Short Story: Irregularities in the Water

Twenty-one. There were exactly twenty-one separate dots on the paper, some milk-white, most soot-black, each paired in a tight curl like a brood of small yin and yang seeds, as if each speck meant to clasp its own shadow and, clasping it, make a whole that no one could split without first splitting their own sight. It felt staged for her, not in the grand way of curtains and footlights, but in the mean, close way of a trap set for a shrew, baited with a crumb that looks like mercy. It was as if the room had been waiting for her to arrive at the page, and the page had been waiting for her to arrive at the dots.

Before she had eyes that knew to name, ears that knew to sort, a nose that knew to rank smoke from soap, before she had the hard little peg of self that people jam into the soft mind and call a person, she could still feel it all, she could still take in the lot of it, the warm and the chill, the sweet and the sour, taught by no hand and yet taught, taught by the tongue itself as it flips and finds, taught by the skin as it takes sun and then takes shade, taught by the mouth as it gulps down a sweet lump in a child’s lap with the brisk haste of a summer gust, and then, on some other day, in the same bright play-world, takes the wrong taste from the wrong wall and learns that not all pale things are kind. All of that came back now, nearly thirty years later, not by prayer, not by drink, not by the slow work of time, but by these dots, these small black weights, these cursed pinpricks, these neat little marks as if dripped from a tool that never shakes.

It was strange, how the mind can keep a store of touch and taste like jars on a shelf, and yet let slip the one craft that should be plain, the craft of telling one face from the next. She had the sense, sharp and sure as a cut, that the bit in her head that once set a mother’s brow apart from a nurse’s, that once knew her own from a stranger’s, had gone dull, had gone slack, had shut its shutters. She was sure it had worked at some point, because she could still call up faces from the old schoolroom with its chalk dust and its damp coats, she could still see, with a kind of sick clearness, the girl with the snaggle tooth, the boy with the raw red hands in winter, the teacher with the tight bun like a knot in rope; she could almost see her mother too, almost, in the way you can almost see a coin at the bottom of dark water if you tilt your head and the light hits right. She could even summon, with a spiteful thrift, the face of the boy who had pressed her into the back of a Toyota Camry behind a Wendy’s and made a crude rite of it, and then, as if the hurt were a joke told for him alone, had put a lit end of a cigarette to her arm and looked away while the skin learned its new law. That face she could see. That face came when called.

And yet the face across from her now would not hold. It slid. It would not click into place as male or female, old or young, kind or cold. It was a face made of features that refused to bind, like a map with its names rubbed off, like a mask left too long in sun. The voice, at least, was clear. Polite. Almost sing-song. A voice meant to be safe, meant to be the smooth handrail on a stair that is not safe at all. It lulled her. It tried to set a soft rhythm in her blood.

Maud Saffron could feel it all, she could feel the past flood up like a sink that will not drain, but the present would not stick. A sleepiness had come on her at once, not the honest sleep that follows a hard day, but a drag, a pull, as if the air had grown thick and her thoughts had to wade. She could not recall if she had eaten in the last hour, or drank, or if she had done either at all, not in the last hour and not in the last day, as if those acts had been cut from her run of time the way a dull clerk cuts a line from a form. She could not tell if she was sixteen or eighty. She could not, with any clean proof, state her own age the way she could state the dot count. She only knew that her childhood was thirty years or so ago, an odd span to claim with such calm, and yet it felt almost exactly that, almost, the way one can almost hit a nail on its head in the dark by feel. It must have been thirty years. It must have been. The number had the right weight.

And there were moments that stood out with a clean edge, moments set apart as if dropped onto a petri dish and watched under a lens, measured and named and then left to rot in plain sight. She knew what it felt like to be alive once, to make wrong turns, to be flawed, to be cruel in small ways and then loathe the self for it, to be a waste of space in her own verdict, drenched in shame like rain, and yet, as a child, she had not had that fear. As a child everything was now. Now was all there was. Now was thick and full and rude and bright.

Now, only the sound of the number twenty-one remained on the tip of her tongue, and with it the slow drip of saliva that comes to wet a thirst only to wet it and wet it again without ever touching the root of it, and the thought that came to replace the thought before it, and the relief that came to relieve what had been relieved before, until relief itself lost its meaning and became only another word to mouth, like “and,” like “the,” like “yes.”

“Can you tell the shape?” the sing-song voice asked.

