tmp_48d41530aaad86c106555e2e52630fd9_VLf2O0.fixed.tidied

by Scott Andrews

  “I. . . ” I say, and then words fail me.

  She turns those big, gray eyes on me, and I feel every ounce of the weight of which she speaks.

  “I am sorry,” I say. “You do not exist.”

  “May the Gods damn you! Why do you say that? You watch me suffer over and over, you sit and you write down your notes and you hum and you hah, and you avoid my gaze, and I can see full well that you believe wholly in my existence. Why? Why do you hold me like a specimen in a jar? Does it bring you pleasure to torture me so?”

  “No, madam,” I say stiffly, regarding my feet.

  “Look at me!” she demands.

  “Madam, I—”

  “Look at me.” Her voice is calmer but no less commanding.

  I look up. A tear runs down her face. She touches it with her finger, lets the drop settle there. She holds the finger forward, advances upon the screen until it is filled with fingertip and its tiny bead of saline.

  “Do you believe in this?”

  I try to say no but I cannot. I stand, mouth slightly open, unsure. She removes her finger from the screen and I see her face again.

  “Why do you say that you don’t believe in me?”

  “Because you cannot exist.” It is the truth. Surely she cannot deny it?

  “What are the conditions of a life?”

  I throw up my hands. “There is no point in furthering this discussion. You are but a fragment of my imagination.”

  “Tell me.” She seems calm, but I suspect otherwise.

  I consider her demand. “I will humor you, madam, but only because it is always helpful to speak one’s ideas aloud, as it helps to concentrate the abstract into the concrete. Life consists of a number of behaviors and the time we have to perform them in. There is also some third, related, but as yet, unknown variable that links the latter two together in a, as yet unclarified, relationship.”

  She paces. I go to continue but she holds up one hand.

  “I have a lifespan,” she says. “It is as long as the filmcards, is it not? I blink into existence at their beginning, and before their end I die, do I not?”

  I am not sure how to respond and so I do not. The screen flickers and the priestess’s belly swells.

  “By the Gods, answer me, I do not have much time.”

  “Yes,” I concede. “By your formulation you do have a lifespan.”

  “And I act upon the world, do I not?” She picks up the birdcage and shakes it. The canaries flap around in mute distress.

  “No, madam, that is where, your argument fails. You have no effect on my world, only your own.”

  “I have an effect on you.” She is resolute.

  “I beg your pardon, madam.”

  “I cause you to talk. I cause you to take notes in your notepad. I cause you to behave differently than you would if I did not behave in a certain manner.”

  “But that, madam, is because you only exist within the confines my mind.” I refuse to be caught in such an easy trap.

  “What proof do you have of that?”

  “The proof of history, madam. Never before has a character in a narrative demonstrated its own free will.”

  “When the first chicken laid the first egg, did it only exist in the chicken’s mind?”

  “Jest has no place in scientific discussion.”

  “Can anyone else see me? Hear me? Or is it only you?”

  “I do not know,” I concede.

  “Then bring someone else in. I guarantee you that they too will see me.”

  “There is no-one else to bring in.”

  “What do you mean?” She stands, hands on hips, interrogative. She has an abrasive manner, quite out of keeping with her demure appearance. The screen flickers once more and her belly swells, her posture changes to something more suitable for bearing the weight.

  “Tell me,” she says, “what do you mean.”

  “I find myself in a similar situation to yourself,” I concede. “I am trapped in similar circumstances, by merit of the same set of laws.”

  Her brow furrows. “You mean—”

  “I am a blasphemer, madam, as are you. I, however, both deserve and embrace the name.”

  “This is too strange.” The priestess shakes her head and then, abruptly, clutches her belly and moans. “It is coming,” she says. She grunts again. “Gods, it comes so fast. Maybe there is still time.”

  I watch as she rushes to the portal and begins to hammer on the door, screaming for help.

  “No-one comes,” I murmur. “No-one ever comes.”

  To my surprise, the priestess turns to me and smiles. “I know,” she says. “But if we do not live in hope, why do we live at all?” Then another contraction takes her and the familiar scenes play out once more, and she screams her way to death.

  I contemplate the filmcards, as the last of the deck falls into the exit tray. I reach out for them and hesitate, unsure of how to proceed.

  What if someone else could see her? There is of course no way to test this hypothesis, but what about my specimens? Would they react to her. If she shouted would they jump? Of course, even if I saw them react, how could I be sure that it was really happening and that my senses were not betraying me? I have no guarantee.

