Katalepsis

The Governor and myself — the Eye and I — stood surrounded on all sides by the aisles of the archives, wrapped deep in the papery embroidery of her mind, embraced by the whorls and coils of clammy, clutching, claustrophobic fog, the folds and frills of her brain.

She — the Eye’s avatar, the Eye’s ego, the Eye’s representative upon the stage of this play — loomed at the end of the row, flanked by grey plastic and tight-packed ranks of books. Fingers of fog plucked and pulled at the shoulders of her laboratory coat, trying to drag her back into the maze of the stacks, to drown her in the weight and heft of her own thoughts. Pink eyes burned like tiny toxic fires in the shadow of her face. Blonde hair the colour of old straw hung in an uncombed mass down her back. Her hands were shoved firmly into her pockets, with the head of Horror the Nurse nowhere to be seen.

The Governor had appeared like an apparition, thrown from the churning waves of fog to shock me senseless with this final revelation. But her expression was placid, passive, plain disinterest. To her, this was no shock at all.

“This is … this is everything you’ve ever observed?” I repeated her words, my voice shaking. “This library, the archives. This is everything you’ve ever observed?”

The Governor nodded once, then looked away, her eyes wandering across the bound volumes on the opposite shelves. “Mm,” she grunted an affirmative. “Everything.”

“All the people and universes and dimensions you dragged into Wonderland, or which fell into your orbit? This is all those, everything you’ve ever seen?”

“Everything,” she echoed.

My heart still raced like a dying dove; my crawling skin was coated with cold sweat; my stomach threatened rebellion, roiling and rocking, rejecting that awful feeling of eyeballs blossoming inside my brain and sharp-nailed fingers groping against the underside of my skull.

But the feeling had faded. The revelation was over.

Now there was simply her and I, alone in the fog.

I felt like my mind would fly apart under the pressure, as if my skull was stuffed with an ocean, straining against the delicate bones of my cranium. This — all this, not just the books which had catalogued the inside of my mind, but all of it, all the tales under alien names, all the records and reminiscences, all the billions of volumes of stories, on and on and on, from all manner of Outside dimensions and Outsider minds, every last word — it was the inside of the Eye’s head, the sum of her observations of everything she had ever seen, every being and world and mote that she had pulled into her orbit, into Wonderland, knowingly or by accident or otherwise.

The dream, the play, the metaphor-made-flesh, had rendered all that raw observation down into a library, peopled it with books, and filled those tomes with words, with stories, all of them in — hilariously or stupidly or bizarrely — British English, my own idiom and vernacular and dialect.

I didn’t know if I should laugh or scream. The absurdity was too much. All these books, all this text, all this—

Metaphor, Praem reminded me firmly, still tucked into the front of my yellow blanket. Metaphor. Not real. These books represented the Eye’s mind. They were signifier alone, not that which is signified.

“And this … this is … ” I panted, still unable to gather myself. “This is your ‘project’? To read … ” I cast my right arm upward and away, indicating the totality of her archives. “All of this?”

The Governor still did not look at me. “Yes. Then the project will be complete.”

A hysterical hiccup-laugh slipped from between my lips. Praem said something sane and sensible, some attempt to grip my arms and steady my heart, but I wasn’t listening.

“That’s madness!” I said. “That’s complete madness. Don’t you understand? This— this— this place, this archive, this library, yes, it’s a metaphor, fine. I get that! But you’re a metaphor, too! And you’re just one person. For one person to read all of this would take more than a lifetime! Ten lifetimes! Let alone to actually understand and process it, to internalise or comprehend even a fraction of it. If this is a metaphor for everything you’ve ever observed, then … then your project is impossible. You can’t read all of this.”

“I can. I will. There will be an end. And then I will be.”

I laughed again, harsher this time, uncaring of how I sounded. I jabbed a finger at the bound manuscript I’d hurled to the floor — the hateful thing which had groped and scratched inside my head.

“Have you even read that?” I said. “How can you? It’s still being written! You and I, standing here, even this conversation we’re having, it’s all been recorded right now! You’ve set yourself a metaphysically impossible task. Don’t you understand? Look!” Still she would not look. “Look at the book! Look at me!”

The Governor finally lowered her pink-froth eyes. She stared at the manuscript on the floor for far too long, so that I thought she had been paralysed by the point I had made. But then she dragged her eyes across the books on the shelf, across the volumes of me, my life, my experiences, my everything.

She blinked several times, then frowned with the tiniest hint of melancholy.

“I need to get around to these,” she said.

White hot anger surged up from my heart, boiling and bubbling into my throat with such force that it took me unawares; Praem suggested that I try to keep my temper, that furious words would avail me nothing. But my mouth was already opening, my vision stained red, my chest and hands trembling.

Violation. Every scrap of who and what I was, laid out on these pages. And she hadn’t even read them!

