But the walls stay, the roof remains strong and immovable, and we can only pray that if these rooms have memories, they are not ours.
I wish I did not recognise pieces of myself within each of the Ieshans. If only Adonai’s soft martyrdom did not remind me so much of the boy who once marched off to the glory of war. If only Pilate’s nest of snakes did remind me of my own inner turmoil, and the vicious bitterness that rots my soul. If only Ruth did not have to say, there are certain things that I cannot feel.
Only moments ago, she had been uninteresting; a princess in name but not in right. A doctor for pleasure rather than practicality. I choose my next words carefully; but I am looking at her with renewed, apt attention. “At least you can admit it.”
I wonder, then, if she means it. There is a difference between an admission and an actual acknowledgement of truth. Do her words not sound like something a tragic princess might say, to receive attention? Do they not sound like something an unremarkable girl might comment to become, instead, remarkable? I have met many women with similar dispositions; but the idea of delving into the “truth” of her remark exhausts me to the point I would rather just take it at face value.
My mouth works. I remember the way blood and sea tastes too much like copper and salt, like the way rusting pennies smell. “It is not so hard,” I say at last. “First, you have to practice in the mirror. You have to put on a skin and pretend to be someone else.”
Who are you tonight? The question takes on the voice of my mother; it takes me longer than I would have liked, to remember why.
She had said it to me at the banquet where I received my medal of commendation. The medal I was meant to receive besides Bondike, adorned in our gleaming war paint. My mother had prepared me for the ceremony, with the paint; across my brow; my cheeks; my neck; my shoulder. Bondike’s colour had always been gold, to compliment me. Mine had always been metallic, coppery red to compliment him. That night, I had chosen gold and gold again: but my mother included old symbols of mourning, of loss rather than triumph, interwoven into the tapestry of less ancient signs that meant prosperity and victory and valor.
I had not felt anything; not even when they put the medal around my neck and paraded me in front of generals and colonels. Even when I had smiled so graciously; and spoken in my own voice; and acted in my old way. Who are you, tonight?
That is when I had begun, I think, to practice how to smile.
“When it is especially difficult,” I remark, in a kind of detached way. “I pretend I am my old lover, instead of myself. He was always better than me. More gracious. Quicker to smile. Quicker to laugh. Slower to anger. Empathetic.”
Even this is a lie.
We had never been lovers, in anything except for our souls.
It is true that, when times had been difficult, I had asked myself what would Bondike do, if he were me? It was such thoughts that gave me the strength to walk away from my father; to go to war again and again and again; to forgive my mother.
Of course, those things did not last without him. Without her. My mouth twists wryly. "The reason you state? It is why I was a good soldier." And then: "If you were to be someone else, Ruth... who would it be?" Even this, I think, has been recited in a mirror. This simple act of interest, of taking the step of asking--the engagement, the words themselves. I do not care what she answers; but the not caring is in and of itself a kind of imprisonment, so it is easier to walk into this story, into this myth, and pretend (and lie) that it does matter.
I turn my eyes to her, and they are not a soldier's eyes.
They are soft as a lamb's; as bruised as a martyr's. I am tired.
(But even that... even that... do I believe it?)
No.
It is easier, I know, to accept that some of us are simply born cursed.
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "O YOU MISUNDERSTAND, / a game is not a law, / this dance is not a whim, / this kill is not a rival. / I crackle through your pastures / I make no profit / like the sun / I burn and burn, this tongue / licks through your body also."
At least you can admit it. “It is easier to admit it,” I say, with a tilt of my head, “than to allow it to be defined on someone else’s terms.” And, if I don’t do it myself, I know what will be made of me. I have seen the psychiatric subject, the patient on the table; and, no matter what I may be, no matter how incomplete I am, I will, at the very least, define myself. It isn’t a choice – it has never been a choice -, but it is some modicum of control.
Else, it is – the strangest daughter of the Ieshan house, have you seen her? There is something quite wrong with that girl.
If there is, and I know that there is – at least it is mine.
