“If you were wondering, that didn’t actually sound like you were whining,” she said, anticipating my immediate self-denigrating thought. “Why would you feel emotionally distant to others?”

I thought about it. It was interesting phrasing, not allowing me the refusal, but at the same time, not insisting that I did. I appreciated it. I turned it around in my head for a moment.

“I am afraid,” she continued, “that ‘why’ questions can be frowned upon in therapeutic situations. There may not be an answer that you can directly anchor to, or is even relevant, but you seem like someone who needs to fix things. If you have an answer that you can attack with a wrench or similar tool, you might be able to adjust your thinking.”

“Well, yes, that’s me,” I agreed. “Generally. Sometimes even if I feel like I won’t get it except intellectually for a long time.”

“Well, yes, that’s all of us,” she teased. Did I mention how pretty her smile was? I wouldn’t consider myself a “smile” guy, since I was 63.4% a legs guy, and a good 28.2% a breast guy, but 8.4% was up for grabs. Or feels. So to speak.

“That common?” I sounded surprised, even to me.

“Some of us go through life sensitive, some of us so much that we’re raw and scraped by every wind of fortune. Most of us build shells against the scouring winds of experience, but at the same time we need to put our mind in focus and interweave it with our heart and body. It’s a pleasant place when the three are in harmony.” She shrugged. “Now,” she said, “I’m willing to take you on, as it were.”

“Student? Client? Padawan?” I asked.

“Thrall,” she shushed me. “But this is like the other events you’ve described.”

“There’s a catch?”

“A quest,” she said. “An adventure.” She paused and looked me square in the eyes. “Payment.”

“Oh,” I said. I don’t think I gulped, but it was that kind of sudden sound.

She laughed. “I promise, I won’t make you slay a dragon,” and I wanted to laugh as well, but the smile never made it to her eyes. Her pale, pale eyes.

“I appreciate it,” I said, swallowing down my concerns and the laughter that had never quite made it out of my throat. “Theft? Murder? Arson?”

She stared at me.

“Murder, then?” I was hoping she’d pick up the reference, but then, I was hoping I hadn’t actually gotten it right.

“Perhaps. If you’re not clever enough for any other resolution,” she said. She turned away. “Would you like some coffee? Tea?” She started to get up.

“I’d like an answer,” I said, which was probably pretty abrupt, given how these things generally went. I wasn’t into waiting or being mollified by hot liquids, or negotiating or whatever courtesies were involved in her delay. I felt I’d already satisfied the demands of Hospitality.

“I’d like a pony,” she said, but turned back. “I need something before the explanation, if it’s all the same to you. I’m offering you something as well, because I am a lady,” she schooled me on that last.

“Something like a shot of whiskey?” I asked.

“That’s available if you’d like. Or a couple of beers.”

“I’d take one of those,” I said.

“Alright, so let me say it correctly. “Coffee, tea, beer?”

“Beer me,” I said.

She went to the refrigerator – I could see the light from the door, and hear the clinking of bottles. She was in the kitchen for a moment. She brought out a couple of glasses, but I shook my head and she left hers on the small end table as well.
I twisted the top off of mine and took a long drink. Sometimes I wonder why I developed the taste, and sometimes I was reminded by the nourishing aspect of it, cold and refreshing. Of course, I like my cola the same way. Still, I could taste hints of honey and maybe something nutty in it, and I felt a bit better.

She drank hers in smaller sips, her hand wrapped around it. “I haven’t left my house in,” she looked up at the mirror behind the couch, “three years? The shields are strong, but they’re not portable.”

That’s what I was feeling. Comfortable, lived-in, yes, but stagnant, too. A wall of discarded skins. I shivered.

“You let me in,” I said, confused.

“A calculated risk,” she said. “Come here,” she said, and she stood up.

She led me into the kitchen, and where I would have expected a pantry turned out to be a door to stairs leading down into some sort of basement. The walls were painted blue with stars in a style somewhere between clip art and cartoon and still realistic. There was magic in the art, but it wasn’t her magic.

She turned on a switch, and a string of intense led lights wound itself down along the banister. I followed her down the stairs into what was a finished space in dark purple and copper. There were electric candles and warm lights, but besides the almost blindingly bright decorative white of the stairs, all the illumination was yellow and gold. It looked warm. Heavy velutinous fabrics with rich colors draped across lounging chairs of the type I thought were described as “fainting couches.” The walls were covered in murals of abstract colours or soft rugs. The floor was a thick carpet in that grape jelly colour.

“I operate a hospital,” she says. “A hospital for those with special needs.”

I looked around, but there was only ourselves. She looked at me with half a smile, waiting for something.

I took a moment to extend my sensitivity slightly. If I thought the shields were like steel above, this was stone, kevlar, and some kind of science fiction force field in honeycombed patterns in clever little bowls around the chairs.

“Wow,” I said, impressed besides myself.

