BEHOLD, A WATCHER!

Part One

Feb 22, 2024

BEHOLD, A WATCHER!

Part One

And then, I was before the Great One again, and wondered what other gift it could have for me. For ten thousand years, the cosmos was my playground; for a myriad I learned, watched, built, consumed, destroyed. I was a god myself, and yet I knelt to my lord and creator and father, and power above all else and asked what was next, and it told me that I now knew the After, and returned me to the Before..

I screamed, splayed on my back, covered in fluid, in sick. My horrible bug limbs flailed about—I retched as I realized that I was back, back in the shell of the bug I had cast off, the empty skin I had shed, and was again a germ. I could not make sense of it—I was so blind, so feeble, had it always been this horrifying? I saw only through a pinprick of eye, a tight cage of a room. I heard, through a snailshell of ear, and felt, through a mean skein of flesh and a horrid mote of brain an animal approaching, a slavering beast loosed upon me to end my misery, and was grateful that this nightmare would end soon between the jaws of some creature.

The door to the room exploded outwards, and the bacterium squealed. It gripped me under my forelimbs, and I screamed anew. A second germ joined it, and they shouted together, their tiny voices drowning out the hammer of my heart and the furious haptic buzz of the electric prison my mind had been forced into. I willed myself to black out, to die, to cease, but my body was not my own. It never had been; it was a cocoon I had let burn to ash behind me, an eggshell that I had forgotten. The din of voices and bodies was so painful, that a miracle occurred: I aspirated my own vomit and choked into unconsciousness.

I awoke, one thousand years later; one eyeblink later. I could not command time, and I had forgotten how to count it. I strained to understand what the alien creatures before me said.

“...a stroke? A seizure? Will she…” one was saying. My hearing faded in and out as I recalled their language. “...chalking it up to a seizure for now,” the other said, “She’s too young for an embolism…will recommend a specialist…”

“Thank you doctor,” the first creature said. “She was fine when I saw her last—it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes. We just want to know what happened.”

I said, “You wouldn’t comprehend it, you bacterium, you animalcule,” but the shadows they cast barely even turned in my direction. The superstitious, fearful ape of my brain wondered if I had died and this was my eternal punishment for the sin of seeking forbidden knowledge; the sensible parts of the ragged sponge that was now my brain began beating that first part of my brain with the crude neurochemical tools they had on hand. Stone knives and bearskins. My mind did not fit into this vessel, and I was losing information, fast. Worse yet, that which did remain was what fit better into the shape of this base, animal brain I was forced into: the memories of their language, their rudimentaries of chemistry, the horrors of their medicine. Every time I lost an inch of cosmic understanding to gain a mile of their worldly ken my body produced wetness that clouded my already dismal vision. I remembered that I was crying, and cried ever harder when the sacrifice cost me the knowledge of a galaxy.

One thousand years later; one eyeblink later, the bug called Joseph talked with another bug of the medicine caste. The specialist. He had violated the dignity of my husk by looking at my eyes, my ears, the limbs that I no longer remembered how to control, and for that, I would kill him one day. They spoke at the foot of my bed, as if I was not there. I did not find the power in me to concentrate on what they said; I was still recovering from the scalding heat of the lukewarm broth the benighted bug Joseph had spooned down my throat, centuries ago. A twitch ago. I caught a word, suddenly, from the white-winged insect: ‘Lobotomy,’ and I struggled to listen to it, over the din of my blood pumping and my breath sucking, the apocalyptic roar of peristaltic suction and neurons firing, the world-ending cacophony of my skin dying and my hair growing.

“...a last resort, of course.”

“I can’t think of committing her. Her mind is fine—she took after our father. And a lobotomy…I can’t imagine what she’d do to me if I laid hands on her brain. God, dad would give me a hiding if he knew I was even considering it.”

“It is simply a correction of falsely-laid neural tissue. I assure you the science behind it is quite sound. While I understand that she may be quite handy with mathematics and accounting, this is a choice between your sister being able to function as a member of society, or you taking care of some genius vegetable for the rest of her life. I understand you may be frightened by the concept of invasive surgery, but as a doctor I would recommend the procedure immediately.”

“She’s a doctor too, you know. If she understands us I can only assume she’s planning an absolutely brutal punishment for me as we speak.”

“She may hold a doctorate, but that’s hardly the same as being a doctor,” the white-winged bug said, angrily. “She’s a woman, Mister Daud, and as technically impressive as whatever invention or arithmetic she may get up to as a hobby may be, I am the specialist in the field of the human brain. If she can understand us—which, given that all she’s been able to say is nonsense, I highly doubt—whatever punishment she devises could only be carried out if she miraculously recovers overnight. Are you not the man of the house?”

The bug Joseph shrank away from the white-winged insect. It put its tarsi in the pockets of its pin-striped grey elytra. “I…well, yes.”

“And yet you fear your own sister. Has she been violent to you in the past?”

“Only when we were children. I don’t fear her, I—she’s a very proud individual.”

“I see.” The white-winged insect turned, and looked at the shelf under the circular window far from my bed. It bent to look at the photographs below. “I see…” it repeated, slowly.

“Doctor?” The timid beetle Joseph asked, and the white-winged insect used a pedipalp to brush under its feed-hole as it inspected more of the room. “I see…” It said again, then turned back to the pitiable thing of Joseph, “How long has your sister been a transvestite?”

“I’m sorry?”

“A cross-dresser, Mister Daud. In many of these photographs, she’s wearing suits, waistcoats, trousers. There are only two pictures of her in appropriate clothing, the family portrait and this one of her as a child.” It pointed at the picture.

“That…one of us as a child is me in the dress, actually.” Joseph said meekly.

“Ah…I see it runs in the family, then?”

