Extract from The Anile Heir © 2006.I, Ysabel Jehan Howard, hereby assert and give notice of my right under s.77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act1988 to be identified as the author of this book

OK Fal, start using the brain you have somewhere.
1.      This is premature.  Even goat-less, I am not at all certain I should move back in with Tet
2.      I am sure I want to go back to Zur.
3.      Tet (probably) would be happy anywhere he had perfect light.
4.      I want Benji.  Not everyone will understand that ??Tet, but anyone who’s had a pet would/should.  You don’t ditch pooch just because you’re moving back in with your ex or not as the case may be.
5.      Among the very many things I know nothing about is the probably wide range of desirable properties to be found in the surrounds of Zur.
6.      On the coast for instance where the light is doubtless fantastic.
7.      Is driving into Zur for a late night movie any worse than driving into Car-sandis?!?!!!
8.      This is my life.  I’d like to share it.  What an admirably sensible remark. 
9.      Only sometimes it is not so simple.
10.   Oh it is, it is it is!  Don’t know where that welled up from.  I have – settled my account in Carlin.
11.   What I want to do is live in Zur with my goats.
12.   What will be, will be.
13.   Is that kidding myself? Because the only acceptable properties are those with scope for a studio!
 
I started to think very hard about being together for ever with Tet only for the moment in separate properties.  See everything is true and everything is false above.  He is – complete without me. And me, so desperate for completion – what I had to understand, I informed myself sternly, was that my independence had been irrelevant.  It simply didn’t matter that when Tet had been painting I’d been out living my own life and I looked very carefully at how I put that and decided it didn’t mean that being out living my own life had been determined by when Tet was painting.  I’d gone out leaving him reading in the garden and come back to find him vanished into the studio.
 
 Love me, love my goats.   
Narak looked at me thoughtfully. 
“We love you.  We love your goats.”
“Especially Benji,” said Lattic.
“Benji is a person,” said Narak
“Really?” I said.
“Does not the BPC tell us to trust our friends?”
“It’s too far,” I said. 
“And too fickle?”
“That too.”
“You go house-hunting.”
 
Yes, well, that’s not so simple because my next spectacular achievement, I quickly realized, was to have impaled myself on whom is this bloody house for?  I mean really, am I looking for somewhere for me or a family home?  I was going to have to have some very specific specs here.  What I actually had was a lot of fluff about perfect light.  Maybe I’d actually learned that I should not start with closed doors.  I started to look at real estate on the Grid. 
 
Some days later, I saw it, I loved it, I looked at where it was and I choked.  The Sohenisle.  Yes, well, that particular ‘border’ had never counted for much.  Well, now I know what I want, anyway.  I found it eventually, just north of Zur in Halet’s Cove, facing south. Almost the whole ground floor was one huge (and light)  south-facing room with a curving central staircase to two half-huge (and light) bedrooms, one of which (I sighed) by removal of part of the roof would just happen to make the studio to end all studios, a bathroom and a smaller room.  Our expansive personalities, I thought, would not suffer by making the bedroom into two rooms, should the need arise. The rest of the ground floor was a  kitchen of sensible size (a kitchen-table at which I can sit and write strange notes to myself being mandatory) and a  room breezily designated utility room.   There was land enough for both garden and goats.  I bought it and shortly afterwards reclined in my armchair looking out over the Straits and asked myself what the hell I’d done now.  I sold the cottage to Narak and Lattic, so they could put up friends or let to carefully chosen tourists as the mood took them, and my possessions were not many. 
 
I sent out absolutely plain, absolutely formal notifications of change of address, no explanations, no exclamations, just one thing.  No surname. 
 
I duly scanned my mail-box for replies from Hass, Reakoed, Maitlan, Tet.  Silence.  Well, they knew of course, after my announcement in Carlin.  The world waits upon what Fal does next!  Grrr! I thought.  They’re thinking.
 
So I’m reclining in my spacious and beautiful room and I hear a car stop. The bell rings. 
“Hallo, stranger,” said Vij
“Out for the day,” said Sarsh, “couldn’t resist. Hope you’re not buried in packing-cases.”  That was not my problem.  “Oh, this is glorious!  Clever Fal!”
“Eeek!” I said. “Darling!”  Same old Sarsh.  Just one thing.  A bump in the middle. “When’s he/she/it due!”
“Not long now!”
We chewed over Zur fat.  It was quite distressingly normal.
 
I looked at what seemed to be about a hundred emails.  So maybe the server had been down.  Nothing from Hass, Tet, Reakoed or Maitlan.  One from Mel.  Welcome home!  When’s the house-warming?  When I got back, I thought – this is my place!  This is where I belong.  Hope you do too.
Oh Mel, I typed back.  That’s really sweet of you.  Yes, yes, I do.  I think!
One from Kyse.  Simply welcome home. 
One from my brother.  Dearest Fal.  Well, you have had a time, haven’t you.  Glad you’ve made it back to base.  We’ll catch up sometime.  I’ll try and drop by asap.  Lots of love.
Several on that theme, Phew, Fal, what a time!
Nothing from Hass, Tet, Reakoed or Maitlan.
Watched pots.
 
The root of all this, I thought, is if I were Tet, I’d start painting, but there really isn’t anything in particular I want to do.  I went to check the savania, which I’d replanted with the tenderness of placing a new-born infant in its cradle.  The savania was just fine.  Benji was just fine.  I surmounted the fence and sat on the ground next to her anyway. She tried affectionately to eat my ear.  Ah yes, my new life. 
 
I had delivered the plot but others were much better at executing it than I was and – what?  My star-turn would come. 
 
Lonely?
 
But no, I didn’t want to re-enter the pulsating hub.  I didn’t really want to do anything.  That was a very unsatisfactory picture of me. 
 
Tired?
 
Emotionally, probably!
 
I could go for a walk along the coast and discover new wild flowers.  Oh wow.
 
I sat hugging Benji, who seemed to understand.  Probably better than I did.  It began to get dark, but yes, it was noticeably warmer than Carlin and I sat in the gloaming. 
 
I could go into Zur.  I didn’t want to go into Zur, another attack of oh help, suppose I meet someone who actually knows me and wants a ball-by-ball account.  I liked the feeling I could go into Zur.   My place, I said to myself firmly, then my place, meaning the new house.  My place.  I felt myself beginning to expand a bit.  Now that I could smell the sea I knew I’d missed that.  I took a deep breath, scrambled up suddenly, found my way to my front-gate and definitely scrambled through hillocks of rough grass to the edge of the beach, still inhaling deeply.  I like this.  Good grief!    I sat and watched the sea, paddled a bit, and dawdled home.  If this was another crash-landing, it was a good one.  I put the TV on and curled up with cocoa, a bun and a book about the inner journey I’d discovered when moving, having forgotten I even had.  I was just arguing volubly to myself with the author when the door went.  I was quite cross but it was mum and dad, so I stopped being cross and ended up quite happy instead.  Oh this is very nice, dear.  I’d forgotten just about everyone in Zur runs on a different clock from Carlin, the evening is just beginning at around 9, and I also wondered if I’d inserted some code so secret even I didn’t know it in my email saying don’t bother to ring first.
Dad asked the fateful question.
“What are you going to do?”
“Decide what I’m going to do,” I said glibly.  “Maybe go to college.”
“Bit of an age-gap,” said Mum
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, busking rapidly.  “I guess quite a few people got caught up in things.”
“Maybe you should write a book,” said Dad.
I giggled.
“It couldn’t be worse than the one I’ve just read.  An analysis of the Kadun revolution.  Some terribly well-meaning Ciletij who just happens to have the wrong end of every stick.  Lend it to you.”  I dug it out.
Dad opened it casually and guffawed.
“I told you!”
Well, we’ll be off now, dear.  Lovely to have you home.
Back to the inner journey and so to bed.
In the morning I felt brave enough for Zur and just walked and walked and walked.  My place.  Even people I knew reasonably well actually didn’t want to drag me off for coffee and hear every last detail.  What, after all, would they want to hear every last detail of, the Kadun revolution?  Probably had it to saturation point.  My little love-triangle? Perhaps they didn’t think they knew me that well.  Boom! I walked into a friend of Tet’s.
“Well, well, well, well, well.”
“Hi,” I said cautiously.
“As shattering as ever!  What a fool he was.”
“Sorry?”
“I doubt it!  Who’s next on the list?”
“I don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other here.”
“No,” he said.
Yes, well, it was roughly the response I’d thought I’d get from Tet but that didn’t make me feel better.  I made my way to Tivona Gardens and sat quietly reliving my I really hurt Tet experience in the – er light of more recent events.  He really loves me.  If he didn’t he wouldn’t want to be in the same room as me.  That of course made it worse.
Oh my fragile peace.  After a while I went on walking but felt I was carrying a little grey cloud over my head.
The consequences of our actions.  Pietri and Caluna.  Not, I thought, without ringing first, and not at this moment because it was just possible I might be idiotic.  The Central Library loomed.  I walked in and said I’d been a member all my life but then I went to Kadun.  Could I rejoin, please.  What’s your name, love?
Does this permeate every bloody thing!  It was, I said, Emery.  I met someone…Sugar, is that the time, sorry to have bothered, sort out later.
I sat on one of the stone plinths at the front of the library, swore really quite aggressively, then burst out laughing, because if there’s one thing I can’t at this particular moment in this particular place do it’s go back to being Falita Emery.
OK, my maiden name is Barvenat.  Hallo, Falita Barvenat, do I know you?  Hadn’t we better get better acquainted.  Because I do not think I can be Falita San-yaega-baht in Zur.  How did I ever think I could be?  Rather easily, really. Of course Falita Emery still has a Dabidan passport.  Where to start?  I scowled horribly.  Like a huge dirty great metaphor for I don’t know how to be me.  All personal legal documents are kept in a most organized and orderly fashion – in a safe with Sorg’s legal guys in Azt.  I had of course told them I'd moved (and they were of course apprised of my plans for the dosh).  Now I told them I wanted to be me. Fix it.  Ah, this is the life.  Of course it wasn’t quite that simple.  I had to sign things and present my birth-certificate to folks, but finally I had a squeaky new passport, credit cards and even the electricity bill in my very own name.  It felt surprisingly good.
In fact I was slightly shattered by how very good it felt.  I have an identity!  I can join a library!  It felt just a little bit like being eighteen again, a grown-up, a person in my own right, who can go forth without fear or favour.  If I knew where I wanted to go forth to, of course.  That little flurry of activity brought to resolution, I was spending a lot of time doing nothing.  Means gardening. 
 
Tet has a strong vibrant personality.  You noticed?  I do not have a weak vacillating personality, except on those occasions where I wonder if I have a personality at all.  Maya, you are probably sick of hearing, just got on with being Maya.  There are other ways of being – rock-solid besides instigating late-night movies.  It was my fate, I mused, sitting back on my knees and putting the trowel down, to surround myself with a group of people each of whom knew exactly what he or she wanted.  So of course I got walked over.  I can’t – well, I can, but I don’t want to, at least not long-term, live a life of total isolation. 
 
Been there, done that?
 
Suppose I think of myself as a tree, or just a shrub would do.  Or a road that diverged.  One road led to Azt and one to Zur.  You have to separate things out, very carefully and delicately.  The whole Senate business had been a complex fantasy, a justification for my existence, no, more (or less) than that, a making of a new life out of the only – life left.  Because I’d assumed with every cell in my body that the Tet door was not just closed but sealed.  Lending a totally phoney simplicity – my future lies with Carlin!  No it bloody well does not.   Of course Maya’s death had devastated me, but what had freaked me was Kyse, who had somehow to be incorporated into the fantasy. 
 
I am in a new continuum.  Am I really?  Yes, I absolutely am, only I don’t know what it looks like.  Bloody Amida!  I am in the continuum, which is new to me, of being Fal. 
 