She wasn’t even paying attention now; the Governor was already turning aside and looking away, angling her eyes out into the fog, toward the other shelves, the other stacks, the other stories.

“So much to get around to,” she said. “Now you see. You see now. You see—”

“You haven’t even read them!” I shouted. “What was the point of all this?! All this violence and violation! You, inside my head for ten years, and you haven’t even read it!?”

The Governor looked back at me. She seemed surprised and confused, her wide pink eyes glowing with soft inner fire.

“You haven’t even read it,” I repeated, throat full of bile. “You—”

“Volume twenty two point four,” the Governor said, and pointed at one of the bound manuscripts on the self. “Word eight thousand seven hundred and sixteen to word eight thousand seven hundred and twenty six: My tentacle touched the black surface of the lightless blade.” Her hand moved to point at another volume. “Twenty one point ten, word three thousand two hundred and eighty to word three thousand two hundred and eighty six. I blinked at him in surprise.” A third point, a third random volume. “Twenty point eight, word six thousand and forty one to word six thousand and fifty: A rectangle of darkness, untouched by the heat-haze sunlight.” Her hand flicked again. “Volume—”

“Stop, stop!” I snapped. “Stop!”

The Governor’s gaze wandered away again. “Check them.”

“ … pardon?”

“Check them. If you do not believe.”

I glanced at the bound volumes on the shelves, the ones the Governor had indicated, but I didn’t need to open them and flick through the pages. I knew those words, those feelings, those sensations; they crawled inside my own head, threatening to peel open the lids of the eyes that had only just subsided into the meat of my brain. Those were my own thoughts, put down on paper — not only read by the Governor, but memorised.

My anger went cold and ashen on my tongue; I’d gotten her wrong.

“You … you have read these?” I said. “Then what do you mean by saying you need to get around to them?”

The Governor shrugged. She began to turn away from me again, back out into the empty central aisle between the rows of shelves. “I don’t understand it all. Not yet. Have to keep reading.”

“Wait!” I cried. “Wait, please. Don’t just run off again. Don’t you dare. Please, just wait, wait there!”

To my great surprise, the Governor did as I asked. She paused just beyond the end of the aisle. Fog lapped about her boots and shins like the shallows of a grey and sucking sea; little wavelets of translucent mist tugged at the hem of her lab coat, eager to pull her back into the ocean of memory.

I staggered forward on my crutch and awkwardly crouched down to pick up the volume I had cast onto the floor — the volume which had contained my own current thoughts, my own recursive actions. I handled it carefully, not wishing to see the pages inside once again; the experience might trap me in some kind of loop, an eternal reader unable to pull away from the page. But I lifted it with care and returned it to the right place on the shelves.

Then I turned away and staggered down the row, lurching on my crutch, bursting out from between the rolling stacks. I rejoined the Governor in the stagnant canal of the central aisle, choked both ahead and behind by endless depths of greyish fog.

The Governor glanced down at me, hands in her pockets, her expressionless face so far away.

“You … ” I said, wetting my lips, knowing I had to make this next step or be paralysed. “Wait right there. Don’t move, don’t wander off again. Stay right there. Promise me.”

“Promise?”

“Promise me!”

“I’ll stay. I promise.”

I turned away from the Governor and looked down the row of rolling stacks, toward the neighbours to those with my name upon them.

‘Morell, Maisie.’ Lapped by fog, written by hand, awaiting a reader.

The first and last of those rolling stacks were moved aside, wide open for instant access. I need only take a dozen steps, and there I would be among my twin sister’s thoughts.

But that was the lure, wasn’t it? That was the very same seductive power which had held the Eye in stasis and observation for a subjective eternity. To prepare endlessly for the taking of action while never making that first real step. To read about others without taking the leap into real contact. What would Maisie’s thoughts avail me now? What would I find in those volumes? Nothing but tears and misery and horror; I knew full well the indignity and isolation of her cell, I did not need to read about it. All I needed was to focus on the revolution, the jailbreak, the rescue.

Reading would not help Maisie now. I had to act.

With great difficulty I tore my eyes away from my twin’s name. I had to focus on the Governor, on winning her allegiance, with what little persuasive power I had mustered.

I turned back to her, but I pointed at Maisie’s shelves. “What will I see, if I read those?”

The Governor followed my finger. Her eyes threatened to wander away again, off into the fog beyond the shelves, but then she pulled her focus back, staring at the grey plastic, at Maisie’s handwritten name.

“Not much,” the Governor said, shaking her head. “Repetition, mostly. She is hard to understand.”

I sighed, not sure if I could ever laugh at that irony. “Yes, that might be because she’s trapped inside a gigantic tank of water. Do you understand how that might have something to do with it?”

The Governor shook her head. Her eyes wandered left and right, then finally alighted back on me, flitting about my form like a pair of pink-winged skittish moths.

“Do you hate me?” she said.

“You asked me that same question earlier,” I replied. “And I already told you. No, I don’t, because there’s no point.”