“No, no! That was just a habit of Mother’s. She was eccentric, just like Olivia. She thought I had a better face for dresses. When I was a boy, that is.” It wrung the tarsi of its pedipalps nervously, before adding: “I obviously don’t wear dresses anymore.” A lie. I knew the sort of hives and nests the bug Joseph frequented. Its grey pin-striped elytra merely obscured the satin and velvet wings that it used when it went to those dens to attract mates. When I had been a bug, I had even helped it choose which colours to next moult its wings into.

“I see…” the white-winged insect said again, musingly. “Yes, I see…a matrilineal insanity, then? That could explain your sister’s obvious illnesses if your mother was similarly delusional. It appears that you’ve been humouring your sister for your entire life, and become accustomed to her rule. She’s a cross-dresser, a spinster, a bully, and, as you say, a scientist,” it chuckled a bit, “Do you not see? She cannot cope with the loss of your father in normal means, exacerbated by her latent insanity from her mother—she has the telltale physiognomic traits of a lunatic—so she decided to emulate him, in pursuing science and dressing as a man, even becoming a de facto man of the house, enough for you to fear her!” The insect became excited, and when Joseph tried to interrupt, it silenced the beetle with a gesture. “You are not at fault, Mister Daud. I’m only glad that the culmination of her mental illness was a seizure, and not a murder spree. You have obviously been a hostage to her sickness for some time—no, don’t object, it is natural for long-time captives to feel sympathetic to their captors. Especially when they are family. Your sister may be afflicted by an Electra complex, homosexuality, or a combination of the two, and a matrilineal disease that may be a new manifestation of lunacy. If you will not commit her for research purposes, I do ask that you let me and my associates study her here, to see how best to treat her.”

“And you think a lobotomy would cure her…illness?”

“It’s worth it to try. Even if she recovers from her catatonia, she would still have her underlying illnesses that could manifest again in a more dangerous way. If you let us treat her, she may have a chance at living a normal life, or even one day finding a husband. It’s a simple, corrective procedure, with decades of research behind it.”

“I…I’ll think about it.” Joseph said. “I’ll have Méabh call you, when we’ve made a decision.”

I screamed as they said their goodbyes. The bug Joseph turned its head to me, but the white-winged insect just smiled and comforted him, saying that he had the cure. I bent my will towards killing them with my mind; with a thought, I could have destroyed this world from light-years away. But that was before I was forced back into the dead larva that was my body. O, Great Father, I begged, Please, please I need to return to your side. Grant my wish again and free me from this perdition!

I waited, waited for release. I waited through ages of pallid soups poured down my throat, through a plague of insects. The one named ‘Joseph’ was supposed to be my brother, and the one named ‘Méabh’ was a servant of some kind. I did not care for any of the others—most were medicine-bugs or concerned relations that I found myself wishing to kill in the moment but was too exhausted with the frustration of trying to fully register. They all expected the same deadness of me, and I concentrated so hard on not losing the formulae, the equations of the universe, that I did not even care to deny each creature the spectacle of useless meat that they came to see. I was, after all, trapped within so much useless meat.

One day, after Méabh had spooned more awfulness into my mouth (I made sure to spill as much as possible down my front in protest of its blandness), I heard the door downstairs open. That always meant a new tormentor, come to marvel at the embarrassment of empty flesh I had become. But this new spectre slammed the door shut without reverence, and stomped up the stairs in a hurry. I hoped against hope that it was someone here to kill me. Even the lobotomy had the chance of catastrophic failure. One could hope.

“I came as soon as I got Joe’s telegram. She’s had a stroke?” The voice at the doorway to my room said. No such luck, it seemed—just another visitor. Although, I’d never heard any of the past visitors call my brother “Joe” before.

“Aye, and a nasty one at that.” Méabh answered. “She’s a doughty bitch though, she’s pulled through. A bit of a fruitcake, but—”

“Where the fuck is he?”

“In the garden, doing his callisthenics. Shall I fetch him for you?” Méabh always had a sarcasm to her politeness. I appreciated her pettiness, and had the strange feeling that I had done so before. That’s why we kept her employed. I fought the memories back into the unevolved parts of my brain, the overworked higher functions of my mind poking it back with sharpened sticks like neanderthals would a woolly mammoth.

“Yeah, you do that, Mae.” The voice at the door was just as dry as the servant. I thought for a moment that they should fight to the death—that would at least be entertaining. There were many scenarios I pored over in my head, but I needed to see this stranger before I made judgement on its strength, size. Méabh’s footsteps, away. Then, the stranger’s bootshod hoofbeat, approaching my bed. In defiance, I ordered my face to twist away from it. I nearly managed to swing my head down and away, before a rough claw gripped the bottom of my face, and turned my head up towards the creature.

The first I noticed was its eyes. They were an etiolated blue-green, a chemical colour, like boric acid caught on fire. Nebulous, teal and jade not quite fully mixed together. The colour reminded me of my form when I was formless—my space-borne body of a past life and death. Remembering my life, my real life, made me sob—I only managed to choke in the callous-polished grip of the predator above me. Unruly black hair framed its face—a proud, fronted face, like a prey animal’s last sight. Furrowed in the brow, and hawkish in the nose. I heard the door downstairs, leading from the garden, open. I was for once grateful that Joseph was inbound, but knowing how timid he was, I didn’t hold out hope for salvation.

The creature’s tidepool eyes searched me, and seemed to find something it was looking for—or not. I could not tell. But the animal said, “Yeah…you’re still in there, aren’t you?” and released me, letting me fall slack against the headboard of my bed.

Joseph burst into the room in his embarrassing callisthenics uniform. “Jane!” He exclaimed when he saw the intruding animal. He was panting, sweat drying on his brown skin, hands akimbo on his hips. I had been wheeled out with him one morning to watch his routine (apparently I “needed the sunshine”) and was frankly so embarrassed I had managed to vomit in protest, one of my proudest achievements in my current near-life experience.

