion interrupted throws her deeper into the arms that bind, struggling to hold her in. “Put us in the pool, the common denominator - throw us out when you’re done -“
Someone grunts, but doesn’t let go. She expends more energy but the results are diminishing, finishing. Vanishing, the corners of her vision going out like little lights. They lower her to the floor almost tenderly, letting her slide into sleep. Shh.
If you listen, you can hear.
She’s having a bad day, they say.
We’ll resume tomorrow.
Here - in this place, the cave of horrors. Her fingers catch hold and catch nothing, and her thoughts drift like fireflies in the night sky. They light her way, the other burning suns in their towers. Their souls shattered lamps for her to follow, drawn as a moth to the scorching heat of their fire. She can’t remember if she hears screaming anymore, if the sounds of their fear are voiced or only echoing from mind to mind.
“What do you hear,” they ask her. As if she could categorize, quantify. As if it was that simple. She laughs, and it sounds like crying.
“I hear you.”
At rest, the average adult human heart beats between sixty and a hundred times per minute. Their lungs expand and contract between twelve and twenty times in the same span. If she shuts her eyes, she can hear it, the beating of their hearts, the whisper of their breath. They’re at rest, in chairs too hard and hard on the back. Back. It’s been a long day.
He smiles - he, singular, in the third person - and his eyes flick to the clock. The minutes pass at a rate of sixty seconds per, seconds defined precisely as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state caesium 133 atom. “What do you mean by that?”
Her hand clenches, forms a fist. She sets it on her lap, very gently, like rocking a baby, doesn’t look up. His eyes are black holes, and if she lets him in too long, she’ll be sucked through and forever gone. She tilts her head upwards and away, watching the cameras, the eyes in the walls. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try to help me understand, River -“
“You don’t feed us.” The plural, first person. Accusatory, her verbs thrown like knives. His throat is bare and vulnerable to attack (it’s okay to think about killing, River; we teach efficiency in this course). Her fist unclenches but it’s still sharp, still dangerous.
He misunderstands. Her words bounce off him harmlessly, ballistics falling and failing. “If you’re unsatisfied with your meals, you can always -“
“We aren’t full!”
All through the Academy, the students are crying out in agony, their need for need. It pounds in her head, it pounds in the halls. Eating them inside out, pulsating and contorting in their stomachs, rejecting traditional forms of sustenance. “You’ve pulled out our hearts!” The doctor (my brother is a doctor) yells, calls for back-up, she’s clawing at her stomach, has to - rip them out with her fingernails. “They’re eating us!”
She falls back and she cries, and everyone cries with her, and the sun rises, and the sun falls, but they never see it because there’s never any light. There’s just blackness, all and forever, a sucking black hole holding them in, their masses adding to its gravitational pull and binding them together and together. It takes more energy to achieve exit velocity. They hold her arms but she kicks like she’s been told and they break, little dolls scattering.
And it hurts.
There’s an empty girl shape in the world and it’s called River; and it’s called Celia and Thyme and Nathan and Summer and every name in-between and every name beyond, and it hurts because they’re in there, they all are, and they will never be full or fully alive. A needle breaks her skin and they muffle her screams so she doesn’t disturb the other patients who are screaming just as loud as she.
She aims a kick and stumbles and the force of her motion interrupted throws her deeper into the arms that bind, struggling to hold her in. “Put us in the pool, the common denominator - throw us out when you’re done -“
Someone grunts, but doesn’t let go. She expends more energy but the results are diminishing, finishing. Vanishing, the corners of her vision going out like little lights. They lower her to the floor almost tenderly, letting her slide into sleep. Shh.
If you listen, you can hear.
She’s having a bad day, they say.
We’ll resume tomorrow.