Work Text:
hello
is there anybody in there
just nod if you can hear me
is there anyone home?
* * *
When it starts, he barely notices it.
It takes some time for him to realize what’s going on, in fact.
He’s read about the cases. He knows what can happen. But it’s usually a quick degradation, weeks or months after the improvement began. The downslide is just as rapid as the uptake was. It’s tragic and sad, a reminder of Humanity’s hubris in thinking they can improve on Nature, etcetera, etcetera. Really, it seems as if the literature takes each case as an opportunity to pontificate about the dangers of genetic engineering, about how it’s doomed to fail.
Well, not always. Look at me.
Because he was special, wasn’t he? He’d escaped it. He was one of the good ones, the perfect ones, custom-built to perform as required and oh, how he’d performed. Chief medical officer of a major space installation, nominee for the Carrington Award at thirty years of age, clever and charming and pretty and light on his feet, always dancing one step ahead of the danger. Eventually he’d stopped believing it would ever catch him.
Mostly.
Every now and then, maybe every few months, he wakes up gasping, sweating through his pyjamas, sheets twisted around him. He’s sliced through an artery and the patient is bleeding out—he’s missed his shot and now the enemy is killing someone he loves—he’s miscalculated the dose and the seizures won’t stop—and they’re looking at him, angry, betrayed, you were special, you were perfect, and now the knowledge has gone, it’s left him just when he needed it most, oh, it’s all very, very dramatic in his dreams. It scares the hell out of him.
But it’s nothing to worry about, not really. Just a boogeyman dredged up by his too-clever mind to remind him of his fallibility, to keep him humble. He’s grateful for it, really. It helps him to remember the ones who are less lucky.
One morning he’s prepping for his day. He’s showered and shaved. He’s styled his hair, freshened his mouth. While he’s reviewing his case notes he feels a pang of hunger—oh, breakfast! Silly of him to get so caught up. He hops up, thinks for a moment, asks the replicator for a scone with jam. When it appears he closes his eyes and inhales, enjoying the scent. He snatches up the plate, turns to put it next to him at his terminal, and there’s no room for it because there are two scones there already.
Even then it doesn’t register, not quite. Later he almost wants to laugh, thinking of it. Right then he just shrugs, rolls his eyes at himself, come on back down to Earth, Julian, and eats two of the scones in about three bites each. Too much to do that day to think much of this now.
When he gets back to his quarters that night, he finds the third scone still sitting by his terminal. It’s old and stale now. He hadn’t remembered to put it back into the replicator for disposal.
Silly of me…
And it’s nothing, it’s really nothing. Not even worth remembering.
The next day he accidentally puts in last week’s password when he activates his terminal. It bleeps irritably at him, and he’s not sure what’s wrong for a moment. When he figures it out, he shakes his head at himself. It’s nothing.
The day after that he asks Rijal three times where she got her new earring. He only realizes when she snaps at him to stop making fun of her. He apologizes, grinning, and it’s believable because he’s always been a bit socially inept, and so it’s nothing, right?
It’s nothing…
The day after that he forgets Rijal’s name. Completely, one-hundred percent forgets it. He knows her, he knows he knows her, he went to her betrothal party for God’s sake, what is her name? He cheats his way through the day with nicknames and “Nurse,” in a silly formal voice, and later he digs through the personnel file until he finds her face. Rijal. Tanylek Rijal. He says it out loud, shapes his mouth around the sounds.
It doesn’t feel at all familiar.
He closes his eyes, feels the breath of the monster on his neck. Hello, it says.
It hasn’t had to catch up to him, has it. It’s been waiting here for him all along.
* * *
come on, now
i hear you’re feeling down
i can ease your pain
get you on your feet again
* * *
The first person he tells is his main staff physician, Girani Semna, because he knows he can trust her to be objective. She frowns at him, has him sit down in her office, handles things very formally. She takes notes. She gets him to estimate precise times for the appearance of each symptom. More than once she stops him to write something down, which would be fine except that then she needs him to repeat himself because she keeps losing her place. It doesn’t take long for him to get frustrated with her, for his voice to become slow-paced and sarcastic. He wants to shout: don’t you understand? I’m falling apart!
