ROWAN-9
Dr. Mulgar’s face did something I’d never seen it do before: it contorted in anger. In a heartbeat, it transformed into a mask of wrath; or perhaps it was a mask that melted away, a mask of calm civility that vanished to reveal the real, as Jayenne might say, or uncover the demon (as Romulus was quick to call Dr. Mulgar) behind it. He certainly looked like a demon to me in that moment. I knew then that if he’d ever been truly angry with me before, he’d hid it well.
In the loudest voice he’d ever used with me, not quite a yell, he snarled, “You defy me?” and without waiting for an answer continued in an increasingly angry voice, each word louder than the one before, the last five words a spittle-laden crescendo of frenzy, “I gave you life! Without me, you wouldn’t exist! You…do…not…defy…me!” After a brief pause, he went on, but by then, I wasn’t comprehending any words; I was in a sort of shock, I think, hot and cold at the same time, experiencing his voice and his face, along with the sharply defined green, brown, and blue of the room, the cold paper face of Dr. Bowusuvi, and even the still-subtle aroma of mixed solid and liquid waste wafting in from Romulus’ room, as if in a dream. Dr. Mulgar had never yelled at me before. It wasn’t him in front of me anymore, it was a stranger, an alien, a god.
Turning to Dr. Bowusuvi, he said, “Give me it.”
Dr. Bowusuvi, his wrinkled old face unreadable as ever, said, “I will do it,” and stepped forward, eyeing me with the grim impassive disapproval with which he seemed to view Existence itself. Dr. Mulgar barred his way.
He growled, “Give it to me, now, old man!”
Dr. Bowusuvi’s long-haired but thin-bodied eyebrows went up and his colorless eyes narrowed. He withdrew the small silver cylinder I knew so well from the inside breast pocket of his many-pocketed lab coat. He began to turn its two halves, which were separated by a cleft, in opposite directions (an action I had always thought indicated an adjustment to the intensity of its pain-giving); but with a look of hatred, Dr. Mulgar snatched it, and glaring at the older man, reversed the directions of the halves.
Dr. Bowusuvi’s eyes widened in alarm, marking the first time I’d ever seen him look anything resembling human; but while he looked on in general disapprobation, he made no protest. It was then that I noticed that his beady eyes weren’t black, as I’d always thought, but blue. They just seemed black because they were clouded with what appeared to be the purple-black liquid that I injected into my arm veins every night.
As Dr. Mulgar came at me with the eye thing, I saw that his eyes, too, were full of the stuff. I turned to run, but he grabbed me, turning me around with unyielding roughness.
“You will learn obedience!” he snarled, and grabbing me by the hair and yanking my head back, he pressed the cylinder against the cheekbone just under my right eye, enunciating with chilling clarity, “You will not defy me.”
And an affliction to make even the worst application of the eye thing I’d ever received from Dr. Bowusuvi seem laughable to even call it pain exploded through my head from my eye to my spine like a pulsing buzzing spear of fire, bristled with thousands of barbed spinning pins. Vaguely, and it could have been just before or just after Dr. Mulgar administered the cylinder, I heard Dr. Bowusuvi say, “You fool, you’ll erase his mind!” and Dr. Mulgar growl, “Shut up, or you’ll be next, you old clown!” and moments after that, just before pain rendered me senseless to the world, “Have your stooges check on him in a couple hours, and kill the other one…”
I don’t think I screamed: I heard myself emit a cut-off gasp “Ahhh___g!” but no more. The infliction didn’t stop at my eye, nor my head this time, but went down my neck, into the bones below my neck, my collarbone and my shoulder blades, and into the bones in my chest, and what seemed my heart, then on into my stomach and bowels, with what I imagined to be stab wounds charged with lightning and snake venom, until at last, pain swallowed me. It’s possible that I lost consciousness, but I don’t think I did, I just became pain; there was nothing else. Thoughts and sensation left me, yet I was still there, still aware, still in a hopeless and unending agony.