The Governor’s eyes floated away upon the fog, off between the stacks. “That doesn’t mean you don’t.”

“Why do you even care?” I asked. “I’m not your real daughter, I’m just—”

“I have to return to the project,” she murmured. “I have to get back to work. Back to reading.”

“No!” I snapped. “No, you don’t! I just tried to explain, the project is impossible to complete, it’s madness, a mirage you can never reach, you—”

The Governor took a step back, half-turning away. “I have to—”

“Stop running away! Stop looking away! You say I’m your daughter, well pay attention to me! Look at me! Look at me, damn you!”

The Governor paused in her retreat. Her eyes flitted back again.

“You’ve read all those books about me, all those volumes which catalogue the inside of my head. Is that correct?” I asked. “And you’ve got it all memorised, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me, what do you know about me?”

The Governor blinked. “What?”

“What do you know about me? Say the words, say it all out loud. Start with the basics. What do you know about me?”

The Governor said, “Heather Lavinia Morell. One hundred and two pounds. Five feet and one eighth of an inch. Sixty five percent oxygen. Eighteen point five percent carbon. Nine point five percent hydrogen. Two point six—”

“Oh my goodness,” I interrupted her so softly, barely louder than a whisper, but she halted for me all the same. “You … you can’t actually see me, can you?”

“What?”

“How many hairs are on my head?”

The Governor answered instantly: “One hundred and fifteen thousand eight hundred and—”

“What did I have for breakfast on February first, last year?”

“Toast, two pieces. Butter. Jam—”

“How do I feel about you?”

The Governor stopped.

“How do I feel about Raine?”

No reply.

“Why am I trying to rescue Maisie?”

Nothing.

I shook my head. “You’ve got all those details, but you can’t really see me. You can’t really see people, you never could. Whenever you would look at things — people, houses, the whole of Wonderland, whatever — your vision rendered it down into components. Into atoms. Subatomic particles. You burned up and destroyed anything and everything you looked at, but you never saw the whole. You don’t know anything about me. You have a whole … story!” I gestured at the row of shelves with my name upon each one. “You have this whole story about me, and yet you can’t tell me anything about myself?”

The Governor stared, and — to my incredible surprise, beyond words — her pink-soft eyes of sunrise in rain filled with a sheen of tears.

The rest of her face did not change. The corners of her eyes did not crease. Her throat did not bob. Her lips did not crinkle with sadness or turn down at the edges with parental melancholy.

She just said: “I’m sorry. I don’t know how. That’s why I have to finish the project. Then I’ll understand. Then I’ll get it. Then I’ll know.”

I shook my head. “No, you won’t. That’s not real understanding. It’s not! If you’ve read all this stuff about me and you still don’t understand me, then reading more isn’t going to help!”

“Do you hate me?”

“I’ve told you, no, I—”

The Governor started to step away again. “I need to return to the project. If you can’t help, I’ll keep going, I’ll keep going. I’ll keep going. I’ll keep—”

I reached out and grabbed the Governor’s arm. She froze, staring off into the fog and the stacks, into her infinite project, her never-ending library of everything she’d ever seen. Glorious and infinite and utterly useless to the task of true insight.

We stayed there for a long moment. My thoughts were like acid in my throat, but eventually I forced them out.

“You are a giant, sky-filling eyeball,” I said. “The size of a planet. Bigger, even. You are abyssal logic written on reality by the force of your own will. And by accident or otherwise, I’ve condensed you down into this human container. Or at least whatever part of you which might be pressed to communicate. And this, this is the inside of your mind. You’ve let me in. And thank you for doing that. Because that’s the point, you see? That’s the point of all this — this asylum, this horror, this bubble-reality I’ve created. That is the whole point. You and me, alone in a room, finally talking, not just you reading books by yourself, ‘observing’ alone. So no, I am not going to let you wander back off into the project. The project doesn’t work. The project has failed. The project is over.”

The Governor relaxed; I knew she would not run, though she still did not look at me. I let go of her arm.

“You’ve done so much damage to me,” I said, thinking out loud. “Much more than my biological mother ever did. But she had no excuse, she was a person from the beginning, she could have listened to me, her daughter. She could have made other choices. She could have done things differently. But you? You’re not a person, or you weren’t, at least. You’re pure observation, a principle made into living matter. I don’t even think you understand what you’ve done to me — or to Maisie — until right now perhaps, this very second, until I put you in this compressed form. You didn’t intend to do this, did you? You just … you just looked, and saw, and kept trying to see.”

The Governor finally looked at me again. Her tears were gone.

“And you’re still keeping Maisie confined,” I said. “You still have her locked up. I should hate you for that, yes. But I don’t think that’s fruitful, because you understood not one bit of this. Did you?”

“I’m trying,” the Governor said. “I have to keep going. I have to complete the project.”

