Joss Makepeace // scheherezade (thestoryweaver) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-08-30 04:55:00 |
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[6 years earlier] The hat was low on his head, obscuring his eyes. He didn’t want to see anyone, and he didn’t want anyone to see him. He’d flown in from Alaska because his father’s lawyer had insisted, but he’d be damned if he was going to make small talk with anyone while he was here. He was going to do what he’d come to do, and then he was going to hop a plane back to the middle of nowhere. He strode into the lobby of the mental facility on two good, healthy legs, and he almost laughed when he saw the decor. They’d brought in some damn interior decorators to make the place look like a hotel instead of a nuthouse, which was just a joke. No one walked into that lobby without knowing why they were there, and he didn’t see the point in all the damn make-believe. He walked up to the desk, and he introduced himself as Sergeant First Class Byron. They were expecting him, he told the pretty woman behind the desk. He hadn’t seen Anana in a few weeks, not since he’d gotten off leave, but the woman was still in the back of his mind; if she hadn’t been, the girl behind the desk would have gotten more than the tip of his hat in thanks when she asked him to wait a spell. The tour of the facility followed, and Colt spent most of his time trying to decide if his father (and his father’s ability) would rip this place to shreds within in the week. He’d heard tell this place could deal with anything, but he wasn’t real sure that was the case. When the manager left him to look around on his own, Colt went straight for the dining hall. He pulled the hat down again, low over his eyes, and he watched, imagining the chaos his father could bring. They were all mad, here. One of the nurses had said it once, kindly of voice and with a warmth and strength to her that was absent in the more regular nurses who had the care of Joss’s ward -- Laburnum, as if naming things after flowers would make them any more pleasant, as if it would banish the smell of antiseptic and disinfectant and vomit and excrement -- the smell of madness that wound its way through everything, bound itself to the sheets and pillows that came back from the laundry too starched and crisp to be comfortable. Ten months, two weeks, five days and sixteen hours since admittance -- Joss knew the discomforts of Laburnum. Come morning, those who could leave their beds were chided from them. Like layabout school-children, they were tidied and swept from the long room of women, who by night were nightmares themselves -- laughing, howling, pissing and shrieking, by day staggered about in nightclothes, herded toward the communal areas where pale colored walls and discretely expensive artwork awaited but the drone of the television held more attention than anything else. Nothing stripped you of who you were than the absence of clothes, she had found. Clad in the indignity of nightdress and tightly-tied dressing gown, ‘A reward, Miss Makepeace! Just be sure not to loose the belt’ with a meaningful look, a pointed sound in the potential loss as if killing herself were an intention rather than a forgetting -- Joss padded through the halls in bare feet, the hem of nightgown tickling and swishing across her toes. In her hand, her talisman - the leather-bound blank book that was never blank for long. They called it ‘therapy’. A circle of those either too drugged or too close to the edge to listen, the ‘severe cases’ handed books that a clergyman might keep his thoughts in; tooled-leather journals fit for secrets that concealed inane scribblings behind the covers. No pens: pens were not permitted, nor ink that would stain hands, could be swallowed -- swallowing reserved for food cooked a little beyond enjoyable, water, tepid tea and coffee with the stimulus drained out, the ubiquitous pills. Therapy during which Joss sat with her feet curled under her in the high-backed armchair drawn into the circle and counted down the days, silently. Ten months, two weeks, five days, sixteen hours. The drugs made her head heavy, made her hand slide against the page and the pencil slip between fingers that fumbled. Each week, they handed over the books -- no secrets here, no private moments, nothing kept secure and she waited for them to notice, to realize, to guess. At first they’d stuck gold stars in the pages, like a child’s reward, lurid amongst stories that sparkled brighter than plastic gold ever could. She’d asked them not to as the haze lifted, as she began to walk in their corridors rather than worlds beyond them. That had been a step back, they said and their eyes were disapproving, their mouths shrivelled, like prunes -- but they’d stopped, and this book that her fingers curled around was free of them. Ten months, two weeks, five days, sixteen hours. There was a distant bell-like sound; the gong, for lunch, a sound more reminiscent of a country house’s elegance than what lunch meant, here. Floppy people, bent in chairs with pale, floppy food put before them with expensive