Pain was everywhere, in every inch of my body, along with nausea—and a great addled-ness. I was obscurely aware of myself as an entity, but I didn’t know who I was, I couldn’t have said my name. My mind swam, flailed really, like someone in water who doesn’t know how to swim. I sensed that I was at the top of a black waterfall, water filling my mouth and nostrils, stinging my eyes—no, not water, the purple-black stuff—carrying me towards this waterfall. I was sucked under, tossed about, turned over; I flailed and groped, struggled to swim away from the waterfall, desperation driving me, but I couldn’t right myself, and was growing weaker and weaker, as pain continued to wrack every corpuscle of my body.
Fighting was painful, every movement causing renewed waves of pain in my head and the rest of my body, and was doing me no good. The harder I fought, the closer the waterfall loomed. And I was getting sleepy: It seemed to me that if I just lay back, just let the current take me, oh, I could have a few moments of peace, of painlessness, before I drowned.
It was then that I brushed up against something, some substance, a tree-like column of it, and opportunistically, I clung to it, and put my face against its rough surface as sometimes I had put it against the wall when I was trying to keep my head from spinning after Dr. Bowusuvi had done the eye thing to me.
My head spun, the black stuff buffeted me like a rushing river, pain crashed through me in waves. I hugged the thing, this column of unknown principle, clung to it, clung to it, clung to it, devoid of knowledge devoid of perception but for one impulse that became one thought making its way through the pain and chaos and blackness: “Don’t let go.”
For how long I clung to it, I don’t know. In literal time, I suppose only a couple minutes, but the world of the mind, of the soul, is different: hours, maybe days, or longer. (“It was years,” Dirk told me later.) But at some point, I found that what I was clinging to was sound, a single, lasting, note, and I listened to it, followed it, just one note, maybe two, followed it for, again, an unknown length of time, to the border of consciousness, the edge of sensory awareness, where I found that it was a wailing, or keening, close to my ears. Realizing this, I felt something hard against my back, and then something else encircling my ribs, and something wet against the back of my neck and the side of my face.
I was propped, in a sitting position, against the bars of Romulus’ cage, his arms, tight around me, keeping me upright. His face, wet, was pressed against my neck, and he was emitting the lament that had pierced the black fog of my mind. I was too beaten up to think about anything at the time, but I suppose I assumed that he was crying because he thought me dead; it occurred to me later, that he couldn’t have thought me dead. He was a very perceptive individual, with very attuned senses; there was no way he hadn’t heard my labored breaths, or felt the desperate beats of my heart.
My eye burned and felt as if it were bleeding, and my head throbbed in excruciating ripples, leaving me aware of Romulus and of the gray room only as from a distance; but the rest of my body just felt drained, weak, trembly, only the echo of pain remaining. The room spun in slow bounces, its grayness a fog that paralleled the state of my mind. I sat there, just waiting: Waiting to recover, waiting for the pain in my eye and head to abate, waiting for strength. I felt myself breathing; I listened to my breaths, thought of nothing, just listened. At some point, I realized that Romulus was no longer crying, and I listened to his breaths also. I didn’t notice the passing of time, I didn’t think, I don’t know that I could think, my mind was so foggy, so lethargic, I just waited, listening, feeling the solidity of my own body, the touch of Romulus’ arms and face, tasting something acrid in my mouth, looking at the gray walls, the gray ceiling, and smelling urine—his and mine, for I found that I’d emptied my bladder. The pain in my head lessened in slow increments, and I grew sleepy—almost pleasurably sleepy.
Romulus’ arms released me, and his voice broke into my world of sensations: “Ah, you’re awake.”
Thoughts and memories were slow to come, but through my sluggishness of mind a heart-jumping memory cut with the same force the barbed spear of pain had cut through my brain earlier; and somehow despite the great lethargy of my body, and the desire just to sleep, sleep, sleep, I managed to jump up and cry, “They’re going to kill you! They’re coming, soon!” Dr. Mulgar had ordered Dr. Bowusuvi to send his “stooges,” which I assumed to be the Fatheads, over in a couple of hours, but I had no idea how long it had been since then.
Romulus tilted his head to the left, which was his usual way of acknowledging my concern about something (tilting it to the right usually indicated curiosity); and said, placidly, “Then we must leave. It is not in your power to free us?”