“Joey boy…” the creature, apparently hight ‘Jane’ (What a plain name for such an egregious monster, I thought), said, with no warmth in its voice. “Care to tell me what the fuck it is I’m hearing about a lobotomy?”

“That’s private medical information, Jane. How did you even—”

“I’m a private investigator. Knowing things is the reason she hired me, Joey. Or should I say, Joy?”

Oh, I liked this ‘Jane’ already. Not enough that I didn’t want to kill her for disturbing my soup time, but enough that I paid attention to the conversation.

“Don’t act like that’s impressive,” Joseph quavered. “She probably told you about my…performance art before all this.”

“Unlike me, she actually respects your privacy. And unlike me, she doesn’t have photo negatives of your ‘performances.’”

Joseph was aghast. “You wouldn’t.”

“What would happen to the respectable Joseph Daud if British society knew he was a transvestite?” Jane asked theatrically. “Drag is seemingly the extent of what you people consider comedy—I expect being a national laughingstock wouldn’t be good for your career as a lawyer, though.”

“Blackmail is illegal. I could ruin you.” Joseph switched tactics to threats, which he was never good at.

“Maybe here. But by the time the photographs go public, I’ll be on a boat halfway home, laughing my ass off.”

Joseph clenched and unclenched his fists. I knew he was considering murder—everyone considered murder in this sort of situation, I thought. It was a natural impulse. As soon as the shadow of violence passed from his face, he seemed to deflate. He was smaller, somehow, when he asked, “What do you want?”

“Call off the lobotomy.”

“I don’t…she’s in the Royal Society of Natural Science, she wants her body donated to it. I’m not sure I can legally call it off after I’ve signed the papers—”

“Delay it then, until I can get her out of the country.” Jane looked at me, and I was chilled by her ghostly eyes. They softened with an emotion that I found familiar, but couldn’t parse at the time. She looked at me in the same way that Joseph sometimes looked at the urn on the shelf across from my bed. “Donated to science,” she muttered.”Science would be the only sober individual interested in having her body.”

“I can’t let her leave the country.” Joseph looked at the floor, wringing his hands as he dithered. “She’s in a state…she doesn’t understand what’s happening. I helped her draft her will…look, she’s basically an inanimate object. Legally, she’s property…and no longer mine.”

“What woman isn’t property?” Jane joked humorlessly. “Especially in this country? What’s our loophole?”

“Loophole?”

“You’re the lawyer here,” Jane said, “What’s our out?”

Joseph’s voice dropped further. “I should have fought harder for her, but I didn’t…they shoved these papers from the Royal Society in front of me and had me sign…they have power of attorney over her.”

Fuck, I thought, That’s not good.

“Fuck,” Jane said. “That’s not good.”

Joseph shifted, timidly. “I suppose if…I suppose I could sue them. I wouldn’t have a chance in hell of winning, I’m the one who signed her rights away, but...it could tie this whole thing up in court for a few months. If she’s able to recover enough to show that she’s not brain-dead, and refuse the lobotomy of her own will, that might be enough to nullify their papers. I could buy us three months, tops, if I called in every favour…”

Jane slapped Joseph across the face, before grabbing him by the shoulders and kissing him on the forehead. “Attaboy Joey! Three months to get Ollie back on her feet? Easy!”

“Easy?” Joseph said, touching his cheek lightly.

“Give me three months and I’ll have her dancing again, Joey boy,” Jane said, before turning its horrible face aside to look at me sidelong, and winking. “Just like old times, ‘ey Ollie?”

My life became a series of days spent with Jane beside my bed, and nights spent trying to recall the forbidden knowledge of the cosmos, and the gateways into the true world beyond the fragile veil of this false dream. Jane had the mien of a cowboy and the mouth of a sailor, and so her attempts at alienism became a sort of contest of patience between the two of us; either I would lose patience first and decide to vomit on myself (one of the few voluntary actions I could take) just to interrupt her, or she would lose patience and swear at me before going downstairs to to the liquor cabinet.

I don’t want to be misunderstood—I wanted to get better. Only, Jane and Joseph’s definition of ‘better’ would mean getting up and speaking and walking about and being a base and ignorant animal again, and it differed greatly from my own definition, in that I wanted to exist as more than a sub-sentient mote of dust. There was no going back to who I was, to what I was. My human life had composed only a fraction of my time spent living. Remembering how to be a human wasn’t even a possibility—I had to relearn it, step by awful step. I was enthusiastic when Jane had begun her therapy with me. I liked Jane, in the same way that one likes a terrible spider—she kept pests away and was interesting to look at.

Jane did not like me. She kept looking at me like a gruesome memento mori, and sometimes when she entered the room without Joseph, she would groan “Oh, god” when she saw me, as if I was her own death staring back at her. She would take me through exercises, attempts to communicate with me, like following her fingers with my eyes (easy enough), or trying to converse with me (fucking impossible). I thought my progress was commendable, meteoric, even. I had mastered much in the short eternity of my practice.

For convenience, I have listed my skills below:

Vomit on command. Self-explanatory. If I had something in my stomach, all it took was a few moments of concentration and I could spit it up. This was not a mastery of my physical body so much as its reaction to my thoughts. Whenever I attempted to remember exactly who Jane was, or pondered my current condition as a human, my body would tremble and heave until I spat bile.
Look at things. This was a big ‘get’ for me, as I could not exactly get my eyes to reliably respond to my commands before my exercises with Jane. Although they would often become un-yoked and stare in different directions, a few blinks and I would be able to look in whatever direction I pleased.
Cosmic omniscience. Basically useless, as my meat-brain could not process any of the information it contained, and was quickly jettisoning the knowledge I had gleaned during my true life into unmemory. Still though, I think it was commendable that I contained more information than any human that had ever lived, even if I despised being a human so much that it made me sick (see: Numeral I).
Move my fingers. I had no reflex, and whether or not the correct finger I commanded to move would move was a gamble, but fine motor control notwithstanding, it was excellent progress that I could tell my body: “Move a digit,” and one of my digits would move. Nobody shared my enthusiasm at this progress.

