[[ I haven't submitted any fiction yet, so here you go. ]]
“Where are you?”
“Where am I?”
“Tell me where you are.” The voice is soft, and patient, but it is not a kind voice.
“I am with Dr. Rousseau.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Do I?”
“Can you turn your head and look at me?”
“Can I?”
“Who are you?”
A crease appears in his eyebrows. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me what my profession is.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“Tell me who you are.”
“I’m not anybody.”
There is a long silence filled only with the sound of scribbling on paper, an expensive pen gliding smoothly across papers backed by a wooden clipboard, and the steady, even staccato of the simple analog clock mounted on the white wall behind them. The entire room was white save for the reflective metallic surface of the various surgical instruments lined up on a tray at the doctor’s elbow, and large industrial sink in the far corner of the room. Every surface of the room was so remarkably spotlessly clean and sterile that it seemed completely surreal. Even the fluorescent light above their heads beamed down with such clean ferocity the entire room was illuminated in a intense, dream-like glow.
The only two occupants of the room were in the center of the room, one was evidently the doctor, clad in a traditional white coat and clipboard in hand, and the other looked like a scraggly, dirty, underfed child so completely out of place in the room full of spotlessness.
The child looked tired, cagey; his dark eyes dead and empty, voids. They were two bullet holes in the whites of his eyes, over a face that was painfully beautiful even if it was gaunt and soiled with blood. His grey lips were as bloodless as his face, and the only color was a smear of blood that trailed from his straight dark hair down the side of his forehead and down his left cheek.
“Are you in pain?”
The boy’s face was puzzled, and when he spoke his voice was distant. “Am I?”
Dr. Rousseau’s pen slashed cruelly across the paper, but his face was a mask of indifference. While in this state, the patient could respond only to commands and had no ability to answer his questions. He waited for commands on how he should feel, what he should say. He was a blank slate waiting to be written on, a shapeless, empty person waiting to be molded into something usable.
“Stand up,” said the doctor flatly.
The boy pushed himself from the table without hesitation, standing in front of the tall man and stared into his abdomen without any movement. He did this so quickly that it was reasonable to assume that the command had not passed through a processing stage at all, it was merely ‘say’ and ‘act’. The doctor’s words equated to the word of God, a law that could not be disputed, processed, or questioned. He was a puppet on the young doctor’s marionette strings, and he could control this human child with the ease of flicking one of his fingers.
This was the beginning of a series of commands issued so quickly that the boy seemed to dance, growing increasingly more puppet-like than before. With each command his limbs moved more jerkily, awkwardly flailing around his frail body as he moved faster and faster until he was held back only by the speed at which the blond doctor could form the words.
“Sit down. Stand up. Take aim. Turn around. Duck. Jump. “
On and on went the list of commands, and shorter and shorter did they become. The doctor could barely breath between them he was spitting them out with such haste.
“Kneel. Stand. Left. “
And finally there came a synchronization which was unimaginable before this moment. It was as though they moved so completely on a single wave length that they were of the same mind.
“Right. Dive. Roll. Sit.”
The doctor still spoke the command, but they were blurred, hasty, and the boy’s actions were not jerky but as fluid and graceful as though he were thinking for himself, as though the commands were in his brain already, as though he were performing a set list of pre-issued maneuvers. They were perfectly synchronized, a well oiled machine.
And then the rhythm was suddenly broken. As the doctor’s mouth formed a word that began with “De-" the boy’s body convulsed and he pitched forward like a broken toy with its balance lost and didn’t catch himself as he hit the floor. There was the thick dull thud of skull against concrete, then silence. He laid there, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth for a span of five seconds or so. When his pupils stilled in their sockets, his breathing had returned to something like normality, but the doctor was still winded.
Dr. Rousseau was far too young to be practicing any kind of medicine, with a thick head of wispy white blond hair and an angular face that was still handsome, despite the eccentric expressions he usually donned. He wore glasses but the glass did nothing to obscure his eyes, which were a deep mossy green around his pupils but with flecks of brilliant mottled jade shards that reminded one of spring time and hot summer afternoons. He was doubled over, clutching the edge of the metal surgical table with one hand, the skin pulled so tautly over the knuckles of his hand that they shone bone white.
His breathing slowed from gasps to something more wretched and animal-like. It took him several long moments to realize that the noise was even coming from him, and when he did he felt like there was something inside him trying to claw its way out. Panicked, he clutched at his head with a spindly hand until it died away and he felt in control again. During this fugue, he wasn't even sure how much time had passed while he was trying to get a hold of himself. He didn't used to have these episodes, but they came more normally, with fewer gaps of sanity in between.