“Mind?” I said, to myself, as well as aloud: as shaky and muddled as I was, I couldn’t keep my mouth from conforming to the inner words I formed. Suddenly I was afraid that the screaming-rod-through-the-brain of the eye thing might have killed Mind, and I repeated, in a near panic, “Mind?!”
His response was immediate, and as matter-of-fact, as free from emotion or concern as anything he ever said to me. “I am here, Rowan.”
“Show me the Fatheads coming in, into this house, uh, yesterday, no, they didn’t come yesterday. Today!”
I was on the bright road; I followed it into the main room, and there, watched the Fatheads open the door and come in.
“No, show me their fingers when they’re pushing the buttons right before they leave.” This time, I found myself standing right in front of the door, looking directly at the cluster of buttons, each engraved with a different number, which was right above the brown knob of the door. As I looked at these buttons, the fat fingers of one of the Fatheads pressed four of them in sequence. I memorized this sequence, and then, releasing the vision, wobbled into the main room, as Romulus, curious and intent, watched me go. At the front door, I pushed the numbers Mind had just shown me. A whirring sound arose from the knob, or the area above the knob, following by a sound somewhere between a click and a snap.
I pulled the knob; the door didn’t budge.
I rotated the knob, then pulled it, and the door slid open. My heart-rate increased. The warm outside wind, accompanied by a soft, all-encompassing susurration of sound, caressed me.
“Now show me their fingers—the Fatheads’ fingers—when they open Romulus’ cage!” I demanded of Mind, hurrying back to the gray room. There, after Mind had obliged me, I pressed the appropriate buttons, and again there came that whir, followed this time by a soft tink. Even before I could begin fiddling around with the complex-looking opening mechanism, Romulus, who had watched the Fatheads unlock it many times, reached through, turned something, and shoved open the door with a sparkle in his eye and the subtlest of smiles.
Exiting the house, which turned out to be a drab dusty white one, I was less overwhelmed than I had been my first time outside, perhaps partly because the area itself, a sort of wasteland of yellow weeds and long grass, with no road, even, leading up to the house, just some beaten down grass, was less spectacular than the place Mulgar had taken me; but, while less overwhelmed than I had been then, I was still dazzled. The absolute pervasiveness of sensory input—of light, of sound, of smell, of the feel of the breeze and the temperature of the air (I say “temperature” because while this particular day the outside temperature was approximately the same as that of the inside, outside the air let me know about itself continually, that it was slightly warm, slightly cool, while inside I never noticed it)—made each individual component of reality difficult to discern, and me slow to act. So, Romulus had to lead me.
A green forest, smiling at us below the sun, was visible in a long curve at the edge of the plain of weeds, and it was towards this lodestar we headed. Taking my hand, Romulus guided me into the weeds, which grew longer the closer we got to the forest, their feathery tops swaying above my head with swarms of gnats. Hand in hand, we strolled on, slowly approaching the forest, Romulus’s nostrils dilating in a seeming celebration of the mild herbaceous pleasantness around us.
Suddenly, Romulus squatted, pulling me down with him. Moments later, a creaking sound cut through the continual whish of the brushing-together of weeds, followed by a clop of horses’ hooves, and then a voice. What I thought must be a gnat, or other bug, crawled up my tailbone. Reaching back to rub it away, I found that it was a droplet of water—sweat. Motioning for me to stay low, and to follow him, Romulus, squatting and walking on his heels, made a smart line for the forest. Bent over, I followed as fast, and with as little noise, as I could.
It wasn’t long until we came to the forest’s edge. Before us an unbelievable array of shrubs, ferns, plants, wildflowers, briars, bushes, fallen leaves, and lichen-covered logs gathered like children, or worshippers, around long stout trunks that stretched up into vast clusters of dark shining leaves.
My heart swam. Romulus’ eyes smiled; I could see that he was happy. The sun smiled upon our backs; the wind touched our faces. The forest seemed to welcome us, saying in a deep and at once whispering and bell-like voice, “Come in, my children.” Romulus rose and stepped from the weeds into the shadow of the woods; and I followed him.
We were vagabonds.