Damian had never understood the customs of the able-bodied. He watched, only slightly interested, as Spencer paced back and forth on the inside of the spacious transportation vehicle. A delicate frown was carved into her dainty features, and her eyebrows were mashed together tightly, as though deep in concentration. Of course, being in her mind, Damian knew her head was empty. Or maybe so overflowing that it didn't know what to focus on. Flashes of inky butterflies and a soft reclining couch kept cropping up in her thoughts. The face of a handsome psychologist was focused on once, and Damian felt something more primal rouse in his bodily friend. Then she retreated back to the safety of purer thoughts and stoutly went back to ignoring Damian's ethereal presence.
He was too old for you. Damian half-advised, half-commented, in his deep, rolling voice. Annoyance welled up inside Spencer's mind like an angry river, and Damian retreated away from her stinging thoughts.
I didn't want to be with him, anyway. She retorted waspishly.
But you thought he was attractive? Sexy, even?Maybe. She said, and she shrugged to no one in particular, considering she was the only physical and living thing in the back of the van.
Damian would have frowned, even sighed, if he had the body to do so. Instead, he settled on once again attempting to penetrate the low voltage barrier that ran through the walls of the van. For a brief moment, he slipped past the electric tendrils that wreathed within the thin wires that had been implanted in the van.
The vehicle was rattling on through thick forest. The unpaved road, dull green with struggling plant life, produced murky, sandy dust wherever the wheels of the van touched. In the inky black darkness of the night, Damian could see no real identifiable structures, save for the trees, bushes, and the occasional utility pole. No institutions or houses. Not even another care.
Without warning, Damian was vaulted backwards violently, like a rubber band stretched to breaking point.
He couldn't fathom why he kept getting through, only to be pushed back within mere seconds.
It's the low voltage. Spencer said wisely.
What?The low voltage. I doubt a car...er...van like this could take on something as high as what's needed for you to stay put. So they resorted to the next best thing: low voltage. You can just barely scrape past it before it beats you back into submission.Oh. Damian felt a prick of jealously, and too late, scrambled to hide the feeling from Spencer. She smirked, but didn't comment on it. Feeling spited, he retreated deeply into what he called his room; a space inside Spencer's brain that not even she could enter, and a place for seclusion where private musings didn't slip between the thin barrier separating Spencer's and Damian's thoughts.
Spencer had always been the smart one, in almost everything (except Math), and Damian hadn't really minded it. Not in the beginning anyway. They had shared a pleasurable life with one another, up until high school when Spencer had decided she and Damian weren't normal, not together at least. Then she had started ignoring him. Things had gone quickly downhill from there.
Damian had almost faded from Spencer's vision in that time, she had clotted him out so badly. And she had renamed him too, from his nice and lofty name Angel, to a mundane, normal-people name, Damian. Plus, she had told her new psychologist, some government schmook who had been treating her for DID (dissociative identity disorder), that Damian was, by all standards, of average intelligence. That had hurt his feelings, and ever since then, any expression of intelligence on Spencer's part had been met with ignorance, jealously, and anger by Damian.
Damian didn't really know why they were falling a part so badly. He didn't know why she didn't want him anymore, or why the government drones had found his existence so intriguing.
The one thing Damian did know, however, was that he loved Spencer. A lot.
Damian had disappeared, retreated to his private little boy's room in
my mind.
Damian's voice had changed over the years; it had gone through puberty, I think. One day, it had been the girlish voice of a little, immature, boy, and the next it had taken on the low incline of an adult man's. I think it was after my first period, while my breasts were still developing. I'm exaggerating with the instantaneous-ness of it all. It actually probably took a good few months, but I could hear while it was happening. He sounded just like my male peers at the time, who had themselves begun puberty.
I don't know what Damian is. I don't understand how a twisted figment of my imagination could have
gone through puberty. He's not real, but he goes through the motions like he is. After I turned twelve, he started asking about naked women, and that just made me uncomfortable. Considering he'd been there all my life, I'd been sure he would have know what one looked like, at least just a little, even I wasn't a full out adult yet. But he didn't seemed to care about me; he wanted to know about
women, grown women.
Well, that didn't float my boat, and we had an argument about it once or twice. Then he dropped it, and settled on conjuring vivid images in my brain. Vividly inaccurate, to be sure, considering the only person my eyes had ever seen naked at the time had been me. And I'd never been in close proximity to other naked adults, so he'd never really been able to reach out of my mind and view one on his own. Humorously, he had, had
no clue what men looked like, which was embarrassing considering...well considering we
thought and still
think he's male.
Of course, that's all changed now. We're too old not to know what naked men and women look like.
He'd been a little behind me in growing up. His voice had gone through puberty with me, but his mind had been slow, I guess, just like any other boy's. When finally he'd decided he was adult, he'd also decided that he was my guardian my caretaker, when I'd already told him he wasn't, and already renamed to give him the idea.