Maud looked at the clustered curl of black and white. The dots did not feel like dots anymore. They felt like a net. They felt like a set of tiny eyes turned inward.

“Maybe a butterfly?” the voice offered, as if lending her a coat.

“A butterfly,” Maud replied. “Butterfly.”

“Yes. A butterfly.”

“Yes.”

She paused, but she also stayed still in her speech, and that was the odd part, the split part. She saw her own mouth move, saw it the way one sees a mouth in a bad video call, across a small gap, out of sync by a breath, and yet she did not feel her lips part. The words came out without the work of them. It was as if the talk belonged to someone else and she was only watching, a witness in her own skull.

Was it a dream? A bad dream? A day-dream that had slipped its leash? Her sight broke into parts. Indistinct bits, as if the world had been half-smeared by a thumb, as if a whole had been pushed into the middle of a stroke and left there, not yet negotiable into one clean piece. The dots on the paper, which had seemed like a tight small whole, began to unhook. She began to forget who she was when she came into the room.

When did she come here? Five odd years ago, when she had stood on a street in New York City with the press of bodies and the hard breath of subway grates and could not tell what kind of woman she meant to be, or eight odd years after the fight with her father about Harriet, her sister, Harriet whose name still had a hook in it, a snag? That fight had shocked the poor man into a kind of inward collapse, a belief that he had been at fault for Harriet’s ward and Harriet’s end, and perhaps he had, perhaps he had not, and it did not matter now because time would not arrange itself into clean steps. Maud could not tell if the arrow on the clock, the thin black arm with its blunt point, was going forward or back. She could not ask. Asking felt like a breach.

A woman. Was she. In the light of day and the midst of mist, in the false white light from the ceiling panels, in the small floating hairs that shed from heads and drift and glitter and make little fractal storms in air, in the fleeced fur hide that covers the skull and makes it seem warm and human, a skull held together like a bowling ball, like a melon, like a thing meant for sport, a thing that can be kicked or thrown or offered as meat to dogs, the skull that holds together a conscious run when a brain sits inside it. Though she could not tell if hers had arrived yet, or if it had long gone and would not return, much like Harriet.

The sing-song voice made a small note. Pen on paper. Scratch. Tick. A sound that should have been small and was not.

“Good,” the voice said. “And what makes it a butterfly?”

What makes it? As if there were a craft behind the saying? As if the task were not to see, but to show the gears of seeing?

Maud looked again. She felt the first answer harden inside her mouth like a lozenge that will not melt. Butterfly. Butterfly. The word had a cheap bright wing-beat to it, a child word. She did not trust it.

“The sides,” she said at last. “The symmetry. The split.”

“The split,” the voice repeated, and there was a soft lift in it, a pleased lift, as if Maud had said the right prayer in the right church.

The dots quivered, or perhaps her sight quivered, the way a cheap lens quivers when the hand shakes. The black spots were not all black. Some were deep brown, like old dried blood. Some were ink-gloss, wet looking though she knew they were dry. Some were a kind of dead matte, like soot pressed into paper with a thumb. She counted again without meaning to. Twenty-one. She could not stop.

The voice slid the first sheet aside and brought out the next, a fresh field. A new blot. A new bait.

“Card two,” it said, and the words “Card two” fell into her mind with the flat weight of a label stuck to a jar. She had the odd sense, sharp and wrong, that her own mind had shelves.

This one was not dots. This one was a smear, two halves pressed together, opened like a book and then left to dry. The shape was broad. The edges were clean in places and frayed in others, like cloth torn by teeth. It looked like a map of a place that does not exist, an island chain, a pair of lungs, a moth burnt at the wick.

Maud’s tongue touched the roof of her mouth. Her throat made a dry click. She did not mean to do it. It was a check. A self-check. She had always done checks. Finger to thumb, thumb to finger. Tongue up, tongue down. Count the ceiling tiles. Count the dots. Counting is a fence. Counting keeps the wolves out. If you can number a thing, it has an end.

“What do you see?” the voice asked, and she heard, beneath the sing-song, the hard rim of routine, the drill in it, the set steps of it, as if this were not talk but a run of prompts in a machine.

Maud’s first thought was not an image. It was a word, a word that did not feel like hers.

Vessel.