The other powers at my disposal comprised jack shit. I could not speak, but would sometimes vocalize a babble—often without realizing I was doing it. When I tried to speak, I would say the same nonsense, or sometimes my mouth would flat-out refuse to comply and I would be silent. I must make it clear that my body was not my own. It was a prison that occasionally soiled itself, which embarrassed me very little but made Méabh very aggravated when she had to change my bedpan, and Méabh was perhaps the only person that I did not quite enjoy tormenting.

One evening, Méabh entered the room, clucking at Jane as she wiped my face with her bare hand. “You could at least use a towel.”

“There aren’t any clean ones. I’m beginning to get the feeling that she’s trying to puke on me.” Which was true.

“I’ve left a stack of clean ones in the downstairs lavatory.” Méabh said. “I’m going out to the theatre tonight with my husband. Joseph has asked me to hide the scotch from you, but I’ve left some in the decanter in the cabinet. Don’t leave any evidence for him to find when he comes home, though.”

“Thanks Mae,” Jane said, not turning away from me. “You need a ride?”

“Patrick is picking me up.”

“I could drive you both.”

“I won’t have you wrecking Mister Daud’s car just because you forget which side of the road to drive on, Jane.” There was no malice in Méabh’s voice, only warning.

“Alright, Mae. Have fun, and give Pat my love.” Jane said emptily. Her nickel oxide eyes were still fixed on me, and I squirmed with discomfort. Méabh stared at Jane’s back for a while, before leaving quietly. When the door shut and locked downstairs, Jane sighed, and finally closed her eyes, and wiped her face with her clean hand. She stood, and walked downstairs, returning shortly with a crystal decanter full of brown liquid, and a short tumbler. She sat in the chair by my bed and drank for a while.

I stared at the ceiling, and attempted to remember who she was, and tried to angle my head a certain way so that when I threw up, some of my bile would end up in her glass. Nothing came, though. I tried again, my mind probing towards the Primate Exhibit in the zoo of my memories, but—

“What did you say?”

I looked at Jane. She stared back in shock, her hand trembling around her drink, her eyes bloodshot around the prismatic calderas of her irises. She set her drink down on the table next to my bed, and grasped my hand. I was surprised at how gentle she was—she held my fingertips lightly, her thumb brushing against the back of my knuckle. She leaned close to me, close enough that I smelled the scotch on her breath, and asked, “Olivia, what did you say to me?”

Her grip was electric. My fingers twitched without my command. I turned to her, and we made eye contact again, but it was different, now. We both seemed to remember, and we both trembled with the memory. I opened my mouth. I vomited on her shoes.

After that, my dreams were more vivid, and more difficult to distinguish from reality. The reliable checkerboard of day and night had been replaced with the opaque tile of guessing whether I was dreaming or awake, the oscillation between sleep and unsleep, time and untime, memory and unmemory. I vomited more, and often without my conscious effort. Sometimes there was blood in my sick, or writhing masses of black, inky nothing. I had decided that the bloody vomit was of my waking world, as it was easier to understand the logic of the blood: I was dying.

In my dreams, then, my vomit would be a puddle of cosmic blackness so other to me and this world that I would faint and wake up—or I would stare at this wriggling thing of empty void, this absence of light and substance that pulsed, alive, in my lap, until one of my caretakers would exasperatedly clean it away. I would stay in that nightmare, aware, until the dark fell upon it and I could fall asleep; I could wake into reality, into the world I knew to hold real consequences for me…or so I once thought.

Sometimes, I would exist in this waking world, confident of its unwavering realness, and be disappointed by it, by its absurdity or mundanity in equal proportion. In both the waking and dreamt worlds Jane would just as often become disappointed in me, and in my lack of progress.

Once, she became so exhausted of me that she put down her book, climbed atop my bed, straddled my body and throttled me. She placed her sure, rough hands around my neck as gently as she had held my hand, and she squeezed the air from me. She stared at me with her anaemic eyes as my mouth frothed, my body struggled to breathe despite my gratitude at her merciful ending of my life—I was about to be free, I cried tears of thanks to her as she strangled me, and yet my body fought her with strength I hadn’t known myself capable of conquering.

It was not enough, of course. Jane was built of blood and gristle and mended bone and scarred flesh, and she choked the breath and life from me like she was built for it. She leaned ever closer to my dying face, her tanned blush lips inches from my bluing, drooling mouth, and relief crossed her face as she killed me, and I died.

I woke up, sparked awake by the haptic shock of my own brain-death, as if from a falling dream; a dream it had been, and it would be morning, or afternoon, or night—or an evening with another Jane sitting beside me in the rickety chair she had dragged from downstairs and placed by my bed, this Jane less murderous but equally impatient. I hadn’t been murdered; or I had, in another reality that I envied from my new prison.

Some dreams were less subtle. I would wake in my bed, just as broken and weak as before, but in my great and celestial body, the bright form I took in my godhood. The day would play out the same—Méabh would bring me soup, Joseph would talk to me about his anxiety for the coming day or the fretful eagerness of his weekends. Jane would sit at my bed and read to me, or she would sit and drink and stare, or she would exercise me and take notes. All the while I was a tendril mass of intelligence beyond them, spilling out from the bed and the room, a depth creature from the hadal zone of time and memory, dying on the surface world beneath the indifferent circuit of the sun like a beached man o’ war.