Then she smiles sadly at him, turns her padd to show him, and oh, she’s been running a mini-mental on him and he’s borderline. He blinks at the result glowing on the screen in soft gold, making everything real.
She biopsies him once, twice, and slips the little bits of flesh into stasis. He lies back on the biobed and lets her run a scan. His neural pathways sparkle before him like a cloud of fireflies. It’s too early to tell, she says, and he agrees.
Still, he resigns his duties as chief medical officer that night, despite Semna’s reluctance to take over for him. It just doesn’t feel safe. Borderline is not nominal, and he’s always been nominal, always been at the top of his game. He has no desire for his nightmares to become reality.
Semna tells him he’s worrying too much. That the degree of decline isn’t foreseeable. That this might be nothing—a temporary glitch in his system, perhaps a virus, perhaps even overwork. He nods, smiles, agrees with her, doesn’t believe a word of it: she’s trying to reassure herself as much as she’s trying to reassure him, because neither one of them wants to believe this is happening.
She comes with him the next morning. She stands with him in Captain Sisko’s office, a quiet presence behind his left shoulder. As he speaks, he hears her breathing.
The captain listens, eyes widening, and when he’s finished, Sisko is quiet for a few moments. Finally he stands, walks around the desk, drops a heavy hand on his shoulder, squeezes hard.
Take all the time you need, Sisko tells him, frowning. But I want my CMO back.
He nods.
Take all the time you need.
He has no idea how long that might be.
* * *
relax
i’ll need some information first
just the basic facts
can you show me where it hurts?
* * *
Do you want me to take your case, Julian? Semna asks gently, eyes probing. But she’s hardly the expert in this area, is she? He is. And so he declines with a smile, and she nods, touches a fingertip to her temple in a mock-salute.
He doesn’t go anywhere near the infirmary for the next few days. He stays in his quarters, mostly. Everything he needs he can access there, because what he needs to do is to read, to learn.
Well, that’s not quite right. What he needs to do is to remember.
He buries himself in his journal collection, trying to pull in all the information he’d never considered important enough to access, because oh, he can feel it all starting to slip away…
Once he’d only had to look at a paper to know it cold. His mind had been like a cathedral, a palace of knowledge; within it all the things he’d learned had been held pristine, protected from the depredations of time. He’d only had to close his eyes, to walk within himself a short way to remember anything he’d ever known.
The cathedral is still there, still lovely, all of its beauty still on display. But he’s forgotten his way around. The information is piled willy-nilly; there’s no sense to it, and so he searches frantically and fruitlessly through ornate display cases, through piles of ancient books. He smashes stained glass windows, knocks over delicate vases, tugs paintings down from their hangings, and he still can’t find anything to help him.
I know it was in here—
But the cathedral is vast, its knowledge unlabelled, unsorted. Once he’d been able to walk its corridors in darkness, to feel the air drifting warm around him, welcoming him. Now his desperate, disrespectful search has made it an enemy, and it will not help him. The air within its halls is cold. Not for you, it seems to say, you didn’t earn it, none of this is for you…
Well, if he cannot remember, perhaps he can relearn…? But his mind is a sieve, and as fast as he fills it with knowledge it starts to drain away. He reads and rereads the papers he’d known back to front only a week or two ago. He makes lists in a frantic scribble, loses the padd, makes another list, can’t find the file, has the computer record a verbal mnemonic, can’t remember the access code—
When Miles triggers the door signal he almost screams.
Miles hugs him hard, and he gasps against his friend’s shoulder from the force of that embrace.
They sit. They talk. Yes, he’s been avoiding Miles, he’s been avoiding everyone. Yes, they all know. Rumour flies fast on the station, and it’s hard to miss the absence of the CMO. They all miss him. They’re all worried about him.
