“Breathe with me,” I say, the way she says to me. “In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.”
She tries. She wants so badly to be good at the things she prescribes.
“You let me live,” I say quietly as I lay steel on steel. “Not because you’re kind but because someone told you to. You tell yourself a story about care. I tell myself a story about accuracy. Both stories can be true.”
Her eyes flick to the instruments and back to me and she thinks of ethics papers and professional standards and the Director and all the ways other people will understand this if she can just say it right. I relieve her of that burden. This will never be understood. It will only be remembered.
“Kayla,” she says again, and there is sweat at her hairline now, and her tongue is clumsy with the sedative, and still she tries to find the correct sentence. “This isn’t you.”
“But it is,” I say, and I say it the way she taught me to state things without judgement. I let my voice go gentle and coaxing and warm as the tea I never drink. “Notice the sensation in your body, Doctor. The heat. The cold. The fear. You don’t have to change it. Just watch. Acknowledge. It’s okay.”
She makes a sound that would be a laugh if she weren’t busy drowning.
I work like a good student. Measured, clean, notes in the margins. Nothing gratuitous, nothing sloppy. Pain is information if you listen, and she has so much to learn. I don’t need to open her much to make the point – no need for evisceration, not when a few carefully placed cuts will do. A line along the thigh where the femoral pulses thick under the skin, not deep enough to empty her, just enough to make the blood spill hot and constant into the towel I’ve so thoughtfully arranged. A little exploration under the nails, scraping out the half-moons of keratin and pushing a needle into the raw beds until her toes curl. The inside of the lip, pinched between forceps and nicked with the scalpel so every word tastes of iron.
There are moments when she sags and I make a noise with my tongue that brings her back, the way she does when Idrift. There are moments when she tries to slide sideways into righteous fury and I touch her cheek with the back of my fingers and she returns to the only thing that matters: this room, this chair, this body, this consequence.
In the hallway beyond, the building invents new silence. It is the kind that happens after snow, when sound is something you have to dig up. I set aside the last instrument like a pen that has written its sentence and press gauze hard into the worst of the cuts, just above the groin, tying it off with bandage so she’ll keep more blood than she loses. A message isn’t a message if it can’t be read.
“See?” I murmur when she whimpers. “I’m taking care of you. Just like you took care of me.”
I walk the corridors one last time and put things where I want them. A chair tipped here, a door just ajar there. The night orderly in the staff lounge tucked neatly into a sleeping position that will, for one clean moment, look like any other napping man before the eye learns what it is seeing: the purpling strangulation mark peeking above his collar, the blackened tongue. The two worst ones laid in parallel under the evacuation map with their arms at their sides because I am not a monster, I am a curator. The mop-hummer who never learned to shut up, alone in the mop cupboard with the radio off because I think he would appreciate the poetry.
I rinse my hands in the sink and watch the water run until it doesn’t know what colour it is. Red, then pink, then a thin watered-down rust. I change into the spare set of clothes Doctor Callaway keeps for me in the cabinet and toss the old ones into a bin. When I step out into the main corridor, the world smells like antiseptic and roses and the metallic promise of revenge.
I drag the Doctor’s chair and position it to face the entrance to the office. She is very light when she wants to be and very heavy when she wants to make a point. I align her gently withthe cabinet I like to sit on. She sits, shaking, eyes too wide, lips whitish at the borders, hands clenched on the rests like they could keep her from leaving her body again. Blood has soaked through the bandage on her thigh and dried stiff on the fabric.
Alive. Of course she is alive. That is the point. Like I said before, a message isn’t a message if it can’t be read.
“Look at me,” I say, and because the habit is that strong, she does.
I hop up on the cabinet and let my feet swing, the heel of one foot tapping a counter-rhythm against the wood. The camera above the door blinks, steady, patient.
“Do you want to practice, Doctor?” I ask, smiling like I’m about to hand her a sticker. “Let’s review your coping statements for when things feel out of control.”
She takes a breath that isn’t big enough for what she’s trying to fit into it. “Kayla,” she whispers, and her voice frays on my name. “Please.”
“Good start,” I say gently. “Name the feeling.”
“Fear,” she manages.
“Where do you feel it in your body?”
She swallows. “Everywhere.”
“Beautiful,” I say, because she has always loved that word when it is applied to effort. “Can you release it?”
Her eyes fill and spill. She shakes her head. “No.”
“That’s alright,” I murmur. “We can hold things we can’t fix.”
I slip off the cabinet and cross the space and kneel so we are eye level and tuck a stray hair behind her ear the way she did for me when I pretended to be softer than I am. I let my thumb rest on her cheekbone where the pulse quivers. I lower my voice to the register she uses to coax me back from the edge.
“You’re doing so well,” I tell her, kind as a lullaby. “Making so much progress.” I smile, all teeth and tenderness. “Now let’s go again.”
The sound she makes is small and human and honest, and then the building swallows it, and the red light above the door blinks once, and I begin again.
UNSTABLE VARIABLE MY ARSE