flower arrangements on the tables. She was late, had furled herself up like an unblooming bud in the ‘library’ where all the books were glue and paper and gorgeous jackets and now the corridor was empty as she shuffled through it. There was a faint smokiness to it, an edge to her vision and a door that didn’t fit with the others at one side -- time for pills, time for a pencil, but someone was walking the corridor, stood in the entrance to the dining hall with a hat pulled low that she had never pictured before, never seen. She peered over his shoulder, on her tiptoes -- he was tall. “You don’t look mad.” A quiet, soft sort of voice at his elbow but with something in it that made you want to listen. Joss didn’t talk much at the facility. “And you’re wearing proper clothes.” Rueful, she didn’t sound insane. But that was what they called ‘high functioning’, here. “That’s probably the best way to judge.” Ten months, two weeks, five days, sixteen hours. Colt didn’t much want to talk to any of the crazy people. The hat pulled low, the uncomfortable set of his shoulders, the way the hands were shoved deep to his pockets, they all spoke to that fact. Somewhere in his mind he’d thought insanity would mind the tells, and that supposition made him chuckle. Insanity didn’t mind shit, and didn’t he know it. Still, the voice at his back didn’t make him move or startle, yell or feel discomfort. No, he’d lived with an insane person long enough to expect unexpected things. Someone in the dining room clinked their plastic, harm-proof spoon against their equally harm-proof cup, and he focused on the sound a moment. Then, after what was obviously too long a time to have passed to not be intentional, he tugged the brim of his hat lower, and he nodded almost imperceptibly. “Not yet, ma’am,” he said about not being insane. That’s how he thought of it, not yet, ever since he was five and his nanny had whispered ‘medical discharge’ to the butler. He moved aside, but he didn’t look at her. Insanity made Colt uncomfortable, and Colt ignored things that made him uncomfortable. Joss was used to being ignored; people did it often, eyes skating across her from one thing to the next without looking at the problematic girl who insisted -- in a quiet, polite, so very sane tone that what she saw, actually was real and no, she didn’t want drugs, thank you. It was the thank-you that made them look again, just to check -- a flicker-quick glance that summed her up, hands in her lap neatly, enough to dismiss. She was used to being ignored before, when it was the best way to get things done, to be a nothing that hid in shadows and heard things. Perhaps it was simply being tired of imprisonment, perhaps it was being a fingers-length from someone normal, who hadn’t chosen to be here but practically twitched with discomfort. Whatever it was, Joss didn’t simply fade away, flit into the dining room and become another silent floppy person, collecting food without color to pass another day -- ten months, two weeks, five days, sixteen hours A thin hand settled against his sleeve, lightly enough to be nothing at all -- a whisp, an echo of a touch rather than something so very solid and definite as such. The fingers were pale, slender; a callous against the forefinger of the hand. “It’s really not that bad,” she said, comfortingly, and there was a thread of something woven into that voice -- it was warm and soothing and perhaps it felt a little like a mother’s hand against a forehead might, when sick. “Not the being mad part. But they look after you, and the food is -- unpleasant, but no one cares much for eating, here. And they care. That’s most important; when you sleep at night, knowing they care. You close your eyes and you pull the sheets up and you know they’ll be there the next day, the same faces and they want you to be better.” It wasn’t a story, not really, but it was enough of one for a little bit of what made Joss herself to slide in, ribbon about the words and make them something more. It was the most Joss had spoken in quite a while. Her voice was gentle, as though speaking to someone who might at any minute startle, jerk away. The hand lifted, the fingers curled under -- movements as tentative as anyone, sane or not sane who was quite alone and quite in want of conversation, if only for a little bit, might make. “Why are you here?” Curiosity invited the question -- it wasn’t in keeping with politeness, strictly speaking but then, when one was clad in nightclothes in the middle of the day, (and mad, Jocelyn, a voice reminded her, candidly, and mad. You can’t forget that) one didn’t need to follow all the strictures of politeness. When she turned her head to look away from the dining-hall to the visitor-watcher who looked as though looking into Dante’s hell, his face impassive but the shoulders and back so tense -- her braid slid from behind her back to across her shoulder, and she hugged her book to her chest with her left arm, tight. He was sane, and so was she -- for now. He had tuned her out easily enough in the beginning, when she’d stood beside him, but then she’d touched him. He looked