“Can you imagine the kind of person that I’d be if I wasn’t hard on myself?” she said back. Luke should be sympathetic. He was hoping to improve the human race, and it would be hard to get there if the human race thought it was already fantastic, thanks very much.
Well, she could still go dark, if she needed to, she could go dark right now. Yesterday she had done Terror. She’d done Fear and Dejection and Remorse. And because she had done Remorse as fully as a person could do it, she knew that she hadn’t ever experienced that kind of pure Remorse before. What she’d felt in the past was polluted Remorse, because half the time she was sorry she was also privately resentful and building a case about why the actions that had led to Remorse could be justified.
“You can go a little bit lighter on my legs,” says Mr. Clusterman. “Sometimes my legs are a little, well, not sensitive, but ticklish.”
“Mmhmm,” Mireille says. She makes Curious with Skepticism face. He asked her to go deeper and now it’s too deep, but he doesn’t want to say that because he thinks it might make him look wimpy and fussy and both those fears are why he’s overweight: he’s not connected to who he is, so he’s not even feeding himself, he’s feeding different versions of himself and most of those versions eat crap.
Mireille is on fire!
She keeps thinking of things she could have done slightly better yesterday, but that’s very natural, if the word has any meaning.
That had been another of her arguments against taking psychoactive drugs: that the moods they produced wouldn’t be natural.
“But then I thought about it, and I realized that most of my moods aren’t natural,” she’d said to Luke. “I artificially induce, like, seventy-five percent of what I’m feeling just with pretend conversations in my head and my imagination. Probably ten more percent is just blowback from whatever chemicals are in all our food and water and air.”
It might be a good idea to run the whole what-is-natural issue by Madoka, when they talk next. Madoka gives good advice.
She should probably stop messaging Luke. He hadn’t asked her to stop, but he had talked about something called “limerence” and how an intense desire for romantic reciprocity is something different from “love” and that sometimes what people wanted wasn’t so much another person, but a return of feeling from that person. She was 75 percent certain he was trying to say he had a crush on her.
Did she have feelings for Luke? It’s a little difficult to tell. She can do Terror while sitting in a chair with fifty sticky dots on her face. Falling in limerence with a cute guy in Utah who asks her about her feelings is pretty much level-one difficulty.
It was all just choices, right? Even her doing Terror yesterday wasn’t totally Terror because Terror wasn’t a thing you had a choice about in the actual moment, and she’d definitely made a choice for Terror.
It was different when you had emotions in some kind of context, like when you were doing a play or working on something for acting class. Then, you could be in the moment and react. Sitting in a chair and displaying one emotion after another only because someone had directed you to was a little crazy, when you thought about it. Maybe it was only crazy that it turns out to be something she is extremely good at.
“That feels tight, that spot on my foot,” says Mr. Shuckelman. “What’s that connected to? Like, in reflexology?”
“Your digestive tract,” Mireille says, although she doesn’t know because she thought reflexology was ridiculous and never paid attention in that class during massage school, but you can always tell people that the something wrong is connected to their digestive tract and they will believe you.
“Oh, that makes sense,” he mumbles.
Really hard to tell if she has feelings for Luke. He talked to her like he was very interested in what she felt and had to say, so that was incredible and rare, but he was professionally obligated to be interested in her, and she knows how that works. She is professionally obligated to be interested in Mr. Shalimar here, and she is giving him a great massage and she’s only using a very small percentage of her attention span to attend to his problems. But her hands are healing. She has that touch.
Luke was a sweetheart, but does she want to be with Human Improvement Guy? She wants to be understood, not made better.
Is that what she wants? No. She wants to be loved as she is, but inspired to be better. No. She wants to become much better, so much better that she doesn’t even need to be loved. There, that was it.
That was her mother.
Mireille tries to get some circulation going in poor Mr. Shukerton’s gastrocnemius. Her mother would probably say that Mireille was wrong; everybody needs to be loved. Or maybe her mother would say something about the difference between needing and wanting. Actually, Mireille has no idea how her mother feels about being loved.
After Luke had gone down on bent neuron or what have you, and confessed hypothetical limerence, he’d also told her about a thought experiment created by a philosopher named Derek Parfit. You imagine that there is a teletransporter to Mars. When you press a button, the teletransporter records all your cells, in the exact state they are in right at that moment, and beams them by radio to Mars, where they are re-created perfectly and come to life, remembering everything right up to the moment the button was pushed. While this happens, the body you have on Earth is destroyed absolutely. “So, is the person on Mars still you? Or is it a replica of you?”
Luke said that many people had strong reactions to this thought experiment. It had to do with personal identity.