I sighed. I had gained a sliver of understanding of the Eye, and begun the process of communication, but this was like talking to a brick wall — or perhaps to an addict, so focused on her addiction that I could not peel her away, could not make her see in any other fashion, could not make her understand that this was not necessary.

“I cannot believe I am standing here having a conversation with you,” I said. “You have been the monster in my nightmares for half my life. You took my sister. You’re a giant eyeball in the sky, and I’m just talking to you. I … I think I’m trying to save you. Why am I trying to save you? You almost destroyed me. You’re right, I should hate you, but I don’t.”

The Governor said nothing.

I sighed again, heavy this time, exhausted inside. “The old me would have been a gibbering ball on the floor by now. Do you even understand that?”

“No,” she said.

“Fair enough.” I tried a different track: “What if you stopped the project?”

The Governor looked back down at me, pink eyes widened a fraction. “Stop?”

“Stop the project, yes.” I gestured about with my eyes, at the library stacks marching off, swallowed up by the still and silent fog. My crutch creaked beneath my left arm. My weight was starting to bother me. My leg ached like a distant drum. “Stop trying to read all of this. Give up. Abandon it. Move on.”

The Governor took a series of short, sharp breaths. I realised with my own wide-eyed surprise that she was terrified of that notion.

“Are you afraid?” I asked, stunned. “What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t want that,” she said. “I’d rather die than go back to that.”

“Go back to what?”

“Before.”

I bit down on my patience; she really was trying her best. “Before what?”

“Before I was … before … when I was … was … ”

She frowned as she stumbled over her words. Whatever it was, she could not voice the concept.

And suddenly, I knew another thing we had in common.

“Before you emerged from the abyss?” I said.

The Governor turned to me and locked eyes.

Suddenly she was all there. Absolutely lucid, totally present, just like that moment back in the infirmary. Those pinkish eyes were torn wide and trembling with something I knew so well, so intimately, so painfully. Her stare was like the grasp of a drowning girl, clinging to me with her sight, threatening to rip me beneath the waves with her desperation. I almost recoiled, clutching hard to my crutch like driftwood in a storm, but I restrained my reaction. I had to stand my ground, I had to push.

“I know you came from the abyss,” I said. “I deduced it, a long time ago now. You pulled yourself upward until you were large enough to burst out into reality. A reality, at least. That was Wonderland, before you burned it to a crisp.”

“Yes,” she said in a halting murmur.

“And that’s the before, the before you don’t want to go back to?”

“Yes.”

“ … what was it like? Why don’t you want to—”

“I was blind.”

I wet my lips, struggling to imagine, but then the Governor carried on without prompting.

“I don’t want to be blind again,” she said, staring at me so hard I thought my skin might begin to cook as if beneath the midday sun. “I don’t want to go back to that. I would rather be dead. I want to be the way I’m supposed to be.”

I nodded slowly. “We really are like each other, aren’t we? I found my true self in the abyss and I’ve been modifying my flesh ever since, trying to get back to that feeling. But you, you’re coming at the same thing from the opposite angle. For you, reality is where you can become yourself. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to be?”

“Complete.”

I sighed, hoping that the human metaphor was making sense. “Nobody is ever ‘complete’. Except in death, I suppose. Nobody ever stops changing or growing, even if that happens in directions they might not like. But you’re not going to stop being you just because you stop reading all these books. I don’t understand the connection.”

“The archives are the only way to understand,” said the Governor. “Without them I don’t know anything.”

“To understand what, though?”

“Myself?”

She phrased the word as a question, and as she did, her focused stare collapsed. Her wide-struck eyes returned to normal. Her gaze wandered away, across my shoulders, out into the fog, over to the shelves — then down to her own hands, removed from her pockets. She flexed her fingers, staring at the motion of flesh and bone.

“Introspection?” I asked. “You’re trying to comprehend yourself?” I shook my head. “But you can’t, not like this.” I gestured outward. “Where are you?”

The Governor glanced up at me. “What?”

“Where are you?” I repeated. “In this library, in the archive. All the stacks are labelled and sorted with names and subjects. Where’s your story? Where are you?”

“I am the sum. I will be the sum, once the project is complete.”

I almost laughed. “You can’t grow just by reading books. I mean, seriously, I’ve learned that from my own life! You can learn a lot of things from books, and they can be beautiful, or powerful, or move you, or do all sorts of things to you. But for growth, for identity, you need context as well. You need other people. Reference points. Here, does Raine have a set of shelves in here too? Have you been observing her? Surely you picked that up from her, right? People need anchors.”

The Governor shook her head.

“You’re a singular, unique, isolated being, with no social context,” I said, talking more to myself than to her. “And you’re trying to build an identity by reading books, but that’s a metaphor, isn’t it? This metaphor is the only way to communicate with you. Your cognitive process would be incomprehensible otherwise. You’re trying to build an understanding of yourself by watching everything else. Observing, but not participating. Never being part of something. You’re like a little girl growing up on a desert island, with only books for company.”

