L.

[5.] Mayhem

I sat still while Nicky looked into my mouth. I sat with my eyes half-closed in the pleasure of being explored, of teaching.

"Your teeth are sharp," he said, "and long."

"Are they long? Or has the pink around them retreated a little?"

He touched my gums with the tip of his finger. "These teeth are long, like dog's teeth," he said.

"Surely not like a dog," I said.

"When I shut my teeth on someone, they cannot escape me."

"Yes, you are very strong," I said, holding him in my arms as I tried to stand, but he had hold of the chair's wooden back, forcing me to sit again in surprise.

"You cannot escape me," he said, menacing me.

I stood up forcefully, knocking his hand loose, and he did not like that. When I let him down, he gave me a dark look, and I gave him a dark look, too.

"I'll wash," he said, petulantly. "I'll wash with Dasius."

It was a relief to me, I so wanted to sleep, and for a few days he had been purposefully keeping me awake, tapping his fingers on me whenever I shut my eyes. What did I think that he was doing it for? Was I really already so devoted to him that I let him do that? Did I want him so much that I let him agitate me? I surely did not like it. I truly cannot remember since it has been so many years, and there has been so much between us. It's not like with Dasius where I still see him in my mind's eye as he was.

I imagine that I was conflicted then, because I so did not want to treat him as I had been treated as a child, though as a child I had had times when I felt cherished, and loved. But it was always that when I was truly a child, six or seven years old, I had been aiming to please masters. And it was always that, when I was truly a child, I was quite human.

And Nicky was not ever the child that I was. Nicky was not ever interested in pleasing anyone except himself at that age, which is natural to children, and quite why if he had ever been in my own situation as a living child, as a contemporary of the Republic, we would never have met. I have a temperament for service, an adaptability, and a slavish talent for self-deception, loving easily and terribly. I know it. Nicky I have admired for being my opposite in most things, and consistent in that way, as horrible as it may at times seem.

And yet, it is the case, that at that age, Nicky was not a living child, and so if I had been thinking of myself in comparison to him, it was folly. There was so much folly. I am folly.

And that I am not an old master, to be obeyed. If I were, what a failure I would have to consider myself. Did I not ever order him to anything. Perhaps I went too far against it.

And have I really changed so much that I truly do not know what I was thinking then? Or not want to know it.

These days I have such nerves that I can only think about pain and fear. I lie awake and relive terrors. My body seems brittle and raw to me, and shoots me with electricity from joint to joint. I cannot please anyone. I want to be beneath my bed and to wail where nobody can see me, and sometimes when I do this, I forget where I am and feel myself trapped, and it makes me to cry about myself, and then when I remember where I am and what I have been doing, I try to remember when I have ever been trapped. And I feel that I really do not know myself, and then anew I am afraid. I lie there.

Sometimes, if I manage to sleep, I wake up and cannot remember where I am, too. I know that this happens to me when I do not use my teeth, do not use anything for the getting of my nourishment, for which I am to blame because I feel too much down to expel the energy, but sometimes it happens to me all the same.