“Eight,” I said. “Maybe eight and a half. Though judging from the essay, she’s come round.”
“Judging from the essay, Gepetta, the dislike currently exceeds ten. Myrna knows how to make people do what she wants, but she doesn’t know how to alter their actual thoughts. Yet here’s Tyche suddenly claiming Myrna’s aims as her own. Can’t you just smell burning in the distance? In a way it would be entertaining to just sit back and watch Myrna get out-manipulated for once. But I can’t do that.”
“Why not? I would.”
—
ROWAN TOLD me about a girl who responded to all external stimuli except human touch. That, she did not feel at all, which was the reason why from an early age other people scared her and kept getting scarier and scarier until they became almost impossible to cope with. She could see and hear her fellow human beings but making physical contact was identical to grabbing at thin air. It was like living with hallucinations that would neither disappear nor become tangible. The worst part was having to pretend that this pack of ghouls was nothing to be concerned about. She quickly learned that getting upset was counterproductive because then there were attempts to comfort her with hugs and the like. She said whatever she had to say and did whatever she had to do to circumvent unnecessary physical contact, but her situation was further complicated by the effect that her touch had on others. She was walking pain relief. She didn’t cure or absorb the source of pain—it was more that she dismantled the sensation itself for a few hours, or up to half a day depending on the duration of skin contact. It didn’t matter what kind of affliction the other person suffered, if the girl held his or her hand pain departed and all other impressions expanded to fill the space it left.
—
THIS, MORE THAN her numbness, twisted her relationships beyond imagining. People in her immediate vicinity somehow sensed what she could do for them and reached for her without really thinking about it, then clung to her, friends, family, and strangers, making use of her without perceiving that they were doing so, clinging so tightly that her ribs all but cracked. It seemed everybody was in all kinds of pain all the time. Shaggy-haired young men camped on her doorstep with their guitar cases and the girl’s father resorted to spending a part of each evening standing backlit in the sitting room window with his arms folded so that the doorstep campers got a good view of his lumberjack biceps. The incongruous combination of white hair, beard, and powerful arms usually caused the boys to scatter with the muddled impression that Father Christmas was angry with them.
—
AS A FORM of escape from involuntary giving, the girl tried to identify those who were in the most pain and spent evenings at her local hospital just sitting with people, holding hands for as long as she could. She tried to do the same on the psychiatric ward but the security was tighter there. When she came home she stayed near her mother, whose addiction to painkillers had already caused her to injure herself for the sake of high-strength prescriptions. The woman’s nerves tormented her so that only medication prevented her howling becoming a source of public or even domestic disturbance. From the little that the woman had been able to explain to her, the girl knew that her mother thought strange thoughts she could never tell anyone. Graphic structures appeared on the insides of her eyelids, a minute exhibition of X-ray photographs. There was affection between mother and daughter, but they’d given up trying to express it; rather than force a display they simply asked for each other’s good faith. And no matter how many times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one. Really the mother’s pursuit of pills wasn’t motivated by the necessity of avoiding pain, but a determination to avoid any feeling at all. That’s why the pills were better than holding the child’s hand.