Come to Quark’s, Miles says. Have a drink, all right?
At first he’s going to refuse, because there simply isn’t time—
But there isn’t time, is there? And a little voice in his mind says, how do you want to spend the time you have? Alone in your quarters, staring at a screen?
He doesn’t tell Miles about that thought. He just goes. He has fun. They sit together at the bar and eat snacks. He drinks two beers and gets pleasantly fuzzy. One by one his friends just happen to swing by, huh, goodness, imagine that, what a surprise to run into him here. His shoulder is patted. He’s hugged. He’s nodded at. No one wants to make him uncomfortable but everyone wants to see him, and honestly, it’s lovely. He’s missed them, all of them. He loosens up as the evening lengthens; by the time twenty-three-hundred hours rolls around he’s tipsy, laughing, and when Miles proposes a game of darts he’s more than up for the challenge.
He steps up to his line, frowns at the board, tosses with precision, misses completely. The dart clangs off the wall with a pang that seems to reverberate through the bar.
It doesn’t, of course. There is no sudden hush, no collection of concerned faces staring at him. No one notices at all.
No, wait. Miles notices. His face is like a punch to the gut.
I will not give in to this. He just needs to concentrate, that’s all.
He plays the rest of the game from Miles’s line. He loses. Miles pats his shoulder, come on, best of three?
He loses those too. Easily. Handily. He can see where the dart should go, he can plot its course in his mind, but when he throws his hand is clumsy, the course is wrong…
That night, back in his quarters, he cries for the first time in years.
* * *
there is no pain
you are receding
a distant ship’s smoke on the horizon
you are only coming through in waves
your lips move but i can’t hear what you’re saying
* * *
The next morning he goes to the infirmary. He finds Semna. He asks her to take him on as a patient. She smiles, bows her head; he’s already listed in her file. She’s been researching his case since he first spoke to her. She has him on the biobed again within ten minutes, running a scanning routine pre-programmed to his specifications.
Once he might have been upset at her presumption. Now he’s just grateful. Please, save me from myself…
The fireflies aren’t dancing quite as quickly as they were a few nights ago. Still, their movement is lovely.
Semna has already reached out to Adigeon Prime, to the surgical teams that perform the enhancement procedures. Pattern-scans of his biopsied flesh were fired off the day she took them, tagged with analysis-requests. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, accelerated critical neural pathway formation is something the Adigea are reluctant to discuss with a Federation-affiliated doctor. She’s managed to wriggle around this by hitting heavily on her Bajoran background, by frowning and shouting and staring them down. It took a while, but finally, she tells him, they have allowed her limited access to their records.
It turns out that in this, as in all things, he is oh-so-very special. There is no one else quite like him.
The degradation he’s experiencing is definitely akin to that seen in failed cases of enhancement. In those cases, however, there’s usually some kind of reason for it. Improper resequencing. Failed DNA grafting. Subject too mature for a proper rebuild. Sometimes they can catch it, correct it in time. Sometimes not. Sometimes the subject simply ends up much as they were before. Sometimes… not.
There doesn't seem to be any reason why it's happening to him.
He watches Semna arguing with the Adigeon representatives, trying to goad them into a final option, some kind of it-might-not-work-but, Prophets, can’t they even give her a timeline? The surgical team is reluctant to speculate on his case. This particular team didn’t perform his procedure, of course; that was another team, years ago, and no one wants to suggest any fault on their part. There is a great deal of evasion until he steps into the conversation, introduces himself, asks quietly for help. He sees compassion in those strange bird-like eyes.
We are sorry. We cannot help you. He’s too old. Barely thirty-three, and he’s too old to be rebuilt again. There is nothing we can do.
The team sends them the pattern for a booster shot, a blend of neurochemicals that could enhance signal transmission within his brain, might help him to function somewhat longer. They’re not certain if the shot will work on him or not, but it has bought them time in previous failed enhancements. They are hopeful that it will do the same for him.