When in doubt, party.  I considered inviting everyone important to me, but that seemed to incorporate half a continent – the Caniba gang, the Carlin gang – and in the end my house was warmed by the Six going on Twelve.  I didn’t think Sarat would come – busy, busy, busy – but he did.  Wrapped in my own little bubble, I hadn’t taken on board Dill living on the hill and she came.  I didn’t think it was my imagination that they seemed to gravitate towards each other.  Mingle, mingle and oh look Sarat’s talking to Dill again.  Cantilip caught me looking and said dismissively, “Elder brother,” then grinned.  
“We all – move on,” I said rather feebly. 
“We do,” she said rather gently then wafted away, leaving me feeling slightly disjointed.  It had simply never occurred to me Sarat would find someone else.  Any excuse to come to Zur?  I wonder!
At last we are alone!  People began to drift away but Tet had shown no signs of wishing to leave. They’re a well brought up lot who left their paper cups and plates on tables not in flower-beds and would probably even have volunteered to help me clear up if it hadn’t been quite so obvious Tet wasn’t thinking of leaving. 
“I’m thinking we should have our second talk.  I was told the latest plot.  And while I am thinking over its meaning I get an email from someone called Falita who tells me she’s now living in Zur.  And while I am thinking over that meaning I get invited to a very fine party.”
“East, west, home’s best,” I said.  “Is that trite enough? I thought – I thought I had to make a life in Carlin.  Now I just think I have to make a life.  I have this problem – “ I grinned.  “Among many.  What we said. What you said.  What Hass said.  What everyone bloody said!   If I’m not reshaping the continent, I don’t think I’m doing anything.  Do you see?  I’m sure you see.  What Reakoed said.  It’s not you, or for that matter Maya or Sarat or Mel.  It’s not you walk all over me, it’s that I’m walked over!  You, all of you, you’re all so – complete.”
“I chastised young Reakoed for that, I’m telling you!  Perhaps I take it back.  Perhaps not.”
“Oh!  Finding myself.  Is that trite enough?  I got lost somewhere in all this.”
“Remember, Fal, I knew you before I loved you.”
“What did you think of me?”
“Oh now Fal-girl, what does any 13-year-old opine of his friends!”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I loved you before I loved you?”
Tears began to trickle.  He was so appalled he burst out laughing.
“The most cutting condemnation!”  He looked around.  “Here now, it’s only a bit of butter...”  He tore off the offending corner of a paper napkin. 
“Thanks…”  Sniff, sniff.
“Now you’ll tell me what I said!”
“I’m such a complete moron, Tet!  About people.  Oh, I have a nice efficient little brain.   Oh.  Yes.”  Sniff.  “Hass asked me what Maya thought about me and I said she didn’t think, she loved me.”
“Fal, Fal, Fal.  If I drew you now, it’d be a raw wound.  You’re wanting me to tell you how 13-year-old Fal got herself into this state?  I don’t think I can do that.”
“I was thinking – much more superficial.  Did you think I’d grow up to be a train-driver!  Did I ever say I wanted to do something!" 
“You have this fixation about doing!”
“Why only recently someone said to me what Sarat does stems from what Sarat is.  I know, I know! And you still all do!”
“You can’t accept, can you.”
“Oh definitely.  Accept what?”
“How many times has he told you to stop? You did not sit there, racking your brain, how can I screw Sar-fenan.  And then – oh and then you will tell me that I took a set square and protractor to ‘The Madrigal’ because I could not see why the angle was not right, though when I stood back from the canvas, clearly the angle was not right!  You will tell me I tore my hair out and – and that is the point!  I did not rack my brains over the conception, I only knew the girl had to be looking through the balustrade and if that was not geometrically possible it had to be made possible!  The thought is after and – what, Fal-girl?  Your efficient little brain demands – “
I sighed.
“It whirrs.  On its own.  It really hates being ignored.  If I’m not – I don’t know – reasoning, plotting, organizing, acting, I feel as if I’m doing nothing.”
“But that is not true.  I’m meaning from your life with me, Fal.  I recall we did a great deal of – nothing.  And then of course I recall that that was not – real.”  The laughter was frank.  “I asked you this before and I begin to see Hass’s point, though I hasten to say I am not bored and nor in truth was he.  Perhaps we should ask Maitlan, a nautical metaphor, your ship ran onto a rock and was ripped open.  I am thinking of Sorg as a symptom not the malady but I am also thinking we should go back many years – perhaps not to 13!  It was not real, the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun, then it was all that was real. Either or but why are not both real.  Because both are real.  And then I’m thinking you must have decided Zur is real, plain ordinary life is real.  But not?”
“Yes, yes, yes!  Getting quite excited here.  Something came together, I saw something.  I don’t mean a vision!  That things weren’t opposites or – necessarily opposites.  I mean I can’t be in Azt and Zur at the same time but wanting to be doesn’t mean I want to be!  I mean Azt represents something and Zur represents something.  It’s what they represent I want.”  I began to giggle.  “Any minute now you’ll tell me it’s all part of the bloody Whole.  It’s  like – one part of the fracture healed.”
“So you sit making sure the rest does not.”
“If I could just put that more positively…I sit weeding.  I sit thinking I’m not – able to share my life until I have one. Because my brain won’t let me do nothing.  Does that make any sense?  I – I watched myself.  I found something for my brain to do.  I did this crazy crash course in economics.  But it’s not what I want to do with my whole life.  As Hass so astutely – damn him!  Give me a problem, an intellectual problem, I solve it.  Find the cottage, buy the goats.  While having a breakdown at the time or not depending on – of course I loved my job.  It was all projects.  Fal will sort it.  The very worst thing I could do is go back to work.”
“Has nothing anybody has said penetrated, Fal-girl!  How can you be this insecure?”
“Did you hear what I said, Tet? I am a complete idiot about people.  My judgement is totally undermined!  I am a quivering wreck!  Because of my own mistakes.  Not even mistakes, just absolute -  cluelessness.  Because I’m not connected to me!  I walked into Sabila in Zur.  He was not flattering.”
“Ah, that now.  He told me. I told him my relationship with my girl is not his damn business.”
“Tet…”
“That was what you thought of me?”
“Shoot on sight,” I said.  “Secure?  How can I be secure!”  He began to laugh.  “What the hell is so funny?”
“Promise you won’t be cross?”
“No!”
“They only love her for her brain. Poor plain little Fal.”
“Grrr.  I sort of got there.  I made a little mantra.  I am not going to think! 1) I feel bored shitless and 2) I don’t feel me and I suppose 3) like if you’re drowning you grab the nearest stick of driftwood – “
“You found something to think about fast enough! I’m thinking and you’ll excuse my seering honesty here – this too comes from you, not from us.  You looked in the mirror and you couldn’t stand thinking of yourself as – ornamental.  Five guys, one girl.  I think I speak for all of us when I say we – enjoyed that aspect of your presence as well as, what shall I say now, your more cerebral attributes and speaking of that, I too was 16 and it is my recollection your – difference of opinion with Hass was  entirely intellectual and the disturbance it generated was as the estimable Maitlan has indicated, has he not, almost entirely intellectual, though naturally when you struck at the core of their beings.”
“Ah-ooh,” I said.
“No sex in it.  I’m thinking you no more wanted to go to bed with Hass than – than you did with Mel – but that yearning – you did, however, want to go to bed with me and I with you, indeed. Now me, I didn’t have any gender theory, being something of a hick from the sticks, I took things much as they came.  Did I not tell you once, I viewed the whole thing like a good movie?  That is not to say I had no questions.  But me, my views were simple.  I should find a girl.  This – continuum of gender was not part of my perception and I told you frankly I did not understand this about the crack but to my simple mind it was to do with your sexual response or lack of and I do recall there was no lack of with me so I did not consider it of significance.”
“You love me,” I said.
“You’ll not be telling me you thought I didn’t!”
“No, no.”  The paper napkin was soggy. 
“I’ll get…”
He came back with a loo roll.
“Be prepared!”
“I swore to myself,” I said, “whatever we said to each other, I should not do the waterworks.”
He sat back and studied me.
“Is that not like your having no friends?  I’m thinking – had we ‘just’ been partners, then there’s a case.  Emotional blackmail you’re thinking.  Poor little Fal, now, she causes pain and havoc, but oh she’s so distressed.”  I duly winced.  “But then how long have we known each other and you don’t think you can cry? And then I’m thinking perhaps you knows you better than your conscious mind! And perhaps also me knows me better than my conscious mind for I am finding – for both of us, apart, it was a question of our pairing, was it not, but we have still known each other since we were 12 and that is not and cannot be – sullied.  And so I talk the talk but perhaps in some ways I am as confused as you.  I do not know if we can live together again, Fal.  I do not say we can’t.  But we are still the bloody Six and if I say we are friends, we are not ‘just’ friends or ‘only’ friends.  And – I am thinking something else.  When we got together I was injured, I was angry.   I needed you.  And this is more complicated than it seems for have you not said did I care ‘that much’?  And then we talk of your insecurity and I do not say you need to be needed but to feel valued and if you did not understand that you were everything to me then our relationship was built on a lie.  And if you did….”
He looked suddenly distraught, naked, completely vulnerable and if he was willing to show me that – crying even harder was not an answer.
“I hurt you so horribly, so badly.  And just at this minute I just don’t know how I could.”  I managed a sad little grin.  “You said it, insanity is not an excuse.  What does it sound like, Tet, me bleating it didn’t seem real.”
“A lot of things, Fal-girl, a lot of things, and I have said, I do not say the fault is all yours.”
“Almost everything,” I said.  It was best to get it over with.
“If some insane demon had said, you can draw or you can have Fal, I should have had you.”
“Tense noted.”
“And now?  Fal – life is not a balance-sheet! I’m meaning – what am I meaning now?  You cared for me, you helped heal me, mentally and physically and then – then it was as though it was all blotted out.  And so I felt I hated you.  But that stands.  That is what is and the other, that is also what is.  The one – it does not cancel, nor does it – redeem.  That much I understand.  I have come to understand.  And so I listen to you and I do not totally understand but that I understand and you, I think – that is your difficulty.  Either or.  Our relationship, our selves, our lives, it is everything, not just a part.  I cannot say – your running off with him is – real and your holding me in your arms while I cried – that is not.  I do not think either was a lie.  So it is complicated.  More complicated than when we – when I was angry I cared to see.”
“Thank you,” I said.    “Either or.”
“And now I think if it’s not walking over you, I’ll dump some of this junk in the bin for you.  Glad to see it’s disposable, though I do not think NoZone would approve.”
I gurgled.
“Fortunately His Imperial Majesty is nowadays too concerned with affairs of state to agonise over the catering arrangements of his friends.”
“I remember a time now and so do you.”
“And Hass.”
“It’s a wonder any of us dared learn to drive!”
Since Tet’s idea of tidying up was to get a bin-bag and sweep everything into it, it took maybe five minutes of his valuable time to do so.    I mean, this isn’t an act of selfless heroism I’m describing here. 
That sounds a bit bitchy.  I don’t mean it like that.  I mean it wasn’t the poor woman is done in and there’s all this work to do. 
“Where does the rubbish go?”
“Little box by the gate.”
“I’ll be off now, take it as I go.  Until our next cosy conversation about the weather and the latest fashions.”
 
Flop.  I don’t know which was worse.  OK, Fal, this is crisis-point, this is between you and you, no hi guys, he-elp!  Item: watching Tet move around carelessly sweeping paper-cups into bin-liner. One of the things removed from the narrative so far is how incredibly sexy I found him.  Cold shower!  I don’t think it exactly helps that both of us are on a knife-edge here.  Item:  I have in the course of a not really very long conversation erased and denied Sorg.  Exactly what kind of a repulsive loon am I?  This is of course what they all mean.  My apparently practically bloody flawless capacity for my only reality being that which surrounds me.  Repeat after me, Fal, both are real, both are bloody well real.  It is not a dream you had.  And yes, you are going to face that you thought you’d burned your boats, there could be no going back, and now you don’t know which end is up, not that you ever did.
I did that.  It was real.
Not according to Maya, it wasn’t.
It was real as most people understand reality: it happened.
It all happened and it is all part of the bloody Whole.  The movie called my life. 
Why do I have this horrible feeling that?  Is it another fantasy?  This horrible feeling that all I ever wanted was what I had, namely a job that engaged my brain and a partner who was nuts about me.
Is there anything here that’s bedrock?  Maybe I did not want to change the world.  But then of course I did not understand how critical was the Matter of Kadun. 
Screaming is good.
Where did I go wrong?  Where did I take a wrong turning?  Did I?  I’ve just had a rather horrible thought.  Some people think they gain completion through money or success or sex.  OK, it’s not exactly acutely bizarre and unheard-of to look outside oneself for the key to one’s existence.  Other people.   No, it’s the wrong order.  Is it though?  I’ll get to what I’m babbling about in a minute.  I found Maya instead.  Something I’m thinking happened in Kadun.    Oh Fal, you screaming nutter.  No, that can’t possibly be right.  The only thing that happened in Kadun of the faintest significance to the Matter of Fal and Tet is that I was away from Tet.
Let me approach this cautiously.  Rather like finding a poisonous snake in the middle of my brain.  Like that, huh?  Then I’d better take my knife to it pdq.  As though I were feeding off Maya, feeding off Sorg.  If Maya had died first, my little rational brain tells me that running off with Sorg would have made much more sense.  But she didn’t and I am carefully erasing Tet from this analysis. 
The thing about Maya staying Maya is that she was always around in what puh-lease so far as I know anything about normality which I begin to wonder but anyway…As Maitlan pointed out, two friends each find partners and provided the partners don’t loathe each other and they stay in the same town they are on the edges of each other’s lives, kind of like sets.  And of course Tet was there.  And little Fal felt safe.  That may be just a bit OTT but go with it.  Or else Tet was my ballast and I was too stupid to realize it. 
I’m missing it again.  But it’s there. 
At which point I remembered briefly I was supposed to stop thinking.  Safe is OTT.  Anchored is not, as in little pink balloon.
But I know that.
How about not going to, going from?  What was I so desperate to get away from?  How about me?
I think I’d rather have fancied a great pile of washing-up at that point.  I’d sorted out my books.  Perhaps I should check my bank statement. 
What the hell is this?  This me and reality garbage, what is it?
I need a new lawn-mower.  I have a lot more lawn now. 
Whatever it is, I am shying away from it like a frightened mare.
And I don’t feel expansively enjoying my beautiful gracious space, more crouched in a corner surrounded by emptiness. 
What is it they say, today is the first day of the rest of your life?  This minute, I said to myself, is the first minute of the rest of my life. 
Good for it.
I’m out of places to run to, mentally or physically. 
I’m here with me.  Maybe I shouldn’t do things by halves, indulge in a night of breakdown.
The car always starts.  There’s a garden-centre over by South Side.  I can’t remember its name, but I can search for it.  Compare specs, read reviews, order.  I didn’t move.
Nicely put, Hass.  Love your eso.  Stripped of the crap – hi Fal, meet Fal.  I know you two can get along just fine if you try.
I mean really, have I gone completely potty?  The answer to that might just be yes and I’m just about to get sane.
Because what I’m saying – I think what I’m saying – is that when I’m with – closes eyes a minute – when I was with – certain people or not exactly with – I kind of use them to be me – or not exactly, kind of absorb their Reality with a capital R, their eso
The phone rang just at the moment I was wholly convinced I wasn’t fit for the company of other human beings.  I let it ring until the machine picked it up, let the caller leave a message if he or she wanted to and then listened but no message.
I could be analytical or I could go to bed.  Not thinking had gone by the board.
What exactly do I think I’m trying to say here?
Who is the key?
Oh.  Maya’s reality (of course) became the Matter of Kadun.  Therefore it had to be my reality.  That is basically such an awful thought I think I’ll go to bed after all.
I have never thought of myself as a sponge.
There is of course chasing the eso.
There are plenty of shops in Zur open all hours.  Ah, but do they sell balloons?  Why not, parties happen all hours. 
That was sufficiently ridiculous to shake off my gloom but I didn’t really think grasping a balloon real or imaginary was going to help tonight.  What is me?  What is quintessentially and utterly me?  Apart from me, of course.  I looked around at my beautiful spacious and largely possessionless room and said out loud, “There’s bloody nothing here that’s me.  Except me.”   I didn’t think I felt quite so derelict that I’d hug myself, though come to think of it that wasn’t such a bad idea. 
No, not analysis: fact.  I started to review my life, not exactly for the first time, you’ll have gathered, but trying to force myself to look at how it had actually been but I got side-tracked.  Not very good at looking after myself, am I, no, not looking after exactly, valuing, but that was all right (kind of!) because other people valued me.  Been here before. 
What’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life?  What should I feel proud of?
Oh.
I guess hugging that little silver stallion would be as good as anything but that little silver stallion is out of reach.
What I didn’t understand, what I couldn’t understand, is that Maya’s reality was never not the Matter of Kadun because if she hadn’t in some sense ate, drank, slept, lived, the Matter of Kadun from the moment she committed herself to Sarat, she would have gone nuts!
How thick is that?
Mel didn’t stop being Dabida’s heir because he is also Sarat’s cousin-in-law.
Fracture.
Everyone else sees it as a whole, poor lickle Fal likes to think, but Mel – why is nothing whole?
Why do I think everyone else skates it? 
Or in other words how the hell can I be this insecure?  Or even just normally human?
What else did Maya do but absorb?  Yes?  No?  Absorb the plot and the plotters as it/they unfolded around her and – file it! Slot it into its rightful place.  About to say so far as it affected her but it all affected her.  Kadun sexism notwithstanding, she was 50% of where the buck stopped and – and the possibility could not have been wholly absent that she might end up 100%. 
Loss.  Do you know I never had an in-depth conversation with her about this in my life?  But then it wasn’t real.  Something else.  A sense of trespass.  The kind of question dumbfuck journos ask, gee ma’am, how do you really feel about being Anile empress?   Gee, ma’am, how do you really feel about being Tar’s niece?  Trespass may seem a strange word, bessiest friend, but for all of us it was an expression of our friendship that we didn’t ask dumbfuck journo questions.
Something that uses my brain and takes all of me with it.  Fal, you are so stupid you don’t deserve to be alive.  Tet hadn’t responded to the word ‘project’ and I hoped as much as I’d ever hoped anything he’d never felt the stupid bitch had just seen him as another project, but of course in a sense that was exactly.
Am I obsessive?  Apart from the Matter of Fal, I mean.  Well, obviously yes, in the obvious sense that whatever I’m doing becomes my reality, precluding everything else on the planet.
Ah, the balance.  The balance I do not have, do not get.
And this is what happened to all the other people who ditched perfectly good relationships caught up in the happening.  OK, some of them were maybe unhappy relationships.  Kadun became life, or even Life.
Within that reality – I never had some kind of juggling work and home problem.  But then maybe Tet’s vibrant personality which did and did not walk all over me wouldn’t let me.  If I’d been single I’d probably have been pretty workaholic.  Tet’s personality in context is not precludable. 
So now, and I had to force myself to think this, I’ve thought myself into a position where my relationship with Tet was perfect and I was complete within it – and what kind of bollocks must that be?
It might even be true bollocks, largely.  If I’d known how vulnerable you are, I’d have looked after you better.
Different. Sorg was different.  The same but different.  Skip the obvious differences.  What the hell am I talking about?
As if I didn’t know. 
Loss.  There are people around one and still the really penetrating questions aren’t asked.  One day…Oh, right, yes, so one goes around stopping people in their tracks asking the really penetrating questions in case they’re not here tomorrow.  Or maybe the questions don’t penetrate until they’re not here.
What, Sorg my dearest, did you understand about me?  My fragile self.  
He treated me like cut-glass.  Outside work, of course. 
Value.
He needed me.  Not in the awful sense that he was nothing without me but needed me, all the same.
What is the difference between the flow and auto-pilot.  That’s an easy one.  Maybe.  The flow is you do whatever because you want to.  Auto-pilot is you do what you have to do when you don’t want to. 
They don’t – distinguish, think some things are more important than others.  That’s crazy.  Do and don’t.  If you see Hass washing-up you’d think it was the most enjoyable task the world could devise.  Think what other people think are more important.  Don’t.  That’s the point of them doing their own laundry, not or not just that they needed to learn how most people live.  It’s part of the bloody Whole.  Generally called life. 
And so I who could have done anything or nothing, made myself a box, a cage, full of things I ‘had to’ do, when I didn’t have to do them at all.
That’s not completely true.  Sorg’s death crash-landed me in Carlin.
Oh but I did have to do them, to survive.  The car could not be allowed not to start.
Tell me something, someone.  How/when/why should I know that I’m in a fit state to live with Tet or anyone else human, for that matter, and not vulnerable to the lure of running off with the nearest Ciletij colonel who values me?
Phrase that one carefully because it’s not really that I should or could because most of my mind and most of my heart would stop me, burned child fears fire and all that, but the feeling that the grass is greener is something else.  Come on, guys, you’ve never even felt a pang?  Sarat, now, but that too is a don’t ask question, not because of trespass, ask it as a joke with Maya there, but with Maya dead – come on!  When we’re all mature and greying with our youthful vicissitudes behind us.  If.
Ah, that little pink cloud where nothing matters.  One day I’ll wake up and none of this will matter.  Really.
What does it mean?
It means ‘I’ shan’t be there worrying all the time about me.
Not merely obsessed, but self-obsessed.
I’m thinking you would not be in pieces on our sofa if I could not.   Quite so.
Hi Tet, I think I probably want to come home.  Not yet.  Find my bloody life.  Hey life, where are you, where are you hiding?  I need you to come out and play with me.
 