It had started to worry him.
“Get up,” he croaked at the boy on the floor, his voice for the first time sounding something like a human voice, but his eyes had lost the spark of youthful summer vigor. He looked as tired and grey as an old man, but his brows were furrowed in apparent frustration and anger.
The boy scrambled to his feet, his feet failing for a moment to find purchase on the smooth unforgiving floor. When he was standing, his eyes wobbled again rapidly in their sockets but that was the only movement he made.
He was a pale, ghostly wisp of a child, but there was strength in the corded muscles of his arms and legs where they poked out of the ratty clothing he wore. His grey lips were stained in the creases with a brilliant redness, and the smear of blood on his forehead had dried an ugly, flaky brownish black.
“Tell me where you are.”
The boy readily provided the information in a voice that was more impossibly detached than before. “I am in room B-202H. I am in Doctor Rousseau’s examination room.”
“Tell me why you are here.”
“I was fighting with the others.”
“Come up with me. If you are a ten now, I want you to come up to five.”
The rapid eye movement again, but nothing else.
“Come up to nine, eight, seven …”
The rapid movement for only a second or so, and his mouth moved.
“… six, five.”
He had lifted the boy closer to wakefulness with this exercise. The rapid eye movement had ceased altogether, and he was much closer to the surface that was reality.
“You will not fight with the others.”
“Okay,” the boy confirmed in a timid voice. He tilted his head down and clenched his fists at his side. He couldn’t be more than thirteen years old, with longish black hair thickly framing his tender face.
“Tell me the rules.”
“Come back alive.” The boy’s dead eyes flashed and his voice trembled with these words, a display of emotion that was impossible only moments ago as he existed in the deepest state of the hypnotic trance. It had taken hours upon hours of work to get this child, to get any of the children, into that perfectly malleable state.
The doctor then performed the same exercise as before, pulling the boy almost completely from the trance by lifting him gradually thorough the numbers five through two. It was at this stage that the doctor issued a command to recall his name one more time, as he mopped the dried blood from the child's forehead with an antiseptic doused gauze pad.
“Tell me who you are.”
“Zero.”
A smile flickered across the doctor’s grim slash of a mouth, but the smile was void of joy or pleasure. He swiped the pad across the rest of his pale, dirty face and picked up most of the top layer of grime.
“I am Zero.”
The doctor didn’t reply, but turned away from him and retrieved a silver instrument from the tray, a syringe with a long, delicate needle and filled with a cloudy white liquid.
“I am Zero. I am Zero. I am Zero.” The words were steadily increasing in volume, and in tempo, until it became a chant, and then a crazed caterwaul that clashed jarringly with the sight of his body held so perfectly still and erect he looked to be made of stone aside from the mouth that flapped ceaselessly. “I am Zero. I am Zero.”
“Zero-“ the doctor said suddenly, attempting to break into his wail with his own voice, calmly but sharply. Dr. Rousseau was growing panicky again, his heart rate accelerating, hysteria rising like a wildfire in his stomach and flaming through his limbs, turning each muscle it touched into jell-o and leaving it useless. He was meek, his hooded eyes haunted behind the lenses of his glasses. His lips move soundlessly, and he is thankful that he is granted these sessions in complete privacy, as per his demands, because at this moment the doctor is so completely useless that his own entranced patient is keeping him hostage with something as harmless as words.
“I am Zero! I am Zero!”
But words are weapons to a doctor of the mind, weapons to anyone who knows how to wield them correctly. Words can be powerful enough to insight a riot, to stop a war, to break a person completely beyond repair, to change a life. Through words alone does this young genius destroy people and re-build them from the ground up as soldiers, slaves. The power of human speech is not lost on him.
The boy's voice was filled with desperation. His words quite obviously equated to 'I am nothing'. This seemed to jar the blond man into reality.
So anger just as quickly follows this moment of weakness, and as he surges with a furious strength he finds the needle in his hand had grown almost unbearably heavy.
The doctor flashes the syringe in his left hand, the brilliant light racing along its length joyously just before it has embedded its tip in the throbbing flesh of the boy’s exposed forearm. The needle miraculously meets a vein, and without bringing him up to stage one in his desperation to hush the cry before it threatened to break him in half, the doctor silenced him.
The boy's body slips to the floor, and pools at his feet as though discarded, and it is like his words are still echoing in the silent, empty room.
But the shaking in the doctor's hands doesn't stop, not even after he breaks almost each and every finger in his right.