down at that otherworldly hand, strange and fragile and somehow otherworldly, and he wanted to get the hell out of there. He’d told his lawyer he didn’t want to do this shit, dammit. He looked over at her halfway through her speech, and he thought of Anana and her grounded strength, her solid realness, her exceptional sanity, and then he took in this little, fragile bird beside him. Her eyes didn’t hold the madness his father’s did. He wasn’t worried she was going to snap at any moment; it wasn’t that kind of madness. But she wasn’t sane either; she wasn’t there, in that dining room, in a way he was. There were levels of insanity, Colt knew. Hell, he looked at his own eyes in the mirror every day and wondered if one bad day could turn him into the man his father was. Some days he saw the potential for his own meltdown more than others, but in the girl beside him, he saw something different. Madness, yes, but built of otherworldly things, not of rage or loss or confusion. It was a part of her. That scared the hell out of him. He moved out of her reach, and he looked back out at the diners. “Looking for a place for my daddy,” he said simply, teeth gritted, anger filtering through clearly on the word daddy. He didn’t ask why she was there, with her pretty brown hair and trusting eyes; he didn’t need to. “What’s in the journal?” There, that was a safe question. Colt kept a journal, and he wrote in it religiously. Safe topic. But it wasn’t; the hand dropped abruptly to her side and Jocelyn straightened, chin notched higher -- the posture of a girl who stood at her father’s side and smiled shyly and kept her peace until the very moment of departure. Delicate, certainly and thin -- she’d never cared much for bland food and when one could dine in a sultan’s halls on comfits and syllabub and honey-dripping pastries or within the confines of a room where the insane slobbered and slavered and whined like a pack of dogs -- a shame that the food of dreams did so little of the body. But she wasn’t a little girl and the brittle-shatter strength of her posture was that of a ballerina who knew the patterns of a politico’s quick-clever dance and had danced them until feet bled. Ten months, two weeks, five days, sixteen hours -- she wasn’t going to break. There was a look in her eyes now -- disappointment, perhaps. The snap rejection, a clear demarcation, ‘I am sane, and you are not’. No one liked that reminder and she made no attempt -- or perhaps simply didn’t care enough to hide the hurt. She’d met his eyes with the shy sort of smile the daughter-child had greeted her father’s colleagues, with deference and humility but a quiet sort of trust. Now those self-same brown eyes were cool and calm -- dignified in a way that the nightgown and bare feet and stamp of insanity couldn’t rob her of, like a queen in sackcloth. Polite, but a certain element of chastisement written in the lines of her face, even as she played her fingers against the much-cracked spine of that book. “Stories. Ideas -- Whatever we like. They prefer us to write about what goes on, but I choose to write about what isn’t here.” A little lift of the chin that encompassed gilted walls and the dining hall occupants and the vast grounds that set the facility beyond the hubbub of reality -- everything that so unsettled him, like a conspirator in a joke, and then, quite deliberately turned her back to the dining hall. One more night of dreaming food rather than eating it couldn’t hurt -- with effort, she willed away the blurring, the smoke-silhouette of someone approaching to lead her away. This was reality, this was a person, this was important. “What’s wrong with your father? And why are you so angry about it?” she asked with a candour that was only granted to the young, the old and the mad -- except in doing so, in showing a little insight, she very much wasn’t any of those. It was a contradiction -- Joss liked those and she leaned her back against the door of the double-set that remained closed, rough wood through thin nightgown. Shutting them out, if only for a little while. Oh, no. Hell, no. He wasn’t getting into that. He’d already had to sit across the administrator who had given him the tour, knowing that the man had known the entire story. There was no way he was sharing it with this girl-woman in bare feet. He grunted, the sound hard and flat. “My father’s crazier than anything you can dream up to write in that book,” was all he said. There was a touch of finality to the statement, a don’t ask about it all. “You planning on standing there in that nightgown all day? Or you going to get something to eat?” he asked, because concrete, sane things like eating were easier to think about than what made people end up hugging journals in their nightgowns in the middle of the day. His tone, however, wasn’t cruel; it was imploring. Leave the topic of my daddy the hell alone, it said, and it said it loudly enough to reverberate off that door she was leaning against. She looked at him, a little statue of calm in a hall now saturated in his desire and need and completely unaffected -- as collected and cool as if she