Let me tell you one thing I have achieved.  I have an empty diary.  I have bloody nothing to speak of to do. 
If I have not driven myself mad, I shall drive myself mad.  Because of course what I’d really like right now is to be absorbed in someone else’s reality. 
Go over it all again.  Have I got the energy?  Is there any point?  In piecemeal, no point.  There has to be some common theme, some unifying force, some – some me, some what Fal is that pulls all this together.  Fuses the opposites.  Is it just too big?  That’s my you think you’ve got it pat when someone pulls the rug away.  But there’s still me.  There’s still what I did at each cross-roads. My choices.  My progressively stranger choices.  
They must all of course think I’m totally raving mad, if for no other reason than  I kept telling them Tet and I were happy. 
I don’t know when I’m happy?
Being happy isn’t real?
Being happy isn’t exciting?
What do I mean by ‘happy’, ‘real’?  Not some great big semantic philosophical debate about universal meanings, me, who made choices, surrounding ‘happy’ and ‘real’. 
In consequence of which I had for a time a relationship which defies description with what might or might not have been Sorg’s ghost. 
Where does that fit in with my yearning for the eso?
That is too big.  That is just too big.
There is a case to be made out that I wasn’t so much happy with Sorg as delirious.  We didn’t have anything like a normal life together, how could we in the heat of the happening?  There is further a case – you can tell I’m not exactly enjoying this one – that that was much more – child-like than – than normality.  How well really did I know Sorg?  I knew – his essence.  I knew he loved me and I responded.  He reached me.  I did not know Mel loved me.  I did not know Tet loved me.  So only Sorg was real.
Add another word to the glossary: love.
Too close.  I knew everything about Tet and Mel.  \
I think – I do a lot of that, not that it gets me anywhere.  How men love women.  What was ‘child-like’ was that somehow I couldn’t distinguish – sort of making mud-pies with sex and a house thrown in.
Tet is being restrained. Perish the thought that we discuss our differences in some ghastly ‘civilized’ fashion divorced from – er, reality.  There may be things he doesn’t want to talk about to me.  How surprising.  He is – surprised by his responses to a real life Fal opposite him.  Tell me about it!  I am – surprised by how far he is going.  Oh, life is full of surprises. 
One of them was Sorg.  What does it mean?
He made me feel real.  Oh great.  So real to me is what everyone else regards as total raving loon.  Come to think of it that makes sense!
Ooh, a man can be attracted to me!  Not my problem, alas.  Ooh, a man sees through the – ornamental exterior. Also not my problem.  Hang on a minute.  Oh dear.  How men love women indeed.  How women love men.  Lucky Fal who had – who has guys who love her for herself.  Only you see they knew me when I was 13.  Because I couldn’t bloody distinguish, could I.  Because I don’t understand – long drop to the bottom of the well – that’s the connection that misfires.  Well, one of them.  Is it?  It was ‘child-like’ because it was mud-pies with sex   No, that doesn’t – what the hell is my problem with sex?  With  Tet or Sorg, nil.  I do not, thank you, Mel, have a problem with sex.  But that of course is now and that was then and something called adulthood happened in the interval and this is something to do with sex and mud-pies. And passion and desire and other grown-up things which may actually be Tet’s biggest problem right now because I am not an idiot (in some ways) and being passionate and being angry with someone can be a rather dodgy mix.  How much older than you was Sorg, darling? Old enough not to be on a learning-curve!  Nor of course was I, but.  But what?  It wasn’t that we did anything more adventurous or different – it’s that word again.  How can you explain a scent on the breeze, an – an atmosphere? 
Anything I said would sound so wrong, make Tet sound like a gangly youth who didn’t know what he was doing.  Neither of us knew what we were doing to start with, who does!  We learned fast.  Mel was not passionate.  Perhaps I couldn’t see the point of the exercise without passion, though I didn’t know that at the time.  Mel is not passionate?  Perhaps.  Oh that conversation with Cantilip I’m going to have when we’re 70.  Mel may be too eso to be passionate. I wonder!  There’s an element, isn’t there, of liking getting hot and sweaty! Mel certainly likes exercise, likes using his body – anyway, he wasn’t passionate with me at six-freaking-teen and consequently I was totally unturned-on.   Ice-maiden is about the last.  I am not frightened by desire which I suppose has something to do with being H-W.  I mean, oh dear, yes, I mean. See line above about dodgy mix.  Tet knows that in the appalling and inconceivable but conceive it anyway situation that in the middle of things his anger reared its ugly head it would not be oh shock oh horror he has hurt me, but more oh shock oh horror he found himself on the other side of the room.  That, er, equally would not be constructive. For either of us. 
Perhaps he is not so much being restrained as running on another track, the friendship one.  On that track he is prepared to surrender to love.  The other one has breaks in it.  He will not (yet?) share with me what if anything he is going to do about that.
 
Lattic said the shrine at Maona-pri had scared him, partly because anything that old defies any puny inadequate meanimg you previously attributed to the word ‘old’, but mostly because he couldn’t understand it, understand what it did to him.  He said he felt absolutely safe there. Nothing inside or out could hurt him.  It’s in the stone, he said, rather helplessly.  The power is in the stone.  The mentors put the power in the stone, Narak had told him. I knew Lattic’s first impression of the mentors (it lasted about thirty seconds or until he started to explain his problems, whichever was sooner) was along the lines of sweet gentle folks who don’t know they’re alive.  Fidub has not remained a Cult-free zone for 6000 years going on ever because they don’t know they’re alive.
 
Not transformed.  Free.  Free to be Lattic. 
I wonder….The ferries run nearly all night in the summer.  I grinned to myself.  Sarat would know.  Sarat probably still knows, underneath the avalanche of further fact that must have crowded his brain.  If they haven’t changed the timetables of course, which they almost certainly have.  I logged on and looked up the exotically named Fidubi Ferries while composing a letter in another part of my brain, which went something like, Dear Tet, I understand that I appeared with a good reference!  I mean you value Hass’s views and he thought I ought to talk to you and I’m not saying it would have been different if I’d appeared off my own bat (bat-wings?) but – but what, Fal?  There was a ferry in an hour which I could catch if I moved it, and one back at about 5 in the morning, which suited what I had in mind just fine. I ought to be able to create an absolutely soothing, silent and safe atmosphere in my own den of course, but I hadn’t.  I couldn’t go to Zur’s shrine, too many people would recognize me.
 