Another time, I dreamt that I was the animal husk—Doctor Olivia Daud, FRS, as she had been before the change. My larval stage, but cast falling forever through the cosmos. I was able to feel the cold and the heat of space, and flail about in the black of night and patient untime. I could see my greater self on the periphery of my eyesight as the same mass of tendrils I was in the bedroom. I could see my Father, sometimes, passing by me, ignoring my pleas for help as I reached out. When I awoke from this dream, I could not remember what He had looked like—as the great intelligence that had brought me into the cosmos, or as the fading portrait of a man who looked like Joseph but with a moustache and spectacles that hung on the wall across from my bed, above the urn that Joseph sometimes looked at.

Both of these eager, curious forms of me—the colossal butterfly of limbs and the meagre clump of cells, Doctor Olivia Daud, FRS, were dead. The dreams were my dying brain taunting me, as the memories from both lives oscillated from it like a tide—I would remember, sometimes, the smell after rain I had enjoyed on my walks. Of the shrieking sound of Joseph’s first dog when it was hit by a car. The formula that contracted time and space for the natural traversal of the infinite. These things would be replaced by the memories of my feverish nightmares, or lost altogether, or regained in sudden full colour and sensation as if I could live them again.

I still did not remember who Jane was. I no longer vomited reliably when I tried to—instead, I suffered a strange paralytic seizure for a few moments, a headache, and then vomited, usually admixed with blood in my waking dreams or the void-black nonsense in my sleeping dreams. When Jane or Méabh wiped my face, they would express shock at the amount of blood that had seeped from my nose, before going about cleaning the puddle of vomit or starless abyss from my lap. I often felt satisfaction at knowing when I was asleep, as if it was some victory over my imagination. It changed the prison of sleep very little.

All through this, Jane was consistent. She was by no means a lodestar—in fact, she confused my senses more than anything. She never changed from dream to waking, and followed predictable routines, but never did the same unpredictable thing twice. She never climbed atop my mattress to kill me again. She went downstairs once, and I heard the soft notes of a piano—she played a song that bounced against my enclosed memories like a hot spike, but never penetrated the membrane that locked me from remembering. She seemed to grow tired of the tune, and slammed the keys, before stomping to the liquor cabinet once more. She cried that night, another regular occurrence, and I fell asleep to the sound, only to wake into another rehearsed nightmare of black vomit and fainting spells.

Once I imagined that she took the revolver from a holster she wore inside her jacket and placed it against my temple, but did not pull the trigger. I realized only days later that it was a memory, that Jane had once done that before my metamorphosis—but as soon as I remembered it, it left the grasp of recall, and was a ship of Theseus constructed of imagined boards and suggested sails. It was something I could remember her doing, but not the when, the where, or even the if of it—perhaps that too had been only a half-remembered dream.

She would attempt her alienist exercises only in the early day when she considered herself and her subject the freshest. Some tasks were familiar, like following her hand with my eyes, always in a new pattern, until she was satisfied. Sometimes she would snap her fingers near my head to test my auditory senses, with mixed results—sometimes I would hear an echo, and sometimes, nothing at all. Sometimes she would massage my useless limbs until I was sore; she was never gentle about it. She would change the formulae of my meals, something that Méabh and her often argued about. The food was always invariably hot and tasteless, even when served cold to me. I could only taste my own bile anymore, and only feel the heat of my own fever.

In the midday, she would read aloud articles from National Geographic, Scientific American, Вокруг света, Science et la Vie, and journals from the Royal Society, apparently for my benefit; or from novels by American authors (whom she loudly preferred to English ones), apparently to stave off her own boredom with keeping me. I was tired of Melville and Faulkner and Twain and Sinclair and Norris, and even of the occasional Jules Verne novel she read to me, seemingly as a treat. But the noise of her sonorous, mournful voice was soothing, and despite never quite listening to her words, the midday time that she read to me was when my brain was most active—it was often when I could discover which reality I was trapped within without needing to vomit my breakfast up, or when I could remember some part of my two erstwhile lives. I no longer treated my great and cosmic life to be any more precious than my human larval stage: they were both shifting away from me that the remembrance alone was enough to satisfy my desperation for something concrete, a moment to hold in my dying brain.

In the evening, she would drink. These were her most chaotic times, the times where she was most aberrant to her schedule. The sky outside the circular window of my room would darken, and she would either retreat downstairs to steal from the liquor cabinet, or to shout at Joseph—they would row like an old married couple. She would sometimes prepare food down in the kitchen with Méabh, occasionally sitting down for a noisy supper with Joseph and Méabh. She rarely did, though, often secreting her meals upstairs to eat in silence next to me, apparently just to nauseate me with the smell. Since the night I had apparently spoken, she took care to watch me in the evenings, drinking slowly in front of me, as if she didn’t quite trust the bottle of whiskey she often brought upstairs with her with her meals.

As far as I knew, she hadn’t discussed my moment of lucid speech with anyone. This frustrated me—wasn’t this the sign that everyone had been looking for? She said nothing of it in front of me, and only her behaviour changed; she applied her therapy with more rigour, and watched me with more care, and only abandoned her attempts when I had vomited too much or bored her too deeply.

Whatever I had said, it had shaken her deeply. I wanted to know the words in only a passive sense, in the way that Joseph sometimes asked Méabh about her family: without any interest beyond the fact that it had happened, and existed in this world beyond my direct observation or memory. Sometimes, when Jane set down her book or her glass of booze and just watched me, I stared back into her aspen-in-summer eyes and wanted to beg, Please, Jane, just tell me what I said!

I still could not speak, and I did not speak again in that unconscious manner that had startled her. Eventually I became exhausted with my attempts at communication and resigned myself to the routine of waking nightmares—I felt as if years had passed, but from what I could gather, it had only been a few weeks since I had first spoken without my awareness or volition.

Jane ate a clementine by my bed, once. I remember her peeling it carefully with her fingers, and splitting it in half, placing one of the halves on the table by my bed, near enough that I could take it if I had the power to reach out. She ate her half slowly, peeling away each part of it. I watched her carefully as she finished each petal of the clementine in two bites each, determined.