had no place else to be, no need herself for anything beyond standing just there and just now, exactly as she was. “Why would I want to eat here? The food is terrible, I just told you.” There was no hint of the other-world in her voice now - just humour dry as dust, the echo of the sort of fall-flat jokes that people told one another out there. Joss glanced down at the nightgown, with the sort of wince of reminiscence, a reminder of something rather forgotten. It wasn’t bad exactly, as nightwear went. Virgin-like cotton, snow-white and scoop-necked -- her hair swung down, brushed against the pale skin of her neck as she examined her feet, bluish with cold; she looked perhaps fifteen rather than twenty but it didn’t appear to bother her. “They won’t let us have clothes. We might escape.” It was matter-of-fact, a prisoner explaining the rules of the prison to an outsider without sentimentality. “I don’t know that that’s possible,” Joss considered the notion idly. Crazy was as crazy did -- if she wrote something, dreamed up something that was truly insane, would that make her the one lacking sanity, or the person into whose mouth she placed the words, whose limbs conducted those actions like a limp puppet lolling in her hands? “Jocelyn,” she said, instead -- shaking off patterns of thoughts that wound like mazes through her head. “Joss. And it probably isn’t. Possible, that is.” A ghost of a smile that flitted across her face. “You’ve not been here at bedtime.” The matter-of-fact statement about escaping made him glance over his shoulder at the door, as if he was truly concerned he might be trapped there. Dammit, this slip of a girl was getting him all worked up. The thought of nighttime in this place made him think of nighttime at home during his childhood, and he cleared his throat and pulled his hat off his head. He held onto the crown and he gesticulated with it a moment, his mouth moving in silence, his mind not quite closing in around the words to tell her to get good and lost. Finally, after a moment, he let the hat fall at his hip. He had no gray in his hair, despite being in his mid-30s, and the hat rested against a hip and leg still untouched by injury. In that moment, his fear was a thing built of the past, nothing of the future in it yet, and he sighed when he looked at her. “Joss,” he said, adding a “ma’am,” at the end. “You have to eat. What say you we sit down and chat while we eat?” he asked, because he was here, dammit; he might as well keep her from starving. She looked amused in that moment, lips pressed together to keep from smiling and the brown eyes sparkling with more life and wit than could be entirely contained within a hallway -- within a building like this one. With a dip of her head, she acknowledged the pleasantry -- the ma’am (which really, really?) -- the way another girl somewhere might take a proffered bunch of flowers that were inappropriate yet well-meant. Caught betwixt worlds she might be, but Joss had years of training at her back -- knife-quick to slide smooth to see and catch the glance over his shoulder, the moment of twisting awkwardness as he stood before her -- regret had flickered across her face in that minute, and sorrow. A lifetime of learning to put people at their ease and a short while (ten months, two weeks, five days, sixteen hours) of yearning for someone, anyone to talk to who made sense and didn’t become less than smoke when you looked too closely. “They won’t lock you in,” she said lightly, cool and sweet like water that trickled over conversation and found the nooks and crannies of what was unsaid and made it said. “You’re wearing clothes.” Pointed out as if it were obvious, and then, “And of course, there are cameras. And they know who we are. You’re quite safe.” She placed a hand against the door, steadied herself and walked past him - back straight as a princess, into the dining hall. “You never gave me your name,” she placed neat little gray plastic pots of what was probably food but didn’t look much like it onto a neat gray plastic tray and balanced that in one hand, and the journal in the other with skill borne of long practice. It looked effortless -- it probably was now, as Joss wove between the stumbling, shuffling patients who shambled from table to what was a pale imitation of a hotel buffet for the mentally ill --to the very, very back of the dining hall. The chairs were plastic that looked like leather, and the walls were the sugar-pastel pink of too-sweet almonds and when Joss sat, she busied herself folding the napkin and arranging the cutlery as precisely as if it mattered to anyone but herself -- before looking up at Colt with a shiver-shy of a smile. “You could join me,” she suggested, “But it isn’t very good. I’d rather not.” She looked at the tray, rather dubiously and poured a glass of water from the stack of plastic tumblers and the jug on the table already laid out -- offering the first to him, courteously, before pouring her own. “Everyone in here came in with clothes at the offset,” he told her, even as he frowned at the pretend-leather chairs. (Could someone kill themselves