He'd started criticizing my taste in men, and my slight infatuation with my, at the time, private psychologist, who was very handsome. He'd hated my first boyfriend, and on our first date, reached out and tipped the guy's cola all over his jeans. When we broke up, Damian couldn't stop gloating about how right he'd been. But he'd been wrong, since out of the three boyfriends I'd had in total, he'd hated every single one of them, without any real reason except one.
Jealousy. Pure, undiluted, infantile, jealousy.
I sighed. Was it wrong to want him out of me when we'd grown up connected not at the waist, but instead, with the mind? I wasn't sure. If these government doctors succeeded in separating us somehow, through whatever complicate psychological processes they had, what would happen to him? Would he die? Would a part of me die with him?
I didn't know.
The van shuddered to a stop and jolted me out of my thoughts. Minutes passed before the double doors swung open to reveal the friendly face of a short, pretty and petite, ambiguously featured woman with light brown eyes. She wore an antiseptic smelling white coat that caused my nose to crinkle, and hers too, by the look of it, and smeared googles rested on the top of her head. Her hair was cut into a cute pixie style, and her young face made me doubt her qualifications to work in a government facility. She had the face, the kind of face that made you want to smile, and I didn't think that would bode well with rambunctious patients, assuming there were other patients where they had taken me.
She gestured for me to get out.
"Hi," I said slowly as I slipped out of the van, careful not to trip on my way down.
"Dr. Singh." She said, offering me a dainty, bronzed hand. I shook it, but my eyes squinted at her suspiciously. I considered her name, which I believed to be Indian or something similar. Having grown up in New York, I had been exposed to my fair share of diversity, and felt confident in my conclusion.
"I didn't think they'd be opening things up here." I said, jerking my chin in the direction of her white coat, which I assumed meant she was some sort of biological doctor.
"Oh, God, no." She said and laughed, "I'm a psychologist here. We were the cleaning the place up for your arrival."
Well, that explained the strong chemical smell.
"
You were cleaning up the place," I asked, not dropping my suspicions. She frowned at me.
"I can't help every now and then?"
Well, I didn't have a very good retort to that. We stared at each for a moment, before she decided it was time to lead me to quarters. The air outside was nippy, chilly, typical January. The blast of warm, comfy air from inside the cinder block like compound was a welcome relief.
The inside of the compound contrasted greatly with the outside. They had drawn inspiration from minimalist decor; the light wood couches, with soft, white, plush cushions; the fluffy, steel gray carpet, whose texture gave off the impression of faux fur; healthy green plants positioned in every corner. The walls were painted a nice off white color, and the tiles on the floor were similarly bright.
The only real indication that it was a hospital or psychiatric ward were the long halls with doors and numbers over them. Positively, it resembled the hall of the birthing section in a hospital, and walking through them, I felt less like I was mentally ill, and more like I was stepping in to visit a new baby cousin, or something.
As we made our way down the hall, I decided to strike up a conversation with my little racially/ethnically ambiguous psychologist friend.
Maybe it was a little rude, but I said, "Indian?"
"Excuse me?" She said, looking only marginally distracted from whatever thoughts she was having.
"Are you Indian?" I had got her full attention now. She turned to me, her face blank. Then she laughed.
"Good guess, but no."
"Oh...Bengali?"
"No."
"Eer...Egyptian?"
She scowled, "They're not even brown, really."
I racked my brain for all the ethnic backgrounds I knew. It was a shame, really, that I was having trouble remembering more.
"Guyanese?" I said triumphantly, having remembered to meet at least three Guyanese people in my life with the last name Singh.
Her face contorted into something - distaste, maybe - and then smoothed back out to its genial self.
"No, but close."
Close?
Close? I didn't know what the hell else was out there.
I was struggling to come up with something more when we stopped in front of an oak wood door. She fished out a key from her left pocket (a card really) and slipped it into the slot on the door's handle.
"There you go sweety. Think it over. Maybe you'll come up with something tomorrow morning."
I thanked her and entered my room. The door locked behind me with a heavy click, and I found myself already missing her. It would be a lonely existence in here, holed up with just Damian for company.
The room was well furnished. Art supplies, journals, and to my surprise even a laptop. They had taken into consideration my interest. And electric piano was holed up in the left corner of the room, exactly in the way I would have put it if I had decorated the room myself. Because, very honestly, music was not my taste. It was not something I preferred, just something my rich, do-everything father had wanted me to do. These wackos had copied my style, to make me feel most at home, I guessed.
Damian still wasn't talking to me, and seeing as I was tired and had no time to apologize (or didn't want to), I dumped myself onto the full sized bed on the left edge of the room. I would deal with everything tomorrow. For now, sleep was what I truly needed.
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