She stood and went downstairs to discard the peel. I opened my eyes. I had not been aware that they were closed—had I just imagined her? Filled in the blanks where I had heard her sounds? I looked at the clementine-half near me. I could already smell it, sickly-sweet like it was rotting.

It remained on my bedside table. I’m sure it had been cleaned up, eventually. But some days I would still see it, as fresh as it had been when Jane had separated it. Sometimes I would not see it but I would smell it, the citrus rot of it burning in my nose. It was there where I truly realized I had passed through the waist of the hourglass: I was fully mad. Insanity ran in my family, and it sprinted now within my mind. Even at my most lucid I would remember the orange, and by remembering, I would conjure its sight or its smell some way or another. It would exist to me as anything else existed to the insane: stuck halfway in the door between dream and reality.

Another day passed; another eternity stretched before me. Today, though, was different, different enough that I had forced myself to vomit early after my breakfast to check if it was not another flight of fancy. I scried the bile on my lap for the truth of blood or falsehood of squirming dark; there was nothing that morning but the sick and the chunks of peas that Méabh had put in my morning stew for nutrient value. Jane had arrived late, and smelled even deeper of alcohol. When she entered my room, she was disgusted to find that the doctor-insect had returned. She looked at him like the pest he was, which I appreciated, as Joseph seemed to give him nothing but deference and Méabh just gave him a wide berth.

“Ah, Jane, this is Doctor Smith with the Royal Society. Doctor.” Joseph said, with a polite smile that seemed to serve as a warning to Jane.

“Ah yes, the American friend,” the doctor said, proffering his hand. Jane took it, but said nothing—a muscle in her jaw twitched with the force she clenched her teeth. The doctor seemed to wince at her grip, but did not comment on it.

“You’re the fellow who recommended the lobotomy, right?” Jane asked, her teeth still seeming unwilling to part.

“That’s right—I take Miss Daud’s case very seriously. I still believe that she can be saved.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” Jane scoffed, with the caged hostility that I knew she usually reserved for very stupid people, or Belgians.

“I’m aware how you feel about the procedure, but please, today I am just here to re-examine the patient at Mister Daud’s request,” the doctor said. “I assure you, I will only ever be here as an observer.”

“Ah, in the Observer Corps, were you?” Joseph attempted levity. “I was in the R.A.F. myself.” Everyone stared at him until he looked at the floor and mumbled about helping Méabh with tea, before shuffling off downstairs. I was left alone in the room with the doctor and Jane, who made eye contact with a level of animosity that could probably kill a small rodent.

The doctor broke first. He ducked from Jane’s gaze to sit on the edge of my bed, gingerly taking my limp arm by the wrist and moving it over my stomach. I tried to throw up on him, but was unfortunately out of ammunition, and simply coughed up a clot of blood. Jane stepped forward to wipe it from my mouth, but the doctor produced a handkerchief first and cleaned my face.

“You’ve been one of her caretakers, yes?” he asked, studying the blood on the cloth.

“Yes.” Jane’s voice gave nothing away. She stared down at the doctor with the bearing of a hawk circling its prey.

The doctor pressed his fingers to my temples, looked into my ears, up my nose, into my mouth while depressing my tongue with his thumb, all while I was helpless to do so much as bite him. I was aware that I made some noises during all this. Jane’s face grew more indignant at the doctor’s observations, but she did not move to stop him. She kept almost perfectly still as she watched, hands akimbo on her hips. She breathed loudly through her bent, aquiline nose, like a pissed-off kettle.

He seemed to be ignorant of her disdain, or was perhaps too well-bred to indulge it. “How long have you known Miss Daud?” he asked absently, while holding his fingers against my neck and staring at his watch.

“Doctor.” Jane said.

“Hm?”

“It’s Doctor Daud. She even has a fellowship in your little Royal Science club.” Jane glowered at the doctor with a malice that she didn’t even have for Joseph at the height of their arguments.

“Ah yes…” the Doctor said, a bit of fear bleeding into the edges of his voice. “Did you…are you aware of her illnesses?”

Jane crossed her arms. “To paraphrase what Joseph told me, you’ve diagnosed her with being a horse-faced virago. While I don’t disagree, I don’t believe it’s something she requires medical attention for.”

The Doctor turned his attention to her, and raised his eyebrow.

“And now, you’re thinking to diagnose me with the same, of course,” Jane declared, loudly. “Psychology is a sciolist’s pursuit, for quacks and flim-flam men to control women and embarrass men. New-age Pharisees of an old-age doctrine.”

The Doctor folded his hands in his lap, watching her.

Jane continued, “Well, I’m not intimidated by you! This is the twentieth century—you know, the Bolsheviks have got equal rights for women, they’ve got doctors and lawyers and even headshrinkers like you who are women. If Olivia wants to wear trousers and swear and smoke and play bridge, she can! Your judgement doesn’t make us sick or disturbed, you’re just another English prot who hates suffrage and Irish independence and immigrant families like hers,” she nodded violently towards the bed. I was not aware that I was an ‘immigrant family’ until now, but she did not stop to allow the revelation any air, “You’re the type who breaks up families, families that don’t conform to what your religion or science deems fit to exist. Well, I can exist, and she can exist. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the only sick person in this house!”

The Doctor and I both stared at her. She trembled with rage and shame and something I didn’t quite understand. I tried to vomit again, mostly for the comedic effect, and to ruin the Doctor’s white coat, but all I managed was a hiccough that they both ignored. Jane stared at the doctor, grinding her teeth together. The Doctor stared back, opened his mouth—closed it again, after consideration. He took off his glasses, frowned, and said, “She hurt you too, didn’t she?”

Jane’s jaw twitched again, and she wavered when she announced: “I’m going to help Méabh and Joseph with tea,” before leaving my room and stomping down the stairs in the way she only did when she was drunk or had just cried.