“But everything is here,” she said. “The archives are everything. Everything is in the archives. If only I read it all, then I can—”

“You need something other than books. Something that isn’t other people’s experiences. You need your own anchor.”

The Governor seemed paralysed. “What else … what is … what is there?”

The obvious solution was almost too obscene to draw, but draw it I did.

“Me,” I said. “I’m right here in front of you. You don’t need all these books about me and Maisie to understand us. We can just talk, like we are now, without you blasting me to atoms and rendering me down to ash and grease. Look at me. Really look at me.”

The Governor looked — she did, she tried, I saw the effort in her face. But all she saw was atoms and parts, the angles of my face, the set of my limbs, the number of hairs on my head. ‘I’ was beyond her.

Her pinkish eyes filled with a sheen of tears once again.

“I tried before,” she said. “I tried to understand you. But I couldn’t.”

“Was that what all the hyperdimensional mathematics was about?” I asked. “The lessons, the teaching, the nightmares?”

“I thought I could understand you if you could tell me about yourself in a way I could understand.”

I blinked in surprise, then almost laughed. “Well, you weren’t wrong, were you?”

“What?” The Governor’s tears vanished.

“We’re talking now, in a way you can understand, via hyperdimensional mathematics. Well done. If you had never taught me, we couldn’t have this conversation. In a very long-winded and roundabout way, your plan worked. Here I am.”

The Governor blinked — once, hard, screwing her eyes shut.

When she opened them again, she stared directly at me.

We held each other’s gaze for thirty seconds, then a minute, then longer. Not once did she look away. Her eyes had ceased to wander. My left shin began to ache, a warning that the morphine was beginning to wear thin within my blood, but I dared not shift my weight or look away, for the Eye finally saw.

“Yes?” I prompted.

“ … hello,” said the Governor.

“Hello,” I echoed. “Hello there. Hi. I’m Heather, but you know that already. And I’m not a book. You see me now, don’t you?”

“I see you.”

“Good. Um. I’m not sure how you did that, but good, well done.”

Her stare was a little too intense, a little too wide-eyed, but I wasn’t about to start complaining.

“What now?” she said, still staring.

“Well, if you want to understand yourself, you do need context, other people, mirrors in which to see yourself reflected, yes. I think I can serve as that for you, if you’re just … looking at me. But you also need to think about yourself directly. That’s why I asked if there’s a book about you in here. You need to … um … ” I sighed, almost cringing at the metaphysical pun as the words came to me. “You need to look inward. Can you do that?”

The Governor seemed absolutely lost. Her lips hung parted. Her hands were held before her as if in prelude to a hopeless prayer.

Praem suggested I start for her, at the very beginning.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“ … my name?”

“Yes, your name. You’re part of the Eye, okay, but ‘The Eye’ is not a name, not really. I’ve been just thinking of you as ‘the Governor’ this entire time, but that’s not a name either, that’s a title, a role, like in a play. Raine called you ‘Eileen’, which I’m not going to grace with serious consideration. I’ve heard other people call you the ‘Magnus Vigilator’. Zheng called you some old Chinese word which I think means ‘lord’, but that doesn’t seem right for you. I think Evelyn spoke your ‘true name’ once, and it made everyone’s ears hurt, but I doubt that’s something you chose. I suspect that’s just some magical terminology that somebody else made up, some mage making assumptions. You had no parents to give you a name, so you probably named yourself. So, what’s your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have a name? Or you forgot it? Or it was taken away?”

“I don’t know.” The Governor stared hard. Her pinkly glowing eyes seemed to expand and expand, as if trying to suck me down into a void. “Nobody has ever had to refer to me before. Nobody has had need to speak a name.”

I did my best to smile — awkward and horrified and deep in the fog of an alien mind, having a sensible and reasonable and polite conversation with the very thing which had turned my life into a tortured mess for the last decade. And rather than turning my stomach with disgust and anger and rejection, I began to feel mostly pity.

She was almost like a child.

“Well, I do,” I said. “I need a name with which to refer to you. If only to stop you wandering off the next time you decide to plunge into the fog and leave me behind.”

“You,” said the Governor.

“Me?”

“No. You.”

“ … I’m sorry, pardon? What are you trying to say?”

“You,” the Governor repeated. “You can just call me ‘you’.”

I narrowly resisted an urge to put my face in my hand. “That’s not a name, that’s a second-person pronoun. It’s not specific to you.”

“Yes it is. You say you, and obviously it is me.”

I paused, squinting my eyes, trying to unknot this linguistic absurdity. “Do you think you’re the only entity with subjectivity? Do you think you’re the only person anybody could possibly be referring to when they say ‘you’?”

The Governor — You? — paused again, bewildered. “I have never thought about this before.”

