Dana’s sense of humor was about as sophisticated as the jokes printed on popsicle sticks, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. She was especially fond of formulaic jokes. Knock-knock; “You have two cows”; lightbulb jokes, and so on and so forth. She collected them, hoarding them like some kind of comedy dragon, only she had no reservations about sharing.

One lightbulb joke of hers ended up becoming something like a mantra to me. Had I been an onmiyoji in an animé, it would have been my chant for calling upon a barashai to help seal away a malevolent spirit. The joke went as follows:

Question: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Answer: One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

The joke was as bad as it was true, but even then, it didn’t cover all the bases. Desire was like faith—indeed, faith really was a form of desire, after all—it, on its own, was not enough to reforge a person into something better than what they had once been. Be it to conquer one’s fears, or turn your deeds toward righteousness, a desire for change wasn’t enough to make that change a reality. I’d like to think the world would be a much happier place if it were. Desire was nothing without action. And yet, desire was an almost inescapable prerequisite for change from within.

And yet, there were some people who, it seemed, could never be reached. Why? I’d pondered that question for a long time. Maybe their perceptions were at fault; for one reason or another—temperament, learned behavior—a person might see the world in a certain way, and that vision would always reassert itself to the detriment of any possibility of change. Perhaps the person was lost in their own subjectivity, with a runaway ego that numbed them to anyone else’s point of view. Or maybe they were just coal-hearted, with spite so deep that the whole world was eternal Night, void of any hope or joy.

But what if you could reach them? What if you could widen their perceptions? What if you could get them to leave their I-lands and see the world as another saw it, if only for a moment? Quite a few of my colleagues—such as Dr. Rathpalla, for starters—took the pessimistic view and asserted. It wouldn’t make a difference. But I believed that it could. And now, that ideal was about to be tested unlike ever before.

The ghosts’ souls were open books in my mind, their pages mine to peruse at length. With the Plotskies, I tried to stay out of the most intimate moments, but, my respect for their privacy could only go so far. Was it wrong of me to read through the sordid details of the Plotskies’ private lives? Probably. But I chose to leave it to others to judge the merits of my decision. At the very least, if it ended up failing spectacularly, I wouldn’t be likely to try it again. I wasn’t sure if that would be enough to assuage my scruples, but it was the best I had on hand.

I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t have asked for this power, had I known it was available. To see a person in this way, to unfold them, core and all… it was just a painful reminder of the barriers that people raised to keep themselves from fully knowing, or from being fully known. Going through the Plotskies’ minds gave me an appreciation for the profundity of the abilities I’d been given. With but a thought, I could ferret out the essence of a person’s being. I could suss out, down to the nanosecond, the moments that birthed their demons. That was an extraordinary responsibility. With that knowledge you could use save a person—make them anew—or you could tear them down in a kind of torture that would make the demons in Hell green with envy.

I was trying to save these people from a Hell of their own making, and then from the depths of the very real Darkness awaiting to swallow them once they’d given in to their despair. I desperately hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I didn’t know how I would live with myself if it did.

As a wyrm-to-be—by the Angel, I would never get used to that!—it was my duty to be Paradise for the spirits housed within me. If my values and morals meant anything at all, I couldn’t allow the Plotskies or any other of my head-mates to remain hateful and miserable for the rest of eternity. I didn’t want to be their Hell. I didn’t want to be responsible for any more suffering. That’s why I had to believe that if I could get the Plotskies to see each other in the way I now saw them, then—maybe, just maybe—I could help bring them the peace that their lives had not deigned to give them.

Or, I could screw up, get them to hate each other for all eternity, and consign them to the Darkness.

So… no pressure, right?

I sighed.

Time to get to work.

Of all the places in the Plotskies’ collective memories, one stood out among the rest—an ulcer on their recent memories. And so, to it we went.

As I stepped into the rift in the world in my mind, I reached in and pulled out the family’s wriggling souls. Then, with a flash the souls left my hands as the void within the rift consolidated into a time and place. The Plotskies’ spirits melded with the scene as Andalon and I found ourselves standing in a cramped patio surrounded by the lathe-and-plaster walls of the house of a man who hated the world. The house of Yan Peshka was a rectangular gob of mortar poorly poured between horizontal slabs of flagstone, and topped in a red-tiled roof, because… why not? The clan was gathered at the big, round glass-topped table in the half of the patio that lay beneath the solid-roofed pergola in the patio, next to a brick-paved garden with its overgrown cacti and wilting geraniums housed in big terra-cotta pots that drank up the summer sun. The nicest thing in sight was the fountain at the far wall, decorated with pretty ornamental tiles. The tiles depicted floral abstractions in bold colors. The fountain flickered between different states of being. Sometimes it was filled with dark, murky water, buzzing with mosquitos and their larvae. Other times it was bone dry, its basin littered with dust and dead leaves, and flaky layers of what might have been pond scum, once upon a time. The owner had paid off the mortgage by committing insurance fraud, claiming non-existent damages endured in an earthquake on a separate property that he owned and mismanaged.

