I’m afraid of the dark and of my own dreams. I’m afraid of being alone and of walking into empty rooms. But most of all I’m afraid I might end up in the Cage again, this time by myself. If that were to happen most likely I’d stay there forever. Or snap and bust out of it in some nonhuman way, and that’s even worse. I don’t know if I’m going to burn in hell or not. Probably yes. If it exists. I can only hope that it doesn’t.
TABAQUI
DAY THE THIRD
—Lewis Carroll,
By the time I pry open my eyes, the morning has already morphed into the day. Guests are gone, as are all traces of them ever having been here. Alexander sweeps out the broken glass and cigarette butts. Lary is sitting all forlorn, his head wrapped in a towel. Someone seems to have put thistles in my eyes and filled my throat with especially scratchy saliva.
“Hey,” I say in a frail voice. “What’s the time?”
Alexander drops the broom and stares at me in horror.
“Must be dying,” Lary says to him, ruefully shaking his betoweled noggin.
Al gasps and runs out, forgetting to close the door behind him. I shouldn’t have scared him like that. A simple recitation of the list of all the places where it hurts would have sufficed. I already regret what I said. Though it’s flattering, to be capable of arousing an emotional response of this magnitude.
“And you had to choose the first day of the new Law for it,” Lary continues selfishly.
“No one chooses the day of their death,” I say.
The pack has an entire arsenal of treatments for every ailment, mostly contradictory. First Humpback dutifully pokes me in various places as prescribed by ancient Chinese wisdom. Then, following Sphinx’s method, I am stuffed into a bath hot enough to cook me alive. I do not protest, because Sphinx’s method knows only two variations: scalding hot or freezing cold. They fish me out, pull a sweater over my naked body, slather my back with something that feels like fire, wrap a scarf around my neck, and put socks on my feet, preceded by a thorough alcohol rub.
At this point in the course of treatment I no longer can distinguish whose method is which and try to rip off all of that stuff, but they hold me rather fast while Blind produces a jar of honey from his secret stash, a very small one, and proudly parades it before me. As if I’m still capable of being moved by such things. Then they feed it to me, and force me to wash it down with milk. I have to suffer it until I begin melting under the layers they’ve wrapped me in, sweating milk and coughing out cream.
Pity me, who is in favor of only one method of healing the sick: tender loving care.
Sphinx entertains me by reading from
TABAQUI
DAY THE FOURTH
—Lewis Carroll,
By next morning my sore throat is gone. I myself am almost gone as well. All that’s left are bones and some kind of syrupy substance. At the physical everyone remarks on my perky countenance and milky scent. Mentions of milk make me want to throw up, but this detail happily passes unnoticed by Spiders. Considering the atrocious torture I’ve been subjected to, I came out of it remarkably well.
The days of the physicals are always on the jittery side, because you never know what the pesky Arthropods might uncover in your internals. And when they confirm that there’s nothing wrong with you personally, it’s time to start worrying about everyone else, and the rest of the day is taken up by recuperation of the nervous system. So those days are mostly quiet, given to apprehension and then exhaustion.