The leader of the team angles her plumed head, clacks her beak sympathetically. We are sorry we can do no more for you. Rest assured in one thing: you will experience no pain.
He can’t hear her. His ears are filled with buzzing noise. He stares at the screen, keeps staring once Semna’s turned it off. He’s barely aware of her hand on his arm, barely aware of her walking away.
* * *
when i was a child i had a fever
my hands felt just like two balloons
now i’ve got that feeling once again
i can’t explain, you would not understand
this is not how i am
* * *
He should go visit his family, his mother and father. God, his father—still in jail for the crime of enhancing his son. And now this.
He can’t face it. He can’t face them. Anyway, the trip would take at least two weeks. That’s a very long time, considering that he’s not sure how many weeks he has left.
Selfishly, he takes care of informing them via subspace text message. He lays it out plainly, referencing the original enhancement information package they’d received so many years ago, the same one he’d waved about with such rancour when he was sixteen. He pushes down any impulse to apologize or gloat. He ends the message with love, Julian, because it costs him nothing to do so.
MESSAGE SENT glows on his padd, soft gold, uncontrovertibly real, and if he then blocks any return messages… well, that’s up to him, isn’t it?
Now he has to face the question of how to fill his days. He doesn’t want to be useless. He doesn’t want to mope around his quarters. He’s not sure what to do with himself.
For a while he helps out in the infirmary. He’s starting to lose his grip on the procedures, but he can still administer a hypospray, can still run a sterilizer, can still clean a biobed. He does scut. He’s grateful for it.
For a while.
One day Semna asks him for a hypospray, and he hands it to her. She looks down at it, up at him, and he’s not certain what he’s done wrong. He stands there frozen, eyes scanning the room, waiting for a clue, for this tiny piece of knowledge to drop back into place.
She flips it open, lets it trill, and oh, it’s a tricorder, tricorder, he knows that—
Her eyes are so sad.
From then on he spends his time with friends, as much time as he can. He can’t manage darts anymore—his hands are like balloons, they’re so damned clumsy—but Miles is with him most of the time anyway. The man actually takes a hitherto-unimagined three days of leave—with Keiko’s blessing—and the two of them spend it in the holosuite on a marathon spy adventure. It doesn’t matter if he can’t quite recall the names of the good guys and the bad guys, or the nature of the evil plot he’s supposed to stop. Hell, half of these stories never made any sense anyway. All he really has to do is wear a tuxedo and look dashing, and he can still manage that. It’s great fun. We should have done this sooner, he says, laughing, and Miles looks at him.
He spends a lot of time with Garak, which surprises him when he stops to think about it. He can’t follow the plot of a novel now. He can barely follow a summary. He’s certainly not up to any high-level debate about Federation morality or Cardassian law. He’d half-expected Garak to quietly bow out of his life. But here he is, visiting… every evening? Is it every evening? It’s hard to tell. What matters, though, is that when Garak comes he brings a book. They sit together on his sofa, and Garak reads to him. He closes his eyes, lets the words call up images in his mind, lets them take him through his cathedral. They illuminate paintings, they make the pages of the old books dance. Sometimes he exclaims out loud with the force of the remembering, and Garak glances at him with sharp eyes. Mostly, though, he just drifts, and Garak’s voice is a soft, soothing hum.
He sees Ezri often. Not as a counsellor, though. He’d asked her about it, God knows he could use someone to help him get his mind straight… but she tells him that she’s too close to him for that. There are tears in her eyes when she says it. He hadn’t expected that. Instead, she sets him up with another counsellor, and meets him every day for lunch. She catches him up on gossip, tells him jokes, makes him laugh, and honestly, that does as much for him as the little therapy sessions do. Once, as she gets up to leave, she leans in and kisses him. He hadn’t expected that either. He does his best to kiss her back, and when they pull apart, the tears in her eyes match the ones burning in his own. Another thing I should have done sooner.