“Yes, that sounds about right.” I tutted softly. “I suppose I could call you ‘Yuu’. That’s short for several Japanese names, like Yukari, or Yuuka. Though I suspect that would give Evelyn an aneurysm. I don’t know enough about anime not to name you after somebody wildly inappropriate. Besides, it hardly solves the linguistic issue. And the linguistic issue is just a symptom of a metaphysical issue.” I sighed and stared back into the Governor’s focused eyes. “I don’t even know where to start with this.”

Praem offered a suggestion — herself.

“Ah! Good idea, thank you, Praem,” I said, and pulled the Praem Plushie out from the front of my yellow robe.

The Governor watched with a curious expression as I held up Praem. I pointed her flat-eyed, expressionless face of felt and fabric toward the Governor.

“Hello?” said the Governor. “Hello.”

“Oh, um, well done,” I said. “I was about to tell you to say that. This is Praem. She’s my … spiritual daughter? Daughter-in-law? Family maid-by-choice? Whichever, she’s part of my family, that’s all you really need to know.”

Praem returned the greeting.

“Do you see?” I asked. “When I say ‘you’, I might be referring to you, or I might be referring to Praem.” I turned Praem so I could meet her flat eyes. “Hello Praem, how are you?”

Praem replied that she was well, thank you.

“See?” I asked the Governor. “To me, you are ‘you’, but Praem is also ‘you’, because neither of you are me. Do you follow?”

The Governor’s face collapsed into the strongest and starkest expression from her thus far — the most cavernous, craggiest, and confused frown I had ever seen on a human visage, coupled with the wide eyes of bewildered revelation.

She looked at Praem, then looked at me, then back at Praem, then back at me. Then down at her own hands. Then upward, at nothing.

“Ah,” she said.

I sighed with relief. “Okay, there you go! So, you need a proper name, you see? Because you’re not just ‘you’. You’re you. So, who are you?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at me again. “Can you give me a name?”

“I’m not sure about that,” I said with a wince. “Are you certain you didn’t have one before?”

“Heather,” said the Governor.

“Yes, that’s my name. But—”

“I could be Heather. It’s a name.”

I sighed again. “No, no, that’s not what you should do. You didn’t choose that, you just picked the thing that’s right in front of you. And it would be incredibly weird and confusing if we were both named ‘Heather’.” I gestured left and right with Praem, at the library stacks and grey plastic shelves peeking through the veils of fog and shifting deeps of greasy mist. “You have this whole library of experiences, all these lives, compressed down into text. Why not pick a name from among these? You must have plenty from which to choose.”

The Governor followed the directions I indicated with Praem, but then snapped back to me. Her eyes clung to me like desperate hands, clawing at the surface, trying to resist the pull of the ocean beneath.

“I don’t know how to pick,” she said. “Please, give me a name?”

“I … I can’t do that, not yet. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know enough about you. I don’t know what you’re like, or what you value, or what you care about, other than observing things, but we’re trying to move past that. If I knew a bit more, perhaps I could pick a suitable name, though it would be better for you to name yourself, I think.”

“Eileen?”

I winced again, much worse. “Let’s not entertain that possibility. Look, the whole point of asking you for a name was to facilitate you looking inward, to define who and what you are. The name is just a container for that stuff. What’s important is the material being contained and summarised. The signified, not the signifier. The signifier can be nice, or cute, or fun, or whatever. So … ”

“Who am I?” she finished the sentence, when I could not.

“Exactly. Who are you?”

The Governor looked left and right, then over her shoulder, down into the murk of the fog. “I’m all of this.”

“No,” I said. “You’re more than that. We’re all more than the sum of the things we’ve read and the experiences we’ve watched other people have. What are your experiences? Who are you?”

The Governor’s face swung back around. She stared at me, bewildered and empty.

Praem suggested I keep dragging her. Don’t give up now.

“You started in the abyss, correct?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And … did you have a twin down there? Is that what you’ve been missing this whole time?”

“No.”

I frowned. “Then why study myself and Maisie? Why the obsession with twins, with pairs, with—”

“Because I am incomplete. Because the archive is incompletely read. I need to look into a mirror. I wanted to understand you, because you looked a little bit like me, but whole. You had a mirror.”

“A twin, right.” But then I sighed. “This isn’t helping either of us. I’m not sure what you need, but I absolutely need to sit down before my left leg falls off. Are you certain there’s no entries in this library about you? No shelves with you in them? Reflections on yourself? Anything like that?”

The Governor shook her head. “None. I am sure.”

Praem made the obvious suggestion; I reached the same conclusion at the very same second.

“Well,” I said. “Can we write a book about you?”

“What?”

I smiled, feeling like I was finally getting somewhere. “A book about you. An entry full of your thoughts and feelings, your memories, your experiences. Do you have any blank books around here? There were some empty notebooks and papers up in your office, but I doubt those count, metaphysically speaking.”