The word rose like a bubble from dark water, and she almost said it, almost, but the sound of it in her own mouth felt wrong, too old, too church-like, too full of hollow. She shut her lips. The silence swelled. She felt the room lean in.

“A mask,” she said instead, and the lie tasted thin. “A mask.”

The voice made its note again. Scratch. Tick.

“And what makes it a mask?” it asked, and the sing-song had slipped, just a hair, into something else. Not cruel. Not even cold. More like eager. More like hungry in a clean way.

“The holes,” Maud said, though there were no holes. “The eyes.”

“Whose eyes?” the voice asked, and that was not in the script, she felt it was not, she felt it the way one feels a wrong step on a stair.

Maud blinked. The ink moved. The blot did not change on the paper, of course, but in her mind it changed, and that was worse. The edges pulled into curves that suggested cheeks. The dark center thickened like a mouth held shut. The symmetry began to look like a face pressed flat, a face made by force.

She tried to summon her sister’s face, Harriet’s face, not to answer, just to steady herself, to put a known face in her head to hold off the sliding unknown face across from her, but Harriet would not come. Harriet came as a name, as a thought, as a taste of pennies in the mouth, but not as a face. The face slot stayed blank.

“Can you tell if I am male or female?” Maud heard herself ask, and she had not meant to ask it, and yet the words had already left her.

There was a pause, the kind of pause that is too exact, too timed, too measured to be natural.

“I am your tester,” the voice said, still polite, still almost sing-song. “Please stay with the card.”

Tester. The word hung. Tester. Like a man who tests wire with a bare hand. Like a lab that tests mice. Like a blade that tests flesh.

Maud’s eyelids felt heavy. The air felt thick. The ink on the card seemed to have depth, as if it were not on the surface but under it, under the paper, under the thin white skin of it, like a bruise under flesh. She had the sick notion that the black was not ink at all, that it was some old ground matter, some ash, some pressed-down remains of something that once had heat.

She thought, with sudden rage, of forms. Of clerk hands. Of the way a ward makes a person into tags and checks and fields, and how a missing field can swallow a whole life without anyone screaming. She thought of Harriet’s name on a chart, Harriet’s wrist band, Harriet’s bed slot, Harriet’s out line left blank. She thought of her father’s hands shaking on the kitchen table as he said, for the thousandth time, “They did all they could,” as if “they” were a force like weather and not a set of hands.

“Card three,” the voice said, and the second card was slid aside, and the third came down like a lid.

This one was red as well as black, the kind of red that does not look like paint, the kind of red that looks like meat-water, like the stain left after a hunt. The shape was smaller, tighter, and yet it struck her harder, as if it had been made to fit some groove in her head.

Maud did not answer at once. The silence stretched. She felt the urge to fill it, to pay it off with words, any words, as one pays off a debt with coins scraped from a pocket.

She saw, all at once, a toy she had not thought of in years, a cheap plastic horse from a cereal box, yellowed with age, the kind of thing a child chews and then forgets. She saw a spoon. She saw the rough wool of a winter coat. She saw a hospital hallway with a striped floor. She saw a hand, not her own, moving a card from one pile to another.

“What do you see?” the voice asked, and the question did not sound like a question now. It sounded like a key being turned.

Maud’s mouth opened.

For a moment she could not tell what would come out, whether it would be her own word or the other word, the bubble-word, the word that had tried to rise before.

She tasted iron.

“A woman,” she said, and even as she said it she did not know whether she meant the shape or herself.

The voice made no note this time. No scratch. No tick. The lack of sound was louder than the sound had been.

Maud waited for the prompt that always comes next, the safe drill of it, the “what makes it that,” the “where do you see it,” the “anything else,” but instead the voice said, very softly, almost fondly, as if speaking to a child who has finally used the right term, “Yes. A woman.”

Maud blinked, and the red in the blot seemed to wet itself, to shine, to swell, and she had the odd, sharp thought that the card had been thirsty and her gaze had fed it.

Twenty-one, she thought, and the number did not belong here, and yet it rose again and again, the way a tune rises when you cannot stop it, and she felt, with a slow dread that had no clean source, that the dots on the first page had not been decoration, not at all, but a count of something that had been waiting, something that had always been waiting, not in the room, not in the clinic, but in her, under the words, under the old sense of self, down in the dark store where the mind keeps its jars and its tags and its missing lines.

“Maud,” the voice said.