So of course the first person I saw was Vax.  He gave a quick yelp of laughter. 
“I have travelled many leagues,” I said, “lit and fig.  Whether I’ve got anywhere is something else.”
“I look in from time to time,” he said.  “I hear things in our island fastness, you know.”
“Maybe one corner of the puzzle is complete.”
“I’m around.”
There’s a café  for when you need to eat  and the party is in the basement if you want to talk  I didn’t want to eat or talk.
Carlin just thinks it’s old.   Did Narulis ever sit here?  No, why would he, he was young, adventurous, a sea-farer – so maybe he went to sea to escape from a broken heart!  If Sarat failed, if he were ever driven out of Kadun – where on earth did that thought come from?  It had to work, it had to.  With very little encouragement I could work myself back into a state wherein it was dependent upon me to make it but no, that had never been exactly.  If everyone didn’t do their utmost that would be a betrayal of Sorg.  The thought sat more easily now that I had defined my utmost and set it in motion. The pillars the colour of damp sand, intricately carved, just a little bit crumbly, shimmered in the candle-light.   I looked more closely and cocked my head. Were those letters?  If so it was no language I knew.  I closed my eyes and no, it wasn’t a time-slip, just an awareness of time, of waves of time, past, present and future, which I suppose is another way of saying the bloody Whole. No, that hadn’t been what I meant, Sarat hadn’t been what I mean, when they did fail, when they returned to Fidub, they must have come here to recover.  All times are now.   I might just as well have been some Fidubi wench from aeons past.  It was easy to be like that here.   I am sitting in a pale-green tunic – well, at least it wasn’t crimson corrugated iron, but I guess that’s part of the bloody Whole too.  I surrendered myself because here I am safe.  The shadows came but could not touch me, not here, shadows trying to blot out the light.  ‘They came, the skull-faces, but we laughed.’  I didn’t laugh, I just went on sitting.  Somewhere it seemed Vax was saying, “And what does Hass say?” and I almost looked round before I realized the conversation was in my head.  “I have to stop,”  I replied.  “I just stopped.”  I did laugh then.  Because it was all so funny.  It never works when you try to put words to what is – the messes people get into, that’s OK, but people being killed, people in pain: It is all so funny.  That makes more sense, the bloody gurgle of cosmic laughter.  Inside.  That’s the point.  It is inviolate.  It is untouched.  It is real? And all the human crap is not real, but we are human and have to be human.  I knew enough to know better minds than mine had lurched at this one, but that is the balance.  I had a sudden image of myself on – not exactly a tightrope, because it wasn’t much more than knee-high and it wasn’t that there was no safety net, the trouble was on the contrary that nets to catch me if I fell abounded, catch and trap me, but I was skimming along, easy-peasy.  Suddenly I felt sure the rope was going to break but no, I told myself, and it didn’t.  Yet.  Suddenly it snapped.   This, I thought, is not totally unfamiliar but this time I know what to do!  I threw myself clear of the nets.  I didn't seem any the worse for wear but I was sure I was somewhere else, thought it didn’t seem to be anywhere.  Despite this mental circus-act, I was feeling very lazy, very relaxed.  I suppose very safe.  I wanted to stretch out and found myself another cushion.  There were a few other people around but they too were lost in their own little mental worlds. I wondered about other people’s pain, grief, fear (that makes a change, huh?) and where it went.  I mean, I had no doubt that some of the people here were as distraught and devastated as I had been but it sort of melts away.  Because it isn’t real.  I sighed.  OK, so let me in this safe place ask myself what the hell is my problem with reality, but it really didn’t seem to matter.  Maybe that’s the only way to look at it, casually, creep up on it unawares.   The central fact of my life is – oh, do I have one of those? A determining fact of my life is that once I was in Azt – what?  Unreal is such an unhelpful word.  No, my relationship with Tet didn’t seem unhappy or boring or even not what I wanted, it just didn’t seem real.  And Tet is not a wishy-washy person.  It was just – somewhere else.  Like everything else is right now, which might just tell me something important if I only knew what.  There is a crossed wire, a plug in the wrong socket, like – like putting the headphones jack into the power socket. A little mental game came to me, unplugging all the major connections – like I knew what they were or anything, but just pulling out any plug I could see!  And Hass would say, I said to myself sleepily, just leave all the loose ends alone, don’t try to figure which should go where.  I can’t honestly say that this little exercise made me feel the slightest bit different, but I did drift into that really nice waking dreams state – is it alpha rhythms, can’t remember – and had a really nice though not remotely revealing, so far as I could see, trip.  I came to eventually, blinking and reflected that – possibly – spending the night with myself on the floor of the shrine at Maona-pri counted as my most insane act yet.  Thirsty.  Where is the caff?  I got up and looked around.  Half-open door with light on, that must be it.  It wasn’t very much lighter, the sort of people who want a drink in the middle of the night don’t want to walk into a blaze of neon, and much as described by Lattic, benches with cushions on and broader benches in front of them to serve as tables, and really rather strange lamps on each table, like mini-inverted chandeliers which, Lattic had said enthusiastically, give you enough light to read by without disturbing the ambience, which was pale pink; the walls were pale pink, and there were paintings which looked rather good, even in the half-light.   [The loos, I discovered, were pale pink too, everything including the bowl, with good paintings, and well lit.  There was a rather gorgeous one of a tree in bud.  I wondered if I could get a reproduction.  Somehow I had no doubt these were originals.  I didn’t think the shrine lacked funding and I wondered.]  Behind the counter a middle-aged man with a bushy beard was engrossed in a book. There was a water dispenser.  I drank thirstily.  There was a solid wall of books, vids and disks cunningly illuminated by under the shelf lighting.  Lattic had raved about this.  I made my way to the counter. The guy looked up and said hi.
Hi, I said.
Hunger? Thirst?
Hot drink?
Anything in particular?  You will be amazed at our range!
I looked around.  I shall?
Under the counter. 
Lemongrass?
Come to think of it, I thought, right this moment, I could do with apple-stock!  I wondered if I actually could or whether that was me tweeting Carlin at me.
And ginger?
And I’ve suddenly realized I’m ravenous!
Do you an omelette?
That would be brilliant!  Thank you!
Give you a shout when it’s ready.
The laughter gurgled up from somewhere
You shout here?
Didn’t you notice the juke-box?
I grinned and wandered over to the books.
The Illusion of Time.  That sounded a bit heavy, a bit theoretical.  Why Am I Here?  You pick that out wondering where is here.  Here turned out to be the universe.  Something a bit more local, I think.  Why is a Zuri in the shrine at Maona-Pri in the middle of the night?  This enchanting collection of meditation music from the Age of Calpedene.  The what?  Oh, it’s the name of the performers.  You don’t call yourselves The Age of Calpedene unless there was an Age of Calpedene.  Slap your wrist, Fal, you should have paid more attention to Fidubi history in school.   I could certainly try that one, my place could just do with enchanting music and indeed there were headphones and a drive to try it with.  Oh yes, oh this is gorgeous.  All I need now is something to read while listening to the enchanting music – er, do you buy, do you borrow, do you donate?  Oh, right, a sort of ledger with a pen tied to it.  The box for donations is in the wall to your left.  We ask you to write the title of anything you take so we can keep stocks complete.  That’s simple enough.  I continued browsing.  Put The Light On!  Why are you so darned unhappy?  So life has dealt you a lousy hand.  You are in charge.  I think I’m going to like this… Eternal Flame: A History of the Shrine at Maona-Pri.  I picked up a vid, Treasures of Maona-Pri, while I was at it. Who are You and What Do You Want?  That sounded – pertinent.   Death: It’s All One Continuum.  That was definitely going to engross me, but not one for reading in a caff, even this caff.   When the chef brought my omelette I asked him if he was one of the mentors and he confessed he was.  I felt suddenly shy but came out with it anyway.  My partner died and I had a sort of experience with what might have been his – ghost.  Some people said it was projection.  I have talked about this, I mean.  I wondered is – there anything you can recommend.  Anyone saying anything sensible about – that sort of thing.  Oh you poor girl, you, he said.  I felt immediately swaddled in love.  Oh I see, I said, that’s what you do.  He cocked an eyebrow.  People can say anything, everything because they’re safe and warm and cosy and smothered in love.  That’s about the size of it, he said.  Whom have you talked to, may I ask.  I sighed.  Hass. Hasiyata Talal.  His lips twitched.  And you want a – second opinion?  I’ve had second opinions, third, tenth, I said.  I think I’d like some kind of – overview.  That’s a good one, he said firmly, pointing to Death: It’s All One Continuum.  Let’s see now, hope we’ve got one…We do try and keep everything in stock…There we are!  He triumphantly produced a small cream paperback entitled Matters of Life and Death. Your dinner’s getting cold.  Unless you want to talk.  Thank you very much.  No, I said.  But I’d better…I gestured at the ledger.  You eat, he said.  I’ll write!  Thank you, I said again.
After a while I went back to my cushions then got up and walked slowly up to the Flame.  It rather seemed to me that I saw things in it, sparks and flashes, but I rather prosaically put that down to tiredness, except I couldn’t stop looking.  ‘Love and cannot leave,’ I said to myself softly. I looked up at the Window THAT AM I and an incredible collage of starburst and flame but – rather prosaically – I guess I’d disconnected again – what had me really gaping was the structure of the Window, its divisions, though the images were different. Yes, well, I’d seen that before; so that’s where the Dacunine Window comes from. 
I was just thinking time I was mooching off when the first rays of sun hit the centre of the starburst, were refracted.  Yikes!  It was as though the whole shrine had been set alight. 
A voice behind me full of laughter said simply, “Good, isn’t it.”
“Is there music in the glass?” I asked.
Just laughter.
I turned to face the stranger.  He was a tall, thin, elderly guy, slightly stooped, now looking at me with frank curiosity.
“The lady knows Carlin.”
“Oh,” I said, “the lady knows Carlin!”
The lady, I thought to myself, has just found another – project.  Ancient history! 
I got home, said good morning to Benji, told her my night’s activities, swallowed some strong coffee and set to thinking about – oh what a cliché – making my house a home.  Then I went to bed, though I didn’t sleep, but did another session of pulling out those mental plugs, an endeavour which seemed to me suddenly as important as regular physical exercise.
My choices were strange and intricate.  Whatever tenderness Tet felt for me could not, I felt, reasonably be expected to stretch to re-creating some of the greatest work of all time for my sitting-room – though I did wonder how it worked – did the artist do the drawing and the glazier the transference onto glass?  Nonetheless, I did not like my windows.  I wanted a window to look at, not through.  I can’t be the first person to feel like that – surely there must  be specialist suppliers.  I searched, there were, but the products were artistic gunge. What I wanted, I realized, was a nest in a corner of that space, a sort of special place where I could sit in a mysteriously imposed mental safety and listen to the Age of Calpedene.  I deliberately gave the psychological ramifications of this a miss on the grounds that whatever it was it could not possibly be damaging.  My room was quite big enough to lose an end of it and this I did, replacing the window, mentally at least, with something large, beautiful and pictorial and creating a step up to an arched entrance which instead of a door was a delicate double waist-high iron-work gate. I didn’t want any furniture, just rugs and cushions and I didn’t want to put anything on the walls because the beauty would come from the window I didn’t have and couldn’t find.   Artists must work in glass, the possibilities are too intoxicating to be ignored.  I tried the galleries and did find some beautiful stuff, but it still wasn’t what picky me wanted.   All it really needs, I thought, is a huge window sticker!  What d’you call them, transfers?  Historic site and all that, there were probably hundreds of them in the shop that I hadn’t found and wouldn’t have been open even if I had found it.  Time for a day-trip to M-p.   Yes, yes, yes!  All glorious in reds and golds.  All I need now is a builder and a glazier – and somewhere to live while the work is being done?  No, I can camp upstairs.  This is rather fun.  I turned my attention to the other 90% of my accommodation.  While I have work done, is there any other work I want done, any other interesting  niches to create!  The trouble with my beautiful light and spacious room is that everything is built-in, and so everything is hidden and so the general effect is as uninteresting as living in a large box.  An artist – I grinned – might rave about the spareness of line, but I didn’t feel in spareness of line mode.  I was not going to invite an artist to give his considered professional opinion.  There were definite ramifications to having my home designed by Tet. I found some interactive interior design software – model your ideal home!  That gave baby hours of endless pleasure.  I got there in the end.  Alcoves, alcoves were what I needed, and a bay window.  My every instinct was against central divisions.  I had quite enough of those.
Oh, and I wanted to make my loo and bathroom fun and pretty
So then I’d had the builders in and got there and felt thoroughly content with not just my place but my space so I went off to spend another night in M-p, appreciating the first one had been good for me at a level I couldn’t even describe or define.  However delectable my space, there is something in the atmosphere after 6000 years, something in the stone.  Something.  Something that wards off all hurt, all pain, all fear, all anger – and all mattering.  This time I rested my back against what I ridiculously thought of as ‘my’ pillar and hugged my knees and simply breathed.  By no means a classic meditation posture but I was happy and this time I felt emboldened to actually take on my dragons and slay them, because I wasn’t.   I think I might find that impossible to explain.   I was also emboldened by having done a little bit of very elementary detective work on break-ups due to the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun from stats from the Vasuculi Civil Affairs Department (couldn’t they call it something else?) to self-help and problem-page sites.  Nobody had been lying to me!  I hadn’t really thought they had but it was good to see they hadn’t. This bit of my saga at least was entirely within the realm of normal human woe.  Of course if I knew what the question was I might know what the answer was.  Yes, this, yes, that, but why.  It’s the wrong way round!  At the centre it will be obvious why.  Again I had the sensation of some kind of fusion.  I am Fal, I said to myself, lazily, sleepily.  THAT AM I.  All are One and do not know it.  I just need to get past – whatever it is I need to get past.  Is that a good circle or is that a good circle?  A circular maze came into my mind and I came to sharply filled with the sudden realization that there was a block on the way through it, which I suppose is screamingly obvious really, but I’d never thought of it like that before.  Hallo, obstacle, what are you?  Now I’d visualized it, I could so to speak prod it and poke it.  It wasn’t very responsive.  You have to bear in mind here we’re talking about a short thick black line.  I felt fairly frivolous.  It’s my mind,  I could push it here, maybe make it change into something else, do what I like with it.  Hey, maybe I can jump over it!  Nothing changed inside but I had the definite sensation of the block rising to meet me. Aw, don’t be like that…How about brute force, pneumatic drills!  I knew the drill-heads broke.  So you want to be difficult, do you?  As though that wasn’t obvious or something. Now look, I made you, I can unmake you…Suppose I parachute into the centre.  Like maybe I fly away on my eso pink balloon and flutter gracefully down.  I enjoyed that one, but it didn’t seem to change anything. What is going to happen to me?  I knew that was the question but there wasn’t an answer.  But no look if I get centred I think I must think mustn’t I, that something so devastating will happen to me that it must be avoided at all cost.  Can’t we have a try before you buy here!  What else am I having?  This business of mattering.  What will it do to me, what shall I lose?  Are you Maya?  And  a chorus of dancing bears high-kicked across the floor of the Ciletij Senate?  No, actually, but I knew I was dead on target.  I had a flurry of the sort of thoughts you don’t want to have and since I was alone having them I was extremely glad I was where I was, in a well-equipped operating-theatre, not in my home first-aid room.  I didn’t fully love Tet, I held back a bit, I loved you.  I’d leave, betray, forget.  Sorg was a male you.  I couldn’t not.  I heard Hass telling me I’m not gay but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t in love with Maya and I felt confused because I felt I understood ‘like that’ and ‘not like that’ but not both at the same time.  I just said over and over to myself, Maya, then reason kicked in and I thought as I had before, no, the order is wrong, it doesn’t make sense, but perhaps after all it did if I thought, no felt, felt that with Sorg at last I had Maya.  Me hadn’t fully, properly – what was the bloody word – loved Tet, not the real me because me was on some kind of eso trip with Maya but I did, I do love Tet, with both of them dead I’m free to love Tet.
Umm, that’s rather a high price to pay.  No wonder I’m  ravaged by the whole thing.  Having thought I’d lost Tet too. 
The word bi floated into my mind, as in bi-sexual.  Can you be asexually bi-sexual?
So long as I can love my eso, not someone else’s. 
It sort of seemed to explain the whole Hass thing, but I couldn’t have put into words how.
Bi. You point both ways, equally attracted, or in my case un.  Hermaphrodite.  You are both. We’re all fthat.  Oh the continuum of gender indeed.  My male part saw no reason why I shouldn’t love Maya.  That made sense.  I think.  THAT AM I.  It doesn’t have a body and it doesn’t have gender.  Therefore I have neither body nor gender.  Therefore we have to be human.  Here and there and in my case all over the damn’ place.  I thought that in my case the chicken definitely came before the egg.  I mean, it all seemed so much simpler to my gang because they hadn’t fallen in love with someone of the same sex without being gay!
Eeek!
Or not exactly.  To complete the square the matching-pair that should have dined with Sarat and Maya was not me and Tet but me and Hass.  Had I oh what’s the word, subliminally understood that?  Amida, Amida, Amida, and what I’d waded into, at six-freaking-teen, I mean, was Sarat and Hass sorting out their relationship, but Sarat isn’t talking, Amida, darling, he isn’t talking about his relationship with Maya and he isn’t talking about his relationship with Hass, and in both cases why the hell should he?
Oh did I hole them below the water-line and other such allusions, not expecting me to be so thick that I didn’t see what water-line, what boat?  Sarat is an outer and exo kind of guy….What difference had that made?  Probably rather a lot. And Tet?  Tet is outwardly outer and exo.  The eso is all in the art.
And in Fal.
Right now, I think – I don’t think – I need to be – I feel, yes, sort of floaty, but in a very prosaic way or maybe that’s actually how it is, I just don’t feel – the weight of me, which is strange because I don’t feel like moving, either, don’t feel I can move from this spot.  The only need I have right now is to see the sun hit the Window again.  Practical Fal kicked in, plenty of time for that.  A drink would be good.  But that would mean both moving and saying words to another human being.  Don’t think I can do that.  To some extent and heretofore, I have just punched me in the stomach, followed by knocking myself unconscious.  Rather literally in terms of having knocked out who I thought I am, but there might be an element of wishful thinking there.  I need to grow.  To let me spread through me.  Just sit.
Eventually I wanted to go to the loo.  We are human.  Quite so, yes.
I definitely wanted the tree in bud.  That is so me. 
It was the same guy behind the counter.  He smiled in recognition. 
“Do you do strong coffee?” I asked.
“We do.”
“Yes, please!”
“There’s a painting in the Ladies’, tree in bud.  It’s unsigned.  Do you know whom it’s by?”
“Guy called Manya.  Lives over on the Leolisle. We sell a lot of his stuff.”
“That’s really what I meant.  I did come once in daylight!  Went to the shop.  I didn’t see…”
“I think it’s in the catalogue.”
“The – yes, of course.”  He cocked his head.  “I mean, you’ve only been here 6000 years.  Not just for locals.”
“I look that old?”
“This place,” I said, “you just could be!” I stifled a yawn.
“We do B and B too.”
“Sorry!  Oh.  No.  I’d miss the sunrise.”  He laughed.  “Why have I been allowed to live my life and not see! Is there music in the glass?”
“Not a lot of people ask that,” he mused.  “Something of a specialist enquiry.”
“Can we just say I know Carlin.  Rather well.” I paused.  “I think I’m being silly.  There’s nothing secret – it’s just -  I’m not here because I need to talk to someone.  I’m here because I need to talk to me. When I was five, kid in Zur, Maya Talal became my best friend.”
“Oh dear, dear, dear, dear, dear.”
Once more the cocoon of love.
“I told you the other bit.  Not the bit in the middle.  I had a partner in Zur.  In Kadun I ran off with Sorg San-yaega-baht.”
“You have been through it.”
“I have rather somewhat been through it. I’ve talked to Hass, Sarat, Amida, Vax and my ex.  I may be sick of bending other people’s ears!  I wasn’t there when Sarat let the music out, but oh I heard about it.”
He gave a grin which showed he knew all about dynamic young emperors releasing music in glass.
“Let out long ago.  You’re Fal?”
“I’m Fal.”
“I’m Taja.”
“Hi!  Do you do this all the time?  The night-shift, I mean?”
“Good grief, no.  We all do a month.  Since there are rather a lot of us, that works out about once every two years. For the caff, I mean.  There’s also the party, of course.”
The cocoon hadn’t wavered. 
“I think,” I said cautiously, “you’re thinking of what has happened to all of us.”
“The terrible pain. The ghost was Sorg?”
“If,” I said.
“Any more thoughts?”
“Not really.”
“Customer!” A thin pale young man had come in.  “If you want to talk again, mail me.  [email protected]
 “Will do!  Thank you.”
He was chuckling.
“I used to be a school-master.  Remember me to Sarat, I taught him when he was ten.”
“Local boy makes good!”
I finished my coffee and took the tray back to the counter.  Taja gave me a half-wave of thanks while talking quietly to the thin pale young man who on closer inspection looked terribly ill.  Perhaps he has some awful disease.  I think I’ve got problems? 
Such as they were, I went back to ‘my’ pillar contemplating them.  I knew I was still a long, long way from where I needed to be.  Two things now presented themselves, neither of which was exactly soothing. 
I thought I’d lost all three.  That was enough to cause havoc to anyone.  Could I say my enthusiasm for my relationship with Tet was – well, real or well – some kind of over-reaction to not having lost everything after all, like – like you think you’ve lost fifty dollars and find you’ve only lost fifty cents.  Phew!  The other thing wasn’t any better.  What would my life with Sorg have been?  Happy, certainly, but an extended fantasy that might or might not have one day crashed on reality?  It was not comforting a) to think that I could have spent the rest of my life in a state of delusion, b) to think of the hurt I should have done to him or c) worst and most unbearable c) that his murder had saved me from myself.
It happened.    Part of the bloody Whole.
I didn’t think I needed to doubt that I love Tet.  I did that before my life got complicated. I did think I needed to be extremely – distrustful of my advanced capacity to tell myself it was perfect before and will be perfect after and the bit in the middle doesn’t matter.   I remembered a bewildered Kai.  But it can’t have been, Fal, perfectly and absolutely happy.  Because to remember it like that is to deny the problem entirely, deny I have a problem.  And it’s my problem and no-one can take it away from me, so there!  
I used the pillar to scratch between my shoulder-blades, if you see what I mean. 
And what is the prime scapegoat?  Sorry, Benji.  Why, it is the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  What would my life with Tet have been? That’s a different can of worms.  Can I say I should have grown up, grown out of it, as Bandi had comfortingly said I should.  Probably, I decided.  We should have had children, both of us, Maya and I – the terrible pain came from nowhere then ricocheted off.  I closed my eyes a minute.  What would Sarat have been?  Not, I think, a vet.  Environmental activist? And they all lived happily ever after, except none of them ever dared use paper cups.  I managed to laugh. The wider question of responsibility.  Or denial of.  While Kadun went to hell.  Could Sarat have been happy worrying about paper cups?   Of course he couldn’t.
Was that another of my either ors.  If Krarlik had decided to invade Dabida, that could have been mildly interesting for about ten minutes, while the ‘invading army’ (once again!) settled in – oh of course, oh how freaking obvious!  I expect. The meaning, purpose and origin of Garsit is probably that it’s far enough from the border for Jaizal’s soldiers to have decided they could safely settle.  But that, the putative invasion I mean, had potential repercussions even hairier than what had actually happened.  Visions of them returning to Kadun with Sarat at their head. 
 None of this is part of the bloody Whole.  None of this has happened.  Well, Garsit has happened.
There was a Matter of Kadun, outer and exo.  By the existence of this – no, by Sarat’s choices, my life has been determined.  Or not, as you prefer. 
OK, Fal, which do you prefer?
Me.  My choices.  I could not keep me separate, being incomplete.   I could not see myself as independent, not required to give a flying fuck about the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  But that of course is exactly the opposite of what I’ve been saying – oh, of course, the independence had to be the delusion and the bMbK the reality.
Sorg.  My choice.  I did that.  But faced with a male Maya-clone who was mad about me – a what?  He was nothing like Maya.  Leave it a min.  I didn’t give myself a choice.  I was being controlled by me?  Not by love, not by lust.  Two halves, one on each side of the crack.  This is what I need. Like when you’re drowning you need air.  Thought I needed?  To heal the crack?
It was beginning to get light.  I went to sit in front of the Flame.  The sun rose on the Window of the shrine at Maona-pri, blotting out everything that could possibly matter.
When I’d finished being transfixed I went home thoughtful struggling with the realization that I had lost nothing or nothing that I ever had in the first place.  I had a session with Benji and then I very thoroughly and systematically searched the site of the (of course) internationally known shrine at Maona-pri.  I was having an idea.  There were lots of things wrong with it, but I was having it anyway. 
Deal with the practical side first. 
I had never in any meaningful sense commuted and taking the ferry to Maona-pri and back struck me as commuting in a meaningful sense.  So I wanted to be a volunteer, did I.  Well, it would certainly be a wholesome and constructive use of my time, but the practicalities seemed to have escaped my better nature.   Obviously I should have taken the house on the Sohenisle.  No, I am not going to move again, especially for something that was bound not to last, a fad, a stage I’m going through.  
Oh really Fal, and why do you want to be a volunteer?   Other than you have transferred your enthusiasm for any eso outside you to a place instead of a person.  I only want to help out in the shop or something…Oh yeah?
Is that a healthy suspicion or an unhealthy suspicion?
Boing!  Oh I see.  The devastation, the loss, is the loss of other people’s eso. 
I think I need to think – I think I actually need to think now.
It’s all in the mind…The crack is in the mind, the glue holding me together is in the mind.  The absence of the glue is in the mind.   The car always starts!  Is that the eso, sort of emergency starter?  When – when the rest of what you think of as you. Because it’s still there even if you think it isn’t.  So exactly what are you saying, Hass?  I need to love it.  To accept it as part of me.  I can be here and now and not float away to – but that wasn’t necessarily exactly all down to me, now was it, whether ghost or not, the bMbK made time itself hiccup.  Except time had slipped in Zur so I couldn’t in all honesty say that was nothing to do with me, whatever that was.  If I love it as much as I love me, I unite with it.  If I love it less than I continue travelling furiously in ever-decreasing circles.  If I love it more than – I – I do things which I can’t accept in some terrible sense damage me such as Sorg.  Because it doesn’t have gender or identity or boundary.  Because  - it’s not ‘my’ eso, it is the bloody Whole, and that bit of the bloody Whole that is Fal is – infused by it.  Is that the point?  Might be.  If I understood it.  Infinite and separate.  Here and there.  But that which is me cannot not be a part of the bloody Whole, whether I think I am or not.  Well now, that depends, doesn’t it, on what you mean by real.  As in whether permanence is part of it.  ‘They just want you to be real.’  Presumably not permanent.  Everyone else gets it, damn it!  Hence of course my insecurity, thank  you, Tet. 
This has to have a source.  So far as I could see, my entire childhood and early youth had been emotionally, intellectually, morally and metaphysically impeccable!  All in the mind…I had consciously/unconsciously/sub-consciously firmly plugged the headphones jack into the power-socket!  I wanted to be like Maya.  But I’m not Maya, I’m me.  Oh dear, is that a divorce or is that a divorce?  And I knew I wasn’t like Maya in what I suppose I thought of as superficial ways.  Hass even asked me, what was Maya doing while the rest of us were making mud-pies?  Oh I see.  I think.  I gave it identity, gender, boundary.  Eso was like Maya.  Not like me.  Like Hass.  Not like me.  Like Sorg.  Not like me. 
I think it’s for moments like this I created my own little hide-away.  The whole terminology – oh Fal, you can’t be that dense.  Can I?  Outer and exo.  Inner and eso.  Some people, my young brain figured, are – contain – the eso and some don’t?  And I’m one of the ones who don’t, but I didn’t know I thought that.  If I thought that.  Eso doesn’t do, it just is.  I think it would be quite easy to have embedded that one.  To have had it apparently reinforced.  Sarat did.  Maya was.  Maya got herself a rather good degree in the ancient languages of the Malpurian sub-continent while Sarat was plotting.  Could anything be less relevant?  Uncomfortable echoes there.  Did I always secretly think if it wasn’t the bMbK it wasn’t Real?  Anyway, it doesn’t follow.  Can’t say Sorg was while I did.  Oh,, oh, oh, oh, oh.  No, I can’t say that.  I just possibly can say the attraction was Sorg was and did.  Showed me how to be me? 
Enough!  I shall read something soothing and perhaps instructive.  I dug out Eternal Flame.
 