with leather?) “So clothes aren’t going to keep any safe at the end of the day.” He placed his hat on the table, and he sat down in one of the offensive chairs, and he watched her. She didn’t look any older than fifteen, but there was something in her eyes that spoke of things seen, things lived, despite the false-childishness of the garment she wore. Eyes didn’t lie, Colt knew. You could dress older, dress younger, wear make-up until the cows came home, but the eyes? The eyes always told the truth. Closer to 20, he finally surmised, and more lost in her own world that outwardly insane. See really insane people had a look to them that you couldn’t mistake. He looked down at the cutlery, then back up at her face. “I’ve spent my life in the Army, ma’am,” he said with a southern smile that could win over Mother Superior. “I’ve tasted bad food. Anything made in a place with fake leather for chairs and pink, spun sugar on the walls has to be better than MREs.” It was true, too. He looked over his shoulder then, letting his gaze travel the room. It was still, and it was quiet, and it was sedated. At the end of the day, it was sedation and the fact that twilight hadn’t yet blanketed the asylum with its inherent madness. He’d always found it interesting that madness fell with the sunset, as if the dark was the right place for it. He looked back at her, at her cutlery and feigned purity, and he nodded when she held out the cup of water. “Ladies first.” “Do you think I’ve poisoned it?” she inquired, head canting like a bird might regard something odd and strange and different in its outlook -- not scared, or wary at all but rather intrigued. “Or that they drug it? I don’t think that’s allowed.” She looked at the cup, lifted it to the window’s light and the sun sharded through the plastic, the movement playing across her face -- Joss smiled, with peaceful pleasure, for a brief (so-brief) moment, child-like. She lowered the glass the next moment, as if reproved and took a demure sip -- spoilt the entire behaviour in the next minute by curling in her chair, legs tucked under her as though sitting still were not entirely comfortable. “I don’t think I’m a lady any longer,” she remarked, and her fork played at the edge of the mish-mash of bland brown that pretended to be food -- she was more interested in the conversation, in the hat that sat on the table in all its other-ness, belonging to Outside and yet sitting there without objection. “I don’t think you can be, in here.” A smile again, candid and brilliant -- Joss’s smile was slow to bloom, beginning in the corner of her cheek but when it did, it made her something other than pale and thin -- pretty, almost. “What’s the Army like?” He didn’t fit - not with the decor, or on chairs she could have told him were so because they were easier to wipe clean of excrement and piss -- he was still uncomfortable, still unsettled, but he had a smile like sunshine and Joss felt a little closer to reality, foot firmly in this world -- at least for a little while. “If you aren’t a lady, then what are you?” It was the first truly curious question of the exchange, and it reminded him of when his father had first taken sick, when he’d actually believed the madness that come out of his mouth. It made him nervous, his own curiosity, and he reached for the crown of the hat, playing his fingers over the rough coarseness to center himself, distract himself. He glanced down at the food, which looked absolutely disgusting, and he pushed it away. What the hell was he doing here? It wasn’t as if this place, with girls like this, was going to be able to hold his father. “Ma’am, I think I ought to be going. See, my daddy isn’t going to be able to come to a place like this,” he said, motioning with the hat, his fingers firmly indenting the crown now. “He’d be throwing things, screaming, trying to kill the corporal with his plastic spoon (this he said while motioning to an orderly, one who was decidedly not a corporal). No, Mr. Byron the Elder was not the kind of man to sit across from a girl in a virginal white nightgown and talk about whether or not she was a lady. A grin then, full of mischief and lively fun -- Joss wasn’t as sedate as her surroundings, her mind intact beneath the blanket of pills and therapy and ever-existing quiet -- a garden beneath heavy snow, awaiting only spring. “Oh, I don’t know. That might be just what this place needs,” Joss tapped her finger against her chin, gaze tracking the progress of the orderly about the room -- as if her imagination were shading in the angry, shouting, railing figure’s lack. A glance back at him, this nameless visitor whose fingers were tight against that hat -- poor hat, quite crushed -- but her smile faded, her eyes dimmed -- the joke wasn’t funny if it weren’t for two instead of one. “They don’t permit dining room privileges to those ones,” she said quietly. “They are in a separate wing. You’d be surprised, how secure a place like this can be -- if you want to get out, that is.” The eyes that had betrayed her age, had told tales of what she was, why she was here -- they were sad now and soft. Joss’s