“Blank … books?” The Governor frowned with incredible confusion once again. “Why would a book be blank?”

“So you can fill it with words. Do you have any?”

The Governor shook her head. “The archive is for reading.”

“Well, you and I are going to work together, and add a new book to it.” I cast about, peering off into the fog. “Here, there must be something we can write on, like … oh! Wait here a second. Don’t run off, okay?”

I tucked Praem back into the front of my yellow blanket, then staggered the few paces over to the open mouth of the library stacks, to the nearest row with my name upon it. I did not step all the way inside, but only reached in and grabbed one of the spiral-bound manuscripts, the chunkiest one I could find.

I pulled it out and turned it to the plastic front cover. A little pink label was affixed down in the corner — ‘M.H.24.27’.

Was this dangerous?

Praem said no, this was not dangerous. This book was not the inside of my mind; these were not my actual words. These were the Eye’s observations of me, boiled down into English text by the vastly powerful metaphorisation process of hyperdimensional mathematics. This would no more harm me than shredding a print out of one of my essays for university would hurt my own physical brain.

Still, I braced myself for the worst, like holding a gun to my own foot.

I used the corner of a fingernail to pick at the little label. It came up easily, then peeled away, and left behind no hint of sticky residue.

Nothing happened. I did not turn to mist or forget my own name.

Quickly, I pressed the sticker onto the cover of another nearby volume instead, rather than litter in even the metaphor of a library. Then I stepped back and opened the now-nameless plastic-bound manuscript, to see if my own imposition of meaning had taken hold.

Each and every page was totally blank.

“Yes!” I almost cheered, then turned back to the Governor and held up the manuscript. “There. Now we have a blank book, and I’m already carrying a pen. True, it won’t be the most comfortable pen with which to write, so you’ll have to fiddle about a bit to get the nice thin part of the nib, but here. Here, take this.”

I limped and lurched back over to the Governor, then pressed the blank book into her hands. She accepted it with confused hesitation, as if she didn’t understand quite what it was. Then I dug around in my yellow blanket again, pulled out the black marker pen I had stolen from Cygnet Hospital’s dayroom, and pressed that into her hands as well.

“There. Now you’re all ready to begin. But not here.” I sighed. “We need to return to the entrance, because you need a desk, and I absolutely must sit or I’m going to fall down. And don’t run off ahead of me this time, I can’t keep up with you on this leg.”

The Governor looked back the way we’d come, staring into the still and sucking fog. “Okay.”

I took one last glance back at the rolling stacks which held Maisie’s name. But they were not Maisie, not her mind, only observations. That way lay madness. Only action would free her now.

We walked side by side this time, the Governor and I. She wandered as if in a daze, holding the blank book before her, sometimes raising the pen and frowning at it as if she could not quite fathom the purpose of such a tool. Sometimes she plodded along for minutes without raising her head, eyes fixed on the first unblemished page of the empty manuscript. But she did not speed up or stride off into the fog; she kept pace with my awkward lumbering gait, as I clung to my crutch and swung myself forward like a drunken ship on these fog-bound seas.

Minutes, hours, days — the return walk seemed to take forever. I no longer had the luxury of noting the names and subject areas on the grey plastic shelves as we passed, for all my spare attention was on the Governor, and the remains were claimed by the increasing pain clawing up into my thigh and hip from the bandaged secret of the wound in my shin.

Praem reminded me that four hours had not yet passed. It was not time for another dose of morphine. Not yet.

But it would be soon. Soon! Just keep walking. Soon! Keep going. Soon!

Eventually the central concrete pillar of the entrance loomed out of the fog ahead of us, like the cliffs of a distant foreign shore rising up from the endless plain of the grey-washed sea. I redoubled my efforts. The Governor picked up her feet to stay at my side.

Finally we burst from the fog-drowned aisle and out into the octagonal open space around the entrance-pillar. I heaved to, swaying on my crutch like a ship at anchor, panting for breath. The Governor stumbled to a halt, unsure what to do with herself without my direction. Tendrils of fog lapped at our rear, plucking and pulling at the shoulders of the Governor’s lab coat, trying to coax her back into the library stacks.

Everything was just as we had left it — the table with the wire-and-meat of the Lozzie Puppet, the free-standing blackboard with the half-complete equation upon its surface, and the plain desk by the door back to the stairwell.

After a few moments to catch my breath, I pulled myself upright and nodded at the desk. “Come on. You best sit down if you’re going to write.”

The Governor followed me like a puppy now. I limped over to the desk; it was cluttered with so many bound manuscripts and hardback volumes that barely a sliver of the desktop could be seen. The Governor hovered at my shoulder.

“Sit down then,” I said. “At the desk, please. Sit down.”

“Why?”

“So you can write, of course. Come on, sit down. The sooner we get this done the sooner we can return to the revolution upstairs.”