His green-eyed stare is on me, more attentive than it has been for all the rest of our conversation; I have provoked his interest, somehow, and I listen silently as he begins to tell me how to smile. It is not so hard, he says, First, you have to practice in the mirror. You have to put on a skin and pretend to be someone else.
He doesn’t understand, I think, but he thinks that he does. I don’t say it. I simply listen as he impresses himself onto me, supposes that he understands. I think that the easiest way to explain the distinction is this: he looks at me, and he sees something of himself. I look at him, and I feel like I am looking at a sandwyrm, or a viper, or something more insignificant – a spider. Something outside-of-myself. Something with a mind put together in a fundamentally different way, so fundamental that it is as though we do not even speak the same language.
I cannot pretend to be anyone in the same way that I cannot pretend to be a snake. That would require some understanding that I know that I can never, ever attain.
It is why I am very honest, for someone who lies as a matter of survival.
He mentions his past lover, and I listen on, unsure if I am faintly interested or apathetic – I don’t think that it matters, in his fit of passion, and I do not bother to tell him that I could never be like him, and he could never be like me at all, because I could never understand what it means to be in love with someone. I understand what love looks like on someone else. I understand, but I know better than anyone that my understanding goes no deeper than pattern recognition; I have seen it so often that it has become recognizable.
But – asking me how it might feel is like asking me how I imagine the courtship of birds. I can see them preening each other, resting their feathered heads against their shoulders, but how could I know what they are feeling? If it is love, it is not love like any of mine, if I can be said to love at all-
(because I know, better than anyone, that everyone I proclaim to care for I care for because of what they do for me. Miriam. Ishak. All my other siblings, probably. If you were to ask me about my apathy regarding Adonai’s so-called illness, about my parents’ death – it is because they do nothing for me, they did nothing for me. I have been told that love, when it is proper, or good, is selfless. I can see that in Miriam’s face. Mine is profoundly self-interested, and I am not so sure that is love at all.)
I listen regardless, because he is Adonai’s newest lover – I think -, and it is best to know as much as I can about anyone who becomes involved in our house. And I do not miss the way that, when he describes his past lover, I can easily attribute his traits to my brother. Insistent on being better as a matter of compulsion. Slow to anger, as a matter of course. As gracious as a proper prince should be, at least in public. Quick to smile – once. Quick to laugh - once, I think, if I am remembering correctly.
I do not know how empathetic my brother is (I have never been good at gauging such things) – but what I do know is that he would surely think of himself as such.
The twist of his dark lips. The reason you state? It is why I was a good soldier. So he is a soldier. I tilt my head, slightly, a dark stripe of my forelock falling out of place where it has been braided back for most of the evening. I am Solterran enough to know soldiers. I am Solterran, and a Doctor, which is more than enough to have held soldiers down while they kick and thrash and scream, to hold my scalpel steady to save them from one gangrening wound or another. I am Solterran, and a Doctor, and this is enough to have discerned a difference between an apathy that is innate and one that is learned. But I do not tell him about the collars, or about soldiers, or about Solterra. I simply consider his question. If you were to be someone else, Ruth... who would it be?
I think, on instinct, of Miriam. Perhaps it is because she is the only good person that I know, and perhaps it is because I have always longed – in some way that is almost certainly misguided and arrogant – to be good, too. But I wouldn’t want to be my sister. I wouldn’t want to be the keeper of our siblings, to be perpetually suffering, all but martyred.
Martyrdom is vile, anyways. I don’t know why people think of it as such a romantic notion to begin with. There is always something voyeuristic about it; and something deeply narcissistic, too.
He is staring at me with a miserable look in his eyes. My gaze on his is not quite anything at all, and that, I think, is the difference between us. “The only thing I would like,” I say, quietly, “is to be normal.” I cannot conceive of what that means, just as I cannot conceive, exactly, of what it means to be someone else – and I do not say it like the opposite of extraordinary, like another woman might, but as the opposite of diseased. My head tilts again, mechanical, the image of curiosity without any of the intent. “And you – who would you be, if you had the choice?”
I do not care – but, when you cannot close your eyes, it is always better to know.
