80 - in which I make a list

Excerpt from the proceedings of the Assembly of Yeola-e, free discussion of matters to be raised by Servants, etesora 29 Y. 1556.

Kusiya Aranin, Servant of Terera South: I raise a matter relating to my membership in the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee, and would like to propose a resolution that requires the assent of the full Assembly of Yeola-e rather than merely the Committee.

Given our mandate, we are asking of Chevenga, and those others near him who can shed light on the subject of our investigation, to reveal in great detail and leaving out no aspect, the most sensitive events and matters that are personal to him. Now I hasten to add that at no time has Chevenga himself ever expressed objection to what we’ve asked, or protested that he should not have to answer any of our questions; he has consented unfailingly to reveal what I have to admit myself would make me cringe to reveal, were I him. His reason he states very simply as the tenet sacred to him, “the people wills.”

But I wonder if the people need and do truly will the excruciating degree of openness we have so far forced him into, the laying open of every word of the most private matters to public scrutiny. I know what we are mandated to do, and I know also that he is semanakraseye and so his life belongs, in effect, to the people of Yeola-e; and yet to some part of my own sensibility it seems inappropriately prurient to let the world, in effect, invade his very mind. I wonder if we overstep the bounds of natural human respect here, in our assiduousness.

Now I do not propose, of course, that the Committee cease work, nor that its report be anything but fully detailed; what I wonder if Assembly will allow is that the Committee proceedings, the everyday recording by scribe of its questionings and deliberations, be placed under general confidence as a matter of course. I know there is no precedent for this other than cases concerning matters of war, but I wonder if we may make an exception here just as a matter of kindness and mercy to one who is undergoing an ordeal, to make that ordeal less painful.

I propose therefore the resolution that Assembly so direct the Committee.

Adakri: Discussion: Servant of Michalere.

Linasika Aramichiya: As Assembly knows, I serve on the same Committee as the esteemed Servant of Terera South. I oppose his resolution on the basis of the principle, which Yeola-e has long held sacred in its public dealings, of openness. Should we start hiding things, in time we will become no better than Arko, where, as Chevenga himself once noted, no one even knew what the names of the ministers responsible for major government departments were, let alone their mandates, intentions and so forth. In secrecy lives darkness, and in darkness evil, being unchecked by the light of scrutiny, can grow. I have never made it secret that I feel that too much has been hidden from us all along in regard to the very subject of our investigation, our semanakraseye, and that it has been the very greatest relief, and raised my hopes for the continued good fortune of Yeola-e, that the Committee was struck and mandated to do its work fully publicly as committees of Assembly traditionally do.

That is the principled basis of my opposition to the resolution; I add also a reiteration of what the Servant of Terera South noted, that the semanakraseye himself has never expressed any objection to being asked any question that we have asked him, however delicate the topic for him, in the full knowledge that every answer will be made fully public. In fact he was asked at the outset why he’d made no effort to legally resist the inquiry of the Committee, and he answered “The people wills,” as the Servant noted, and said also that the approach that Yeola-e makes to such matters, an open and public investigation, is not only traditional but the best course in his own mind, for which I commend him. If Chevenga were here he would recuse himself from this discussion, of course, but were we able to read his mind, I think we would see that he himself would oppose the resolution…

...Adakri: Out of two-hundred and thirty seven Servants today present, I have counted and doubly-counted: ninety-four chalks, one-hundred and nine charcoals, and fourteen abstentions; by that vote the resolution that we direct the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee to keep its proceedings under general confidence is defeated by a majority, thank you all.

†

I slept two beads in Surya’s healing room; when I woke and took my leave, he gave me a last order; that I should come in for talk healing early next morning. Were we going daily now? I said “A-e kras” and was there on time, though.

“That which is most overwhelming and frightening,” said Surya, “we remember in bits and scraps, each separated from the others by our refusal to recognize that they are, and mean, the same thing.”

“If we remember it at all,” I said. I was thinking of being tortured in Arko, most of which I could not remember, mercifully. What I could remember of it was indeed fragmentary; I couldn’t even arrange them in the line of time. Of course I’d given up trying years before; my feeling now was that the best measure for it was not to think about it at all.

Of course I was going to have to. In my own first questioning by the Committee, they’d let me know they planned to delve into the Arkan torture, since they’d interpreted their mandate broadly and so would look into everything even distantly concerning my mental state. I had told them I had no leftover troubles other than a worse aversion to vein-needles than most people have and my tongue sometimes locking when I spoke about it (of course my tongue obliged nicely by demonstrating, right then), but I got the distinct feeling they didn’t believe me. They planned to ask Alchaen to come before them, and even toyed with the idea of asking Amitzas, before quailing.

In a sense they didn’t need him, as they had his file, which detailed in his careful, precise, Mahid-schooled hand everything that had been done to me. I had never read it and never intended to, but they were bound to, of course, by their mandate.