He’s so grateful to them. To all of them. Even the ones he doesn’t see as often. They know him. They remember him as he was. He couldn’t explain it to anyone else. This person he’s becoming… This isn’t who I am…
But it feels familiar, it does; as all else slips away, he is starting to remember this…
* * *
okay, just a little pin prick
there’ll be no more—
aaaaaah
but you may feel a little sick
* * *
The booster shot becomes a daily presence in his life.
His morning routine is careful now, everything laid out on his bathroom counter in a specific order. Otherwise he’ll forget. There’s so much to do every day…
So: first, the sonic shower, pre-programmed by Miles so he doesn’t have to fuss with any settings. Next, dental cleanser and depilation—cream now, not a razor. He doesn’t like it as much, it doesn’t leave his face quite as smooth, but it’s safer with his clumsy hands. After that, hairbrush and grooming cream, and he’s fortunate that he never did much with his hair, because even this is sometimes a bit too complicated.
And last but certainly not least, next to his sink rests the hypospray, pre-set to dispense one dose per day. He can’t jimmy it to give him more. Maybe he could have once.
He presses it to his neck—
Ah, and he flinches, eyes shutting involuntarily, God, it hurts, no pain indeed… but it’s worth it, oh, it’s worth it, because it all comes back to him in waves…
For about three hours, he’s almost like he was. Almost. Still can’t play darts worth a damn, but he can remember names, can do errands, can meet a friend for lunch.
After that, the nausea starts to creep in. He’s learned to eat light, because over-indulgence buys him an afternoon in the head, body doing its level best to empty itself out completely. Still, though, if he can press down the nausea with slow breaths, or if he takes a dose of anti-nauseant and pushes through the grogginess, he can function. He can laugh with Ezri. He can smile at Miles. He can be himself.
By approximately eight hours after the shot, he’s useless. His brain is soft and slow. Semna usually wants to see him then. The fireflies don’t do much, these days; Semna sighs and runs scan after scan, and he blinks up at the lights circling over him. He knows they move faster when the booster’s fresh.
Can’t I have more?
No, Julian.
Why not?
You’ll become tolerant to it.
I… I don’t…
It will stop working.
Oh… and he rolls his head to the side, stares at the blinking of the console next to him. He knew what it did, once. He still does. It’s somewhere in there, inside the cathedral with its poorly-lit displays, its doorknobs that slide within his twisting grasp.
How much longer, do you think?
I don’t know, Julian. Her voice is calm. It’s always calm.
I don’t like this.
I know. None of us does.
I’m better with the booster shot.
It does seem to help.
I wish you’d give me some more. Why can’t I have more?
She doles his life out to him in measured doses. Eight hours today. Eight hours tomorrow. The time between shots may as well not exist at all, and yet it gets longer, longer…
Eventually, it’s all there is.
The shots work for less and less time, the clarity they buy him is shorter and shorter, the nausea worse and worse. One day he places the booster against his neck, blinks at the pain, and is immediately wracked with nausea beyond belief; his body arches, he cries out, he falls—
He awakens in the infirmary, surrounded by people he knows. He can’t remember any of their names. Some of them are crying.
He stays in the infirmary after that. Without the shots, he can’t function on his own. He sits on his biobed, watches the people moving from place to place. He wishes he could help them. Once he could have helped them. Once, he knows, he was a doctor, a very good doctor. Sometimes Semna sits with him, tells him about it. He asks her for stories. What did I do? Tell me about someone I helped. She does. He never quite believes her. Really?
It’s all still in there, all still in his mind, but he’s so lost in the cathedral now, and it’s getting awfully dark in there. He lies back on the biobed, shuts his eyes, wanders from room to room. He’s made such a mess of things. He tries to piece together a smashed vase, tries to re-order the pages scattered from the binding of an old book. It’s something to do. It passes the time.
The days recede from him, drifting away like flotsam on the waves.
* * *
can you stand up?
i do believe it’s working
good
that’ll keep you going through the show
come on, it’s time to go
* * *
One day something is different. He’s not sure what.
