Chapter Twenty-One

I don’t know exactly what it was. But I felt like I had a vague idea of what to do, I just didn’t yet have the words to do it. I stretched out on my bed and held the datapad over my face and began dictating to it. Reciting observations, critiques, and sensations. Color symbolism, the engraving of institutional values into stone, everything I saw right down to how close Coach Will’s heir stood when listening to her father’s words.

I had the light off, and even though I could see ‘kind of well’ in the dark, at least somewhat better than homo sapiens. Well enough at least that I could keep the screen brightness to ‘barely’ above its off setting. ‘No light. Nope. Absolutely not.’ I told myself and made a mental note after I sobered up in the morning to make sure the machine recorded my words properly.

When I woke up in the morning, blinking my eyes in the dark, I reached up and touched my head, I couldn’t help but groan at the throbbing. “I will never drink again.” I muttered and reached for the datapad while I sat up.

The bed squeaked a little under me and I shoved my back up against the wall. I didn’t turn on the light, I really didn’t want to do that. It was fair to say that even though I knew the rest of the house was stirring, I was hiding out, at least a little.

I pulled up the University of Louisville website… which was a nightmare to navigate I will admit, and once I found everything I needed, started the download of books, materials, and other assorted software used in learning, and then began to read.

I spent the next two days like that, holed up in my room. Comfort in isolation is natural to a dlamisa, and I had some time before I had to return to work, though I did keep my word about requesting that the embassy allow Boatswain to take some time off from minding us to do an exchange with the local army office.

I could hear them all upstairs, but I felt listless, withdrawn… that ghost of an idea for a research project had still not come together in my mind in such a way that I could actually say what it even was. The humans call this state, ‘on the tip of the tongue’ where they can almost say it, the knowledge is there but they just cannot bring it all together in such a way that they can understand it or make it understood.

I begged off of invitations to join them for dinner, and it would be a fair thing to say that for those few days, my research suffered. All I could really write about were my feelings. ‘Why am I isolating myself?’ I wrote that a dozen times, though I say it only once in this final release, in my original writing I asked myself that again and again on multiple lines.

I didn’t really understand it. And in fact I said:

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“I don’t understand. Why am I doing this?”

I ran the shower a lot too, even though I didn’t get in, humans never disturbed each other in showers, baths, or toilets. Cleansing rituals were private things except between bonded pairs, or so I concluded from the fact that William and Rebecca would sometimes run the shower at the same time.

I did ask to observe once, to which Rebecca replied by crossing her arms in front of her chest and glaring between her husband and I, she said only “Don’t. Say. A thing.”

William however, didn’t listen. “There’s videos of that sort of thing if you want, Bailey, but I’m afraid our privacy is off limits.”

I expected Rebecca to be angry, but instead she seemed quite pleased with him. That was when I started paying more of a mind to the things that humans did or seemed to do in isolation, whether that isolation was one person, or a pair bond. I read over my professor’s notes again, and concluded that, ‘Isolation for prolonged periods is harmful, but isolation in small blocks of time is beneficial to human wellbeing.’

I laid out examples of things they did without thinking, unconsciously embracing their cultural mores without even being aware of it themselves.

And now here I was making use of those unconscious boundaries to make more space for myself.

I wasn’t really sure whom I was avoiding more. William for his inquisitive looks my way, his wife, for the inevitable spoken questions, or… Fauve, for the conversation I would have to have.

She had no idea that this really still loomed over me, and she was so upset by the possibility of my leaving before, and truthfully, so was I. The fact that everything was just getting back to normal, that we were all secure in the fact that the failed human would not be leaving prison and would not stop trying to, just solidified that belief that I would be staying.

I tried to think of her response. As humans went, she was the most dlamisa-like, reasoned, calm, studious… but she was not a dlamisa. ‘She’s an adolescent human, a child in their terms.’ I knew very well that human children could be excitable, their emotional states far larger than their bodies. Fauve being as reserved as she was, I had to wonder what a real outburst from her would be like.

Humans are strange with their emotions, sometimes embracing them, sometimes rejecting them, sometimes at war with them. They were perhaps the humans greatest strength and greatest weakness, as they drove the humans to action to build, to protect, to attack, to destroy, to take risks… They seemed to be like some mysterious element that was unpredictable by any known measure, and the less some humans seemed to have for themselves, the deeper they actually ran.

Of course all the showers and late dinners in the world couldn’t keep the inevitable at bay, and though I might have continued the process far beyond a mere two days… two days was all I got…

Because who should knock on my door in the middle of the night, but Fauve herself. “I know you’re up, Bailey. I want to talk.”

‘Damn.’ I thought, and got up to unlock the door.

In all my life up to that point, I’d never moved so slowly.