expressions slid through the fingers like quicksilver, too changeable to catch. “You haven’t even introduced yourself,” she said -- the words a rebuke, but the voice quiet -- restrained, as if trying to hold back the wistfulness that tore in beneath them. “And I’m not a ‘ma’am,” added, to herself and the spot on the tablecloth, where her fork lay, greasy. The food he’d been so intent on her consuming, untouched. He watched her gaze, and then he sighed. Damn place, making him worry about nothing little girls in white. “Eat some of that, and I’ll stay,” he grumbled, and it was entirely obvious that he was put out by the offer. “And I’ll tell you my name,” he added, motioning to the fork, his fingers letting go the hat on the table. “Go on.” The fact that there was a secure wing didn’t surprise him, and he imagined himself there, as old as his father, behind some impenetrable gate. He looked back at the girl, at Joss, and he wondered what broke her. To Colt, the mind was like a delicate bit of glass, breakable if you hit it at the right angle. Hadn’t his father been sane before his mother died? Everyone said he had been. Hell, the man had been a decorated soldier in a hell war that drove everyone mad, and yet that hadn’t broken him. No, the death of a woman had broken him. “What broke you?” he finally asked her, demanded, barking the question a little too loudly. Her head jerked up like a puppet’s strings yanked by an unseen, careless hand, and she stared at him for a startled second before her eyes dropped to the fork once again -- she played with it between her fingers like a magician might at cards, preparing for a magic trick -- dandled the tines against the tablecloth, considering its weight, and that of the question. Her eyes slid nervous-quick to the hat laid down like a peace-offering and slowly, the tightness of her shoulders and spine began to unfurl, at ease -- or at least, as possible as that was. “Ac-ute sch-iz-oh-phre-nia,” she tasted the syllables on her tongue, bitter-bright and too solid, as if by breaking the words into pieces they would lose their potency, their power. Once out, the words glimmered menacingly between the man and the girl, heavy and pregnant with division. To a man who feared madness, they were a weight Joss had lain down with delicate care, her head bowed over the dinner-table as though expecting the derision. A moment -- waiting. “It’s what they say,” Joss’s fork was near her mouth now, loaded with something indescribable -- she spoke carefully, a flash of a look that darted to his eyes and back down, as if being caught in the looking would earn punishment. “But I would say that, I suppose. If I were mad.” She chewed thoughtfully, swallowed with a look of abject distaste, laid down the fork. A smile promised itself in the corner of her mouth, her gaze flickered to his -- almost sly, certainly hesitant -- a child with a secret they longed to share. What would it matter, to tell? No one saw, no one believed -- just once, once -- “But I’m not broken,” she added hastily. A beat. “Just a bit bruised. An apple, not a glass.” Now she was looking studiously at the fork, dipped toward the plate. “I’m still here. It’s just I see things they can’t. I used to make them up, before.” The heaviness of a significant event, a before that was so indubitably other, it divided time in twain. “But now, I don’t and it happens. Places, people. I just can’t see the edges all the time,” Joss said solemnly, explaining the rules of a private, complicated game. “If I could, then I think I would know -- real and what wasn’t, all the time rather than when they drug me. Or I write it. The writing helps, somehow,” she wondered aloud, uneasy fingers creeping to the resting journal at her side. Another bite, but slowly. Resigned to his leaving now. Oh, God, she was insane. He sat back in the chair, and he wished he was somewhere in the sub-zero Alaskan snow, somewhere he would be too numb too feel, too numb to care, too numb to do anything but sleep it off at the end of the sunless day. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, and he closed his eyes a minute. “Now?” he finally asked, because there was something about that phrase that was important, that reminded him of too many soldiers that came into the general infantry who could do things now. He reminded himself that her answer didn’t matter, because her statement had included a before. “Colt,” he finally offered, because her confession merited some kind of offering. “My name.” He lowered his fingers, and he looked at her earnest face. Schizophrenia. Damn. That promise of a smile came good and again now, Joss’s face lit the way a believer’s in church might, a light shone in the eyes that couldn’t be found in any one of those curled over their bowls of stew, or corned or mashed meat -- whatever it was in the little gray plastic dishes. “Colt,” she tried it, the sound and feel and stretch of it, and that smile danced against her lips as though she’d been given a present beyond imagination. In exchange, she took a larger mouthful, swallowed and washed it down with water. “It’s lovely to