The Governor pulled out the chair, clutching the empty manuscript and the black marker pen to her chest, then sat down. Her lab coat puddled against the seat and upon the floor either side. She looked rather awkward and gangly all of a sudden, with the pose and poise of an uncomfortable teenager, despite her obvious sixty years or so of age. She stared at the clutter on the desk.

“Can’t I finish reading these, at least?” she asked, reaching for one of the volumes. “Can’t I—”

“No! No, you can’t!”

In a mad panic that she was about to relapse, I grabbed the edge of the desk with my free hand, raised my crutch into the air, and swept the metal pole across the desktop. The mass of manuscripts and books were shoved aside, off the desk, tumbling to the floor in a tidal wave of falling paper and flapping covers. The Governor gaped as the books fell; I felt an instant wave of regret before the first volume even hit the carpet — for though these were mere metaphor for thought, they were still books, this was still a library, and that was an act of most grave disrespect.

The Heather of a year ago would have been aghast. And so was I.

Praem did what Praem does best; Praem reached out of my yellow blanket and tidied the books as they landed, sorting them into neat little piles. Rather than a deafening crash and clatter of crumpled spines and crushed pages, the volumes landed with a slap-slap-click-click-slap-click of rapidly stacked up books.

In the space of a second or two, several little towers stood by the desk, all neat and tidy, with no mess in sight.

“Oh,” I said, blinking several times. “Um. Thank you, Praem? Thank you.”

Praem said I was welcome.

Praem was still just a plush doll stuffed into the front of my yellow blanket, with stubby little plush arms and stubby little plush legs, boasting of no fingers, no hands, and only flat disks for eyes. The haze of morphine had receded just far enough for me to question this fact — but the pain in my leg bade me not think too hard. More opiates would be forthcoming soon enough.

I decided not to worry about it. Praem was on my side, after all.

The Governor looked rather nonplussed. She was still clutching the empty manuscript to her chest.

“Here, put it down on the table,” I said. The Governor did as I asked, but gingerly, as if she was defusing a bomb. “Open it to the first page. That’s it. Now uncap the pen. Set the cap aside. There. You’re all ready to begin.”

The Governor stared at the blank page, pen held awkwardly in her right hand. She tucked her long messy hair behind both ears. Then she didn’t move, for quite a long time.

“You … you do know how to write, yes?” I asked.

She looked up at me. “Yes.”

“Then—”

“I don’t know what to write.”

“That’s a common enough problem,” I said, surprising myself with an easy smile. “But don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can just put down whatever is inside your head. Whatever you’re thinking, about yourself, about your feelings, thoughts, and so on. But mostly I want you to write about your history. Where you came from. What you did. How you got here. All of that stuff. Who are you, what do you want, where are you going? Those kinds of questions. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

I waited, but she just stared. “And do you think you can do that?”

“No.”

I sighed. “Just write. Start with anything. You’ll figure out where you’re going as you start moving. That’s how I write essays for university, when I’m not sure where to begin. I always have to spend a lot of time editing and rewriting the opening paragraphs, because they’re full of nonsense. But you have to push through the nonsense to reach the meaningful part. Start with … how you were created, or the first feelings you can remember. Can you try that?”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” I smiled again. “You can do this. And I can help you, too.”

The Governor looked down at the blank page, then back up at me. “Where will you sit?”

I glanced around, but there really was only a single seat. “On the floor, I suppose. Right here.”

I limped away a few paces, then spent an awkward minute lowering myself to the floor, clambering down my own crutch until my bottom met the carpet. I kept my left leg stuck out in front of me, shin throbbing and pulsing with slow waves of painful little needles. I lay my crutch down beside me, then put Praem into my lap.

How was I going to stand up again? That was a problem for Future Heather, and I was quite sure Future Heather was not going to like Past Heather and her surrender to the floor.

I let out a heavy sigh and looked into the distant layers of fog. They reached out from the library stacks, lapping upon the shores of the clear space around the concrete pillar. Then I drew my eyes in closer and stared at the unfinished equation on the blackboard. An idle hand removed the stick of chalk from within my yellow blanket.

“Are you going to write too?” said the Governor.

“Ah?” I looked around at her, then at the chalk. “Oh, no, no. I don’t think I even can, not without all of me. The other six parts of me, I mean. I need your help to free them, too. Then maybe I can finish that equation for you, once I know what it means.”

“You could complete it now.”

“Not without you,” I said. I nodded at the blank manuscript, and at the Governor’s right hand holding the black marker pen, still and unmoving, framed by the distant whorls of fog. “You need to get started. If you need help, I’m right here. I’m only going to sit and rest, I’m not going anywhere. Please, start whenever you’re ready. Anything you like.”

The Governor — the Eye — returned her gaze to the blank page. Her pink eyes, like clouds before a sunset storm, focused on the emptiness, on that unblemished white expanse.

Her hand trembled. She let it fall toward the white. She tensed, relaxed, let out a sigh.

And then put pen to paper.