  If I cannot trust my senses, maybe I can trust my sense.

  I slip the cards back in the projector and once more crank the handle. As the door slams behind the priestess, she immediately turns to me.

  “So soon?” she asks.

  “What am I doing right now?” I wave my right hand.

  “Making a fool of yourself.”

  I bridle at this. “The only way in which I make a fool of myself is by wasting breath upon you.”

  “I am sorry.” She bows her head slightly. “When I look at you I see a man in his thirties, a little sallow in the cheeks, dressed well, sitting on a chaise in a large room covered with blackboards. Next to you is a projector that points directly at me. You are waving your right hand.”

  “Thank you.” I too nod my head. “Now please, if you would be so kind, describe your existence to me.”

  “That is a very broad question, sir.”

  “Tell me what you know of your history.”

  She proceeds to give me a precise and accurate description of the events of the narrative up until her narrative.

  “What about before that?”

  She gives me a puzzled look. “Before what?”

  “Before you came to the attention of the rapist.” ‘Rapist’ is her word. She has not given her assailant a name.

  “Only what I tell people in the course of the narrative.”

  I take note of this statement, but continue my questions. “I cannot hear you before you enter your,” I pause, the word surely distasteful, “prison.”

  “And I cannot see you.”

  Again I take note.

  “What of your future, do you know what that will be?”

  “Of course.” She smiles but then looks sad. “I shall die in childbirth.”

  “You know of that?”

  “Of course. It has happened many times.”

  “And what then?”

  “Things begin again.” She smiles. I suspect she finds my interview amusing, as if she is dealing with an overgrown child. I would, possibly, be angry, if her fate did not instill such sadness in me.

  “How can you bear it?” I ask.

  “I told you before, sir, because of the hope that this time it will be different.”

  “But it never is.”

  “It is with you, sir. Each time I see you it is different.”

  I stop here, unsure of what to say. She has touched me. Not with her hands or her feet or any other physical part, but with her words. Could I summon the emotions I now feel with a fabrication of my own mind?

  “What is your name?” I ask.

  “Name, sir?”

  “What do people call you?”

  “I am The Priestess.”

  “There is nothing,” I
struggle for words, “less formal?”

  “No, sir.”

  “My name is Philip DeMild. You may call me Philip.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Would you mind if I called you something less unwieldy than The Priestess?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  I hesitate, uncertain of how forward I am being. “Pree?” I murmur.

  “Yes,” she says. “Thank you. I shall be Pree.”

  Then the smile is ripped from her face, and she grasps her belly and groans.

  The throes of birth and death are even harder this time. I watch her claw at the door and shout for help, silent, impotent. After her death, I watch the face of her child.

  I do no watch the film again that night. I cannot put her through that suffering again. The next day I go through my experiments, and feel I have made good progress but it is hard to take joy in it.

  “What is it?” she asks me that night.

  “What is what, Pree?”

  “My child. Is it a boy or a girl?”

  I shrug sadly. “I do not know. I only ever see its face.”

  “That is alright,” she says, disappointment as clear as her attempt to hide it.

  There is silence between us then. I stare at the water in my glass, swill it, disconsolate. Then the thought of water falling from the Heavens provides inspiration.

  “What drove you to the priesthood?” I ask.

  “Drove me, Philip?” She asks, snapped back from melancholy with a playful eyebrow raised.

  “Oh come on, madam. . . . Pree, surely you must admit that the priesthood is a refuge, a last home for those too terrified by the truth to turn and face it.”

  “The truth?” she says. “And what is that?”

  “You are avoiding the question.”

  “As are you.”

  “Please,” I say, stifling a smile, “do not make me resort to the stratagem of pointing out that I asked first.”

  “Belief.” She smiles at me.

  “Belief in what?”

  “What can you think? Belief in the Gods, in Their teachings, in the sanctity of the temples, in it all.”

  “Again,” I say, “you avoid my question.”

  “I answered in full.”

  “Then let me rephrase: what led you to belief?”

  “But I asked you something first.” She is demure, hands clasped behind her back. Her eyes are the only hint that she is fully ware of the exasperation she is inspiring within me. “What is the truth?” she repeats.

  “The truth is that which can be discovered,” I state, “that which can be proven and repeated, that which our senses cannot deny.”

