ROWAN-5
“Thanks, Mind,” I murmured, as Dr. Mulgar eyed me with voracious curiosity.
Before Vonnae, I often awakened somewhere in the night in a panic. I should say, rather, that my body was in a panic, for I never actually felt afraid. If I had been afraid, I could have alleviated my fear without difficulty: I could have verified that I was lying in my bed, the same bed I slept on every night, I could have opened the door to my bedroom to reassure myself that nobody was sneaking around the house in the dark, I could have checked the outside door to make sure that whoever had departed last had pressed the buttons that locked it; but I didn’t have to, or feel the need to. I knew that everything was as it always was; all was well, all was calm, there was nothing to fear.
Yet, on such nights, my heart would be beating with a rapidity that exceeded what I considered its capacity. One beat would follow another with increasing frenzy, each one gaining on and catching up with the one before it, so that instead of beating, my heart would seem to be whirring, although I knew it had to be beating. Or did it? The Grail said that your heart beat until you died, but maybe the Grail was wrong. According to Romulus, it was often wrong about the details of flora and fauna.
In any case, it would be beating much faster than it did when Dr. Bowusuvi made me do exercises, or even than it did when I raced in and out of Romulus’ room during a tile- or bone war. My entire body would be shaking, my breathing uneven, gaspy, and no matter what I would do, I would be unable to subdue the panic within me. I would tell myself that everything was fine, that there was nothing to fear, but my body wouldn’t listen to me. No matter what I said to myself, my heart would continue to whir and my body to quake. And unable to control my body, my mind would inevitably follow it into panic. I would soon begin to be unable to concentrate on anything or to complete a thought, or even to attempt to go to sleep in the hope that I would feel better when I woke up. It was strange: I wasn’t afraid of any specific thing, but my fear was undeniable, overwhelming, primal. I would have a powerful urge to run, to bolt to safety, I suppose like a wild animal, but there was nothing to run from; and I would want to scream but with my body shaking and my heart whirring I could only whine—which I did, clutching at my blankets and tearing at my pillow in an effort to get the fear to go away.
On such nights as these, unable to bear the silence of the dark, I would say to Mind, “Mind, are you awake?” and he would always be there. He would say, “I am here, Rowan,” in his mild, careless tone which so often annoyed me when I was trying to impart the importance of a situation to him but which comforted me then; and he would keep me company through the night, answering my questions, asking me questions in response to my questions, and showing me certain people who I asked to see, who’d struck me some other time in some other scene at the end of the bright road, and whose presences help chase away the night’s hideous dread: the vagabonds, the girl with the hyacinth eyes, the man with the black sword, the old wizard, and most of all the black-haired woman with the scar under her eye.
It had occurred to me in the clear but wordless way that I saw things at the time that the focus, or basis, of my fear was a dream that I’d had in which it seemed to me that Mind was torn from me. I lay on an angled table of clear glass, several masked doctors gazing down at me with shrewd curiosity as a giant needle descended towards my head. My wrists bound, my fingers locked in a desperate clench, my neck muscles straining against a bond that held my head against the table, I screamed in terror, “Mind! Mind!” but he wasn’t there, and I screamed again, “Mind! Mind!” and still he wasn’t there.
When I woke up I screamed, “Mind!” in the inside-the-head way that I conversed with him, but also aloud, as I learned later from Romulus, who had heard me from his end of the house.
“Yes, Rowan?” Mind asked in his mild, eternal voice.
My terror subsiding, I asked him, “Was that real?”
“Was what real?”
I described my dream to him and he asked, “Do you think it real, Rowan?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”
“Why do you think it real?”
“I don’t know. You were the one who said dreams were real.”
“During the conversation you are referencing, Rowan, I asked you why you thought the reality you call dreams did not intersect with the reality you call waking. From that statement, you inferred that I doubted the veracity of your belief that dreams are not real, and from this inference, you further inferred that I believed the opposite of what you believed. However, if you review my words, you’ll see I made no statement of belief.”
This gobbledygook was indecipherable to me, but the flavor of it seemed comforting. He seemed to be saying in his odd, circular way, that there was nothing to worry about, nothing of what I’d seen in my dream was going to happen.
Yet, it, the dream, bothered me, and it bothered me that he wouldn’t just say, “No, that will never happen, Rowan.” It bothered me, and though I’d awakened with the heart whir and body shakes many times before I had that dream, they had been worse since I’d had it. I wondered if I might not have had a similar dream in the days beyond my memory’s shore, and whether this unremembered dream might not be the very reason for my night terror.
