Nawashi

by Gray Miller

  She closed her eyes for a moment and hummed. Brian didn’t recognize the tune, but it soothed him, winding in and around his consciousness with a soft, relaxing touch that had just enough syncopation to add a little energy to his spirit, and keep him from losing consciousness entirely. The melody went on for several minutes, then her hand again hovered for a moment over his neck, and he felt the heat of her hand sinking in again and sealing the melody into his bones so that when she stopped, a moment later, he still heard the soft flow of notes weaving through his useless muscles and frame. She leaned forward and whispered, “Stay with us a bit longer, Nawashi. They are almost here.”

  He couldn’t even murmur his assent or thanks. In spite of the song, he felt his reserves draining around, and the sounds in the room, the feeling of the comforter, they all grew more distant, no matter how much he concentrated on staying in touch with them. He suddenly wished for the rope again, just to give him that line, that place to go and hover in the luxury of the now…

  “That’s all?” Sullivan’s voice, suddenly harsh, gave him a momentary respite, a rock to slow his rush into the tide of unconsciousness. “You’re going to hum some tune and that’s going to take care of him? How about calling someone? You’ve got to know someone… damn, if only Mistress Alicia wasn’t at the Crucible this weekend… Come on! We have to do something! I didn’t lose my house and get fucking shot at just so we could bleat a little Irish ditty at him and let him fade!”

  “Bleat?” The single word came out of her mouth with a soft tone that still seemed to stop Sullivan’s tirade with the suddenness of a slap. “Sometimes, Sullivan, you are the true avatar of the Green One, and we love you for it. Right now, though, you are simply being Man, and I would ask you to stop it while in Inanna’s house.”

  Brian could almost hear Sullivan’s pout. “I just think that one of us should be calling for somebody that knows how to… ”

  “They have been called. They are, in fact, here.” The faint sound of a door opening somewhere in the house came to him.

  Sullivan’s dismayed grunt was followed with an explosive “Fuck, you bunch are telepaths now? I don’t believe it… ” but then it all grew dimmer, and the voices began to lose their timbre as everything got further away. It was much like when his awareness had hovered at the top of the rope… except that there was nothing to hold on to, this time, and so he was simply… falling…

  He heard a sharp snap-hiss-pop come through the fog, and felt the vague stirrings of alarm as he identified the source as match being lit near his head. There was no energy to respond to it, though, and so he simply lay there with only the mildest curiosity as to what might be going on around him. His back barely twitched as he felt a cool roundness, like the rim of a thick drinking glass, press against his skin, just between his left shoulder blade and spine.

  A moment later, the drawing began.

  The skin underneath the perimeter of glass was lifted somehow, and with it, a slight anchor for his diminishing awareness was cast. It was a tenuous thread, but it was there, and Brian clung to it with a desperate slippery hope. Another pop of a match, and another slightly chilly circle was placed on the opposite side of his spine, and he this time he could feel the heat at the cente, before his flesh was pulled up in a little hemisphere.

  The anchor for his consciousness was more than doubled; the two circles seemed to complete a circuit for the energy that had been eating away at him to flow through, and he felt the currents start to circulate around his spine—still not going very far, he could very clearly feel the blockages below—but with the flow came a palpably stronger link to awareness.

  Cups. He was now alert enough to realize that this was the Chinese healing treatment he’d vaguely read about, where glass bowls of varying sizes were placed on the skin (and isn’t flame involved somehow? he wondered). He remembered it had something to do with the flow of chi –ki in the Japanese tradition—through the body’s meridians—a chart he remembered from a shiatsu class in college flashed into his head, lines of force traveling like a roadmap across a human torso, and with that memory, the glass circles on his back seemed to pulse, as if the recognition of their purpose added to their power.

  The cups were now aligning the full length of his spine, and he had a strange image of himself as some sort of stegosaurus as imagined by Tesla, with glass and fleshy bumps filled with energy that seemed to crackle between them traveling up and down his body. The blocks that that woman had sensed were painfully obvious now, like dark holes in his back contrasting with the glowing force of the energy flow. He could hear the voices more clearly now around him as well, Sullivan and the Woman and two others, a man and a woman, who were discussing… kitty litter?

  “Yes, we found that Zot really needed to have his own… ah, the patient stirs.” The new woman’s voice suddenly shifted from conversational to a more intense directness. “Brian. Please do not move. I am Elyse, and my partner Alan and I are trying to open channels of ki which have been twisted and blocked during your ordeal.” She paused. “I can tell you’re aware of the flow right now. Softening the blocks will be… difficult for you.”

  Another voice, male this time, came from his other side. “Brian, I’m Alan. We’re going to begin trying to work through this in a moment. Your part will be to breathe, to move the air through your body and add its force to ours.” The voice paused, and Brian could hear the gravity of concern through the soft tone. “It’s going to be very hard, Brian. Just remember, as we work through it, that the energy wants to be free, and so it is actually trying to help us.” Another pause, then “… no matter what it feels like.”