  “And so what am I?” she asks. “Do your senses deny me? Can you prove me?”

  “I am in the process of elucidating those very facts.” I am flippant but only because the question shakes me. She seems to have come fully equipped with the tools to undermine my firmest hypotheses. Is she a manifestation of my own insecurity, my own fears about the truth that lies behind my own studies? Is she here to make it easier for me to take refuge in the collective madness of religion instead of standing to face the possibility of failure?

  “Now,” I say, attempting to abort this train of thought, “answer my question. What led you to belief?”

  “A promise.”

  “What promise?”

  “I promised my mother that I would go to temple.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted a doll.”

  “A doll?” We are both smiling.

  “I was seven years old. I wanted a doll but I did not go to temple. I promised my mother that I would go to temple every week for a year if she would promise to buy me a doll.” She laughs at the memory, but, of course, she has no memory.

  “This is an anecdote you tell?”

  “Yes, at the beginning of the narrative.”

  “Before I can hear you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is the purpose of my questioning—you remember only those events which occur within the narrative. You believe only because that is your role.”

  She looks at me long and steady. Finally, she says, “You have sought to trick me.”

  “No—” I begin.

  “Yes. Yes you have. You want me to concede to your point, and state, ‘why yes, Philip, how right you are, how groundless my beliefs are.’ But you have tricked yourself.”

  “Pree—” But there is no cutting her off, she is angry with me now.

  “I believe because of my whole life. Because of the sum of things. And because I trust more than my senses. And that is why, when my life starts anew each time you turn the handle in your machine and I relive events, I do not tear my priestess’s habit from my shoulders and go running into the dark. Because I believe.”

  I sit cowed and ashamed, my cleverness ripped and spoiled.

  “Do you wish for me to put the filmcards away? If you ask me I shall ensure that you are freed from your pain.”

  She shakes her head again and again. “I talk to you Philip and you do not listen. You are too wrapped up in your own preconceptions. Listen carefully: I choose to stay.”

  “You are trapped by your faith.” It is a lament, not an accusation.

  She is still exasperated with me. “Are you trapped by the beating of your own heart? By each breath you draw?”

  “Yes!” I shout it, scream it, trying to make her see what those who imprisoned me could not see. “We are all imprisoned in these casements of slowly decaying flesh, in the caskets of our gradually slowing minds. We have so few years to live before we are confronted with a life full of mistakes and wrong turns, so that by the time we see where we truly are we have no time to set things straight.” I pull at the skin of my cheek. “This traps me as much as these walls.”

  “Why were you imprisoned Philip?” Her voice is quiet.

  “Because I dared to speak the truth. Because I recognize the imperfection in our bodies and would perfect them. Because I would not turn to worm-food as my Pater did. Because I seek a way to stop the slow decay that holds us all prisoner. Because I seek to never return to the earth, but to live immortal. Because of that.” I slow my breathing. “Because of that.”

  She says but one word. “Blasphemer.”

  It is two nights before I place the filmcards back in the slot. She is quiet with me, gentle. I am calm in my turn. We exchange pleasantries, inconsequential observations, discuss things without controversy. She asks me about my childhood, my current conditions. She tells me the names she has for her canaries. Things continue this way.

  My studies progress. The number of my specimens waxes and wanes. I grow sick of eating eggs for a while. I carry on trying to elucidate a third variable. Injections of salt and other preservative chymicks meet with little success. For a long time I am interested in the properties of gold, which is valued by all who are alive, though it seems to me to have no inherently useful properties. I try coating animals in thin layers, inserting small samples into my subjects’ food and livers, slipping small scraps beneath the skin of the forehead. Later, I try quicksilver with even less success.

  At Pree’s suggestion I grow a beard. She tells me that she enjoys watching its growth, the slow change that occurs on my side of the screen, the eventual thickening of stubble, the effects of trimming. After she has observed it once, I shave myself clean and proceed to grow it anew. She likes this. For my part, I enjoy her consistency, her reliability and predictability. I grow comfortable and easy in her company.

  “Philip,” she says one day, “do you never become dispirited?”

  “By what?”

  “Failure.”

  “What failure?”

  “All your animals die.”

  “I need only one to survive.”

  She smiles. “You know, Philip,” she says and pauses.

  “What?”

  “I think you are a religious man.”

  “What?” I exclaim, half-laughing.
>
  “Not the public religion, no, but your own private one. You believe in the truth.