In moments when the Witch is absent, he is cared for by a middle-aged Filipina named Rose. It’s Rose who rolls him from room to room and wipes the sometimes drool from his chin. Behind her eyes is a human being controlled by fear, a woman who startles when she hears her name shouted from the darkness, who crosses herself when she thinks no one is looking.
He sleeps on a bare mattress in a corner. In moments where he feels capable of rational thought, he wonders if he’s being punished or if he’s being executed—slowly, deliberately erased. It matters not that erasure this way makes no rational sense, that if his father wants to disown him, there are simpler ways. No. Stuck in here, chemically negated, he remembers that old chestnut: the cruelty is the point. But then the needle comes again, erasing every thought. Sometimes in the night he wets himself, the drugs sabotaging control. In the morning, Rose will change his hospital scrubs, sponging him dry, and clucking.
At twilight the Witch sits in the shadows, just out of sight, and speaks to him in low, quavering tones.
“Little boy,” she says, “little boy.”
He stirs.
“You know who I am,” she says, “even if you don’t know my name.”
He peers into the darkness.
“Your mind has been warped to believe in lies. You need to wake up. Your father is a great man. How do we know? Because he is wealthy. If the poor were so smart, they wouldn’t be poor. Your father’s success is proof of his destiny, his superiority. Who are you to tear him down?”
As Simon drifts in and out of consciousness, she tells him all the old fairy tales from the point of view of the wolf. A lonely witch in a gingerbread house. A wee man enslaved by his own name. The point is not to see things from their point of view. She doesn’t try to justify their actions in some reverse moral paradox. Instead, she suggests that empathy itself is a lie. One is what one is. Wolves eat pigs. Witches eat children. Poor you, if you’re a child, but one can’t argue the natural order.
“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?