Loop 120, Day 30

It's interesting, the things that you think you understand because you've read them, only to discover later that you never understood them at all until you experience them. In “House of the Dead”, Dostoevsky writes, "Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.” Dostoevsky is discussing being a prisoner and adjusting to the most horrific set of changes a person can undergo. I had no idea how true that was until the quote came back to me.

After I had spent an operative month inside of the loop, I got caught up in routine and testing the effects that luck had. Since my routine had not involved trying once more to get Kaye involved in my training, I was shocked to realize how long it had been since I had made an attempt. I remember it was Loop 22, Day 5; I was thinking, once I know the measure of how luck affects my interactions with people, I will go try again to enlist Kaye's friendship and help.

But I got caught up in experimentation, realizing that I had the perfect Petri dish for measuring whether or not a result had an operative change based on luck plus one or luck minus one, and even further. So, I made a point of having the exact same interaction with the exact same person at the exact same time, just with a different level of luck. The results were all over the board. I began to suspect that luck was not the only defining factor of what sort of interaction I had with the people I bumped into. There must be other factors at play. What they were, I hadn't figured out yet. But I did tend to get a better interaction with people when I had positive luck.

However, there was something else at play that I wasn't able to define. I wasn't able to contract my larger aura, no matter how I pushed and pulled. That didn't seem to be how I was growing in strength. My untimely end at the senior assembly didn't seem to be pressing on that particular muscle at all, but instead on the second aura that Kay had pointed out—the one she said was inside the cage. I had begun to find that I could survive longer and longer underneath the combined attention of the entire senior assembly by dodging.

Instead of trying to reinforce the cage or contract the larger aura so that people could not direct their attention to me— as I had come to assume would be the case— I instead used the larger aura to redirect the emotions. I found that almost like a practitioner of Aikido, I could redirect the emotions so that they didn't come in contact with my core aura, as I had come to think of it. Since I had no one to challenge any of my naming conventions, "Core-Aura" had become a name that had stuck. I had been calling it that for weeks, which was a weird thought in and of itself.

What did seem to be growing stronger was my ability to redirect and also my ability to actually strengthen and maintain my cage. I don't know what this said about me, that I was choosing to reinforce the cage that held what? My soul? I didn't think so. My emotions? Really, I wasn't sure. I needed an expert, which again prodded me with a guilty thought. I should go try again to get Kaye.

I was standing outside underneath the maple tree. I had been practicing telekinesis when the quote popped into my head from “House of the Dead”. I had the disturbing idea that I might be in a prison of my own making. The thought had ground all ability to practice telekinesis to a complete halt. Why had I stayed here for so long?

That was easy. I hadn't discovered everything I wanted to discover. I believed that if I spoke with Not-me, or Kaye, or Cece, or any other voice of reason in my life, they would talk me out of continuing to practice and grow. And I didn't want to stop. I was seeing progress. I was growing stronger. I had superpowers!

Like, come on. I could move stuff with my mind. Well, with my mind and my tongue, which was really weird.

Okay, let me explain. I discovered through some experimentation that I was not physically putting my tongue on anything. I wanted to know for sure, which was easy. All I had to do was raid the chemistry lab and see if acid actually burned my tongue when I telekinetically moved some of it. It felt burned like I stuck my tongue in the acid, but I found upon careful examination—which was not easy without use of a mirror—I had not burned and blistered my tongue.

Which meant I now had a wide lexicon of flavors, tastes, and textures that I'm sure most people who are now alive did not. I am sure some poor fool who decided to drink hydrochloric acid also had the knowledge of what that tasted like, but I doubt they got the chance to tell anyone.

I shook my head. Sherlock Holmes would be proud. I'd always envied Holmes's ability to categorically remember smells, flavors, and textures and associate meaning to them. I had fancied that someday I could be a Holmesian detective who had superhuman powers of deduction, only to find that much of my ability to remember things depended on me reading it, which meant I had to arm myself for success.