The morning starts out the same way. The nurse helps him into his clothes, helps him to depilate, to cleanse his mouth. He thanks her and she smiles. She’s nice. He hopes she’ll come again the next day.
But when the doctor comes in, she’s frowning, and he knows something is wrong.
Is it something he’s done? He tries haltingly to apologize—
No, Julian, she says, and she smiles at him. Today is the day you leave.
For a second he remembers—they’ve been telling him for a few weeks… is it weeks? Somewhere different…
Are you angry with me? Did I do something wrong?
No, ja’lat.
Then why do I have to go?
But apparently this new place is somewhere they may be able to help him, somewhere he’ll be more comfortable. He wants to argue. He’d rather stay here. He knows everyone here, even if he doesn’t know their names, he knows he knows them…
But it’s hardly fair to them, is it? This little infirmary is too small to have a permanent patient. He’s in everybody’s way. He doesn’t want to be a bother.
All right, Doctor…
He doesn’t have much to pack, not really. A few changes of clothes. Kukalaka. Two books, not that he can read them. Everything else he owns was put in storage when he was moved to the infirmary. He doesn’t miss it. He can’t remember any of it, not really. They take away the few things he has left, and he hopes he won’t forget them, too.
Hold still, Julian.
What is that?
Your booster.
My what…? But she’s already pressing it to his neck, oh, it hurts! She follows it with a second shot to the other side of his neck, his hands too slow to block her motion—ah!—and she mutters to herself, there, that will hold you…
Why did you do that? He’s almost in tears. His neck hurts.
Her eyes are calm. So you can say goodbye, ja’lat.
Oh. Oh. The nausea wells up, but she’s done something, she’s given him something, and he breathes through it—
Semna. You’re Semna.
Yes, Julian.
It’s… today, isn’t it. I’m leaving, aren’t I.
She nods.
Thank you so much for all you’ve done for me, Doctor.
She embraces him briefly, helps him up. He leans on her as he walks. His legs are clumsy. His arms tremble. It’s so hard to move everything in order, to walk smoothly. It’s good to have help.
There are people waiting outside the infirmary. He knows their faces, but he can’t find their names…
He reaches out with wondering fingers, and as he touches their faces, suddenly he knows who they are. Brown skin, smooth scalp, solemnity is Captain Sisko. Rough grey ridges press against his palm—Garak. Pallor and red eyes resolves into Miles. Blue eyes and a sad smile and the prettiest pattern of spots on white, oh, Ezri…
Kira. Odo. Quark. Worf. Leeta… No Jadzia. Where is Jadzia?
Oh, well… most of them are there. They’ve come to say their goodbyes. He smiles at them, all of them.
Thank you all so much. I’ll never forget you.
It’s a lie. It doesn’t matter.
* * *
there is no pain
you are receding
a distant ship’s smoke on the horizon
you are only coming through in waves
your lips move but i can’t hear what you’re saying
* * *
He watches the station shrink through the runabout window. It’s such a pretty little thing, hanging there in space like some kind of ornament. It’s so small, so delicate. He wants to remember. He stares at it unblinking, trying to will its image into his mind, somewhere I can find it again, God, please…
But the anti-nauseant Semna gave him is making him drowsy, and soon he sleeps.
When he awakens it’s later, much later, and there’s no one there that he knows. Someone speaks softly to him, offers him water. He accepts, sips, watches. Someone else is flying the ship, many-fingered hands moving smoothly over the pilot console. He peers at the co-ordinates displayed, can’t make sense of them. They glow golden, soft and bright.
A woman smiles at him. He doesn’t know her.
How are you feeling, Doctor Bashir?
No, he tries to say. No, please don’t call me that…
He can’t quite get the words out. He frowns, tries again, but it’s a garble.
It’s all right. Just rest.
He does as she says.
The ship flies on, and he drifts, he dreams. Sometimes he sleeps. When he’s awake he wanders through his cathedral, following the fireflies that dance through its corridors. Their movement is disordered. They flit from place to place without any apparent goal in mind. Sometimes they frame a memory, something beautiful; sometimes their light makes shadows dance horribly against the wall. He walks in wonder.