Yikes.  ‘Since before recorded time there has been a Flame at Maona-pri. Legend has it that the first mentors came from Var but there is no evidence that Var in fact existed, though the sandstone from which the shrine is constructed is not indigenous to Fidub and no explanation has been found for its remarkable durability.’  Oh really.  I knew enough about the other matter to know mind can maintain the strangest things.  So that’s what the mentors do.  My mind wandered slightly to something I had found mildly interesting.  The literature on offer was wholly what Lattic had called vanilla.  This wasn’t exactly surprising – we do not want to encourage seekers for either thrills or power or indeed those on the wrong side or even for those with apparently the most upright and academic reasons for interest in the Cult, not without a nice cosy chat first.  They must always have provided sanctuary and healing.  Where the shrine at Maona-pri fitted into the history of the continent, I shall doubtless learn if I keep reading, though some of it will be between the lines.   So what did they do in their beautiful shrine.  They tended the Flame, they healed the sick, they observed the stars.  Oh and they conducted ‘what some have called’ counter-rites at Xu-laman, ‘a concentration of power then believed’ to oppose the power of evil unleashed by occult practitioners on these ‘Days Celebrant’.  Oh did they really.  I frowned slightly.  So they knew about the Cult pre-Narulis.  How?  They ran schools.  Narulis was educated by the mentors.  The plot thickens.  Exactly what was he taught?  ‘The precise events leading to the establishment of the Anile Empire are veiled in some confusion.’  I bet!  ‘The subject is naturally one of great interest to historians but outside the scope of the present work.  Nonetheless the role of the mentors is plain.  It was they who instructed Narulis in the nature of the terrible enemy he had confronted and advised – ‘   In-ter-est-ing.  In it up to their necks, these sweet folks who don’t know they’re alive.  ‘It was mentors who formed the phalanx of the first PANTHER!’  Well beyond their necks.  Wanna know how they knew how to confront the foe.  The present  – vanilla – work is obviously not going to tell me.  When was it published?  Latest impression last year.  I ruthlessly skipped about 200 pages.  ‘At the time of writing it seems there has been an unfortunate resurgence in Kadun of those primitive practices now known universally as the Cult but perhaps more extraordinary still is the rumour that Narulis’ descendant, Sarat-ban-essa, is preparing to repeat history.  Sarat, as have all the scions of the House of Fire, has of course been extensively educated by the mentors.’  So you taught Sarat when he was ten, did you.  Nothing I knew about Sarat which is a very great deal confirmed an extensive inner education.  ‘As did his illustrious ancestor, there can be no doubt that he derives his strength for the great task before him from the shrine.’  Oh good grief!  He was going to be a vet!   I think, you know, they are not indifferent to the Great Enterprise though I was rather glad not to have the present author describe the service to mark the funeral of Maya-ban-essa.  It wasn’t optional, I said to myself softly.  Sarat, if you will insist on this particular career-choice, you are going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming from the NoZone stall into the shrine to understand the bloody Whole…Cho and Vax, I presume.
 
I rifled through the pages I’d skipped.  The Building.  The original structure is of course a circle within a  pentagon.  An open circle within a pentagle within an open circle.   The points of the pentangle are joined by obviously curved rows of little rocks such as might mark and indeed do mark the edges of  flower-beds.  Four of the triangles contain the caff, the library, the shop and the Change.  The what?  ‘The exact purpose of the area known as the Change is lost to history.’  Oh really.  Ask Vax.  The fifth triangle, that pointing due east, of course contains the Flame and the Window.  I don’t suppose they had a caff and a shop in pre-history, either, though come to think of it they probably did have some kind of refectory for the weary traveller on the road of life and indeed here that is confirmed by the present author.  ‘Sustenance has long been provided by the mentors for all who seek it.and also retreat for those who wish to fast or engage in other spiritual exercise.’  Why on earth didn’t I think of that?  Probably because it didn’t seem exactly relevant; food, drink, possessions, these are not my dependencies, just the esos of two people who are dead.  Of which I am necessarily deprived anyway.  I mean the point of fasting is it stops you taking something in to rely on and forces reliance on that within. 
Which just might be another ground zero point now I come to eyeball it.  If am not forced kicking and screaming into my eso, on what am depending?  My intellect is a rather big fat obvious answer.  Could I possibly have been told that already!   Nonetheless there is something I can resolve with my mind.  After that I might actually understand it.   Cantilip was wicked about the ancient languages of the Malpurian sub-continent. Good to have a linguist on the team.  Perhaps the team might learn to speak irtubi.  Mitch sighing and pointing out that most irtubi don’t speak irtubi.  What exactly was it I could not understand?  Apart from how to say, ‘what is your name?’ ‘would you like to go to bed with me?’ in irtubi!  Cantilip produced a not exactly serious list of ‘useful phrases’.  How Maya – why Maya – how Maya could have concentrated wholly on her studies or even concentrated at all.  Why Maya was not divided on this bloody Matter of bloody Kadun..  I realized that intellectually I understood: when she was absorbing a textbook on grammar, all of her was there, and when she was with the plotters all of her was there.  Compare and contrast my fixation that whatever I was doing I ought to be doing something else.  So what’s the proposition?  Anything that’s part of the bloody Whole is of equal value, as per washing-up and laundry, which is clearly ridiculous.  Add two words.  To me.  Complete. 
Not sponge. 
Hmm.
Not leaking?
Let me try and gee really feel the reality of this, which I know took place, year in year out, Maya studying in one room and the plotters immersed in gross national product in another.  I wondered what Cantilip and Karula had made of Maya, at least before they got to know her.  Anile empress not obsessed by Matter of Kadun!  Read all about it!   See Maya as she was, not as I thought her to be.
 
I can do that, can I?  I suppose you could say – eeyuh.  Yes, certainly you could say that.  My mind is running ahead of me.  Say cautiously that she tended to the quiet and studious.  But then they all do, don’t they, if they hadn’t/didn’t have public faces, Maya, Mel, Sorg.  To some extent.  That’s not the eeyuh factor.  That’s – Lido extending!  When we got to Kadun (we, Fal?) everyone knew about Sarat but Maya was something of a closed book.  And Maya just wandered around being Maya and if whenever she found a Lido in need of extension she said so, which was of course about every five minutes, which is what they all did and do.  What did Hass say, all the major decisions had been taken in Zur.  All the major decisions were taken in Fidub aeons ago!  Implementing change to the infrastructure is something else. 
Maybe it’s just time I went to bed.
I slept until the early hours, got up and began to fumble around in the kitchen while muttering to myself, this is no good, Fal!  Messing with my biological clock.  I went back to bed and set the alarm.  Even if I didn’t really sleep again, that was one track I could get myself back on. 
At any rate until I went to M-p again, which I felt would be rather soon, because even lying in my little bed I didn’t seem to be quite able to get myself into the frame of mind where  I actually got anywhere. I was trying to summon up the maze but it wouldn’t come into focus.  I can’t really be frightened that I’m going to crack again.  How badly did I frighten myself?  What?
Into sharp focus came my most terrible of moments but it was gone before I had a chance to anything really except feel what I felt at that exact instant, which was exactly nothing, total anaesthesia, except of course the car started, the car always bloody well starts, so – yes, so the eso is pretty hopeless at slitting people’s throats, either if the person has just murdered your partner, and in the fraction of a second after, yes, I did feel the urge but that is a long way from doing, no that’s not what I mean.  I mean – although I badly wanted to cut the bastard’s throat I was no more likely – it was like there was an impenetrable barrier which I think I now recognize as the eso I keep insisting I don’t have.  Equally I didn’t want to.  Oh, I frightened myself all right, but not by my understandable murderous urge but by being – taken over.  What am I talking about?  Not by loss of control but loss of control over loss of control!  Fal’s eso rides to the rescue to save her from herself!  That’s obvious garbage.  Is it?  Is it really?  The crack is in the mind.  The glue is in the mind.  The – the conviction that there was nothing holding me together could only be over-ridden – could not and cannot be rationally over-ridden, only in  that supreme moment of crisis or, or, or in that place of absolute safety because I am a bit frightened of my eso, of letting it out of the cage I’ve put it in.  The only thing stopping it spreading through me is me.  Frightened of letting go.  Frightened of ceasing to be me.  That’s not as melodramatic as it sounds now, is it, Don’t wanna be inner and eso.  Wanna be outer and exo.  Wanna be me. 
What a nice little argument.  So why have I spent my life latching on to other people’s esos.  Uh-oh!  How about because my own was too dangerous?  In my mind. 
They’re all so complete.  Safe.  There is nothing safe about the eso!  That’s an interesting little conviction.
Not sure when or for how long I dozed but I do know the alarm went off.
I awoke with a thought.  Just stop, Fal, just stop!  It was, however, a rather limpid thought.  ‘You’re the eso one, Fal’  Yes, I answered, I know that.  I just don’t want to be.  Think I don’t want to be.  Due to my slightly peculiar ideas about eso.
Meaning?
Skipping lightly over the minor details that ‘I’ can’t decide what to do and ‘I’ thinks that Doing Something is Crucial, what ‘I’ paramountly does not want is to find herself doing something totally different from anything I think of as me and which has been ‘chosen’ by an eso I don’t accept as me.  
The pronouns are enough to freak me.
Or in short shut up and love my eso.
Coda: But of course why I can’t decide is because my poor abused eso is screaming at me that none of the things I contemplate is me.
It is very un-me to spend daylight hours sitting very quietly doing absolutely nothing. After a while I grinned to myself and went into Zur to buy a packet of pink balloons. 
I blew them up and watched them happily bobbing around not necessarily within reach and thought: my problem with free flight is what?
The number of things I’d never thought of doing is so large it’s not possible to list them but they range, shall I say, from parachuting to the ancient languages of the Malpurian sub-continent. 
There is no given, no indelible reason why any of these things ‘aren’t me’. 
Anthropology to art.  One is enough!  I can draw in a rather basic sense, my people look like people and my houses look like houses, possibly even my fountains look like fountains and my water might fall downwards, but my people and houses don’t look like particular people or houses.  I certainly have no great talent for it.  Putting smudges of paint on a piece of paper to create a somewhat impressionistic picture of a beautiful vista is not the same.  Among the services offered by the shrine, I should explain, was art therapy.  I wasn’t quite sure what Tet’s reaction would be but I suspected it would make me giggle.  Hass’s simple (not so simple) point had been I can try anything, don’t have to magically think I know I’d like it in advance.  Do not close those bloody doors!  No, that wasn’t it.  Do not look at a row of closed doors. 
I went back to the Grid-site of the shrine. There were all the obvious soothing things for people who were feeling frazzled, art, music, dance, poetry, gardening.  There was a series of talks on things like The Window and The Building and another on what I suppose you could broadly call current affairs insofar as they impinged on the shrine or the shrine on them – give or take 1500 years.  The Shrine and the First Anile Empire.   That I have to hear.  Alas, as is usually the way when you come across a really interesting event on the Grid, you’ve missed it.  How about ‘When did the Modern Age begin?  What defines it?’  I put a mental half-tick against that one.   Then there was a section called The Inner Journey.  Self and Other.  Love and Power.  Form and Essence.  There was a section called simply Help which said the mentors can be reached 24/7 and how so to do.  Interestingly, I thought, the Study page mostly just said the same, but it also said there was a retreat house on the Leolisle.  My immediate reaction was rather that I’d done a lot of retreating and advancing was more what I had in mind, but I read on.  Somewhere between a first-class hotel and mental survival training.  You leave behind your family, your friends, your mobile, your netbook, your books, your magazines, your music, your anything you can escape from yourself into and learn to live with yourself.  You don’t even talk to anyone, except the mentors, presumably when after 24 hours you’re climbing the walls.  The menu is fruit, raw veggies, yoghurt and water.  However, our beautifully appointed rooms…Discomfort is not part of the trip, though you did do your own laundry (and make your own bed and tidy your own room if you wanted your bed made and your room tidied – the guest’s space is sacrosanct.  Be assured no-one else will enter your room from the time you enter it to the time you leave it).  You can stay in bed all day if you like and swim and ride if you don’t.   Yes, but can you paint smudgy sunrises?  Yes, there are many outlets for creative expression…  I have to try this. Hallet’s Cove was so far free of friendly goat-sitters.  Trust your friends.  I mailed Narak and Lattic and asked them if they’d like a holiday in Zur.  Whenever they felt like it, really, no rush. 
 