meet you, Colt,” she said with the hand extended to shake, the sound of a thousand polite greetings at her back but with the pull of genuine enjoyment, happiness to make his acquaintance -- it was quite obviously lovely for Joss, right then, in a way that never was, outside. And then she frowned, feather-brown brows tightening together as she considered the question of a word repeated. It wasn’t said with the prying, cloying sweetness of a doctor, whose mind was a bible of medicines and in whose eyes Joss could see the black and white type of diagnostic criteria. Instead, he looked pained -- the hand extended became a sympathetic pat against the bit of his arm she could reach across the table, an attempt at comfort. “Now. What about it?” Her attention was taken up with crumbling the bread-roll (the only edible thing on the tray but Joss seemingly had no intention of actually eating it) into pieces with her fingers, scattering them into the meat-mess for want of something to do -- certainly not eating. “It wasn’t a problem before. I didn’t see things, they didn’t speak, didn’t do things by themselves,” a frustrated little way of speaking, as if all of Joss’s woes were wrapped up in that moment between before and after. They were, after all. “They blame it on my reaching adolescence,” a beatific smile given Colt, for listening, at least. She didn’t mind his not understanding -- no one did. “But I reached adolescence long before. And I managed, first. When I moved. But it just started to happen, and I couldn’t tell to begin with. They look so real, and it seemed so real and I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know.” She was wistful now, not really speaking to him at all but more to herself, a reassurance that becoming this, winding up locked in like a sultan’s daughter imprisoned in dreaming, was not her fault. “A lady -- I was at the grocery store. And it happened, it had been worse. I was talking to someone who wasn’t there -- they say. He was more real than all of them, to me.” A smile, too sad to be a smile at all. “So they took me here. It’s worst when I sleep. If I’d known before, I wouldn’t have left -- except, I couldn’t know. It’s only here.” She looked at him -- him and his hat like his passport to outside and the humanity who had their foibles tucked up inside instead of out on display, with the calm resolve of one committed to an ending. “I suppose you know I’m mad, now.” His father, they said, had trauma induced psychosis. At first, they’d thought schizophrenia, but then they’d recanted, the army of doctors that had looked him over after he’d finally snapped so cleanly that there was no turning back. He looked at this girl, and he imagined his father there. His father telling him the people on the TV were talking to him, his father saying people were making faces at him as they walked by, his father saying they were all army spies. She reminded him of all of that, of having the uncertainty of a child, of believing the late night calls asking whether he was alive or dead, the calls that came from Bellevue before he had them blocked. She looked harmless, an angel dressed in white, but her words brought back things he’d run all the way to Alaska to forget. He considered reaching for her hand again, this time with the intention of finding out if she was like him, a Creation, or if she was mad. He considered it as she she looked at him and his hat. He considered it. But no, because he couldn’t deal with learning otherwise. For a time, he’d hoped his father wasn’t insane, that it was just his ability. He’d avoided touching him for years; years spent hoping and wishing. In the end, he’d touched him, and he’d learned the truth. His father’s ability? Predicting things. Life’s irony. He’d decided that caused the break, caused his father’s mind to shatter - that he hadn’t predicted the damn garden would kill his wife. Or, possibly, that he had, and that he’d discounted it. No, he couldn’t care about this girl, couldn’t care about what kept her locked here in that white nightgown with her child’s face. All of him, who he was, said save her, but Colt, Colt just pushed back his chair and stood. He took the hat, and he began to lift it to his head. He began, but he stopped short. Instead, he put on her brown locks, the hat looking silly with the nightgown and the writing journal and the mush on her plate. He leaned forward, his palms pressed against the table, and he gave her a smile and a wink, a real one, the kind the gals liked. “Ma’am, I got to be going,” he told her. “But you hold onto that hat for me,” he said, shoulders already starting to loosen with his imminent escape, with the ability to walk outside and leave insanity behind him. He walked, and the doors swung behind him and nobody looked up from their plates except for one girl-woman sitting with her knees curled up to her chin in her chair, who watched him go and take a little of the light from the room, the air of outside that didn’t feel stuffy and false, but real. “I’m not a ma’am,” she repeated softly, to the empty air, and tugged off the hat that wasn’t a passport any longer. |