  With that, Brian felt their hands each touch one of globes, towards the middle of his back, and the energy cousing between them began to expand, bands growing thicker, edging closer to the dark blockages… and then they touched, and Brian screamed.

  The pain was tiered in distinct levels. There was the point at which the energy met the darkness, which drove like a spike into his flesh, a raw kind of tearing sensation as the energy eroded and broke against the black twists. At the same time the energy was trying to find other routes of escape, and each of the points where his skin was drawn up into the cups felt like a miniature volcano, bubbling and seething with a vicious determination to explode into bloody release.

  Then there was the burning. It covered his skin, making it feel as though it were being ripped off as a single piece in every direction from his body, a million pricks of flame flaying him simultaneously. This pain didn’t pulse or ebb as the others did; this one simply manifest at a level of excruciation. And began to rise from there.

  Brian’s hoarse scream was cut off suddenly as Elyse and Alan slid the globes in their hands softly along his spine, and the energy was pushed even more strongly into the tangles of darkness that seemed to eat into his flesh like acid. He floated in the shock of new pain, trying to find something to hold on to and keep the pain from driving him into the madness that he felt gibbering up inside. Everywhere his mind went, though, only brought him back to the pain that suffused him. There was no way to do anything more than draw another shuddering breath and try to scream through the agony.

  Then he felt a soft line drawn across his palm, and instinctively he grabbed it, twisting his wrist in a circle to grasp the loop of rope that Sullivan had given him more tightly. A bright line of energy cut through the wash of pain surrounding him, and instantly he could feel every inch along the length of rope, as it looped around his hands and flowed out to… to the strong hands of Sullivan, loops flowing over his palms and across the backs of his hands, and again the rope moved out to… to the woman’s hands, this time, the Wiccan that Brian didn’t know the name of yet.

  But as he felt her hands on the rope, as his mind’s eye expanded with it to where it met her skin, he knew her far more deeply and intimately than if he’d spent hours with her. It was not about the collection of facts and statistics that normally make up a person’s identity, the things he
felt were far more important than that. He could feel her, and with it came her peaceful strength and determination to help heal him.

  He drew on that strength, pulling it back along the woven rope, past Sullivan’s hands again, which also added their raw and wild power to him, with an unspoken but very clear “Go get ‘em, tiger” added.

  Brian came back from the momentary respite to his body, to the pain, to the twisting shadows that had been planted by the ‘pressors and Vashte’s mistake. The pain was greater than before; Elyse and Alan had managed to erode the dark knots until they were hard, unyielding balls of roiling pain, smaller but still blocking the flow of energies between the glass cups with their tiny draws of flesh. Though he couldn’t see it, Brian’s flesh under the cups was now a dark and angry purple, the flesh close to bursting from the energies that were drawing beneath it.

  The pain was greater… but Brian found that the strength he drew along the rope made his awareness larger than the pain, larger than just the tortured vessel his body had become. He looked at the darkness they were battling with an awareness that was now dispassionately removed from the agonizing sensation… and he saw, with a cold clarity, just how wrong they were. They were ugliness incarnate, planted in his flesh by the Repressors and their tools, and they offended him.

  He got mad. He got to work.

  His awareness poured around the cups, diving into the lines of energies that they conducted, and like a body surfer riding a wave he let the current carry him. Instead of a soft beach, though, they were carrying him towards a hard reef of coiled wrongness, that frustrated the sweet taste of the ki seeking release.

  But his awareness could see the coils, could see where they lay across each other and pulled their own darkness into themselves… and it could shape into a fine spike of power, a pick that drove into the first knot and sank between the coils like they were soft wood, not all the way through but deep into them.

  And the energy guided by Alan and Elyse could feel that attack, and sensed a victory. The waves of ki washed over Brian’s sharp awareness and worked it into the knot, loosening it bit by bit, the darkness boiling inchoately with the frustrated rage of being inexorably overcome. For Brian didn’t give back any ground, simply worked forward through the knot, until finally it dissolved in a silent roar of release as the ki surged up past it, joining the line of current connecting the cups above, and again he rode it, Alan and Elyse moving the cups to give him that extra drive, this time going deeper into the next knot with the first thrust. It took less time, not because the shadow twist was any less deep but because the energy had increased exponentially as it danced across and through his body.

  The last two knots of painful darkness dissolved almost at the first touch of Brian’s mind spike driving through them with the roaring power now flowing freely through the cups. The mounds of flesh under each glass globe were no longer a bright purple, and the burning had subsided to a glowing warmth that covered his sweat-covered skin and kept it from growing chill. As the last ball of pain dissolved, he felt the now-unfettered energy swirl through him, the pulse of the flow gradually merging with the slow beat of his heart and the two disappearing within each other just as he realized Alan and Elyse had removed the last of the cups from his back.

  He opened his eyes.

  V

  “You need a Focus.”