“Where are you?”
“Where am I?”
“Tell me where you are.” The voice is soft, and patient, but it is not a kind voice.
“I am with Dr. Rousseau.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Do I?”
“Can you turn your head and look at me?”
“Can I?”
“Who are you?”
A crease appears in his eyebrows. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me what my profession is.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“Tell me who you are.”
“I’m not anybody.”
There is a long silence filled only with the sound of scribbling on paper, an expensive pen gliding smoothly across papers backed by a wooden clipboard, and the steady, even staccato of the simple analog clock mounted on the white wall behind them. The entire room was white save for the reflective metallic surface of the various surgical instruments lined up on a tray at the doctor’s elbow, and large industrial sink in the far corner of the room. Every surface of the room was so remarkably spotlessly clean and sterile that it seemed completely surreal. Even the fluorescent light above their heads beamed down with such clean ferocity the entire room was illuminated in a intense, dream-like glow.
The only two occupants of the room were in the center of the room, one was evidently the doctor, clad in a traditional white coat and clipboard in hand, and the other looked like a scraggly, dirty, underfed child so completely out of place in the room full of spotlessness.
The child looked tired, cagey; his dark eyes dead and empty, voids. They were two bullet holes in the whites of his eyes, over a face that was painfully beautiful even if it was gaunt and soiled with blood. His grey lips were as bloodless as his face, and the only color was a smear of blood that trailed from his straight dark hair down the side of his forehead and down his left cheek.
“Are you in pain?”
The boy’s face was puzzled, and when he spoke his voice was distant. “Am I?”
Dr. Rousseau’s pen slashed cruelly across the paper, but his face was a mask of indifference. While in this state, the patient could respond only to commands and had no ability to answer his questions. He waited for commands on how he should feel, what he should say. He was a blank slate waiting to be written on, a shapeless, empty person waiting to be molded into something usable.
“Stand up,” said the doctor flatly.
The boy pushed himself from the table without hesitation, standing in front of the tall man and stared into his abdomen without any movement. He did this so quickly that it was reasonable to assume that the command had not passed through a processing stage at all, it was merely ‘say’ and ‘act’. The doctor’s words equated to the word of God, a law that could not be disputed, processed, or questioned. He was a puppet on the young doctor’s marionette strings, and he could control this human child with the ease of flicking one of his fingers.
This was the beginning of a series of commands issued so quickly that the boy seemed to dance, growing increasingly more puppet-like than before. With each command his limbs moved more jerkily, awkwardly flailing around his frail body as he moved faster and faster until he was held back only by the speed at which the blond doctor could form the words.
“Sit down. Stand up. Take aim. Turn around. Duck. Jump. “
On and on went the list of commands, and shorter and shorter did they become. The doctor could barely breath between them he was spitting them out with such haste.
“Kneel. Stand. Left. “
And finally there came a synchronization which was unimaginable before this moment. It was as though they moved so completely on a single wave length that they were of the same mind.
“Right. Dive. Roll. Sit.”
The doctor still spoke the command, but they were blurred, hasty, and the boy’s actions were not jerky but as fluid and graceful as though he were thinking for himself, as though the commands were in his brain already, as though he were performing a set list of pre-issued maneuvers. They were perfectly synchronized, a well oiled machine.
And then the rhythm was suddenly broken. As the doctor’s mouth formed a word that began with “De-" the boy’s body convulsed and he pitched forward like a broken toy with its balance lost and didn’t catch himself as he hit the floor. There was the thick dull thud of skull against concrete, then silence. He laid there, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth for a span of five seconds or so. When his pupils stilled in their sockets, his breathing had returned to something like normality, but the doctor was still winded.
Dr. Rousseau was far too young to be practicing any kind of medicine, with a thick head of wispy white blond hair and an angular face that was still handsome, despite the eccentric expressions he usually donned. He wore glasses but the glass did nothing to obscure his eyes, which were a deep mossy green around his pupils but with flecks of brilliant mottled jade shards that reminded one of spring time and hot summer afternoons. He was doubled over, clutching the edge of the metal surgical table with one hand, the skin pulled so tautly over the knuckles of his hand that they shone bone white.
His breathing slowed from gasps to something more wretched and animal-like. It took him several long moments to realize that the noise was even coming from him, and when he did he felt like there was something inside him trying to claw its way out. Panicked, he clutched at his head with a spindly hand until it died away and he felt in control again. During this fugue, he wasn't even sure how much time had passed while he was trying to get a hold of himself. He didn't used to have these episodes, but they came more normally, with fewer gaps of sanity in between.