She started, because she had not told the voice her name aloud, not once, and yet the voice had it with the ease of a hand finding a tool in its own belt.

“Yes,” Maud said.

“Good,” the voice said, and the sing-song was back, and that, strangely, was worse. “Now tell me what else you see.”

She did as she had been taught, though she could not recall the teaching and could only feel the pressure of it, the old pressure that rises in a throat when a question is put with kindness and therefore cannot be refused without seeming monstrous, and she looked again and again as the cards advanced in their ordained order, black then red then black again, each plate a small court in which she must testify against her own sight, and each time she spoke she felt the words pass through her as through a thin reed, taking on a tone not quite hers, a timbre that seemed to have been practiced elsewhere, perhaps in other mouths, perhaps in the mouth that had once been Harriet’s, perhaps in some mouth now dust, now locked, now stored, now waiting in a dark place where paper does not yellow and ink does not fade.

“What else,” the voice would ask, not harshly, not even firmly, but with that syruped sing-song that makes refusal feel like breaking a toy in a child’s hand, and Maud would offer a second answer, and then a third, and sometimes she would hear herself begin the sentence and hear the voice finish it, as if they shared a single breath between them, as if speech were a rope pulled hand over hand from her into the other, and the scratch of the pen would return, and the pen would sometimes pause in mid-air as if awaiting a particular noun, a particular hinge-word, a particular small confession that would let the page close.

She began to notice that the cards did not merely invite images but invited a certain kind of grammar, a syntax of split and mirror and paired halves, and when she spoke of symmetry the voice brightened, and when she spoke of faces the voice grew quiet, and when she spoke of anything that lived, anything with wings or limbs or eyes, the room itself seemed to lean, as though life were the very scent the place had been built to draw in, and Maud, who had always thought of her mind as a private chamber, began to feel it as a hall with doors on both sides, doors that other feet might use if they knew the pattern.

At some point, which she could not time because time had ceased to be a straight rail and had become instead a coil of wire in a drawer, the tester asked her to repeat her own name, a simple grounding task, the sort of humane little trick used to steady a person who is drifting, and Maud opened her mouth to say Maud Saffron and found that the syllables were not seated where she had left them; they were present, yes, but present as a label is present on a jar, and behind them, behind the paper-thin tag of them, another name pressed up as if from the underside of the tongue, a name with softer edges and an older warmth, and she did not say it, not yet, but she tasted it like a penny held between lip and gum, metallic and undeniable.

“Again,” the voice said, still gentle, as if coaxing a child to pronounce a new word, and Maud tried again and felt the act of naming as a kind of lifting, the way one lifts a lid and discovers the jar is not empty but full of something that is not what the label promised.

The cards went on, and she went on, and in the going-on she began to lose the sense of beginning, which is a thing people do not value until it is taken, for without a beginning every thought is only continuation and therefore belongs as much to any other mind as to one’s own; and she began to lose the sense of ownership in her own recollections, so that when the old schoolroom came it did not come with her small body seated at a desk but came as a view from the doorway, and when the hospital corridor came it came not with her hand held tight in her father’s but as a quick bright glance from a bed-height, and she felt, with a slow bewildered dread, that the memory was being re-lit from another angle, that the same scene had been stored twice and now the second store was being opened.

The tester’s face, still ungraspable as sex or age, grew in Maud’s sight less like a person and more like a surface, like a pane of glass in which her own features might be tried on and adjusted, and she found herself studying the mouth not to read emotion but to read procedure, the way one watches a metronome and learns the beat, and she noticed that the tester’s questions never truly asked for meaning but asked for mechanism, never What is it but What makes it so, never Who but How, as if the work were not to see but to surrender the hidden gears by which seeing becomes belief.

A thought came then, quiet as a hair settling on a sleeve, that the inkblots were not pictures but gates, and that her answers were not answers but keys she was forging in real time, each key cut by her own habits of mind, each tooth filed by her own favored metaphors, until at last there would be a key that fit, and when it fit it would not open the card but open her.

She tried to resist, but resistance requires a firm self, and the self was precisely what had begun to soften, to smear, to become like wet ink pressed between two sheets, and when she attempted to think, I will not, she heard instead a milder sentence, a sentence that sounded like a thought but behaved like an instruction, and she did not know from where it came, only that it sat in her mind with the same flat authority as a printed line on a form.