The Doctor turned back to me, and grimaced, almost apologetic. He grabbed a large medical bag he had left on Jane’s chair and pulled it to his lap. After some rummaging, he produced a few bottles, three needles, and a syringe, and some medical apparatus that I did not recognize: its shape was familiar to me, and passed through some thing-shaped hole in my memory, but did not represent any archetypal concept like the others did that filled in the gaps of what it was. He cleaned a bit of my arm, drew something from the second-smallest bottle into the syringe, and injected me, the same apologetic smile on his face. I quickly realized that it was morphine—and with the muted, belated panic of those unfamiliar with opium taking their first dose, that it was too much. As I began to lose consciousness, sinking into the warm comfort of stupor, the Doctor said: “Now we can have ourselves a bit of privacy.”

I woke up to the sound of rain pattering on the circular window in my room. I could not tell what time it was by the darkness outside. The electric light was buzzing overhead. The doctor sat on the edge of my bed, in the same place he had before the rain. I felt strangely alert; I had assumed that after an opium coma, one would at least feel groggy. I looked down at his medical tools, which lay on a towel spread over my legs. He was packing them away slowly into his bag, but I saw the un-remembered medical apparatus and a vial of india ink among the few tools still remaining. When he placed the ink vial into his bag, the liquid did not seem to swirl or move, and was fathomless black as to even suck the shine from the glass that trapped it. I closed my eyes. This is a dream, I told myself. It smelled of oranges and antiseptic in my room.

“You must think you’re very clever,” the Doctor said, not interrupting his work. “Or, perhaps,” he placed the apparatus into the bag, “You think you’re very stupid, to have gotten where you are now.”

I remained a hostage to my sleeping body, and did not speak. He continued, without need of interruption or reply, “You thought, perhaps, you could cheat the Royal Society. That you could join us, and steal from us, as if we wouldn’t find out. As if you wouldn’t end up like this. Like father, like daughter, then? Thieves to the core.
“Every lazy thief likes shortcuts,” he continued. “It’s their moral failing, the trait that always trips them up in the end. You stole our research to further your ends, and you ended up like the test patients. Maybe better off, maybe worse. I don’t know what sort of message you sent, but I seriously doubt anything out there has the time to listen to you. Doesn’t concern me—I’m just here to clean up after your mess.

“I can’t let you die, of course. You survived down there for longer than any of the test subjects, without even a diving bell around you. I do expect to find some surprises when we finally open you up and get a good look at that brain of yours.” He seemed to see something in my face that I did not intend to show, that I did not even know myself capable of showing, and he smiled. “Oh, yes. We’re very patient. Not all knowledge is revealed in one lifetime, although, I am rather anxious to see what happened to it. The leucotomy will give you a few years, good years to forget you were ever down there. We don’t need to know what you saw, if you thought that could save you. I just want to take a look at what’s growing in there.” He tapped my forehead a few times.

“Although,” he said, “I do consider the leucotomy a bit of a peek at the presents before Christmas. We’ll take that egg out, whatever’s in there, and make you functional. I’ll have your brother kissing my feet in gratitude while you live out your last years as a normal person. ‘What a terrible fate,’ you must think, ‘to be made to be merely average.’ It’s worse than death for arrogant people like you. It’s what you deserve; and I think, when my work is finished, you’ll agree.”

I was mostly confused, because, well, what the fuck was he talking about? But I did fear being average. Average was a mathematical term. Normal was even worse; it was just a fucking line, an imaginary standard against deviation. I was much more than a line, even confined to my bed. He seemed to detect my panic, and smiled again. “I love normal people. Given my work, meeting them is such a rarity. I might even like you, once you’ve been fixed.” He looked down at his hands, and smiled. “I’ve always liked to fix things, fix people. In another life, I think I would have been a bronzeworker, fixing broken boats and wagons. Iron and copper. But in this life, I fix broken people, of flesh and blood. Brain and heart. Consider that, Miss Daud. I know you can hear me in there.” He closed his bag, and stood. “It makes it easier to be fixed when you accept that you’ve been broken. He crossed the room, to the lightswitch, and flicked the electric light off.

I woke up. The room smelled like tea. The Bronzeworker was gone. Jane sat in her chair, sipping from a cup and reading a book. I stared at her, and thought of how much I preferred her to the Bronzeworker that had drained my blood. I watched her, confident in my insanity, reminding myself that dreams were dreams, and this was real, and that even when the two became indistinguishable, this would remain more real than any. I found myself pleased that Jane was real, and the Bronzeworker was not. Eventually my eyes became too heavy to bear open, and fell asleep to the sound of the pattering rain.

My mouth was dry when I awoke. The shades had been drawn, but I could tell the time was about early evening, because Jane was reading a novel silently in her chair next to me. I looked at her, and smacked my lips. She didn’t even look up from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I exercised my mind for a moment, trying to think of ways I could psychically flay her if only I had the capability, in that idle way that you can only really do when you are both monumentally bored and deprived of your former godhood. I focused my energy towards mentally exploding her for nearly a full minute when I finally relented, and decided to go back to sleep as a means to escape my thirst. Maybe in my dream I would be less dehydrated.

Jane did not look up, but intoned, “Hmm?” before turning a page.

“I said I want some water,” I repeated.

She set her book down with the spine up to keep her page, and took the glass and pitcher that sat on my bedside table, pouring me a drink and tipping it to my lips. I drank, and sputtered a bit, but kept it down. She replaced the glass on the table, and picked her book back up. She stared at the page for a moment, but her eyes did not move across them. She then looked back up at me. I stared at her with the same realization. I had just spoken.

Jane set the book back down, spine-up, without hurry or hesitation. She crossed her legs at the knee and laced her fingers together, and leant forwards, her brow furrowing. She said, “Did you just—?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think I did.”