  Brian looked up from the glass of Earl Grey at Ada, the Wiccan priestess, who was seated on the floor cross-legged in front of the plush couch he lay in. Sullivan sat next to him to the left, one burly arm cast out behind Brian’s head. Elyse was on his other side, her hand gently rubbing his arm, with Alan next to her massaging her neck. The two healers had paid a price in tension from the exertions of the evening, and back rubs had been exchanged all around before Ada had called them all into the living room for, as she put it, a War Council.

  “I’m not trying to be a smartass, but just to be sure: you’re not talking about a car, are you?”

  She smiled. “No. A Focus in your particular branch of the Path is a sort of funnel… no, that’s not right. An aiming device, perhaps would be more accurate… a way for the energies which you can create with your art to be sent through them towards whatever task is necessary to be done.”

  “What is it?”

  “Better to ask who is it, unless you are the kind of Man who objectifies that much.” Her voice held just the slightest note of disapproval, and Brian found himself glad that he was not that kind of Man, not at all. “Have you ever met a person who, when they walk into a room, will make both men and women catch their breath? The kind of person who can’t help but draw your eye, your ear, your attention? Not the ones who seek it, through garish decoration or expensive baubles; the ones who seem to do it without trying.”

  Brian thought immediately of an actor he’d known in college, James Marqueson, a man with a deeply resonant voice and a presence that had brought to life the both the roles on the stage and the drama in his personal life. He recalled Marqueson’s obliviousness to his effect on the opposite (and often the same) sex. “Yeah, I’ve known some people like that. Lucky bastards.”

  “Sometimes, perhaps. They often have more problems than you would think, though. Imagine trying to find time to be alone when everyone wants your company. Imagine trying to be inconspicuous in a crowd when every eye is turned to you.”

  “Regardless, those people are natural focal points for the energy that you produce. Most of them end up in some field that makes use of their natural draw for the public eye, whether it be acting, educating, or politics.”

  “The thing is, while the power you create is immense, you can control it up to a certain point, but no further. With the mark Vashte laid on you, your rope work will cause even more Power to accumulate, and without a release and a direction to send them, you’ll again become a target for the Repressors.”

  “Couldn’t I just… not do rope work? After all, I do have vanilla sex occasionally...”

  “Could you? Of course that would be the easiest answer. Look inside yourself; could you lead a fulfilled life without ever using your weaving patterns again?”

  Brian bowed his head again to his tea, and did as she asked, looking into his own desires and needs… and finding a true need to use the strands to weave round and through the others he interacted with on that sort of level, to find that connection. He tried to take it out, to push it aside, but even as it moved within his mind it always came back.

  He felt Sullivan’s hand tighten on his shoulder sympathetically. “Don’t worry, bucko, it’s always that way when you find a fetish. Hell, you have it easy; you can untie your knots and start over. I’m eventually going to run out of skin to stick the inky needle into.”

  Alan reached over and patted his thigh. “Elyse and I tried to be vanilla, what, dear, four separate times during our relationship? We would throw away the shackles, rip up—oh, on one occasion, we actually burned them—all our copies of Skin Two and the Beauty books. We’d decide that this time we would meditate, do yoga, try scrapbooking, anything to keep our filthy minds from going back to that degrading nasty habit… ”

  Elyse laughed and tousled her husband’s hair, dyed a bright blue and contrasting with her brilliant gold and purple locks. “Well, you did, dear, you were always the stronger one. Me, I had a stash, always. And so,” she turned back to Brian, “the pain of being in full lotus began to feel sweet, the yoga began to be nude and pushing past the point of comfort, the scrapbooks started becoming lined with black leather with little chains bounding each of the pictures… and then one night it would all come to a head, and he’d be happily spanking my ass while I screamed and loved every minute of it. For some,” she looked at Ada on the floor, who nodded, “it’s just a spice, an occasional foray into their darker side. But for some of us, the darker side is not a side that we can ever get away from, it is too much a part of us. It is just the way our motherboards are wired.”

  Ada nodded. “I don’t share that path
with you—my path has more peaceful means to power—but I understand and even on occasion enjoy—“ her eyes flashed for a moment to Sullivan, who grinned ferally back at her, “—playing with those who do follow it. And as my calling is that of a healer, I have some understanding of it.”

  “The Mark that Vashte has put on you, combined with your natural affinity with the ropes, has put you in the delicate situation of being too powerful for your own good. As you’ve felt, the power tends to run wild; as such, you become both a beacon for those who would like to either utilize or destroy it.”

  Brian frowned. “It’s really that cut and dried? Couldn’t I reason with them somehow, or find a way to play that would keep the power from growing within me, or something?” He paused, trying to control the quaver in his voice. “Is my life going to always be like this?”

  Sullivan gave his shoulder another squeeze, and Brian looked up at him, and was surprised at the serious expression there. “Aye, Bucko, likelihood is it will be. What’s worse is that it’s not like we’re organized or able to offer you any kind of security. Sure, we’ve managed to save your bacon here, but for the most part? It is just a ragtag group of people who happen to share both a dislike for the system and the ability to manipulate power of one sort or another. That’s all.”