116 - The *tenar menhu*

There was one advantage to being legally incompetent that came my way right away. When the writers crowded in calling, “Chevenga! Chevenga! Question!” Shaina, Etana and Skorsas all felt free to say instantly, “No! He’s speaking to none of you, you may not ask him anything, Chevenga don’t say a word.” Oh well, I thought. They and Kaneka’s four wrapped themselves into a solid knot around me. Surya and Kaninjer stonewalled the writers as well; they could reveal nothing personal to me without my permission, and, being legally incompetent, I couldn’t give it. I heard Linasika saying in his quote-me voice, “There is much being hidden here, much that we on the Committee need to find out.”

We lurched as a cluster out of the courtroom and Assembly Palace. Their words all ran together, “forgive us it’s best we love you please understand,” so that I could barely hear. I said only, “I could climb better if my ankles were free.” No one had re-bound my arms; after a quick look at my aura, Surya said “Yes.” I thought I’d do it myself, but too many people were gripping me; Kaneka untied his own knots.

As we came into the Independent, the children crowded around, curious. At the sight of the ones who’d been stream-tested, my mind blurred with dizziness and my eyes with tears, and I suddenly felt arms keeping me from falling. “Whichever room is the most secluded in the place is where he should sleep,” Surya said. “First my healing room though, let’s get him there.”

He sent everyone else out of the room, and had me drink several long draughts of water and lie on the table. “I’m going to speak to your mind in time,” he said. “I’m going to speak to your body first. Make the white line, and breathe…” He kept saying, “Not deep enough,” though I thought I was breathing the same as any other time. Finally he clamped his hand over my mouth and nose, held long enough that I was beginning to panic, and told me to feel the panic thoroughly. When he let go and I gasped in air right down to the pit of my lungs, he said, “That’s how deep they should all be. Breath is life. A big part of the problem is that you’re depriving yourself of it. Do you know that when you went dizzy when you saw the children, much of it was because you were not breathing? You thought, ‘I did this to them, I should die,’ and you held your breath. I saw it. The death in you was smothering you.”

He ordered me to breathe very deep and fast, both, then, as if I were running; he called the rhythm, in and out, and I mindlessly followed. Very gradually, he slowed it down, until I was taking breaths so deep and so long that they were just at the edge of what I could bear. How long he kept me there I’m not certain; in a calm so deep it was almost a trance, I could not measure time. Then he freed me to breathe at the pace I wished, but told me to make sure it stayed deep, and took hold of my penis in his impersonal way. I’d got calm enough to feel what it is natural to feel. What he did to me then, my confidence with words again shrinks at the thought of describing.

“You relinquished your will to me; do you remember that?” I signed chalk. “Will you still do as I command, or are you forsworn?” I said, “Kras, I will do as you command.” His hand tightened on my manhood, sending a streak of pleasure up through me, in spite of everything else I felt. Then he said, “Think of the stream-test. You lay in ice-water, and no one would pick you up…”

I stared at him, speechless. You want me to think of that, and feel pleasure, at the same time? “Yes,” he said. “Hold it in your mind while I talk to you and touch you. Think what I tell you to. What you have to do is accept it. It happened. It is reality. It can’t be undone. Accept that. With each breath inward, draw in acceptance.”

I breathed, felt myself falling and rising both at once, suddenly reminded of what had happened in the woods near Terera. “Feel what my hand is doing… feel it totally… breathe in acceptance of that.” I closed my eyes, felt the rising stronger than the falling. “Just as you were laid in ice-water, you laid your own children in it. One of them died.”

A cry tore out me, and I whipped my head away. This is too brutal to be real! He didn’t stop. “It is what happened, Chevenga. It can’t be undone. Accept it. Breathe in acceptance. Just as you looked up at your mother wondering why she was killing you, your children looked up at you. In one case you really were killing him. Feel what my hand is doing, accept that too.” I screamed.

It is like having two parts of yourself smashed into each other, like having two parts tear each other apart. He kept going, over and over, from my own stream-test to my children’s to the pleasure he was making me feel, then back around the circle, and always, “These things are all real, the truths of your life. Accept all of them at once, breathe in acceptance of all.” My will relinquished, I had no choice to be driven around that circle with him, no matter what it did to me.

“You are fighting acceptance by holding your breath,” he said once. “Don’t. Breathe it in deep.” After the third or fourth time I’d cried out, he said, “Next time you bring to mind the stream-test, make no sound. You are using expression to fight acceptance. Take it silently.” But that’s the opposite of what Haians teach… isn’t it!? He didn’t relent. “You’re using tension to fight acceptance, right here”—he touched the back of my neck, which I realized was like rock, and starting to hurt. “Let it go loose, breathe acceptance into it.” Do as he commands mindlessly, however impossible it seems, I told myself, and commanded myself to be unable to think anything he didn’t command me to.