The voice said her name again, and Maud felt the name land on her like a tag tied to a toe, not cruelly, simply, as if tagging were a kind of care, and then the voice asked her to look at the next card and tell what she saw, and Maud saw, with a clarity that made her stomach turn, not a bat or a moth or a mask, but a pair of hands washing a pair of hands, as if one set were being scrubbed from the other, and she heard herself say, “It is cleaning,” and the voice replied, “Yes,” as if pleased, as if the word had been needed, as if the word had been missing.

It was then, or perhaps it was much later and only seemed then because dread makes clocks stutter, that she became aware of the page-like nature of the cards, their rectitude, their hush, their insistence on being looked at in a certain way, from a certain distance, for a certain span, and she thought, with a sudden uncanny shame, of the way you are looking now, the way a reader must look, the way the eye takes in black forms on white ground and cannot help but make them into sense, cannot help but supply the life behind the mark, and she wondered whether the test had truly begun in the room at all, or whether it had begun earlier, in the first moment someone agreed to interpret.

For a while, she spoke less, and the voice spoke more, offering suggestions with the same soft helpfulness that a map offers, and Maud found herself accepting the offered shape with a relief that frightened her, because it is a terrible comfort to have meaning handed to you, and worse to notice how eagerly you take it; and each time she accepted the offered meaning the card seemed to settle, as if the ink had been waiting not for her to see but for her to consent, and in the settling she felt something settle behind her eyes, like a new lens being seated.

The first overt sign, though it did not feel overt in the moment and only later would she understand its grossness, was that she began to answer before the question had fully landed, as if the answer were queued, as if the answer were already on a rail and only needed the signal to depart, and she heard herself say words that she had not intended, words with a public quality, words like announcements, and she wondered why her mind had begun to speak to itself in that tone, that tone of general instruction addressed to no one and therefore to everyone.

The tester said, “Good,” and the pen scratched, and Maud felt her thoughts begin to arrange themselves into short imperatives, into safe little phrases, into the sort of language that assumes a crowd and therefore erases the singular; and she tried to think of Harriet again, and now Harriet came not as a sister but as a rule, as a caution, as a line on a sign, as a thing said over and over until it loses blood and becomes habit.

The room grew very still, and in that stillness, in that uncanny lull between one card and the next, Maud felt the faintest shift, as if a chair in her mind had been pulled out from under her without noise, and she realized that she could not remember, with any certainty, what she had answered on the first card, nor what she had answered on the second, and that she could not remember her own forgetting either, only the present demand to continue, to comply, to interpret, to keep the ink alive by feeding it meaning.

“Now tell me what else you see,” the voice said again, but now it did not sound as though it came from across the table, it sounded as though it came from within the same skull-space as her own thoughts, and Maud, who had long ago learned to obey inner voices even when they were only echoes of outer ones, opened her mouth and felt the beginning of speech form with a peculiar tenderness, as if the tongue were not merely muscle but an instrument being tuned, three long syllables rising toward the palate and returning again, not words yet, but the promise of words, the pure shape of compliance before meaning stains it.

Please mind the gap between the train and the platform  and stand clear of the closing doors, please and see it, say it, sorted and please place the item in the bagging area and unexpected item in the bagging area and please take your receipt, the phrases stepping one by one like polished boots across the bridge of the tongue, each small command dressed as courtesy, each courtesy hiding its hook, the soft sibilants and clipped plosives making their neat progress up to the tip and back again, as if speech were a commuter current and her mouth only the station through which it must pass, as if the simplest daily utterance could be made into a key by repetition and rhythm and the tender violence of being said for you, and said in you, and said through you, and if you see something, say something, and mind the closing doors, and please mind the gap between the train and the platform and stand clear of the closing doors, please and please place the item in the bagging area and unexpected item in the bagging area and please take your receipt, until the meanings thin and the music remains, and the music begins to sound, very faintly, like your own.

Maud tried to obey, for obedience had always been her first posture in a room with clean walls and a voice that sounded as though it had rehearsed kindness in a mirror, and yet the instant she turned her gaze back upon the card, upon that wet-looking red which was not wet and upon that black which was not merely black but seemed to have a depth like a bruise beneath paper, she felt the strange recoil of her own mind, as if some inward clerk had stamped the sight as forbidden and yet, having stamped it, had also filed it where it could be found again, and found again, and found again, until finding became a kind of doom.

“Tell me,” said the voice, and it was no longer merely prompt but permission, no longer the civil tone of a tester but the low sure tone of one who expects confession and grants it in the same breath, as if the telling itself were the absolution of having seen; “do not be afeared of what rises, for what rises was already in thee.”

Maud’s mouth opened, and she felt, with a flash of animal panic, that she was not opening it, that the hinge was being used, that the tongue was being played like a reed-pipe by fingers she could not see, and still she tried, she tried with the frantic cunning of a dreamer in paralysis who knows he must move and cannot, she tried to seize her own speech before it left her, to hold it like spit in a closed mouth, but the syllables came regardless, and with the syllables came a knowledge that did not belong to her, a knowledge that behaved like a memory and yet had no childhood attached to it.

“Herypastabyllkane,” she heard herself say, and the name was ugly in the mouth, not because it was hard but because it fit too well, because it sat on the tongue as though the tongue had always been shaped for it, and in saying it she understood, with a clarity that felt like nausea, that the inkblots were not merely inkblots and not merely tests, but a set, a rite, a keyed instrument, and that the key was not hidden in the paper but in the watcher.

The face across from her, the ungraspable face, softened into stillness, and the voice lowered further, almost tender, almost private, so that Maud felt she was hearing it inside her own skull rather than through air.

“Very good,” the voice said. “Now we may speak with her.”

With her.

Maud’s hands went cold, and she tried to name herself again, she tried to hammer Maud Maud Maud into the center of her thought as one hammers a nail into wood to prove the wood is solid, but the name splintered and would not hold, and in the splintering there came, like a child’s face pressed suddenly against a windowpane, another presence, small and fierce and terribly familiar, a presence that did not push like an intruder but rose like a drowned thing that has at last found air.

“No,” Maud whispered, and it was not the sort of no that refuses, but the sort of no that marks the instant the trap has closed.

“Hush,” said the voice, and the hush was not command but comfort, the hush one gives to a sobbing child, and that comfort made Maud’s terror sharper, for comfort is a way of taking a person apart without their noticing which pieces have been removed; “Maud is weary, Maud is full of old filings and rust, Maud has carried what was not hers, and now the burden may pass.”

Maud’s thoughts began to lengthen, to stretch into strange archaic coils, as if the modern quickness of her mind were draining away and leaving behind some older manner of thinking, slow and ceremonial and thick with subordinate clauses, the sort of thinking that feels like candlelight on stone, and she understood, in the same instant, that the thickening was not poetic but terminal, that it was the mind’s final reach for dignity as it is emptied.

“Harriet,” the voice said, and the name struck Maud like a bell heard underwater, muffled yet undeniable; “thou hast tarried long, little one. Art thou there.”

A sob rose in Maud that did not belong to Maud, a sob with a child’s shape, and she felt her own eyes sting while somewhere behind the sting a different pair of eyes seemed to open, eyes that had been shut for thirty years and now blinked at light as if light were a stranger.

“I am,” said Maud’s mouth, and Maud did not intend it, and Maud did not consent, and still it was said, and the voice on the far side of the table answered as though it had been waiting its whole life to hear that syllable.

“Speak,” it said. “Tell me what thou seest.”

Maud tried then, with the last hard remnant of self that remained, to do what she had always done when frightened, which was to describe, to count, to render the world into words and thereby keep it outside, but the describing turned upon her like a blade, because the moment she tried to tell what the inkblots were, she felt the inkblots tell what she was, and each description she formed became not a fence but a doorway.

She saw them all at once, not ten cards in sequence but ten cuts into the same wound, each plate a different angle on the same thing that could not be held in one view, and because she had become aware of them, because she had named their set and thus acknowledged their existence as more than paper, they began to seize her vessel, not as a hand seizes a cup but as a mold seizes liquid, giving it shape by refusing it any other.

Card one, the twenty-one dots, milk-white and soot-black in paired curls, the neat seed-spirals that pretend to be yin and yang but are in truth small mouths biting their own tails, and when you stare long enough the dots cease to be dots and become eyes, and the eyes cease to be eyes and become holes, and the holes become the absence of a face where a face ought to be.

Card two, the pressed smear like a book opened and dried, whose edges fray like cloth torn by teeth, which is a map, which is lungs, which is a moth burnt at the wick, which is two hands washing two hands, which is also a chalice tipped on its side, and the chalice is also a cradle, and the cradle is also a coffin, and whichever word you choose is the one that chooses you back.

Card three, red and black, meat-water red, hunt-stain red, a shape that fits a groove in the head, and when you call it woman it answers yes, and when it answers yes it drinks your gaze like water.

Card four, the heavy black that looks like fur and bark and old felt, a king-shape, a judge-shape, a door-shape, and if you say door you hear, without meaning to hear, stand clear of the closing doors, please, and the phrase repeats until the door is not a door but your own mouth closing.

Card five, the clean bat-butterfly that is always offered as safe, the symmetrical mercy, the easy answer, the child-word that makes the room pleased, and the pleasure is the hook.

Card six, the pelt, the hide, the thickened ink like animal skin, and if you say hide you remember hiding, and if you remember hiding you become small enough to be hidden away.

Card seven, the delicate forms like two girls facing each other, or two vases, or nothing at all but the suggestion that something is missing, and the missing becomes the center of your mind.

Card eight, the bright spread with colors like bruises in bloom, and the colors are not colors but flavors, sweet and sour, warm and chilled, and the tongue flips and finds and cannot stop.

Card nine, the spill, the cloud, the something that cannot be agreed upon, and in the disagreement your self thins, because self is agreement with oneself.

Card ten, the riot of marks that pretends to be many things, and in being many things it teaches the mind to become many, and in becoming many it teaches the mind to stop being one.

Maud tried to say this, tried to get it all out as if vomiting could save her, and the effort contorted her inwardly, so that her thoughts came in a rush and then stalled, came and then snagged, and she felt herself locked behind her own eyes like a person sealed behind glass, watching her own lips move with a distance that grew wider each second, and still she fought, still she fought with the desperate mania of someone banging from inside a coffin lid, and the banging took the form of description, because description was the only motion left to her.

“They are not pictures,” she tried to say, and what came out was, “They are not pictures,” but the sentence belonged to no one, it floated in the room like disinfectant smell; “they are teeth, they are keys, they are—”

“Hush,” said the voice, and now the hush was spoken not to Maud but to the thing rising within Maud, as one speaks softly to a timid creature one wishes to coax into the open; “thou art safe. Look not upon the terror, little one. Look only upon what is given. Tell me thy garden. Tell me thy sun. Tell me thy sister.”

Maud’s mind reeled, because the word sister should have anchored her and instead it loosened her, it pulled up the last peg of Maud’s identity from the soft ground of memory, and the hole where the peg had been filled at once with something else, something older, something that fit too perfectly.

“I cannot move,” Maud’s thought screamed, though no sound matched it; “I cannot, I cannot,” and the scream became archaic as it ran out of modern breath, becoming I may not, I may not, I am undone, I am unmade, as if even her terror were being translated into an older tongue to suit the one who was taking her place.

“Harriet,” said the voice again, and there was in it the intimacy of certainty, the assurance of one who has heard the same confession a thousand times and knows, before it is spoken, the shape of the sin and the shape of the pardon; “thy name is thine. Say it.”

Maud tried to keep her mouth shut, but the mouth opened.

“Harriet,” said Maud’s mouth.

And at that, something in Maud went quiet, not all at once, not as a lamp is switched off, but as a fire dies when the air is slowly starved from it, so that the flame grows long and blue and then retreats into ash, leaving behind only warmth without light, and warmth itself fades.

A small laugh came out, high and startled, not Maud’s laugh, not the bitter adult sound Maud had learned to make to survive, but a child’s laugh, the sound of surprise at being heard.

“That is good,” said the voice, and now it spoke directly to Harriet, and Harriet answered as if she had always been sitting there, as if she had never been gone, as if she had only been waiting behind a thin screen for someone to call her by her true name.

“I see,” Harriet said, and her words were simpler, not because she was dull but because she was young, and youth has not yet learned to pad truth with ornament; “I see a butterfly.”

“And what makes it a butterfly,” the voice asked, still in the old drill, but now the drill had become lullaby.

“The wings,” Harriet said, and there was wonder in it, the plain wonder of a child who trusts her own sight.

Maud, if any remnant of Maud remained, could only watch this wonder as one watches one’s own funeral from behind a curtain, unable to weep because the muscles of weeping no longer answer, unable even to name grief because grief requires a self who claims ownership of loss.

Harriet blinked, and the blink did not feel heavy, did not feel drugged, did not feel like drowning, but felt like blinking in a garden when sun is bright, and with that blink her mind, newly seated in the vessel, reached for what it knew, not for wards and forms and barcodes, but for the green old particulars of childhood.

“I used to play hide and seek,” Harriet said suddenly, without being asked, because memory in a child runs on its own rails and does not wait for permission; “in the garden, where the dirt is soft by the lilac bush, and Maud always counted too loud, she counted like she wanted me to hear, one, two, three, and I would laugh and put my hands over my mouth, and the ants would crawl on my shoes, and the sun would make the leaves look like glass.”

The tester’s voice softened further.

“Tell me of Maud,” it said.

Harriet smiled, and the smile was bright as a coin, and Maud, behind the smile, felt nothing but the fading echo of having once been able to smile.

“She was big,” Harriet said, and big meant older, big meant safe, big meant the one who knows where the best hiding places are; “she had a red ribbon once, and she tied it to the apple tree, and she told me it was a flag for a secret country and I was the queen, and she would bow like a silly knight, and then we ate strawberries from a bowl and the juice ran down my wrist and she wiped it with her thumb.”

“Yes,” said the voice, as if savoring each detail like a proof; “yes. Good. Continue.”

Harriet continued, and with each fond particular she grew more real in the body, as if the vessel accepted her more fully the more she could furnish it with innocence, with sunlight, with the remembered weight of a sister’s hand, and Maud’s last remnants, if they existed at all, were pushed into a smaller and smaller corner, into a place without language, without name, without even the relief of screaming, for screaming is a kind of identity too.

A door opened somewhere behind Harriet, and another voice entered, brisker, lower, not sing-song, a working voice, a voice that belonged to corridors and clipboards.

“Status,” said the new voice.

The tester did not look away from Harriet, did not break the soft confessional cadence, and yet answered with the calm of a craftsman reporting a finished joint.

“Transfer is seated,” the tester said. “The Maud layer is down. The Harriet conscience is primary.”

“And the trigger,” said the other voice.

“The Herypastabyllkane Inkblots,” said the tester, and the name sounded now like a brand, like a patent, like something printed on a box; “they do not seize the unknowing. They require recognition. They require the subject to apprehend the set as a set, to hold the exact shapes in awareness, which is to say, to complete them.”

“Complete them,” the other voice repeated.

“Yes,” said the tester, and there was a faint satisfaction in it, the satisfaction of a method proven; “the subject believes she is merely seeing, but she is in truth supplying the missing half, and once the missing half is supplied, the vessel becomes legible.”

“Hospitalize the new resurrected subject,” said the other voice, as if reading an order.

“Yes,” said the tester, and then, as if to soothe Harriet, the tester returned at once to the gentle tone and asked, “And where did you hide, little one, when Maud counted?”

“In the tall grass by the fence,” Harriet said, delighted, unaware of anything but the garden; “and I could see her shoes, and she pretended not to see me, and when she found me she said I was the best hider in the world.”

If you are reading or listening to this, you have already done it, because you have already pictured the dots and the smear and the red and the heavy black and the bright spread, you have already held them long enough to make them into something, and making is the same act, in the end, as opening, and the opening is the same act as letting in, and you will tell yourself, as all readers tell themselves, that it is only a story and therefore safe, as though safety were granted by paper, as though ink were not precisely the old device by which one mind reaches into another, and you will feel, perhaps, a small sting of guilt at having made Maud and Harriet in the first place, at having minted them from your want, at having dressed them in names and grief and childhood light, at having used them as furniture for your own curiosity, and you will want to shut the book, to close the page, to stand clear of the closing doors, please, but closing is not the same as undoing, and the mind, once it has completed a pattern, cannot pretend it did not.

Please mind the gap between the train and the platform, stand clear of the closing doors, please, if you see something, say something, please place the item in the bagging area, unexpected item in the bagging area, please take your receipt, the phrases sliding along the tongue with that odd daily holiness of the habitual, those clipped little imperatives that rise to the tip and return again, over and over, as if speech were a wheel and the tongue its rim, and you will notice, perhaps only faintly at first, that the simplest sentence you form in your head now comes preloaded with someone else’s cadence, someone else’s calm, someone else’s gentle certainty, and that somewhere, very softly, a voice is saying your name the way a tester says Harriet, not asking, not guessing, but knowing.