I tell out of order, jumping ahead; I’ll come back. The two of their number they chose to do it were Chanae and Kuraila, then Omonae Shae-Lemana, Servant of Thara-e-Tinanga-e, who was Kuraila’s replacement when she had to leave the Committee, which I will get to. All three were so shaken just by reading the first page, that they all took Haian remedies; to get through it, they themselves sought out the help of yet another psyche-healer, even though Kuraila is one herself and Omonae in training to become one.

When they summarized it to the entire Committee, they made sure everyone had calming essence, and had two psyche-healers and a senahera elder, no less, on hand. The first thing they did afterward was call me in informally, not to ask me questions but, as they themselves confessed, to reassure themselves that I was still alive and my mind in one piece, insofar as it was, as only a visit in the flesh would allow. There was one member of the Committee who shall remain nameless who was affected as much and deeply by the file as to need a psyche-healer for another half-year afterwards, I learned.

“If we remember it at all, yes,” Surya said. “So it is a method of healing to gather all the fragments together in your mind, see their similarity and see their number, and accept that they are all of a piece. It’s another meaning of the word ‘integrity,’ as in ‘House of Integrity.’”

“Yes,” I said. “What are you leading up to here, Surya?”

“Well… let me ask this. Do you think of yourself as inclined to suicide?”

“Well… I’ve had turns, but always for good reason,” I said. “Hasn’t everyone?”

“Mm-hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “Have you ever made a full accounting, all at once, in your mind, of all the times you’ve either considered it, almost tried it, or tried it in earnest?”

I couldn’t answer, my tongue locked entirely. Prickles spread down my arms and legs, so hard in my hands and feet they hurt.

“What I’m leading up to here is to point out to you that you remember, and consider, the subject fragmentarily only. You’ve written a memoir of your life, in great detail, recounting each of those times you had a turn, as you put it… but if I were to ask you how many times you have tried in earnest to kill yourself, and how many times you’ve just had a strong enough urge to act, even if you then forestalled it, could you tell me?”

I felt sick, my mouth going dry. He was right; I had never made an accounting and so could not put numbers to these things. My mind shied away even from the thought of making such an accounting. I had recounted each time in my memoir, yes, but with everything that had happened between, between; piecemeal, in other words, which was, of course, his point.

Sometimes an aura-seeing healer is a mercy, as when you need not answer his question, as you know he is seeing the answer in and around you. “So… next step in my healing,” I said, when I could form words. “I guess I am ready for this, or you wouldn’t raise it.”

“Ehh, that’s not why, actually,” he said, looking as he rarely did: a touch uncomfortable. “It’s that when you go before the Committee later today, that’s what they are going to ask you about. They mentioned it as I was leaving.”

That was my first true and hard lesson in the fact that, while Surya, with his effortlessly seeing of my aura, would wait until he was certain I was ready for a step before he made me take it, the Committee went by its own schedule. I took it with the room spinning end over end and my stomach doing likewise, the only scrap of solidity in the world his hand on my arm.

“Deep breath, make the white line,” Surya intoned. I did, clutching the arms of the chair as with claws, my mouth gone dust-dry. With shreds of calm came tendrils of anticipation. Of course I knew how it would go; they’d first ask me to recount in summary every instance, then go through them one by one in detail. I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider that it might be easier to make the one last attempt that would be successful rather than undergo this. Several very familiar cliffs on Haranin and Hetharin came vividly to mind, with their heights so great the carpet of treetops below was blue. What stopped that thought, more than anything else, was knowing that if I did it, I’d be remembered eternally as a coward.

“I… I guess… I can’t expect them ever to question me on anything easy, given their mandate,” I said, my voice coming out very weak.

“Here’s what I suggest you do in preparation,” he said. “Make a list.” The room spun end over end anew. “Pardon me, I should say, I do not suggest. I order.”

It took me about a bead and half, nine-tenths of the time spent breathing deeply and making the white line while he held my head front and back in his hands, but I did it: a neatly-written, numbered list with each incident summarized in a single line. So, if the Committee asked, I would be able to tell them that in my life I’d made three full attempts, two almost-attempts in which I’d changed my mind, seriously considered it twice more, been prevented somewhere between three and five times by the Arkan amnesiac drug when it was my full intent, taken an almost-mortal wound by a momentary compulsion rather than by intention, and thought yearningly of death, as I just had, more times than I could count and therefore list.

“So now you’ve done that,” Surya said, “I ask again. Do you think of yourself as inclined to suicide?”

I laid my head on my forearm, closing my eyes. My mind filled with the imagining of a yawning height below me and the bliss of falling into it, the wind in my hair, knowing an end to all my troubles awaited, after a flash of extreme pain that would be but momentary, below. I guess I have to sign chalk, I thought. It wasn’t as if he too wasn’t seeing it, at the same time as I was, in my aura. I signed chalk.

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