The Vital Abyss

I have no clear memory of the second week. When I came to myself again in the middle of the third week—ten days still remaining on my rented room—I felt weak and hungry and clear headed in a way I had not realized until then how much I missed. My mind was my own. I could not help but think of my mother and the way her disease blinded her to its own symptoms. I understood her better then. My own addiction functioned in a similar way. In the exhaustion of my recovery, I dreamed of finding doors that had been plastered over that opened to rooms I’d had once and forgotten about, filled with books and scientific instruments that I needed and had been unable to locate. The metaphor wasn’t subtle. I swore that I would never compromise my mind that way again, though like all such resolutions, I have since broken it profoundly.

With seven days remaining, I bathed, shaved, and took myself out for a meal of eggs and coffee I could barely afford. My time in the underworld nearly over—so I thought—I had to prepare for my return to the world of the living. If there was nothing waiting for me, that meant turning myself over to benefits administration. I cannot express how terrible that option seemed to me, but I was willing to face it, should it prove necessary. I thought I had moved beyond illusions about myself and what I was capable of enduring. That might even have been true. Remembering what I felt then and feeling it again now are very different things, and one is easier than the other.

I had five messages waiting. Four were from the applications I had sent out, two asking for more information about my qualifications, two scheduling interviews. The last, to my surprise, was Aaron returning to my life. His research-and-development gig had come across something that justified bumping up the budget. There were new positions opening up, including a full nanoinformatics team. Later, I would wonder if I saw the changes in him even then. A recording on a terminal can’t carry the same weight of nuance as an actual conversation and sociopathy often approaches undetectability, even under the best of circumstances. I hope that I genuinely missed it. If I saw it and chose to edit it out of my perceptions, if the leaping hope in my breast was more important to me than the new-won integrity of my mind, it speaks poorly of me. I would rather be damned as naïve than willfully ignorant.

I responded at once: I would be delighted to talk about work. I told him that, just between the two of us, I’d been in a dry spell, and was even beginning to think that David Artemis Kuhn had led me astray with his professorial charisma and beautiful name. I made a joke of my season in hell, telling him but also not telling him, afraid of what he would think of me. At the time I gave more weight to the opinions of others.

Aaron’s response came quickly. He’d spoken to the powers that be, and the project lead wanted to speak with me. He would be reaching out in the next few days. His name, so I could expect it, was Antony Dresden.

* * *

The others, even Alberto, didn’t really understand what it meant to be research. I do believe that’s true. On Thoth Station, we were treated as different—as dangerous—which we were. But their sense of our monstrosity was misplaced. The changes that we went through to become what we became didn’t blind us to humanity. Our emotional lives didn’t stop. All of us in research suffered the same loves and hopes and jealousies that administration and maintenance and security did. If someone felt flattered or excluded or tired, we saw it just as anyone else might. The difference, and I think it was the only difference, came from not caring anymore.

The confusion rose from metaphors of mental illness. The others thought of research as a collection of borderline autistics, and while there were several who did participate on that spectrum—Owsley in chemical signaling, Arbrecht in modeling—they were not created. They brought their diagnoses to the table with them. The other pigeonhole, sociopathy, was nearer the truth, though I believe there were still some differences.

I remembered caring about people. My mother. Samuel, a boy two years my senior, who was my first lover. Aaron. I remembered caring deeply about whether they were well, whether they suffered, what they thought of me. I remember defining myself by the opinions of people around me. My worth had been determined from without, by how I imagined that I appeared to others. That is what being a social animal is, after all. Emotional and definitional interdependence. I remembered it like remembering that I once knew a song, but not the melody itself.

Quintana broke my nose.