But the walls stay, the roof remains strong and immovable, and we can only pray that if these rooms have memories, they are not ours.
It is easier to admit it than to allow it to be defined on someone else’s terms.
I disagree.
It is much easier to live the lie; it is much easier to live on someone else’s terms. This is an avenue of conversation I once would have pursued ruthlessly, as I had in the academy. We are nothing if not the opinions of others, I might say.
But now I know better.
Now I know that most of us are nothing no matter what we do, no matter how we act, no matter what we own up to.
This, however, is the fault I have inherited from my father. I do not possess the true extent of self-reflection she does. I cannot step back from myself and say, as one does hard facts, exactly who and what I am. My father was a narcissist. So am I, although my hamartia is being unable to recognize. Instead, I feel as if I've found a kindred spirit; instead, I feel briefly as if she understands the depth of my suffering.
My suffering that is beyond the suffering of others.
My unerring belief in one’s rightness. Of course I am right. Of course I find a semblance of my pain in her lack thereof, in her truly apathetic appraisal of life. We are the same, because my pain is greater; we are the same, because my pain recognizes itself in the degrees of everyone else’s life.
Yet, if I were asked, I would say: mine is the greater and my knowledge is more. Not, this is who I am and this is why.
(The only area where her clipped appraisal of me is not quite correct is in regards of her brother—
I do not care for Adonai because he reminds me of my old lover.
I care for her brother as one cares for a broken winged bird. As one cares for something they believe they can save; and in the saving, feel like god.
Perhaps she would know: that is the difference, between a narcissist and a sociopath.
Where one dissects bodies to analyze what is within them, another dissects solely to bring them back to life and say, I saved you and now am a god.
Yes. I am a god—who isn’t, to the things they can save? Just momentarily. Just long enough to feel as if you are everything—)
And anyways, her expression is quiet; and anyways, she does not reveal the thoughts that shift beneath the surface of her face like the quiet mechanisms of a clock. The only thing I would like is to be normal.
I make a dissatisfied noise, in the back of my throat. Just like that, she has lost my intrigue. She has become no different from the rest.
But then: “What is normal, Ruth?”
I might not have asked it, if I were not a little drunk; if my gaze, and expression, were not darkening like a storm.
And you—who would you be, if you had the choice?
“That’s simple.” I answer. There is something volatile about the way I say it; about the way my lip twists into an almost-sneer.
“Nobody.”
There is an old legend among my people.
Better to be a herdsman of sheep than ruler of all the dead. (Of course, I know I could never have been anyone else; I know that this is my lot, and I never could have been a faceless member of the crowd, of society—)
And so I amend, with a wry twist of my mouth. “Maybe your brother.”
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "O YOU MISUNDERSTAND, / a game is not a law, / this dance is not a whim, / this kill is not a rival. / I crackle through your pastures / I make no profit / like the sun / I burn and burn, this tongue / licks through your body also."
I watch the interest drain from his features, and I do not move. I am accustomed to disappointment – his is more like a recognition that I have already come to. We are not so similar at all, no matter what he is hoping to find in me. It satisfies me more than it pains me to hear the sound he makes in the back of his throat, to see the way that his expression twists; but mostly I feel gaping. Mostly, I feel like nothing. Like a half-filled basin. A statue. A bird watching a snake, or a snake watching a bird, if there is even any difference-
(It is a matter of species, I suppose.) What is normal, Ruth? His question does not disguise his disdain. I do not even raise my brow, and I pay no mind to the way that his expression is turning into something that should probably be frightening. “Do you know,” I say, “what we call normal, in the medical field?” A normal body. A normal mind. Normal organs, normal teeth, normal eyes, normal limbs – all enviable characteristics. (Extraordinary was just as likely to cause some other illness as it was to work to your benefit. Gigantism, for example.) “Unafflicted. That is what I mean by it.”