If I wanted to remember something, I had to write it down, which was sometimes very inconvenient. What would be handy is if I had a screen in my mind in which I could call up, already typed, anything that I wanted to remember without having to trouble to pull out my pen.

The limitations concerning telekinesis I had found were interesting. To begin with, I was, in essence, using my tongue muscle to move things with my mind. So, I could not move anything that I was not physically strong enough to move with my tongue. I remembered Not-me had said the knack behind telekinesis required the person attempting it to find which muscle, or muscle set they used for it. It would be much more useful to be able to move things with my hand, but I was stuck with what I had.

The second limitation that I found was I had to spend aura like currency in order to move anything. For better or worse, the cage I had around my core aura kept me from using it at all. And so, that simply didn't work. But, as I had discovered accidentally with Billy, I could spend other people's aura. Practicing spiritual Taekwondo had allowed me to take in somebody's aura and maneuver it around my large aura— I hadn't thought of a clever name for my large aura yet— Avoiding my core aura long enough that I could spend it as currency.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

I had to have it inside of my large aura to be able to use it. I found I could hold on to somebody else's aura for several minutes—sometimes as many as ten if holding it was not particularly painful— Oh yeah, did I mention that it was painful? I don't know why, but having someone else's aura inside of my larger aura hurt.

There were things inside an aura I didn't have a name for that were physically painful to experience. Many of them were very difficult to closely imagine. That is to say, I couldn't examine them closely enough to put myself in their shoes because they hurt too much. I thought of my spiritual hands as developing spiritual calluses as I got more and more adept at taking these painful things and deflecting them without getting seriously hurt.

I had yet to spend another loop with Billy in Mr. Pfeizer's office. There were too many reflective surfaces, and I didn't want to risk an encounter with Not-me and break the spell. I was really beginning to enjoy the routine I had developed. I had begun spending most of my time outside underneath the maple tree because there were no reflective surfaces anywhere near me. Also, I was stuck in what had to be one of the most beautiful days of the year. The sky was heartbreak-blue, without a cloud in sight. The temperature was hovering somewhere in the mid-seventies, and there was a gentle breeze stirring the leaves overhead, providing a very pleasant backdrop to everything I attempted.

It kept bothering me.

“Man is a creature who can get used to anything.”

Unbidden, another quote from that book sprang to my mind.

“I was always astonished at the extraordinary good nature and lack of malice with which men who had been flogged spoke of their beatings, and of those who had inflicted them.”

A niggling thought plagued me. Was I self-inflicting a form of torture? How did I feel about the punishment that I received every time I stepped into the torturous hell that was Senior Assembly? I needed to get outside of my own head.

What if I could spend eternity here? I was dead, and this was my afterlife…

That thought killed me.

Promptly, I stood up and walked straight back into the school. There was one person's office who I knew I could step into without any judgment or written excuse. And so my feet carried me straight to Nurse Streep's office.

She was merrily typing at her computer, and startled as I stepped up to her and said hello. She made a frantic effort to do something on the screen before she greeted me, unaware that I couldn't see whatever it was she was working on.

"Hi," I said.

"Oh, my. I'm sorry, dear. You startled me," Nurse Streep said. "What brings you into my office?"

"I don't know, how to describe it."

"Are you feeling sick, dear?" She blinked. Then her eyes focused on me, and she looked me up and down with a critical eye. "Oh, I know who you are," she said. "You're young Timothy. My, but it's a pleasure to meet you. Please come in. Have a seat."

She directed me to her table with the crinkly paper. The familiar antiseptic smell of the room brought back a memory of watching a mouse gremlin for the first time, and calling Cece and her showing up an absurdly short amount of time, her engine smelling of burnt clutch and her tires smoking.

Remembering that, I had a hitch in my throat, and at first I couldn't speak.

‘What's wrong with me?’ I thought.

I attempted to speak, but my voice faltered, and I had to clear my throat. I had often wondered why old people cleared their throats so often. Was it because they were so full of unexpressable thoughts and emotions that their throat would close? That seemed like what was happening to me.