She shot up from her seat. “Ollie, you can talk!”

“I can speak.” I said, already irritated.

“Ollie!” Jane reached forward and wrapped her arms around me. Her grip was suffocating, and the contact of the rough fibres of her shirtwaist burned my skin.

“Off! Off!” I demanded from beneath her iron grip. She retreated, an idiot smile on her idiot face. “Listen, you buffoon. I need you to do something.”

“Anything, you mean little bastard.” She looked happier than I could remember ever seeing her.

“I need you to stick your fingers down my throat.”

“Oh but Ollie, this is all so sudden,” she taunted. “You really ought to take me out for dinner first—”

“Shut up, you fucking nuisance,” I snarled from the bed. “I need you to trigger my gag reflex, now.”

Jane smiled again, wide enough that I could see that two of her molars were capped with silver. She said, “Thought you’d never ask,” and before I could curse her more, she grabbed my chin from underneath with her left hand, deftly wetting two fingers from her right in the glass of water and pushing them inside my mouth, feeling for my oesophagus, before pressing my uvula back. Bile chased her fingers from my mouth, and I threw up into my lap, with Jane moving her left hand from my chin to my back, pulling my hair away from my face. I emptied myself into the towel that had been kept semi-permanently down my front ever since I had regained the ability to puke to keep Méabh from having to wash my sheets every time I spat something up, voluntarily or otherwise.

When I finished vomiting, I looked into the mess. A squirming hole in reality floated in my vomit, a window into starless night. I shuddered and laid back against the headboard. “Fuck,” I managed to gasp out.

“I’ll say. That’s a lot, even for you.” Jane sighed, grabbing a bucket from below the bed.

I closed my eyes so that I would not have to look at that moulin of falling dreams, to not have the void stare back at me. “Jane, what do you see in it?”

“The breakfast that Mae worked very hard to make you, and what I would guess is an ounce, ounce and a half, maybe, of blood?” I felt the shifting weight of the towel being pulled off of me, and heard the sound of it being dumped into the bucket, my mouth being wiped with the corner of the towel before the bucket was placed on the floor. None of it was gentle. The sounds and feelings assaulted me like a hailstorm on a windowpane. “Sorry, I never got into tasseography,” she continued. “Maybe we could ask Mae what it means. Tea leaves are a hobby of hers, I think.”

“Fuck…” I groaned. “It’s a dream. This is a dream.”

“As long as you’re talking again, I’m happy. I consider it progress.” Jane said, or, the dream of Jane said, pressing the towel into the bucket with her foot. It made an awful squelching noise that made me want to throw up again.

“Jane,” I tried to keep the tremor from my voice, but it had been so long since I knew how to speak that I’d forgotten how to control my vocal cords. Even in a dream, I was still useless. “Jane…more water.”

She gave me more water. I didn’t even care that she had put her fingers in it. Nor that she didn’t wash her hands before or after sticking them down my throat. It didn’t matter—it was a dream, after all. She set the glass down, and refilled it, but I refused a second glass. The taste burned in my throat. She asked, “Ollie, what happened to you?”

I blinked, hard, and shook my head. “My questions first. I haven’t been able to ask anything. I can’t ask the real Jane, but you will suffice in her place.”

“Good to know I’m sufficiently Jane enough for you.”

I shut my eyes tightly and wiggled my head, which was as close to a ‘Shut Up!’ motion that I could make. “First, why didn’t you tell anyone when I first spoke?”

The dreamt simulacrum of Jane sat back in her chair, then lifted herself slightly to scoot the chair closer to the bed. “When you first spoke?”

“I don’t perceive…time, the same way.” I didn’t open my eyes. There was a pain growing in my head, some migraine of the midbrain that swelled with a new hot sting the more I spoke. “I said something, and don’t remember saying it, but I remember you asking what I said.”

“Oh. That was about a month ago…I thought you’d said something, but I…I assumed it was a dream myself. I thought I drank some bad liquor, or was imagining things.”

“What did I say?” I rasped.

I heard Dream-Jane shift in her chair. “You said—and I’m quoting here—you said: ‘Be still…’” I expected her to continue, but she said nothing.

I furrowed my brows, and opened one of my eyes, puzzled by the fragment of a statement I had apparently declared. Dream-Jane looked back at me with her searching, uranium-coloured eyes, her chin resting on her fist. I closed my eye again. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Hence me chalking it up to a memory,” she said, before quickly adding: “Or a dream.”

“A dream…” I repeated. My life had turned to dreams, and I could not even count on my caretakers to report their realities correctly. I heard Dream-Jane take a sip of the water that still likely had some of my spittle and bile floating in it. Yuck.

She asked, “Can I ask my questions now?”

“No,” I said. Then, more gently, “Not yet. I have more questions—and I’m afraid…I know that if I answer you, I’ll fall asleep again, or die of remembering…or you’d kill me.”

“Fair enough. I’ve wanted to kill you plenty of times, especially over the past few months.”

I wanted to say, You did. I wanted to tell her, In a dream not unlike this, you strangled me to death, gentler than you had ever touched me before. Instead I asked: “Who are you?”

“You told me that I was a dream, which might be the nicest thing you’ve said to me in years.” Dream-Jane said.

“No, I mean, who are you to me?” I opened my eyes and stared at her. The pupils of her eyes were like the voids in my vomit, the scars in reality that told me she was not real. “I have no memory of you from before my…circumscription to this bed, to this body.”

She smiled the leery, crooked smile she shared with Joseph when she goaded him into suing the Royal Society. “Why would I answer that? It means I have a fresh start in your eyes.”

“Jane…” I closed my eyes again. Her smile made the migraine spike in my head. It felt like my brain was a thin balloon full of oil and air. “Please, Jane.”

I heard her shift in her seat. She was silent for a while, before she declaimed: