This choice: Insist on talking to Kali • Go Back...Chapter #95Goodbye, George by: imaj   You sit opposite Kali as she takes her lunch to the kitchen table. “I’d rather talk a while, if that’s ok,” you ask.
“About what you saw this morning,” says Kali. Her sandwich stops a few inches short of her mouth. “You have questions. I would be surprised if you didn’t.”
You nod. “A lot,” you reply. “The big one is why they both got the same punishment? The first dude didn’t seem sorry at all, but George looked like he was about to burst into tears.”
Kali takes a bite out of her sandwich and chews it thoughtfully. “Not all go through the door Will,” she explains. “From some we even strike the fetters and send them away. And though it is one door, they all find different things on the other side, for they each take different things with them."
“So what happened to them,” you ask.
“I do not know,” she replies, with a shrug. “As I say, it will be different for each of them, although I suspect we may be seeing the second cultist long before we see the first again.”
So much for that. Kali’s answers have only left you with more questions, and you suspect that if you press her on the issue you will only be left with even more questions. “Could that have happened to me,” you ask, taking a different approach.
“What do you mean,” asks Kali, putting her sandwich down.
“I was involved with Blackwell back home,” you explain. “It could easily have been me down there.”
“I suppose if you had made your choices differently then it would have been, yes” admits Kali. “But as you saw, what you might have said to Fyodor would have made a big difference.” You aren’t sure you saw that at all at the trials, but you nod. “And if Joe ever catches Professor Blackwell then I suppose you might well see him at trial too.”
“It scares me,” you admit. “Not so much the… whatever the door in the wardrobe leads to, but how thin the dividing line is between me and George.”
“It is to your credit that you do think about such things,” says Kali with a faint smile.
“I want to get rid of George’s imago,” you say abruptly. “I mean, it’s great that stealing his memories helped us stop the cult and everything, and I guess that’s going to be my job once you finish my training, but…” You pause, thinking on just how to put your thoughts into words. “I don’t want to fall across that dividing line, and I don’t want to remember falling across the line. Touching on those memories yesterday was bad. What’s it going to be like when I have more than one set of memories like that? Two? A dozen? More…” you tail off. It is a shock when you realise that the beginnings of tears are welling up in your eyes.
“Of course Will,” says Kali sympathetically. “We can start today.”
*****
That sets the pattern of your training for the next few days: In the morning, grinding, painful sessions with Margaret, spent almost entirely in silence. You sense that she is still looking for an answer to that question: How can you tell? The maddening thing is that you feel the answer is close, just out of reach somehow.
Your work with Kali is more productive. She starts with elementary memory exercises, which seems counterintuitive to you. Not that you are ungrateful, for they seem to push your abilities to sift through the associated memories of an imago one step further.
That in turn helps with what Rick has you doing. Undeterred by your encounter with the cultist he has you back on the hunt for bedroom faces. Hélène lead you to Peter – a rakish oaf whose angelic face had the quality of making women forgive almost any wrong he did to them. Peter, in turn led to Arabela – a raven haired postgraduate student in Italian literature with a sultry voice and a body to die for. The memory exercises help you keep each persona separate inside your increasingly crowded head.
It is on the fifth day, as you meditate on a threadbare sofa in Margaret’s living room that the real breakthrough comes. You are only dimly aware of your real surroundings , the dated furnishings of the room, Kali sitting keenly in a chair opposite you and Rick lying on his back in the adjacent couch. Instead you are focused on the imago you have collected as they dance around you.
Once they would have been distant, difficult to bring into focus. Thanks to Kali and diligent practice they orbit on steady courses. Each one glides in magnificent isolation, unperturbed by the others not matter how close their courses take them to each other. The wisps of their memories, which used to move about according to some chaotic pattern that you didn’t understand, now fly in a tight formation. They are so dense packed together that they seem almost solid.
You dive into Peter’s memories and they move about to accommodate you, sticking close. It is now so easy to flit between them and pick out individual memories at will. As you review every last detail, trawling through every linked memory you reflect that he is an unpleasant person, but a very useful face to have: So surefooted in his seduction, you are sure you could use him to get close to almost any woman.
You pull away from his imago, letting it slip back into its path. It seems so easy to manipulate them now, nothing at all like the crude blast of force you used so long ago to first rid yourself Miko’s face. It takes only the slightest touch to wrap yourself in an imago and use it as a disguise.
That’s when the idea hits you. Your ability to handle memories is so improved that you can move them about with ease. What would happen if you focussed all your energy to move one now that it is so easy. You single out George’s imago orbiting at the periphery of all the others and strain to push it as hard and fast as you can.
The imago streaks into the distance, leaving nothing but a blinding line of light to mark its passage. Carefully you probe in the direction you pushed it, sensing nothing. It’s gone, truly gone. As an experiment you pluck a lone memory from the cloud trailing in the wake of the flight attendant whose face you stole to travel to England, Jen Moore. You don’t look too closely at the memory, an argument with her flatmate over some trivial thing months ago, instead subjecting it to the same treatment as George’s imago. The wisp disintegrates into nothingness. Try as you might, you cannot recall what the argument was about at all.
You break your meditation and laugh.
“Is everything ok Will,” asks Kali.
“Oh, great,” you smile back. “I worked it out, I got rid of George’s imago. It’s gone. You really helped me with that,” you add.
Kali smiles widely. “It’s what I do,” she says with a touch of pride. You know her well enough to see that another little block of her confidence has been restored.
“I also worked out how to remove individual memories too,” you explain.
“That’s real good, squirt,” interrupts Rick. He puts down the book he was reading, a trashy paperback, and sits up. “We can start you on apprentice work soon.”
You look excitedly at Kali. “Is he right,” you ask.
“I think there’s still some distance to travel before that, Rick,” she replies stiffly.
“No you don’t,” replies Rick. He’s grinning, which is always a bad sign.
“Oh, and I suppose you would be the expert on such matters,” says Kali, lacing her voice with a rare touch of sarcasm.
“In this case I am,” he says. “When was the last time you called the squirt ‘child’?”
Kali looks dumbfounded. You realise it’s been nearly a week since Kali referred to you like that. It’s been ‘Will’ for several days now. “I’ll concede you have a point,” replies Kali, smiling faintly as she finds her voice. “But Margaret still hasn’t finished with Will yet.”
“I’m close,” you interrupt. “Like the answer she’s looking for is just out of reach, I know it.”
“Hmm,” muses Rick, rubbing at his stubble again. “She ain’t interested in the technical aspects of your education, I know that much. Maybe you should tell her about what you learned here though. It might unlock something.”
Well, if nothing else, it’ll break the long painful silences you were expecting next time you saw Margaret into smaller chunks.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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