You didn’t book, just mailed or phoned to let them know you were coming.  I guessed they never turned anyone away even if temporary accommo had to be found in a sleeping-bag rather than a beautifully appointed room and that it was impossible to predict how long people would last out. I did know that although you are of course free to leave at any time you are asked to talk to one of the mentors first. 
 
I turned up.  The house was beautiful.  The diet didn’t bother me.  I didn’t have to stay if the other stuff did. I was a little ambivalent about what it was going to do for me but I supposed I’d find it a soothing and soulful experience.  I think I conceived it as a just slightly more disciplined version of what my life was like already, erasing all the little things that break up a day.  I settled in, nibbled some fruit and went exploring.  I found the Art Room.  There were paper, brushes, and boxes of paints, Oh I see, yes, this is good, what you also don’t have to do is start babbling in semi-explanation, gosh, you know, I haven’t painted since I was a kid, don’t know if I’ll be any good.  I noticed there was also a shredder, presumably if you found your work embarrassingly bad.   There was a slim dark girl about my age who looked up and smiled but of course we didn’t speak.  I started to mix colours until I had a pale pink I was happy with and started to smudge.  Pale pink, pale blue-grey, more a sunset really.  What this needs is a few clouds, pink ones of course.  And how about some land.  Yes, I can cope with that.  Those are fields and hedges, at least if you’re feeling generous.  It’s pretty, though. Flowers in that field, I think, little dabs of red, yellow, purple. It’s something else too. Where’s the stream?  Oh. I suddenly felt a block.   I put Carlin At Sunset aside a minute and stared out of the window.  Well it was therapy, healing, not preparation for my first exhibition. Was there a person in this landscape?  I thought there probably was but I didn’t want to wreck my achievement so far.  I took another piece of paper and dabbed out a human form, gender and identity indeterminate, hair mouse, dress dark green, quite tall, all of which told me nothing. Except not Sorg.  Not Maya.  Not for that matter Tet.  I suddenly laughed and went to find a pencil and a big fat rubber.  I was going to make a total pig’s-ear of this but no-one would ever know.  
When my attempts at drawing Tet, Sorg and  Maya were I thought as good as they were ever going to be, which was lousy but desperately well meant, I sat back and considered that actually this was technique rather than talent.  I just did not know how to get features right.  I could draw something that was clearly meant to be a nose but when I tried to make it a particular nose it evaded my clutches.  I suppose that like monkeys at a keyboard coming up with the BPC if I persevered for long enough by trial and error I’d eventually get it right but the key to my life didn’t lie in teaching myself to draw Maya’s nose and it was time to give up.  I surveyed my works.  My mysterious figure in green, I thought, needed some surroundings.  Damn it, I’m enjoying myself!   But the surroundings didn’t come.  Think I might be arted out for the day.  I guess you just leave - ? I gathered my bits together, wiped down the table and went for a walk in the gardens.  What’s that?  I giggled.  Like in the botanical gardens or the zoo, there were neat discreet boards identifying the growth, just in case you wanted to use what’s that as an excuse to start talking to someone.
I flopped down on the grass only mildly irritated by the perception that somewhere I’d mentally slotted this experience into the box on holiday and therefore given myself permission to do absolutely nothing.  There was the gentle buzzing of insects, the scent of flowers and – and someone standing over me, probably Sorg.  There was of course no-one standing over me, least of all Sorg.  I sighed. And anyone wonders why I like my eso safely behind bars?  Something sort of clicked.  All so vanilla…Yes, well, training in containing the esoteric is not one for the Grid.  Let baby not run before she can walk.  Starting by accepting the poor abused little creature would be good.  All are One.  Some do not know it.  Poor little eso! Love, love, love, love, love…My intellect protested, loudly.  OK, the bloody Whole.  OK, we do past, present and future.  Where in the past, present or future has Sorg stood or will he stand over you in a garden on the Leolisle? I answered back rather feebly, I thought, I don’t know it was Sorg and someone in the future could but as for stand over, stand guard over – whoops. And anyone wonders why I like my eso safely behind bars?   Hang on a minute.  I’d cracked – open?  And the eso roared out in the form of Sorg?  Don’t see how that – shut up a minute, I said to my intellect.  Just see what happens next.  I sank happily into alpha rhythms and a rather delectable moving picture show, places I’d never been and doubted existed to go to, strange, strange scenes of coloured rock and impossible skies, and beings that never existed on this planet.  So this is the connection, this is the trip.
The next 48 hours or so were pretty impossible too.  The most mesmerizing time-slip came as I helped myself to our renowned buffet of garden fruits and Sarat was there, emanating most discordant waves of fury.  Dragged kicking and screaming!  Oh, I think so. 
I am in a fully equipped operating-theatre.  I am under no requirement whatever to function normally.  Let’s just see if this settles down a bit first. 
 
It did a bit but I was under no illusion that I knew how to deal with it. 
 
I picked a female mentor who superficially looked 18 but close-up there were fine lines and was probably I guessed actually about 40.  She had long black hair and a sparkly bandana and she looked as though she might be fun.  Can I talk to you?  Sure, any time.
I’d given myself a bit of time to think how I was going to approach this.  I hadn’t got anywhere, but I’d tried.
“I grew up in Zur with Mel and Hass.  Maya was my best friend.  Some of the – outer aspects of how I ended up here are personal to other people.  I have talked before. To Hass and to Sarat, and to grown-ups!  Amida and Vax.  It’s the inner.  I have a very dodgy relationship with my eso.  I started going to the shrine.  Since then – it’s changed.  And since I’ve been here – time-slips, the lot.  So I thought I just want to talk about the inside.  Then I thought and my problem is what?  I mean – it is engrained in all of us, but you’re not exactly going to ring Glitz.”
She held her hand up to stem the flow of  babble.
“Which one was your lover?”
I sighed.
“Mel.  When both of us were unattached.  Maya. When she was with Sarat.  In neither case remotely turned on.  Later relationships fine.  Hetero.”
“Some people avoid talking about others so as not to appear to blame them.  Some people choose talking about others to avoid talking about themselves, whether or not blaming them.  Some people have a genuine sense of the private.  There’s a question of blame?”
He-elp. 
“That’s a chapter in itself.  It’s not – the – the key relationship doesn’t actually have anything to do with me.  It’s not a relationship I had.  It’s not even a relationship someone I had a relationship with had.”
“So it’s private.”  She nodded understandingly.  “But critical?”
“Sarat and Hass were lovers when they were 15.  There was never any question of Sarat’s being gay.  If they could express their feelings for each other like that. I couldn’t see why Hass and I couldn’t.  I am more recently assured this was an intellectual quest on my part.  Others have put it that the sexual relationship I wanted with Hass didn’t actually have any sex in it. It seems this rather upset the guys’ thinking on love, sex and gender.”
“We have all of us of course understood,” she said smoothly, “that you are all very close.”
I grinned.
“Not that close?  Sarat says now – it was he who was surrendering his boundaries.  Hass was just making love to a guy he loved.”
“Interesting.  When did Mel fit in?”
“After the Hass interlude.  Before I paired with Tet. Then Mel went off to the Schools, Hass met Venga, Sarat and Maya set up house in Zur.”
“And,” very softly, “you all thought you’d live happily ever after?”
“I did,” I said.  “That’s a rather large part of it.  I left Tet and went off with  Sorg San-yaega-baht.  Maya, Hass, Sorg, all frantically eso.  The general idea is I’ll look anywhere but.  There’s one other thing.  Because of my social circle I know about a lot of things that a lot of people don’t.  I know they exist, I mean.  If I refer to them, it’s not I’m claiming to understand them.”
She looked at me thoughtfully.
“D’you mind if I have a go at translating all that?”
“Er – no!  Don’t mind…”
“My intellectual knowledge is way ahead of my actual knowledge and I may be asking things or even wanting to learn things that might just raise an eyebrow.  These people aren’t idiots.  They’re not going to teach me how to put a key in a lock without finding out the whole story – but I don’t want to tell them that, so I hope my excellent references will in some way oil the wheels.”
I giggled.
“I think not exactly.  What I want to know is how to deal with me, how to be me, living in Zur, far from the foe.  What I know about is – what happened to Mitch and Karula, for instance.  I assume – “
“Correct.”
 “No-one else has cracked up, dropped out and taken up goat-farming. Least of all Mitch and Karula.  I’ve just realized – what they’ve been through is more than any of us but of course they’re older.  I  felt insecure compared to my friends, my contemporaries.  That – that I’d somehow failed.  Yesterday I had a time-slip at your renowned buffet of delectable garden fruits.  Sarat was there.  He can’t have been more than 18 and he was livid, that’s the overwhelming impression I got.  Dragged kicking and screaming from his mobile!  Then it came to me that everyone else was fast-tracked because of who they are.  Then I felt I put two and two together – this is the don’t really know what I’m talking about clause –   Tar, Saski, Cho, no-one would have let them within 20 nani of the border if they weren’t able to deal with the Cult.  That’s where the two things overlap.  I think.  I mean, I realize, I think, they all have – an extra layer of protection.”
Unexpectedly she grinned.
“Wise beyond their years.  Indeed.  Goat-farming?”
“I think I’d better give you a potted bio. Mel, Hass, Reakoed, Maitlan, me and Tet were a gang when kids.”  I sighed again.  “AKA the Seismic Six. Maya wasn’t part of it but my best friend anyway.  Tet and I paired.  I was H-W.  I went off to Carlin, then to Azt.  I ran off with Sorg San-yaega-baht.  After Sorg’s murder I crash-landed in Carlin on a back-to-nature kick, cottage, veggies, goat.  I also cracked, though Hass says I didn’t – fill in that in a minute.  I – experienced Sorg’s – ghost for a while.  I was just thinking I might be back if not upright then standing on one leg.  Maya was murdered.  I’d tried immersing myself in the life of Carlin.  I had more questions than answers.  I turned to my friends.  I got one thing straight and came home to Zur.  Currently living alone except for Benji, my goat.  I’ve been through what should I be doing, who am I, what is my name – I’m back to my maiden name –  which is my country. Bandi screened me for the H-W. She said I had a crack which wouldn’t matter unless I was under extreme stress.  I’d grow out of it.  Really, what stress was I going to be under?  I cracked along it instead. I’ve had a time-slip in Zur. That sent me running off to Amida.  I had one in Carlin. Kaminua mistook me for a lady of his time.  I’m told the particular field of flowers.” I could see she was quietly laughing at something else I knew about.  “The extent if any to which Sorg’s ghost, projection was also consequent upon the Matter of Kadun is something I accept I may never fully understand – why should I when no-one else does! But my more recent thoughts on that are that – more like, when I cracked I let out my eso which I’d kept – caged.  I had some rather odd convictions about the eso and I found it – chased it, needed it -  in Hass, Maya, Sorg because that was safer.”
I could see her digesting that lot. 
“Being here in Fidub with people who don’t know you is on balance less complicated than being in Zur with people who do?”
“I’m not actually sure about that one. I didn’t come to Fidub to talk to people.” 
I filled her in a bit on that one.
“But you’re talking to me, not rushing back to Hasiyata?”
I made wide eyes.
“That would be a bit rude!  When it comes to it, Hass has other things to do.  I think I probably want to do this independently.  It’s not I feel I don’t really belong in the – inner circle.  It’s I feel I don’t know how to belong.  Reakoed, Maitlan, Tet, they don’t have a problem.  They’re just themselves.  I’m not myself.”  I grinned.  “The general verdict is if I could just get over thinking I had to be Maya, I’d get somewhere.”  Her eyebrows flexed.  “Not – give my life.  Maybe risk it.  Definitely do something public.  That’s without the eso side.  I know this might sound an incredibly trivial side-line.  What I know is that Maya studied ancient languages while the plotters plotted.  She just got on with being Maya.   At the same time she was just as much part of the plot as Sarat.”
“By being themselves you mean distinct?”
“Yes, exactly.  No – overflow.”
She was laughing.
“It is your misfortune that your dearest most intimate friends, blood-brothers, I believe the Press has said, are the stars of the greatest blockbluster of the age and possibly of any age.  Reakoed, Maitlan, Tet, what do they do?”
“H-W, Fleet, artist.”
“It tells you nothing that you paired with the one who kept himself – distinct?”
“Ow!  Maitlan cut the cord.  Went off to sea.”
 “Sensible man.  Reakoed?”
“Reakoed doesn’t just seem one of those happy-go-lucky chaps who go through life unruffled, he actually is that.  Tet’s more complicated.” I explained my complicated Tet.
She seemed more interested in Maitlan.
What is it  they say about the Fleet?  It goes round the continent clockwise until it gets bored, when it goes anti-clockwise instead.  If called upon to serve his country concerning this Matter of Kadun, he would be as far as possible from the hub of events.”  She smiled.  “Or he just likes wide open spaces.”
“Neither,” I said briskly.  “Or rather I suspect the first, but not as you’ve made it sound.  He’s another Lido-extender.  Explain in a minute.  Maitlan is uber-cool and uber-bright.  I think he might have understood doing his bit lay in making friends in far-away places.  Not sure how that meshes with his most famous saying!  One can immerse oneself in the Matter of Kadun or one can get a life.”  Uber-cool, uber-bright mentors don’t piss with laughter, but her eyes danced.  “Maybe if you make it more personal?  Maitlan would have understood that whatever happened Mel was putting himself in the firing-line.  Politically I mean, as well as.  Why are we talking about Maitlan?”
She didn’t answer directly.
“Three young Dabidans.  I may assume you would fight to the death for Dabida, indeed for Mel.  It is part of your normality that your dearest friends are also Dabida’s heirs.  The rug is taken out from under you.  Your friends are the emperor’s cousins.  Mel is clear on the matter of sovereignty.  You would not fight to the death for Sarat – perhaps.  But Maya?  Is your personal perhaps rather than political loyalty to Alzani-Meta not also your loyalty to the Anile Throne?  Does it not betray Mel and Hass to ‘reject’ Maya?  You were the only one confused by Maya Talal Ban-essa?”
“There are so many things there,” I said.  “And then Maya wasn’t there any more.”
“The invisible link to Alzani-Meta is what I should imagine is the unbreakable bond between Sarat and Hass.”
“I guess,” I said, “no-one knows what Mel would do if Sarat were really in trouble.”
“No-one except Mel.”
“And Tar,” I added rather glumly.  “Mel and Hass adored her.  Maya.  She was very adorable.”
“So far they have admirably and brilliantly walked a tightrope.” 
I giggled and told her about my tightrope.
“Interesting.  So many things there?”
“This is a practical in the irrelevance of time?”   I sighed.  “I thought I’d got the loyalty one done and dusted.  Then there are invisible lines crossing lives.”  I filled her in.  “There might also – this is something I’ve only just thought of.  Dependency on the future of Kadun!  I mean a feeling that whatever I choose to do may be abruptly interrupted.  Sorg, Maya, if Kadun collapsed shouldn’t I feel I had to fight?  Tet says no.  One stray Zuri is not going to make the critical difference.”  Fill-in.  “Reason is one thing.”
“Why did you decide against the Kadun Senate?”
“I thought of something better to do!”  I told her about You Can Do Banking, Kai and Sar-fenan.  “Part of the other matter stuff is nattering about how Narulis learned to fight.  Then I was reading a history of the shrine and how mentors were the first PANTHER.”  I explained very briefly about Lattic and how the word ‘vanilla’ had entered my active vocabulary other than descriptive of a flavouring.  “Please may we talk about my eso!  My delusions are so basic here.  Don’t wanna be inner and eso.  Wanna be me!”
She smiled radiantly.
“Just getting a bit of background here. Your relationships with Mel and Maya?”
I sighed again.
“That means I have to tell you about the cottage.  Mel said – by loving each other we get that bastard off the chair.  He meant it rather literally.  He, Sarat, Hass and Venga had  - sexually experimental times together.  Maya and I were giggling about it and sort of naturally progressed.”
“An extension of your relationship.”
“Might have been if I’d been remotely sexually interested.  It was a good giggle and more but not sexually more.”
“Maya didn’t mind?  About Sarat?  She was with Sarat?”
“Oh yes.  I was about to say indissolubly.  Saski asked that.”  I grinned.  “The grown-ups were informed.  Cantilip had thought she might have a future with Venga. He went off with Hass and she had to deal with his not being gay.  Then she and Mel found each other and Mel thought Tar should know all about it.”
“I think I’m lost.  You and Mel?”
I explained about me and Mel.
“Ten of you, then, the core of whom – Reakoed, Maitlan and Tet did not take part - ?”
“They didn’t. This was future leaders of the world stuff.”
“I think I shall not attempt to analyse relations between the six of you  -  a family of six siblings traumatized during adolescence by the simple fact you were not?  The rest, one might say, is history.  What is clear is you  have caused no rift.”  I must have looked completely devastated because she pushed my tut! polystyrene cup of water towards me and murmured, “Have a sip.  Clear,” she repeated and began to laugh.  “Falita, nothing is more common than that friends of both former or otherwise side with one or other of a pair when a relationship breaks up.”
“The only rift is between me and Tet!” I considered.  “Bit pat isn’t it, sibs can’t be sundered.”
She looked pleased.
“Of course.  You have a better metaphor?”
“Not really.  There’s one thing missing.  It’s the way you put it – the idea of Hass and Reakoed being on different sides – though they do have very different views.  Hass said I half-think I have neither family nor friends.  I’m related to him.  Sarshi.  Sarshi is Sorg’s twin.  Her other half is Vij, Maya’s brother.  From their point of view, I cut myself off.  Which is sort of true.  I mean I don’t think it ever occurred to me everyone wasn’t a phone call away.  Busy, busy, busy.  There’s an element of lasting out on my own as long as I could.  When Amida said I should talk to Sarat I jibbed a bit, but that was sensitivity not distance!  Gee Sarat, we both loved Maya.  What I really want to talk about is me!  Eight out of ten,” I decided.  “The people I grew up with I’d say anything to and they to me.  I shouldn’t confide in Cantilip or Venga.”
“Time to stop, I think,” she said.  “Same time tomorrow?”
 