This unworded hypothesis, however, while shining a light upon the source, or a possible source, of this terror, didn’t do what the philosophers say knowledge does to fear; in fact, the frequency of my dark sojourns continued to increase with every passing month.
I guess I believed but wasn’t sure that the dream did foreshadow reality. Wasn’t sure being the key phrase, this slight doubt making it seem that perhaps the reality the dream presented could be circumvented, and this possibility that it could be avoided filling me with a sort of desperation about having to figure out how to avoid it, and a fear that, having no idea how to do so, I would do the wrong thing.
It seemed to me, though, that if nobody knew that Mind was inside my head, nobody would think to take him out; so, when I told Dr. Mulgar about the man and the girl in the cave, I refrained from telling him how I had gotten the vision and in fact was in desperate straits trying to come up with a lie that he would believe if he asked me, “How’d you come up with that one, Romulus?” which was a thing he asked me on occasion.
But he didn’t. As I told him my vision, he watched me like a shark, hunger heavy upon him, but when I had completed my tale, he was overjoyed, so overjoyed, I believe, that in the moment he didn’t think to ask me about details of my method. After he had departed, and knowing that he would at some point remember to ask me how I had produced the vision, I consulted with Romulus about what to do, and together we decided that if it wasn’t a lie, Dr. Mulgar might not perceive it as a lie. If, therefore, I said something like, “My mind told me,” which as Romulus pointed out, would be a realistic thing for a child to say, and would be more or less the truth, I might be able to draw his attention away from any possible discernment of Mind’s existence.
After I told him about the man and the girl in the cave, Dr. Mulgar cried out, “Yes! Yes!!” not to me but to the air, to the world, in release, it seemed, of long frustration. He strode across the room with long, victorious steps, his fists clenched, his face etched with what I could only describe as rageful joy, an equal mixture of triumph and angry defiance; then he strode back, and then across the room again, and back.
Beaming, he turned to me. Bursting with excitement, he said, “This is great, Romulus! This is great!” and “I’m proud of you!” and let fly many other such joyful expostulations which, lost in the flurry of his excitement, I didn’t hear, or at least didn’t digest. I think he even hugged me. He was convinced that this vision was just the sort he was hoping for.
That’s when I put it together: whatever Mind showed me, I could tell Dr. Mulgar, and he would be happy!
The next few days—that’s all it was, not even a month, or a half-month—were happy, stress-free ones. I would play with Romulus in the morning, and in the afternoon, Dr. Mulgar would come. I would tell him about some random thing that Mind showed me, and he would be happy. He would pat me on the head, and say “You’re doing great, Romulus, you’re doing great,” or “You’re a special boy, Romulus,” or “Everything’s going to be alright,” and wouldn’t even give me any assignments to do on the Grail. He’d just say, “Just concentrate on having those visions, Romulus, just concentrate on having those visions,” which of course I didn’t have to concentrate on at all, but simply to ask Mind for one.
When he got around to asking me about how I’d at long last produced the right kind of vision, I told him the little lie, or incomplete-truth, that Romulus and I had come up with and which by then I had practiced telling Romulus a hundred times, at least.
A few glorious days after I shared the vision about the scarred man and the freckled girl with him—and I’d given him a few more nuggets since then—he said, as he was leaving, “How’d you do it, Romulus? After all this time, how’d you do it?”
I said, shrugging, “My mind told me,” and he laughed and went on, expressing no doubt of my truthfulness. This surprised me, for it had always seemed to me that he noticed everything, and that, thus, hiding anything from him would be impossible. I had hoped, but it had been a small hope, that he would accept my half-truth this time, but I hadn’t expected him to.
Several possibilities of why he had this time presented themselves to me, and the first of these, that I’d actually tricked him with a convincing, practiced delivery of what was, technically, the truth, seemed the least likely. I thought it more likely that his usual piercing discernment of my state of mind was compromised by his focus on and excitement about the visions I was sharing with him; or, most likely of all, he was suspicious that I was hiding something from him but was neglecting for the moment, for reasons beyond my ability to comprehend, to confront me about it.
But I knew no matter what he did, I wouldn’t tell him about Mind. Mind was my friend, he had always been my friend, my constant companion, a bright road within me; and even though as I have said, I liked Dr. Mulgar, and wanted to please him, and even though I had been sucked into his unknown quest, and willingly, by his strength and intensity, and the vortex of his longing, he was a doctor, and that needle that in my dream had cut Mind away from me was a doctor’s instrument. And more than that, I sensed, without any true understanding of it, but sensed nevertheless, the profane-ness of his being, the blackness I injected into my bloodstream every night drawn like a magnet to the blackness within him, and I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, give him Mind.