“Bees are born to a hive,” says the Witch. “We call them drones, and they do what they’re told. Is this the life you want? Where the weak murder the strong? Where those who can’t take care of themselves make rules for those who can? To limit us, to tell us what we can be? Like we’re children.”
Simon wants to answer, but his brain isn’t making words. In his mind he is a toddler again, a squirt. Late at night when he couldn’t sleep, Claire would lie beside him and stroke his hair. She held his hand in the park. If he could speak, Simon would have said, Isn’t it the job of the strong to protect the weak? But then what’s happening in that room isn’t a conversation.
In the bathroom he is sometimes allowed to be alone, but he’s usually so out of it he must lean against the wall, even when seated. There is a narrow, frosted window above the sink. Staring at it one day, mind blank, Simon notices a chip missing, a clear indentation in the glass. He leans forward and places his eye to the spot. Across a narrow walkway, he sees an identical window, also frosted. In the grime, someone has written the word despair and then drawn a circle around it with a line cutting through. He keeps that picture in his mind when he hears the Witch’s fingernails scratching late at night, when he feels the chill of her breath on his neck.
“Fear,” she says, “is the first emotion. This is universal. Witness a baby lying on its back in the dark, cold and wet. No sense of place, no knowledge of time. It’s terrified no one will save it. So it screams. And when it screams, Mommy comes. So it learns that screaming equals love. This goes on for weeks, months, years. The baby becomes a dictator, screaming for everything.”
In those hours between dusk and dawn, she sits in her wicker chair and chain smokes. Her words move through him like sap, the air thick with choking carcinogens. In his dreams he is haunted by explosions of creaking wicker. He pictures her sitting in a chair weaved from human hair.
“Now, you know math. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. Well, let’s do the math. If being a baby means living in a state of constant fear, then doesn’t it make sense that living in constant fear makes us babies? This state of constant agitation, this fear that the planet is dying, that dark forces are moving against it, this fear has made you powerless. And so you became a dictator—just like all those bleeding hearts bossing honest God-fearing citizens around—give up your guns, wear a mask.”
After a week of eating her soups meal after meal, he is forced to wear a diaper. The edges of his personhood are wavering, turning to liquid, as if he himself is becoming soup.
“Do you know what all your rules kill?” she says. “They kill magic. All those children who were scared of the dark invented a thing called science and a word called truth, but of course we both know the really important truths defy rational understanding. None of us can know the will of the Almighty or comprehend the mysteries of the supernatural. Scientists can call something an atom and another thing an electron, but that doesn’t make it so.”
He hears the sound of her cigarette dropping, of her grinding it out, then, just as quickly, lighting another.
“My friends,” says Simon, the words blurred.
“Your friends have been corrected. Some of them permanently.”
“What does that—”
“Death,” she says, “is a permanent correction.”
He rolls onto his side to look at her, but when he does, there is nobody there. Just a thin line of smoke wafting from the littered floor.
That night he dreams of Louise dancing in the desert, so thin she looks like a rib cage with legs. Where are those ribs now? In a soup?
Scientists call our current geological era the Anthropocene, meaning the Age of Man. But others have suggested we call it the Eremocene, meaning the Age of Loneliness.
In the devil’s hour, he stirs. His body is spread across the mattress like a puddle. The room is so dark he’s not sure if he’s awake or dreaming. His guts are roiling. His face is wet. Why is his face wet? Wait. Something is dripping on him. He tries to move, but his muscles are jelly. He hears a voice, low and raspy, chanting. Guttural consonants and glottal stops. A hissing brogue. His eyes adjust to the light. She is standing over him, naked, her thin, flat breasts dangling. There is a wooden bowl in her hands, carved and splintered. She dips her fingers, muttering. What’s inside the bowl is more of a paste than a liquid. He feels it hitting his skin like mud, slug trails down his face. She looms over him, her legs a triangle, peaking in a thatch of matted gray hair. She squats down, and he sees her teeth, bared in a wild grimace. There are symbols and runes painted on her face in what may be shit.