"I just need someone to talk to," I said, giving her as close to the truth as I could manage. What I needed was a psychologist to talk through this situation with because I was in an unprecedented set of circumstances and trying to self-analyze my behavior.

I wondered how big of a psychology section the school library had.

"Oh," said Mrs. Streep. "Well, I can certainly be an ear to lean on. That's something I've always been good at."

‘An ear to lean on,’ I thought. I think she was mixing metaphors. I didn't have the energy to make a joke, which said a lot about my mental state.

"Thanks," I said, which was all I could manage.

"Are you having trouble adjusting to the rigors of high school?" Mrs. Streep asked.

That wasn't what I was having trouble adjusting to, but it was as good a metaphor for what I was going through as anything. I nodded and found myself opening up to this kindly woman and her rosy cheeks and knowing eyes.

"I just, I feel like I've completely lost touch with everything outside of this school and what I'm doing here," I said.

Mrs. Streep nodded and prompted me to continue.

“I didn't realize that I felt lonely until my brain began spitting out prison metaphors from old books I had read.

“I just thought of my friends for the first time in days,”I said, reducing the actual time spent to a believable number since, in her perspective, I had only been in school for a week. If I told her that I hadn't thought about my friends in weeks, it would seem absurd. And the last thing I wanted to do was ruin this opportunity to speak with someone by creating absurdity.

Mrs. Streep nodded. "And that bothers you," she said.

I hesitated. "No," I said. "The thing that bothers me and makes me worried is that it doesn't bother me." I hesitated. "I don't feel troubled by the fact that I haven't thought about my friends."

A thought hit me right in that moment. Or my mom. Or my dad. A pit formed in my stomach, and my eyes teared up. There really was something wrong with me. I swiped at the water that was blurring my vision and looked down, feeling embarrassed I had lost control. The last thing I wanted to do was lose control in front of somebody who would see me as a child. I was twelve. I wasn't a child.

Mrs. Streep took the opportunity to put a comforting hand on my shoulder and give me a reassuring smile. Strangely, I found it helped. "Dear," she said, "you have nothing to feel bad about."

What did she know? I had completely exaggerated the amount of time and the amount of thoughtlessness that had gone into me becoming hyper-fixated on what I was doing and completely forgetting about the people who were involved in my life.

"You're feeling overwhelmed," Mrs. Streep said. "It's perfectly natural to focus on something that's new and challenging to the point where other things become a background, because the safe and familiar, can safely become a familiar background, dear. And sometimes, it's true, our relationships do suffer while we're in a time of transition. But if they're true relationships, they will always come back when given the opportunity."

I gaped at her. This was far more insightful than I had expected. I had just wanted somebody to talk to who wouldn't think I was crazy. "What do I do?" I said. "How do I manage this overwhelm and transition, like you said, without letting go of my relationships? I feel like I need some sort of check and balance."

Mrs. Streep smiled. "This is the hard work that comes of true love, dear."

"True love," I sputtered. "I'm not..."

She held up a finger. "You misunderstand. You heard me say 'true love' as if that concept existed. Poppycock. No, I'm talking about love as it is truly. Love, my dear, requires work, investment, a daily effort like a garden. You can't have love without cultivation. And so, if you think that it's going to be anything less than hard work to have the relationships in your life that truly matter and to keep them, you're quite mistaken. And so, like any hard work, you must simply schedule it and grow into being able to accomplish it, dear. Create a calendar. Set reminders. Set aside time. You would be surprised how much ten minutes in a day counts towards building a relationship. If you fail to connect with the people you care about, you will fail in relationship."

I didn't know what to say. Apparently, I needed a calendar. "Thank you," I managed.

She smiled. "Of course, dear. Love is my most favorite thing to talk about, but unfortunately, it's not an accepted course of study in high school." She smiled at me.

I had drastically underestimated the woman in front of me. I made a note to myself to look up her pen name and go read one of her books on romance. I thought it would just be useless fluff, but I was beginning to think that it was something much, much more.

“I’m going to schedule time with people I care about,” I said, meaning it.

***