I supposed I’d wanted an independent view.  I felt, not shattered or anything but a bit strange.  I’d bared my soul (not just mine!) to a complete stranger.  But it’s so much easier to talk to people who’ve known you since you were five!  Or of you, or the frame of reference in which you dwell.  I wondered.  Plus side.  Independent conclusions, if they struck me as deeply wrong, maybe I hadn’t explained properly.  Minus side.  The other people weren’t putting their side.  Bit I said he said they said.   Maybe cheating a bit, but I couldn’t get away from that, have to go to the other side of the world and even that probably wasn’t far enough to find someone who knew absolutely nothing about the people I was talking about.  I made it into a mental game.  How far back would I have to go?  Obviously Narulis.  Where would I have to go?  Harn to explain the origins of the Cult.    You should write a book.  Someone should.  But then all the sexy bits would be left out.  To be published when we’re all dead, then?  Let us assume of old age.  How would our kids feel about it?  Maybe for private reading only.  But to be written now, while we remember.  Who has time to write a book?  Er, I do.  I just didn’t think it was my thing, though I suppose I’m not making too bad a job of my bit.  It does matter to the bloody Whole.  Kai!  She must be at a loose end.  So it came to pass in a beautifully appointed room on the Leolisle!
 
Aw shucks, I couldn’t even pick up my mobile and tell anyone.  I wondered if I’d been a bit naïve about the cause of Sarat’s uncharacteristic rage.  I suppose they’d turned him inside out and he didn’t necessarily like what they said.   Not as though I wanted to be Anile Emperor.  I considered Senta.  No cocoon of love had enveloped the little bird with a wounded wing.  I’d have to ask her about that. 
 
I was just thinking I might like to do something physical, maybe go for a swim, when I fell asleep.  As you know, my usual diet is light and, as you also know, I really love masali.  Perhaps it was another piece of self-deception that I should be unaffected by the menu.  Who cares!  I don’t have to do anything.  Mostly.  Umm.   I think I’d prefer to be clear-headed and well rested for further sessions with Senta.  I am, I thought, already aware of mild sensations of evisceration or perhaps that’s too strong a word.  Of being uncurled, as a fox might uncurl a hedgehog.  I didn’t mean to sound curled up, I protested feebly to myself.  It must have come across like that. I was just dozing off again when it jolted me to realize it was like that, I’d just said it was like that, sort of, anyway  It did feel strange talking about myself to a stranger.  I dozed anyway. 
 
 
I awoke feeling clear-headed, well-rested and pro-active.  Damn it, I’m going to talk about my eso!  Well, eventually.  I formulated my baseline.
 
“My baseline here is I really don’t want to find myself talking to Zani in the MegaMart.”
“But why ever not!”
“Social embarrassment? People might stare?”  I changed the subject.  Pro-active, you know.  “Taja in the shrine cocooned me in love.  I felt completely safe, completely relaxed.  With you I feel – just the tiniest bit on my mettle.  I’m wondering why, whether it’s you, me or both.”
“And?”
“It felt odd to have told a stranger the private bits, just because you’re a stranger.  Obviously this isn’t stuff I’ve clasped to my heart, my lips sealed.  It feels as though it is.  The – the sum of what Hass said to me, followed by what I said to myself.  Completely mad.  I took it all on board without feeling – what didn’t I feel!  Stripped?   Tet for obvious reasons was more – personally critical.  That sounds a bit feeble.  He was frank about having felt he hated me.  I’m not so delusional that that was something I hadn’t been able to conceive of.  There was a cushion of what you said, an unbreakable bond, a cushion of – love.  Shielding me from reality?”  That last bit came out in rather a rush.
“How can it?”
“That may be the question?  Hurt is illusion.”
“So?”
“So I feel that reality is illusion?  I’ve thought that.  But then it doesn’t make sense.”
“Reality is what?”
“Ah-uh.  I’ve asked myself if I have special Fal definitions of certain words.  I asked Hass about whom he talked to about Maya.  I’ve told you, he adored her.  Venga, Tar…But what he said was it happened.  I know it struck me as brutal.  It happened.  Sarat was standing where he was standing.  If he’d been standing where she was standing.  You can say it shouldn’t have happened but you can’t change that it happened.  That’s the – common-sense view of reality and it’s Hass’s view, so far as it goes.  And – everything that everyone else in the universe happened to be doing at the time happened.  Me digging the garden.  My Fal definition is rather that a sort of – film of unreality settles over that which is elsewhere.  It’s not exactly true that I never felt shocked or anything.  After my second talk to Tet I was appalled at myself.  I felt I’d managed to erase Sorg from the record.  I sat saying to myself.  You did that.  It happened.  Then – though I’m not sure about this one.  Ninety per cent of the continent didn’t think Sarat could do it, so I’m not sure saying it didn’t seem real to me.  But then in Azt it was like the only thing that was real.  Though I think that was a common ailment too.  I actually – I wanted to be sure people weren’t just being kind and I looked up the figures for relationship break-up consequent upon the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun!  But it was a very definite feeling.  Not that Sorg didn’t matter morally or emotionally or for that matter historically.  Not essentially that I was trivializing my feelings for Sorg or my betrayal of Tet.  More that it just didn’t happen. Tet and I had somehow got separated and now we might get back together.  I’m a sponge?  I asked myself that.  I seem to completely absorb – oh.”
She laughed.
“Oh?”
“That can’t be right, either.  A wider reality?” I wondered hopefully. “I’d told him I’d drivelled to Hass about how it had seemed to me we – Tet and I – had not grown-up, lived the lives of a couple of big kids in a delusional state about what was about to happen to our little lives.  He said nothing had happened to his little life except being smashed up by me. Cue for Fal absorbing life in Zur as all reality.”
“Or back into your life with Tet?”
“They weren’t the same conversations.  Oh, I see.  Oh shit. Sorry!  Tet was explaining – his reality was loving me as a friend, as a member of the Six, blood-brother, sister, etc.  To which of course.”
“To which of course.”
I had a strong feeling she was just managing not to giggle. 
“The word that occurred to me is ‘leaking’ which I find a bit weird.  More holes than a sieve I can cope with but it seems to be letting stuff in not out..  The bottom line is that my edges are blurred.”
“Necessarily.”
No giggle there, only a certain dryness.  Try harder, Fal?
“I can see – can I?  If I find, need, have decided that my eso lies outside me I must be – porous.  Leaking?”
“Uncontained, shall I say.  All over the place.”
“I’m telling this piecemeal,” I grumbled.  “It’s not I had it pat. It’s that one bit followed from the next.”
“Do tell,” she said.
I finally got to the rich history of my eso.  The only time she showed the flicker of a reaction was when I voiced my healthy suspicion of attraction to the shrine, but she didn’t say anything.
“It has of course occurred to you,” she said at length, “that as you change Tet may no longer be among what you want.”
“It has,” I said steadily.  “I don’t think so, but if I’m wrong I’ll know before not after.”
“And of course,” she said.
“No,” I said, rather firmly.  “By lose I mean lose as in dead or might as well be.  Never wants to see or speak to me again.  Both of us are in a – process of discovery of what can’t be lost.”
“How can you lose Maya?”
“That freaked me a bit.  ‘Cept I was in the shrine.  I think.  I think I think something like.  All the external stuff people tell me about stopping thinking I have to be Maya.  It comes from a – conception of Maya’s eso. Which I prefer to my own.  Stick to like glue?  Because I am just a little bit petrified.  All in the present tense.  Maybe.  One of the reasons I’m here is because I think I see that I can control myself by brute force, slam down the lid? Be a sort of fake me.”
“When?”
“Ever?! I’ve left out.”  I narrated That Fateful Day.
“Implying?”
“No, I don’t think that!  Except in the terms that I do!  Running on higher octane gas?  I don’t think they all know.  Knew.  Exactly what was wrong with me, Is.  I hate verbs!  Maybe Hass.  A – perception something wasn’t right?  Time!  We were all of us so hopelessly busy.  The idea that what Maya was thinking about, chewing over when she finally got a minute to herself with Sarat was me.”
“You didn’t tell me you were PANTHER.”
“For ten minutes.”
“You stopped.  Suddenly there was time.”
“Oh yes.  No Sorg, plenty of time.  I was stopped.”
“I disagree.”  I flexed my eyebrows so much they hurt.  “What is the source of your feeling of  inadequacy?”
“Oh. Control?”
“Do continue.”
I giggled suddenly.
“I guess it centres on the cup of cocoa? What they know, what they can do is stop it falling.  What I know – experientally is it was impossible not to crack.  What I know intellectually is there’s a place before the cup falls where you can stop yourself dropping it. You always have choice.  In theory.”
“What was it they said, vaccinating sheep?  Have you asked Sarat if he’d like to goat-farm?”
“He’d be bored silly.”
“And you are not?  Did you not say?  What is the difference?”
“What – what I think you’re saying.  Not least because Hass has already said it.  Why am I pretending to have had a breakdown?”
“You are more bereft than Vij and Sarshi?”
“That is painful.”
“That too is reality.”
“What you’re actually saying is a person always has choice.  No I’m not arguing, just trying to be clear.  There’s a level where I rejected choosing not to fall.  Or chose to fall.  Because it was what I needed to do.  To be me.  To be real.  But who’s me doing the deciding.  The eso I reject but which is there anyway….Which is totally divorced from me.  I think.  Thus making choices I don’t know about.  Ohhh.  It kind of forced its way through the crack and – manifest as Sorg - ?”
She held up her hand to stop me.
“As you say, why should you know when no-one else does!   I should certainly agree there was some kind of shudder in you.  I should also agree that your experience of Sorg was in some way consequent upon that.  The field effect we shall have to leave open.”
“That’s it,”  I said, feeling quite excited, “a shudder, that’s exactly.   But then that’s like there was a shell, a block with a crack in it.  I thought I’d discovered something when I thought of the crack as lateral, horizontal, between the mushroom and me.”
“The block in the maze?”
“Wha - ?  To mix my metaphors?  There was no crack in the block in the maze.”
“As you said, when Maya died, the crack wasn’t there any more.”
“But the block sealed tight?  Thinks: this is getting a bit esoteric.”
“D’you want to come up for air?”
“Thought that’s what I was doing….”
“D’you feel more relaxed now?”
“Now you come to mention it. I’ve just thought of something a bit weird.  I think it’s pretty trivial.”
“Tell?”
“I jumped from wow, I’ve never talked to a stranger to of course I have: Kai.   Depends what I mean by stranger.”
We called it a day.
 
 
I lay in the garden and tried to recreate the maze.  It didn’t want to come.  Means, I thought sourly, I don’t want it to come.  Had I learned anything?  Stop trying.  Sorry?  I thought my eso was rampaging through me.  Oh triple shit: not if I find the place I don’t want it to. Which as we all know I do without choosing. So I just need triggering, do I, Senta?  Hmmm.
 
Okey-dokey, try step by step.
Who’s in charge around here!  I seemed to remember something about laboratory rats and a maze but since I had no access to any source of information I hoped Senta was hot on laboratory rats and mazes. 
Ah-hah, o little maze!  I may not be able to read about you but I can draw you.
 
I could just paint it out, I thought, as I wandered off to the art-room.  The block, I mean.   My previous efforts lay untouched at the side of the table.  Look at them later.
 