“A comfortable prison, eh?” she said, turning around. “There are no patients here.”

“Is…” I started. I stopped. “I don’t get it. This is a beautiful set-up. Is that the problem? You need me to put an ad on the backpage of the local alternative rag? Crags Place?”

She smiled indulgently, but her eyes were dark again, and it was sad. For a moment she looked like Naul, and I felt a wave of panic, but it went away as she stepped back, managing to gracefully drape herself across one of the chairs.

“I had a patient. His name was Vasil Greyn.” She pointed to a seat, and I sat down.

I stood right back up as the chill managed to get past my neck and straight to my spine. The hair on my arms stood up, and I felt as if something had not only stepped on my grave but started to pull me into it.

“What the–” I started.

“He had something inside him. A doorway to something else,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me, but past me, into the long darkness. “I tried to close it.”

She was quiet for a while.

“What happened?” I asked. I found another seat, close to her. I didn’t know if I was supposed to touch her, but this seemed to be a moment that needed it. Maybe it was anchoring her to the now, to the physical reality. I reached out and took her hand in mine. It felt strangely intimate, and yet appropriate.

She squeezed my hand and let it go. Another sad smile. “I closed it, of course.”

I waited for her to elucidate, and when she didn’t I started. “Soooooo?” I made it long but hopefully not petulant.

“I made a mistake.” She looked at me, shaking her head and coming back to the present. “I closed the wrong door. I closed it the wrong way. I left the evil inside and locked the human away.”

I felt my lips making a swear word that didn’t leave them in sound. I had… I had never really considered that an option. Sure, it was metaphorically possible, but from practice… What belonged in this world stayed when a door shut. Things returned to their origin. It was the point of the piece, part of the ritual, untangling the worlds where they strayed together, cutting the threads, all the analogies pulled them apart. Even when I did what I did to Naul, it wasn’t cutting pieces of her off, but closing the sources of power to which she was connected.

“Tell me more.” I took a deep breath. “What do you mean by evil?”

“Is everything a,” she used an obscenity, “philosophical question with you? Evil. Evil exists, little boy. It exists in smiles, in the unrelenting sunshine, in the glint of the eye and the shine of the knife. It’s not shadows and in the dustbunnies under the bed. It’s right there whistling and jogging behind you. It tips its hat to you and goes on its way, and all you feel is the fear of its passing. A fear you shove aside,” she stood up. “You shove it aside and go on, but the poison in it has already touched you. You speak a word to the next person you don’t mean, born of that fear. That passes on the poison. They know you don’t mean it, but what was it you asked? If everyone feels the difference between what their mind knows and what their heart knows? You’ve poisoned their heart. Their mind was immune. How long do we last with a poisoned heart?” The last was almost yelled at me.

“We can last quite a while with poisoned minds,” I said. “We grow antibodies. We rarely purge them clean, but some poisons are a chemotherapy of the soul.” I stayed sitting, and my voice was calm.

“And we calcify our hearts,” she shook her head. “He’s out there. Hurting who knows how many, and yet lost.”

“The human condition,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I demurred. “I was being cynical.”

“And how often are you passionate? In a positive fashion?” she asked me. “You think self-denigration is normal?”

“For me, maybe,” I was hesitant.

“But what about for a child? They love openly. They love fearlessly.”

“Children are selfish and cruel,” I said. “They have no sense of boundaries, or of proprieties.”

“Proprieties that have changed with ‘civilization’,” she retorted. “I am not denying that there are places children need to develop; they are immature, after all, and have transformations to make… but look at them in the sense of their emotional beginnings.”

“No original sin?” I asked. “They are blank slates?”

“We know better than that, in both cases,” she said, and she came back to sit down. “We all are imbued with the map of our histories, the changes that were made to our cells by experience, the personalities that nurture us, the memories that are stamped in our roots, exposure to magic… Some of this is transferred genetically. Who knows how much? Perhaps there are family curses that affect all humanity, but no matter how original the sin, the burden is so small as to be interesting only to mathematicians, much as is the level of our being cousins to each other.”

“Yeah, poking badgers with spoons is so last decade,” I sighed. “But children would totally do it.”

“That’s science,” she laughed. “Medicine is poking dead things with sticks. Psychology is wondering why we want to poke things with sticks. Sociology is wondering why that thing we poked with a stick is mad. Physics is how it moves when we poke at it with a stick. Biology is poking live things with sticks. Math is how many things and how many sticks.”

I chuckled. “Business is trading the best sticks for poking things? Politics is organizing stick poking expeditions? Religion is asking why it’s so satisfying to poke things with sticks?”

“More the reasons why it is right to poke things with sticks,” she suggested.

“Overruling the study of sociology. Of course, my religion says poking kittens with sticks is just wrong. Poking clams with sticks, well…”

“That’s a dirty euphemism and you should be ashamed of yourself,” she chuckled.

“That’s not what I meant,” I protested.