There’s one thing he can remember. A story about a man lost in a maze, a maze with something terrible at its centre… but the man unrolled a ball of string as he walked so that he’d know where he’d been, so that he could find his way out again.
He imagines himself with a ball of string, a little line of self. He ties it at the entrance, lets it unspool behind him as he walks. If he finds something worth remembering, perhaps he can tie the other end to the memory…? Perhaps he can hold on to something of what he was?
It’s all still here… but he can’t recognize any of it. The books contain only scribbles. The paintings are splashes of glorious colour, lovely and meaningless.
He walks, and walks, and finds nothing worth tying himself to.
When he’s awakened by a hand on his shoulder, he’s somewhere he doesn’t recognize with people he doesn’t know, and both ends of the string are flapping free.
* * *
when i was a child
i caught a fleeting glimpse
out of the corner of my eye
i turned to look but it was gone
i cannot put my finger on it now
the child is grown, the dream is gone
* * *
Hello, Julian. Do you remember me?
No. (Yes, I do—)
Her face is familiar, but barely so. Has he ever met her? Perhaps she was a dream…?
I’m Doctor Loews. Do you know that name?
No. (Oh, no…)
She shakes his hand gently, smiles at him.
We’re going to take care of you here now. There are some people here you might remember.
He follows her mutely, his walk a shambling step. He clutches at a railing built into the wall. She moves slowly, allowing him time to catch up.
They walk for an eternity (a few minutes); take a turbolift, another; pass two stern-faced men who he’s never seen before. Finally they stand before a door. It’s decorated with small suns, with smiling stars (I am not a child!). He looks at it, bemused.
You’ll live here now, Julian.
His quarters…? (My cell.)
When the door opens, he sees a large room with one, two, three, four beds neatly arranged along its walls. There are consoles scattered throughout the room, books, things that look like toys. It’s a mess.
On the bed closest to him sits Kukalaka. At the sight of him he makes a clotted sound, a moan, and moves haltingly to the bed. He sits, buries his face in Kukalaka’s fur, inhales the scent of him, ties his string to him as tightly as he can. I know you. Oh, God, I know you.
There are other people in the room. There’s a lot of noise. He keeps his face hidden, but peers out of the corner of his eye.
He catches snatches of conversation. Most of it moves too fast for him, but now and then it’s clear.
…going to live here with us?
Well, that’s only fair, hmm? He took Sarina, hmm? Only fair we get him in exchange, hmm, hmm?
Shut up, Jack—
It’s not important, it doesn’t affect him. He holds Kukalaka tight, squeezes his eyes shut.
Someone is sitting next to him. Her arm is around him. He can smell her. She smells lovely.
It’s all right, she says. We’ll take care of you.
He can’t understand you! It’s an angry voice. He doesn’t want to look up.
The woman’s voice is angry too. He can understand me just fine… he’s not an idiot… Now her voice drifts low again, soothes him. He’s just a little lost, that’s all…
Another man is near him now. He lifts his eyes from Kukalaka, and the little man smiles at him.
I can help you! I can teach you tricks!
Tricks…?
Mmm. Once the doctor goes. All right?
He wants to smile, but he’s so tired. The woman next to him pulls him close, kisses the top of his head, and he leans against her.
Shh, it’s all right… You can rest… You’re safe now…
He closes his eyes, sits with Kukalaka in his lap in the courtyard of his cathedral. He looks up at it, at its beautiful windows, its spires, the silhouette of its great dome. Fireflies dance around it, glowing gold against the night.
He looks at the string tied to Kukalaka’s chubby midriff, at the jumbled mess of string he’s trailing behind him, the end still flapping loose.
(This isn’t me… this isn’t who I am…)
(This is who I always was.)
He ties the other end to his ankle with clumsy hands, knotting it again and again.
* * *
i have become comfortably numb
—dar williams, "comfortably numb"