Uh.  I am not gifted at drawing perfect circles.  I just found that out.  Why shouldn’t it be square?   My circles would do.  And it’s got an entrance.  And it’s wildly simplified, circle within circle, within circle.  This won’t do, might just as well draw a straight line.  What else is it?  The block, I mean.  The point about a maze is most of it doesn’t matter, most of it is just there to confuse you.  Hang on, Fal.  If you could just think occasionally.  Most of a maze is dead-ends.  The block, I mean, is just another dead-end.  So it’s not the way through at all.  I just think that’s the way to the centre?  Ah-uh.  I was absolutely sure.  But then I would be, wouldn’t I.   It’s a dead-end, you idiot, just a particularly flashy one.  Which doesn’t mean getting through it isn’t – dramatic.   There is an actual path through my five-year-old art-class maze.  
This does not do.  I need a picture of a really complicated maze.  It’s going to have to be square.  Set-square and protractor!  Does the equipment provided include a ruler?  It does!  As an after-thought I looked for a pair of compasses, but there wasn’t one.  I drew 20 boxes within boxes.  Now whadda I do?  Close my eyes and make arbitrary breaks?  They are – no, the dead-ends are – all my creations.  OK, put some breaks and dead-ends.  They don’t have identities, values, attached so they can’t be subconsciously determined.  That sounds impressive!  On the other hand I might end up with no way through my maze.  I guess maze design is quite complicated?  Narak might know.  Could there be a maze in the grounds?  Sort of thing landscape-gardeners have fun with. 
Time-slip.  Protracted, if not protractor.  I am eight and sitting at the kitchen-table with a puzzle book.  I have a fine-tipped green felt-pen and I am scowling horribly at the maze in the book.  Bunny needs to find his way back to his warren.  Warren?  The entrance to the warren.   I turn to the little crossword further down the page. 
I guess you could say the eso is a warren.
I sat doing nothing for a while before I turned back to my work.  Then I felt a ludicrous urge for a fine-tipped green felt-pen.  There probably was one, but I didn’t exert myself to look.  I had a pencil and readily re-created my eight-year-old’s scowl.   I also had a rubber and I stealed myself to at least giving my maze an entrance.
Need a coloured pencil to make my line of progress or retreat clear.  I got a green one.
OK, suppose I turn left, then right, then – I am travelling, very fast, like speeded-up film.  Not like being in a car or a train.  Why not like?  Along – I have no idea what along, never seen in my life, it winds and it has rails on both sides, ornamental ones with spires and curlicews.  Then it stopped, faded, no sensation of having run into something or indeed, I suppose, having fallen off the end.  WTF?
Surprise, surprise, I have come to a dead-end.
Supposing I’m irritating about this.  Just barge through, as a line on paper, you understand.  I barged. 
Quite disappointed that the point of my pencil didn’t break off or something.  I continued heedless on my merry way.  I knew what was going to happen now and it happened.  Until I met The Block.  Of course I am super-imposing…. It’s just a line of exactly the same thickness as all the other lines.  But I refuse to see it like that.   
Now where were we?
I’m talking about two different things here.  Not sure either of them makes sense.
Hallo, block. 
Oh wait a minute, it’s got to have a hairline crack.  A few moments’ delicate rubber-work.
No, no, no, no, no!  Excuse me, Bandi said I had a crack, not a block with a crack.   A crack which should heal. 
Unless of course after that I made the block round the crack?
This is doing my head in.  Ah well, it’s meant to.
I can’t draw a crack within the frame of reference of the maze without a block around it. 
Oh yes, I can.
I picked up my maze and went to look for the nearest mentor
I brandished my maze.
“Look this may sound silly, but I want to alter this but I don’t want to lose the original.  Is there a photocopier I can use?”
“Copy it for you.”  He broke into a grin.  “How many copies would you like?”
“Ten, please!” I said while working out that I couldn’t use a rubber on photocopies but I could use white paint.
When he came back, I said, “Graphics software.  I think I worked out that what a program can do is not what a person can do and a person can’t necessarily use a program properly.  Either way it doesn’t come direct from you. In instances like this…”
He smiled.
“Infinitely saveable, infinitely alterable.”
“That’s the one.”
“There you go.”
I wandered back, frowning slightly.  Maybe he didn’t have an answer.  I doubted that; it must be a common enough question. I diverted myself readily enough to technology.  A scanner, then, scan, save, print.  Suppose you wanted to take home on disc – well, you’d just have to have a scanner of your own, wouldn’t you.  This place has a specific purpose and I was entirely sure the people who had worked out what did and did not mesh with that purpose were very unthick.  This was in danger of preoccupying me.  Work-avoidance!
It’s all perfectly simple really, I thought to myself hopefully.  The crack runs straight through the centre of the maze.  Thick squiggly line.  Damn it, I want software.  Scissors and paste it must be to have the two halves slightly separate.  That means the eso is split.  That can’t be.  That means I feel the eso is split. So that’s what Mel was raving about. But the maze.  The only opening – one half is full of openings.  The other – ah-uh.  The only – what is the only apparent opening in it into the – space is blocked by The Block.  Peculiar but interesting….Oh no, of course, the rest have previous dead-ends.  The only path from the entrance that leads to my Great Divide. 
Now I may be where I need to be, where to start from.  Emphasis on ‘may be’.
Hallo, block.  So you’ve got a hairline crack in you, have you.  But you didn’t when - ?
This is frantically interesting but does it play in real-time?
OK, there I am with my lickle hair-line crack through the middle and it’s something and nothing, immaturity, I’ll grow out of it.  Then Mel puts his oar in and makes a thing of it.  Umm, it’s quite unusual for Maitlan to declare his best friend should be shot.  Nor do I think Vax makes a habit of wondering if people should be strangled – well, people who aren’t Sar-fenan, anyway.  I can either protect Mel or analyse this and know I may be protecting Mel.  Or I can jump Mel entirely, trusting my famously reliable judgement that what followed was not down to my having been in some way scarred by Mel.
Decisions, decisions. 
If it’s immaturity, then all the dead-ends are weak, they’ll collapse.  Except the Maya one which grew stronger?
Oh, oh, ohh.  I sort of feel I see something.  Not sure if I can find the words.
Let me not get ahead of myself here.
If I say, as I have said, that I was actually fully myself with Tet, taking all of me with me.  Then I can also say, yes, dear, but you didn’t feel that.  What graphically, where graphically - ?
That needs two divergent versions, superimposed.  How about an overhead?  I think I may be gurgling beneath the waves thinking I can draw this. Memo to the management of the retreat:  look, personally I think an OHP is critical.
Let me take this slow-ow-owleeeeeeeeeeee.
If I can stop gurgling a minute.  No, look, wait a min, if – but then I might as well tear my pictures up.
It’s only images.  Metaphors. 
Force you to rely on yourself.  If you can draw it, you can see it in your mind, not on a screen.  Hmmm.
Suppose this bloody crack is between my eso and what I thought of as my eso.
I rather wanted to take my sheets of paper, paint and pencils outside and arrange them round me but it was beginning to get dark.  I demand a flood-lit terrace!
Certainly I could go and nibble something, so I gathered up my latest work into a neat heap and vamoosed.
I returned to the art-room now of course in total darkness except for moonlight.  I put the lights on and returned to my task.  The light was OK, but it wasn’t dazzling.  It wasn’t as though I was working on intricate gradients of colour but there didn’t seem any reason I couldn’t continue this in my beautifully appointed room (at any rate if I didn’t get permanent white paint over the carpet – I sneaked a look at the tube: washable).  I slipped my kit into my pockets and retired for the night. 
There was a fat armchair, cream, a bit frilly for my taste, but nothing objectionable, by the window, and a reading lamp (and in the bathroom a separate tap for drinking-water).  I curled my legs up under me, sipped slowly and scrutinized my portfolio. 
Where was I?  Damned if I know…I was also – distantly aware, shall I say – I had or might have interrupted myself because I didn’t want to continue.  I was going to have to recreate continuation mode.  It apparently came quite easily and soon I was oh, yes, I see, I meant that-ing, but I was suspicious.  It was too like having been away from work for a couple of days and sorting out what was on my desk.  It wasn’t personal.  Fal, you have to really feel this…Feel is not the right word.  Be inside it, not an on-looker.  Guess that means going in the entrance to the maze. 
The crack itself, you idiot, you, is not real.  Or rather, it’s my crack, I put it there, and no-one can take it away from me, so there!  No-one else. 
OK, with Tet.  Taking all of what I think of as me with me.  Only – only what?  Only I have – imagined?  Good a word as any.  A split in my eso.  Based on this idea that I ‘can’t be’ eso because that’s not me.  Only I know that I need it.  Oh.  Again.  Gosh, did I do that?  There is something there about Mel and Hass both, but not sure it’s sharing with me.  I grew up in heavy water.  That still doesn’t mean I even knew what my eso was at the time of my non-existent relationship with Hass.  You mean I do now?  Maybe I can rephrase that.  Oh.  In triplicate.  Maybe I just sit and yowl?  The idea embedded somewhere that unity requires union.  Instead of with myself.
Union with someone else.
Half an eso looking for partner to make music with.
Gee, Fal, you really need to love yourself.
Yes, Hass, you told me that. 
Now, I am not Sarat: I am not a walking coffee-bean, pride myself indeed on lemongrass and nettle.  I allowed myself a giggle wondering how Sarat currently would react to caffeine deprivation (not earlier, don’t think he was hooked at 17).  In other words I could really do with a mug of really strong hot coffee.  Was that distracting myself from the matter at hand?  Probably!  Where was I?  Does it play in real time?  It sounds as though it does.  That may not be the same thing.
Sarat and Hass.  Sarat and Maya.  Where could I possibly have got the idea of the union of opposites?  It’s my crack, I made it, etc.
I internalized garbage in other words.  Twice over: the inner and eso is not me, only the outer and exo is me. 
Mel went ape.  Bandi said I’d grow out of it.  Mel was seven-freaking-teen and Bandi was in her 50s.  Both were right.  Discuss.
At what level did Mel go ape?  Can’t ask Maya.  Either.  Discuss.  Cantilip, I feel it is only honourable that you be present at a conversation about the relationship Mel and I didn’t really have.  Or at any rate know about it.  I imagined those delicately arched eyebrows rising somewhat.  Look, this isn’t just idle curiosity, it’s driven me halfway round the bend (only half?) and sent me to retreat on the Leolisle…  At some level – that may be a rather good let-out, but leave it for a min – at some level both Mel and Maya detected – sounds like scanning a freaking laptop – discerned that as far as Fal was concerned she didn’t have an eso to unite with – so – so they were loving but as far as Fal was concerned the whole thing was a dead loss.   Seven freaking teen.  Let’s say they didn’t have a lot of idea what they were looking for, only that it wasn’t there.  Could even have been (she said hopefully?) much more superficial than that, a – perception Fal just isn’t bringing all of herself along to this party.  Is not ready.  Is immature.
So I was a late-developer who hadn’t been fast-tracked because I and my immediate circle wanted to restore the Anile throne.  Bit of a gulf there.  I had to giggle and did.
Hang on, the bMbK wasn’t on the horizon then.  Oh.  No.  OK, who hadn’t been fast-tracked because I wasn’t the future freaking king/A-M/who just wasn’t the frantically eso Maya.
 I put aside the increasingly imperative talk with Mel and I took another look at my maze, the version of it where the only path that led to the centre ended in a block and a drop. 
OK, if that’s a block, I can rotate it (damn it, I want software!), make it a bridge.
Oh dear.  I don’t know exactly how I feel resistance and I do not rule out that I am making myself resistant
Maya is dead
I shall never see her again, laugh with her, hug her, talk to her, giggle with her.  Leech off her. 
I have memories.  I do not need this – phantom relationship.  I cannot lose her.  I cannot forget her.
I need to cross that gulf.
I love my eso.
I have – hurt it?  I have hurt me.  I am frightened of it. 
Lots of stuff about floating away on little pink balloons. 
I am so terribly afraid of letting go.
It’s not – it’s not a fear I can find.  It’s a fear somewhere in the maze.  A fear I have only pretended to confront, that I shall not want Tet?
But no, it was there when I thought I’d lost Tet.
Controlled by my strange notions of the eso?  I shall be someone I do not know?  I suppose I could say that is increasingly unlikely.  Only I am convinced of it.  What I need is someone, who sigh can only be me, to take the two halves and drag them together.  That’s you, you moron!  Now get on with it…
No software.
Forced to do it myself whether externally or internally.
I need a clean sheet of paper.  I turned over one of the mazes.
I drew – some things on half the sheet.  Not sure they looked like what they were meant to be but I knew exactly what they were.  A mobile, a goat, a fence, a plate, anything that came to mind to represent my exo world.  Then on the other side lots of clouds and balloons and starburst. 
They’re not separate, idiot. 
Of how to – infuse mobile, goat, fence, plate with starburst graphically or any other way I had not a clue, I felt, except they’re infused already. 
In my mind, in my mind, in my mind…
At least if I make a bridge between them, that’s a start! 
It was a rather good bridge, actually, one of my better efforts. 
It ran across my mind that maybe it could be over a river and that I could swim across, but my mind told me instantly that the current was too strong.  Thanks, mind.  I am really going to have to have a little talk with you. 
I accept.  I reject.
This is my mind I’m talking about and it really does not want me to do this.
Gee, well, no-one ever said this was easy.
Moron!  Idiot!  You’re still doing it.  Whatever you say, you still do it!  Deny the other half.  Start there, idiot. 
That half is not a maze.  Well, it is.  Not in my sense.  That half is open.  A curve with no boundary.  But no entrance except at the Great Divide.  Just pick up the rubber and make a way in. 
Feel.
It will not surprise you to learn that I didn’t want me to do this but I thought-experimented my way – in would be an exaggeration: to the threshhold.
Feel.
What?
 Lost?  There are no directions.  I had to giggle.  What?  I don’t have to run for the Senate or plough a furrow?  Whaddya mean, I can do banking?
Blind?  I am going to walk into a little pink cloud that loves me.
Like wrapping myself in a warm fluffy blanket.
Look for things.  Things infused with starburst.
Such as me?  THAT AM I.  This am I?  What am I?
I am somewhere.
I am?
Who is me?
This doesn’t feel real.  No, well, it wouldn’t.  Discuss.
It felt real in the shrine.  It doesn’t feel real now.
Dive.  That’s a good image.  I am paddling, not even paddling, more like you’re heating some milk and you dip a finger in to test the temperature. 
Let go, Fal, let go!
Even if you do hold your nose.
Mental climb to top board.  Look at all that sparkling blue water I mean pink cloud.  What’s on the other side of it?
At which point I had the clear feeling I was asking myself to be the cup falling from the first floor window which can’t stop itself.  I found myself saying to Hass.  I know perfectly well what you want me to do.  It just happens that I can’t.  Course you can, he said.  Let me show you.  Nice dive.  Very nice dive.  Only he didn’t come up. 
Senta!  He-elp!  Alas, it was 3 in the morning.  I was perfectly sure she was instantly available if I’d been about to cut my wrists or something.  Since that was just about the opposite…
Guess I’d better go to bed, then. 
OK, that’s clear enough.  I have this figured as suicide.  Death of the self, sigh.  The end of me as I know me.  But it’s not! 
What the freaking hell do I not want to lose?
It’s too late to have another go at infusing my mobile, plate, goat with starburst.  I really do think I shall just – I flopped on the bed and fell instantly asleep, without even cleaning my teeth.  Oh shock, oh horror.
 
Without drawing the curtains, either.  The morning sun streamed in.  Urgh, don’t wanna wake up.  Very, very un-me.  Clearly I had found my previous night’s antics absolutely exhausting (bearing in mind conducted without the support of coffee or indeed anything excessive in the way of food). 
 
I can’t be this tired.  It is not reasonable.  I wondered about the relationship between don’t wanna talk, wanna sleep and forcing reliance on that within.  One of two things would happen if I kept my date with Senta.  I’d fall asleep or I’d find that inner reserve I don’t have.  Why doesn’t being lackadaisical and unclear occur to me?  It occurred.  I was going to have to take a really big decision here: whether or not to get up.  I got up, showered, examined briefly the notion that I was a hard case and the only way I was going to crack my shell was probably by fasting, the time for which was not yet.  For the moment that within was going to be sustained by an awful lot of food.
 
I caught up with Senta and presented my apologies, up half the night, be better if I’d had some sleep first.  She murmured understandingly.
 
At the point I left her, I actually thought I was going to flake out on my bed and at least doze. 
 
I got as far as stretching out on my bed but didn’t feel the slightest bit tired.  An avoiding Senta mechanism?  Hmm.  I frowned horribly at myself, then wondered if I needed something to happen before I talked to Senta again.  The state of not feeling the slightest bit sleepy would be readily attributable to coffee, if I’d had any.  The other thing, I mused, was being tense as hell or at least tnsed-up, geared for action.  I assessed myself.  No, I didn’t feel sleepy.  Nor did I feel the slightest bit willing to do anything.  And the word for that is?  Stasis?  Paralysis?  Freezing.  I found myself staring at the ceiling and somehow that seemed too much so I rolled over onto my stomach and closed my eyes into the bargain.  Look within, right.  What does happen if I fast?  Can’t feel any more inert than I do now.