Held between, my feelings went went back and forth, agony, ecstasy, agony, ecstasy, until I didn’t know up from down. My mind ran back and forth like a rabbit between two fires, helpless, flailing, futile, and feeling more and more immutably drawn towards the edge of some kind of complete collapse.

He saw it, of course, and said, “Good—let yourself go over the edge. That’s exactly where you need to be.” My eyes went still, staring at the ceiling as if I couldn’t move them, like when the Pharmacist had griumed me; my sight went blurry. His words seemed to become things of their own, like the utterances of Gods expressed in natural phenomena, rather than a person’s words; each fell bone deep into me, huge as the world, as if I was under truth-drug.

“Relax,” he said, more gently. “You have to accept that this terrible thing was done to you, and you did this terrible thing in your turn, and yet there is still love in the world enough for you that someone is willing to give you pleasure. That’s why I ask you to accept all of it at once.” That sent me over, as ponderously slow as if I were a palace falling off a cliff.

The emotion and the tension by which I clung to it fell out of me, leaving nothing but his hand, and what it made me feel, and nothingness.

“What do you want?” he whispered. I couldn’t answer; I couldn’t imagine an answer. “When you accept enough,” he said, “it will come to you.” And then he took me back onto the circle, and ran me around it again and again, until I felt like I was dying.

“What do you want?” Every now and then, between the ecstasy and the horror, the hot joy and the icy anguish, that question was there, as if I had any right, any call, to want. “What do you want? Accept sufficiently, and you will say it.” How long he kept me there, feeling every moment as if I were about to die, I don’t know. I lost all measure of time. “What do you want… what do you want…accept and say it…”

Time was on his side. He could do this all day, if he wanted. It came without warning out of a deeper depth than I’d known was in me, like an explosion of lava out of still ground, the only words that could make sense of it all. “I want to live!”

Today he was being mercilessly thorough, though. He tested it, took me a few more times around the circle, your stream test, stream-testing your children, one of them to death, my hand, accept it all at once, what do you want? I want to live, each time the “I want to live” getting stronger. Then, just as in the first session, he told me to fly on the wings of it again as he lifted me to ecstasy, to form my joy-cries into the words. I did, even wilder and stronger and deeper in my soul than the first session.

It has always been true of me that sex can break locked-up emotion out of me, and I know it happens with other people too; now it came up about the stream-test, full-bore, and in a moment I was screaming in his arms. But the edge that makes it madness, of wanting to freeze or smash my head or tear myself open and see my blood splash out free, was not there. It was just the pure pain, of the stream-test, suffered and imposed at once, that one wants to kill oneself to avoid. He held me through it, and I fell asleep without knowing I would, with my head on his arm.

†

I had not slept enough the night before, so now I made up for it, not rousing until evening. All-Spirit blessed me; I had no dreams. I woke on a bed in a room I knew as one of those in the guest wing, and so knew he’d had me carried here. I was hungry, and ate all of the dinner he sent for, which I could tell he took as a good sign.

“The way the court request was conducted made it sound as if your spouses initiated it,” he said when I was finished. “They didn’t. It was I who convinced them.”

“I thought so.” None of them would have had the nerve except perhaps Niku, and she wasn’t here.

“What I didn’t know was that you’d be… removed from the demarchy. For not knowing, I apologize.”

“That’s one thing about court,” I said. “Something always happens that you don’t expect. If you’d asked, I could have told you. But would that have made any difference? Wouldn’t you have done it anyway?”

“Yes, I would have had to,” he said. “You aren’t feeling it right now, because the”—here he said two words I didn’t understand—”eased it, but you are still suicidal.”

“Because the what eased it?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m speaking Haian. Tenar menhu: it translates as ‘extreme juxtaposition.’” I knew exactly what he was talking about. Accept your own stream-test, accept that you stream-tested your children, killing one of them, accept what my hand is doing, all at once. It was a healing method, a Haian one, it had to be, with a name.

“You’ll get over it,” he said. “You’ll be back in truth entirely once you fully understand and accept what you have learned. But you’re not there yet, so you need still someone to decide for you, in the meantime. Do you deny it?”

“You heard my answer to that when I was under oath.”

“Healing can have phases like this,” he said. “Just as it can have phases like almost-fatal training accidents. Everything is—”

We said in unison, “Going as it should.” I found myself laughing, of all things.

“It cannot possibly seem to you that your losing the semankraseyesin is something that is going as it should… and I confess I don’t understand that myself, as I thought medical leave would suffice—”

“Maybe it’s as simple, Surya, as Yeola-e deserving better than a lunatic as semanakraseye, even ceremonially. Meanwhile, I’m in your hands; you rule my whole life now, not just part. From here we go forward, somehow. Talk to my mind.”

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