Thus was the Monster King brought into the world—a murderer of his father, made monstrous by his mother, and now heir to all the lands and armies of the wasted territories.
And the world would pay a heavy price.
The next week, the woman came again. She opened the door and brought the child his lunch. There was an apple and bread and chicken.
"This is your favorite food, isn’t it?" the woman asked.
"Yes," the child said after thinking about it for a moment. "I think it is."
He wondered where the woman went when she was not with him. She never spoke of her time apart. He wondered if she ceased to exist when she was not with him. It seemed possible.
After a while, they went over the cards again.
"Blue," the boy said. "Blue."
The woman pointed
Floor, ceiling, door, window.
"Good," she said.
"Does that mean I’m getting better?"
The-one-who-was-not-him did not answer though. Instead she rose to her feet and walked to the window.
The boy followed and looked out the window, but he couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Couldn’t hold it in his mind.
"Can I go outside?" he asked.
"Is that what you want?"
"I don’t know."
She turned to look at him, her pretty, oval face a solemn mask of repose. "When you know, tell me."
"I want to make you happy," the boy said. And he meant it. He sensed a sadness in the woman, and he wanted to make her feel better.
The child stepped closer to the glass and touched it. The surface was cool and smooth, and he held his hand against it for a long while.
When he moved back to the table, something was wrong with his hand. Like a burn to his skin. He couldn’t hold his pencil right. He tried to draw a line on the paper, and the pencil fell out of his hand.
"My hand," he said to the woman.
She came and she touched him. She ran her finger over his palm, moving up to his wrist. Her fingers were warm.
"Make a fist," she said. She held her hand up to demonstrate.
He made a fist and winced in pain.
"It burns."
She nodded to herself. "This is part of it."
"Part of what?"
"What’s gone wrong."
"And what is that?" When she didn’t answer him, he asked, "Is this place a prison? Where are we?"
He thought of the high tower. This is because of your mother.
The woman sighed, and she sat down across from him at the table. Her eyes looked tired. "I want to be clear with you," the woman said. "I think it is important that you understand. You’re dying. I’m here to save your life."
The boy was silent, taking this in. Dying. He’d known something was wrong, but he hadn’t used that word in his own thoughts. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. "But I don’t want to die."
"I don’t want you to die either. And I’m going to do everything I can to stop it."
"What’s wrong with me?"
She did not speak for a long while, and then changed the subject. "Would you like to hear another story?"
The child nodded.
"There was once a man and a woman who wanted a child very much," she began. "But there were problems. Problems with their genes. Do you know what genes are?"
He considered for a moment and realized he did. He nodded. "I’m not sure how I know."
"It’s bleed-through," she said. "But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the couple did in vitro and had a child implanted that way, but the children died, and died, and died, over and over, until finally, one day, after many failures and miscarriages, a child was born, only the child was sick. Even after all they’d done, the child was sick. And so he had to live in a hospital, with white rooms, while the doctors tried to make him whole. Anyone who visited had to wear a special white mask."
"A mask like you?"
"Is that what you see when you look at me?"
He studied her. The smooth oval face. He was no longer sure what he saw.
She continued, "The child’s sickness worsened over time. And the father had to donate part of himself to save the child. After the procedure, the child lived but the father developed a complication."
"What kind of complication?"
She waved that off. "It doesn’t matter for the story. An infection, perhaps. Or whatever you’d prefer."
"What happened to the father?"
"He left the story then. He died."
The boy realized that he’d known she was going to say that before she spoke it. "And that was because of the child?"
She nodded.
"What happened to the child?"
"The boy still wasn’t healed. There were TIAs. Small strokes. And other issues. Little areas of brain tissue going dark and dead. Like a light blinking out. It couldn’t be helped."
"What happened then?"
She shrugged. "That’s the end of the story."
He wondered again if she even existed when she wasn’t with him. A thought occurred to him. A terrifying thought. He wondered if he existed when she wasn’t there.
"How long have I been here?"
"Try to remember," she said. "Try to remember anything that happens when I’m not here."
He tried, but nothing came. Just shadows and flickers.
"What is my name?" the boy asked.
"Don’t you know yet?" The woman’s eyes grew serious. "Can’t you guess?"
He shook his head.
She said, "You are the one who isn’t me."
He studied her eyes, which were either blue or green. "That can’t be right," he said. "That’s your name. You are the one who isn’t me. It can’t be my name, too."
She nodded. "Think of this place as a language. We are speaking it just by being here. This language doesn’t have different words for you and I," she said. "In the language of this place, our names are the same."
[Reload Protocol]
White light. {
You are catchment. You are containment. {
You are.{
A fleeting memory rises up: a swing set in the back yard under a tall, leafy tree—dark berries arrayed along delicate stems. The sound of laughter. Running in the grass until his white socks were purple—berry juice wetting his feet.
The sun warm on his face.
The feel of the wind, and the smell of the lawn, and everything the white room was not.
A man’s voice came then, but the words were missing—the meaning expunged. And how can that be? To hear a voice clearly and not hear the words? It might be a name. Yes, calling a name.
"Look at me," she said.
She sat across the table from him.
"There have been changes made."
"What changes?"
"Changes to you," she said. "When you were sleeping. Changes to your fusiform gyrus," she said. "Can you read me now?"
And gone was the porcelain mask. The boy saw it clearly and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it until that moment—her face a divine architecture. A beautiful origami—emotions unfolding out of the smallest movements of her eyes, lips, brow. A stream of subtle micro expressions. And the child understood that her face had not changed at all since the last time he’d seen her, but only his understanding of it.
"The facial recognition part of the mind is highly specialized," the woman said. "Problems with that area are often also associated with achromotosia."
"Chroma-what?"
"The part of the brain that perceives color. It’s also related to issues with environmental orientation, landmark analysis, location."
"What does that mean?"
"You can only see what your mind lets you see."