Seagram jerked. He said, “Jesus on a stick!”
It was just chemicals, Milo knew. He had moved neurochemicals around in Seagram’s head. But neurochemicals, like memories, made the man.
Yes, Milo! cheered his old soul.
He let go of Seagram’s head.
Seagram sat with his mouth agape.
“Your headache is gone?” asked Milo.
Seagram leaped up, with impressive energy for a fat man. “What did you do?”
“I think I made your brain work better.”
Seagram stared around his shop as if it was all new to him.
Something new in his eyes. Something you didn’t see in Unferth. Milo couldn’t give it a name yet.
“My God,” he breathed. “Thank you.”
“So, can I stay?” asked Milo. When it came to avoiding Thomas, he was very goal-oriented.
“You can,” said Seagram. “But I think you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t hide or run from something.”
“He can hurt me. He can kill me.”
Seagram shook his head, nearly crying with happiness.
He said, “Not if you do to him what you just did to me.”
Milo couldn’t imagine trying that. He spat on the floor. But, whatever. If Seagram wanted him to go, he’d go.
He nodded goodbye and set out through the dark stone labyrinth.
As he went, he felt around in his own brain. Navigated his own black ocean. Groped until he found his own hidden door. Broke it open…wider and wider and wider…
—
Seagram lived on Level Two, many corridors and four villages away from the dwelling Milo shared with Thomas. Milo discovered that if he gave his head a little internal tap, he could sniff out the way he’d come. He actually made it back to the edge of his home city before other prisoners glimpsed his face, recognized him from video, and started following him. They grabbed at him, shouting questions.
“What the hell did you do?” they asked. “Are you magic?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I passed out, and then I woke up.”
“Lying-ass punk! What do you know you ain’t telling?”
“Nothing,” he answered.
Someone grabbed his arm.
Let go of me, he thought.
And they did, for just a second, as if they’d gotten a shock or felt something slimy. But in a moment their hands were back, gripping, twisting his clothes.
Let go! he thought, and bolted for Thomas’s house.
He came tripping across the threshold, out of breath, and there was Thomas on the floor with some work he’d brought home with him: pipes and elbows and wrenches and things. Milo went down in a heap against the far wall as the crowd behind him blocked the door, made it dark.
Thomas roared to his feet, a pipe in each hand.
Smack! A broken jaw. A howling intruder.
The crowd dissolved.
Thomas turned to Milo. His eyes burned.
“You’re back early,” he said, through his teeth. “I told you, you better make him happy, or—”
“He is happy,” Milo said, sitting up. “Listen—”
But Thomas wasn’t listening. The crowd had pissed him off.
“Seagram give you these?” he snarled, tugging at Milo’s clothes. He bunched his fist to tear the shirt off, and Milo grabbed his wrist.
Thomas slapped him.
“You lost your mind, boy?”
Milo didn’t let go.
He took one hell of a beating, but he gripped Thomas’s arm with everything he had. Something muscular coiled in his mind and extended to his hands. He climbed channels of light and bone, until at last he had Thomas’s self—a smaller ocean than Seagram’s—in hand.
And he shouldered the pain and shrugged it away until he found the buried door, and the pain came flooding out.
He opened his eyes to see Thomas vomiting in the corner.
Milo fetched him water. Helped him drink. Cleaned up as best he could.
At last, Thomas was quiet. And he sat in the middle of the floor and lifted his shaggy head and looked straight at Milo, and just said, “Yes.”
—
Gob was much more difficult.
Thomas had to tackle him, or try to, anyhow. He distracted him long enough for Milo to daze him with a lead pipe, which distracted him long enough for Thomas to knock him out properly with a larger lead pipe. When Gob was asleep, Milo took his head in his hands and opened his door.
It was a small house. Its innermost room didn’t contain a lot of light. Gob wasn’t going to be anybody’s self-renewal poster child.
He also didn’t vomit and shit himself when he woke up. He just said, “Better,” and started to cry.
—
Freedom! Kind of.
Milo finally got his own room, or cell. With Thomas, Seagram, and Gob, he showed up in a doorway belonging to a sad, tall man wearing nothing but a burlap turban.
“Would you like to be happy?” Milo asked him. “Would you like to have something to live for?”
“Say yes,” Thomas softly advised.
“I’ll break his arm,” offered Gob, but Milo stopped him with the lightest of gestures.
“Yes,” said the man. And Milo grasped the man’s head and opened his neurochemical door.
“Go out and walk around and see how good everything is,” Thomas advised. “Milo needs your cell.”
So the man gladly left and did as Thomas said.
Later, eating dinner out of the turban man’s bowls, Milo, Thomas, Gob, and Seagram had a very simple but important talk.
“What is it?” asked Thomas, “this thing you can do?”
“Something natural,” said Milo. “Something the brain does, a talent some people have.”
“What’s next?” asked Seagram.
“I don’t know,” said Milo.
Seagram cleared his throat and spoke with quiet humility, looking into his bowl.
“I think I might have an idea,” he said. And he told them his idea.
Seagram thought they should “cure” the whole prison.
“How wonderful it would be,” he said, “if, instead of living like animals, we could have a civilization in here. A real one, where people work together and take care of one another. Where they do things not because they’re being beaten and killed but because they enjoy their lives. People have to have something to live for besides just staying alive; that’s what animals do. We need to evolve.”
“So Milo will go out,” said Gob, “and evolve everybody?”
“I think it should be their choice,” answered Seagram. “When they see how it’s made things better for us, they might trust him. But it’s going to take more than that. We’ll need to start teaching and learning from one another, or the brain-chemical thing, I’ll bet, will just wear off. Once they—we—have a new vision of what being alive is, we’ll behave differently.”
They sat silently. Meditating.
“We should get everyone to come to a meeting,” said Thomas. “One village at a time, starting here.”
“Yes,” said Milo, even though his very first thought was: Fuck no, they’ll just eat us.
—
They did not get eaten.
But they weren’t convincing, either.
Getting inmates to attend a gathering was pretty easy. Most of them were bored, so anything different was an automatic draw. But that wasn’t the same as being open to ideas.