It had started to worry him.
“Get up,” he croaked at the boy on the floor, his voice for the first time sounding something like a human voice, but his eyes had lost the spark of youthful summer vigor. He looked as tired and grey as an old man, but his brows were furrowed in apparent frustration and anger.
The boy scrambled to his feet, his feet failing for a moment to find purchase on the smooth unforgiving floor. When he was standing, his eyes wobbled again rapidly in their sockets but that was the only movement he made.
He was a pale, ghostly wisp of a child, but there was strength in the corded muscles of his arms and legs where they poked out of the ratty clothing he wore. His grey lips were stained in the creases with a brilliant redness, and the smear of blood on his forehead had dried an ugly, flaky brownish black.
“Tell me where you are.”
The boy readily provided the information in a voice that was more impossibly detached than before. “I am in room B-202H. I am in Doctor Rousseau’s examination room.”
“Tell me why you are here.”
“I was fighting with the others.”
“Come up with me. If you are a ten now, I want you to come up to five.”
The rapid eye movement again, but nothing else.
“Come up to nine, eight, seven …”
The rapid movement for only a second or so, and his mouth moved.
“… six, five.”
He had lifted the boy closer to wakefulness with this exercise. The rapid eye movement had ceased altogether, and he was much closer to the surface that was reality.
“You will not fight with the others.”
“Okay,” the boy confirmed in a timid voice. He tilted his head down and clenched his fists at his side. He couldn’t be more than thirteen years old, with longish black hair thickly framing his tender face.
“Tell me the rules.”
“Come back alive.” The boy’s dead eyes flashed and his voice trembled with these words, a display of emotion that was impossible only moments ago as he existed in the deepest state of the hypnotic trance. It had taken hours upon hours of work to get this child, to get any of the children, into that perfectly malleable state.
The doctor then performed the same exercise as before, pulling the boy almost completely from the trance by lifting him gradually thorough the numbers five through two. It was at this stage that the doctor issued a command to recall his name one more time, as he mopped the dried blood from the child's forehead with an antiseptic doused gauze pad.
“Tell me who you are.”
“Zero.”
A smile flickered across the doctor’s grim slash of a mouth, but the smile was void of joy or pleasure. He swiped the pad across the rest of his pale, dirty face and picked up most of the top layer of grime.
“I am Zero.”
The doctor didn’t reply, but turned away from him and retrieved a silver instrument from the tray, a syringe with a long, delicate needle and filled with a cloudy white liquid.
“I am Zero. I am Zero. I am Zero.” The words were steadily increasing in volume, and in tempo, until it became a chant, and then a crazed caterwaul that clashed jarringly with the sight of his body held so perfectly still and erect he looked to be made of stone aside from the mouth that flapped ceaselessly. “I am Zero. I am Zero.”
“Zero-“ the doctor said suddenly, attempting to break into his wail with his own voice, calmly but sharply. Dr. Rousseau was growing panicky again, his heart rate accelerating, hysteria rising like a wildfire in his stomach and flaming through his limbs, turning each muscle it touched into jell-o and leaving it useless. He was meek, his hooded eyes haunted behind the lenses of his glasses. His lips move soundlessly, and he is thankful that he is granted these sessions in complete privacy, as per his demands, because at this moment the doctor is so completely useless that his own entranced patient is keeping him hostage with something as harmless as words.
“I am Zero! I am Zero!”
But words are weapons to a doctor of the mind, weapons to anyone who knows how to wield them correctly. Words can be powerful enough to insight a riot, to stop a war, to break a person completely beyond repair, to change a life. Through words alone does this young genius destroy people and re-build them from the ground up as soldiers, slaves. The power of human speech is not lost on him.
The boy's voice was filled with desperation. His words quite obviously equated to 'I am nothing'. This seemed to jar the blond man into reality.
So anger just as quickly follows this moment of weakness, and as he surges with a furious strength he finds the needle in his hand had grown almost unbearably heavy.
The doctor flashes the syringe in his left hand, the brilliant light racing along its length joyously just before it has embedded its tip in the throbbing flesh of the boy’s exposed forearm. The needle miraculously meets a vein, and without bringing him up to stage one in his desperation to hush the cry before it threatened to break him in half, the doctor silenced him.
The boy's body slips to the floor, and pools at his feet as though discarded, and it is like his words are still echoing in the silent, empty room.
But the shaking in the doctor's hands doesn't stop, not even after he breaks almost each and every finger in his right.