I ask my question, regardless of the look on his face, of his tone, of the curve of his lips. He can think what he will – at least it suggests enough of his nature to be useful. That’s simple, he says, in a tone that is almost-dangerous – the tail end of a sneer, an unspoken question that asks, isn’t it obvious? It isn’t, for me. (Nothing ever is.) I eye him impassively, like I am looking at a specimen twitching under a microscope. Nobody. I can only assume that he means nobody in the metaphorical sense, not that he’d like to be dead, or unborn, and I-
I tilt my head at him slowly, like a mantis. I suppose that he thinks himself significant.
I don’t even know his name.
And then, like an afterthought, with a wry twist of his lips, he adds, Maybe your brother.
How foolish. No – it isn’t even foolish. It’s utterly stupid, and incomprehensible.
I can only assume that he means Adonai. What I can’t understand is why. Who would want to be so utterly sickened, brought to his knees, helpless? I wonder if he knows all the ways that the poison is eating away at my brother’s mind. I wonder if he knows about his paranoia – about his isolation. I wonder if he can possibly understand what it means to be sick in a way that is chronic, to have a condition that will follow you for your entire life. (That is the only thing that I share with my gold-skinned, fair-eyed brother.) I am not sure what kind of person would crave to be sickly, like that, and crave to be so abandoned, such a broken-winged, unloved bird-
(That is probably more of what my brother would like to be than what he ever has been, but that is beside the point entirely.)
And I wonder, very suddenly, if this man really cares if my brother lives or dies. Else, how could he see his situation as something – desirable? I can’t understand what it would mean to be someone else. Their internal lives are as incomprehensible to me as a spider’s, or a fly caught in its web. Regardless, I know that I would not want to be poisoned. I would not want to be helpless. I would not want to be the fly. I scan the man’s muscular features, the warlike curve of his horns, and I wonder, silently, at his cravings.
I wonder what he sees in Adonai, too. I have always loved Miriam best, but Adonai – before he was sick – was something of a bright light in our household. What I can say about him is that he has never quite looked at me like he loathes me, or like he’d rather I disappear. (Pilate has, on more than one occasion. He finds me embarrassing.) What I can say, a bit more than that, is that my brother has never quite looked at me at all. I wonder if he feels guilty about it. I can see him doing just that – sometimes I swear that he likes it.
(It wouldn’t matter if he does.)
I wonder what he would think of the Adonai I know. Surely, he must be a different person entirely; or in my head he is.
I stare at him, and I ask, without a hint of hesitation, “Why?”
Even if he tells me, I know that I won’t understand. Not really. I’ll understand in the way that I understand abstract mathematics.
My question stands, regardless.
But the walls stay, the roof remains strong and immovable, and we can only pray that if these rooms have memories, they are not ours.
Do you know what we call normal, in the medical field? Unafflicted. That is what I mean by it.
As quickly as she has lost my interest, she regains it. I have yet to decide if she deserves it, however. Nothing else in my demeanor changes. I am merely watching her again, with acute interest, with the same expression of almost-disdain. I have grown accustomed to looking down at women; I have suffered a lifetime of it. Perhaps it is an old habit. ”Unafflicted,” I repeat, quietly.
I cannot help but think life is not the medical field. That there is no one who remains “uanfflicted.” That we become afflicted from the moment of our births; with parents; with siblings; with destinies wrought for us by the decisions of others. “That only adds to my point, Ruth. No one is unafflicted.” There is a breach in my coldness, a sudden flash of compassion that is there and then gone. Has this fact not become evident throughout the course of this conversation?
I have become a contradiction before her; I find, however, that this doesn’t matter. I am already not myself in this country, in this nation. Nothing is as it should be. So that when she asks, Why, I only shake my head.
There is a pause. I am suddenly weary of this, of her. I nearly regret the decision to speak to her. I turn away, toward the distant sound of the celebration. As I walk, I cast a glance over my shoulder to say: “It is easier, I believe, to be afflicted with an illness than with yourself. You gave me an honest answer. My honest answer? If I had a choice, I would return to a time when I was young, a version of myself... unafflicted... by life."
That is the truth; or as close to it as I can come. Because even as I think of Adonai, of Solterra, of Ruth I understand I belong to none of it, and never will.