This place was important. It was a crossroads; a common denominator of all three lives. The Plotskies were unified in their revulsion of the place, reacting to it like the sight and smell of an open sewer. Memories and information flooded into me, leaving me overwhelmed and dizzy. Pictures of scenes of the past winked in and out of existence across the patio and the house beyond. Activity flashed across time in that place. They rose and fell in a convection current. People moved and talked and aged—in both directions—all while the dinner party sat in place in their seats around the glass table. I saw a little girl laughing as she hopped in and out of the shower, reveling in the way the magnetic door snapped as it closed, much to her grandmother’s dismay. I saw a smug, facile cousin running out the front door with tears streaking through her dirty-blonde hair after her grandfather told her that she was a faggot because he thought her boyfriend looked like a faggot, and that meant she had to be a faggot, too, because only a faggot would date someone who looked like a faggot. And he wasn’t even a doctor!

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Yan Peshka was the father of the daughters three: Babra, and Mabel, and Kaythe. Yan had once had a son, but no one spoke of him because the young man killed himself at the age of twenty-two. Even so, Yan still brought his suicide up every now and again, just to remind everyone that it was “the only good decision that good-for-nothing painter ever made.” Mrs. Peshka was heartbroken by it, just not heartbroken enough to ever try talking her husband down from his perch. Besides, she was afraid of being alone.

It was a textbook example of an abusive family dynamic. Babra felt fealty toward it, even though they didn’t deserve it, and neither Jed nor Ileene had ever understood why she felt the way she did. This laid the foundation for a great evil. A quiet evil, but an evil all the same.

In a way, quiet evils were even more insidious than the loud evil that brashly trotted across our lives. Both were seemingly unconquerable. Both cried out to the Angel for justice and resolution. But, unlike their loud siblings, quiet evils all too often passed unnoticed, so silent and subtle that they could only be heard if you opened your ears in the deep of Night and listened to the stifled sobs of a child crying in the dark as they waited for sleep to come and make them forget their pain.

I, of course, knew the reason Babs felt the way she did. It was a horrible reason, one that made me sick to my stomach, and I knew that neither her husband nor her daughter understood it. That created a wall between them, and I couldn’t think of a better way to start than by tearing it down.

Andalon watched, wide-eyed, as I waved my hands like I was conducting an orchestra. Heck, a baton appeared in my hand; thankfully, I’d had the honor of once conducting an orchestra in high school for a concert, so I just went with it, hoping for the best. Even from within the memory, I could feel the Plotskies’ attention on me as our concert began. I imagined their memories unfold in the spaces in my mind like a symphony’s opening flourishes. I gave the cue, and the memory I’d chosen came rushing into the foreground, flooding the twilight skies with white.

We were elsewhere and elsewhen, in a large room with plaster pilasters on the longer pair of its four, whitewashed walls. Casement windows in between the pilasters let the congregation bathe in the sunlight’s full glory. The Angel gazed down upon them from the image in the stained glass above the windows, focused on the altar next to the spot at the chamber’s center where the ceiling Eye let in high noon. I did not need Babra’s memories to know what this place was. There was no mistaking the rows of heavy-set wooden pew-like seats that surrounded the Eye’s light. The shelves built into backs of the seats housed copies of holy scripture, available for use for the students seated in the desks behind them. The desks were meant to be leaned back until they pressed up against your seat. They had legs, and you pushed your feet down on those legs to hold the desks in place, as if they were feral rocking chairs, wild and untamed. The priest stood in a lectern built around one of the four supporting columns surrounding the Eye. He read aloud, expounding on the writings of the Elder Voices; that was the only way to be sure that Sessions School students were properly catechized.

The priest spoke.

“We heed the Voice of Blessèd Wybert, Fifth Lassedite, of the Righteous Five, who said: as man is to the Godhead, so is wife to husband, and child to parent. We are tools in the Angel’s hands, and to us He has given, in His perfect wisdom, the ties that bind us. To all things, there is a season and a purpose, and it is in that purpose that we know Love, both in one another, and in those who watch over us. Through our obedience, Love finds us, and in our noble servitude, we find it.”

A little girl sat in one of the seats. Her legs were just barely long enough for her black, buckled shoes to hold the desk in place. Her tight-fitting dress was as gray as a raincloud, and she worried the Angel would be upset with her because her white stockings had a small tear in them and there hadn’t been time to fix it before school.

Little Babra worried about many things. Father Ode was not one of them. She loved the way the priest led their readings: the kindness in his face, the warmth of his words. He answered every question she ever asked, and always gently, and with a smile. He seemed to know all that there was to know, and he was always happy to share it with her. Every day, without fail, he told her how much the Angel loved her, and how that love was tucked away in every inch of the world around her, just waiting to reach out and greet her. Somehow, when Father Ode spoke, everything made sense. Life was simple. She knew what to do. And, in her heart of hearts, Babra knew that as long as she followed the Angel’s commands, she would be like Father Ode. She would blessèd and happy and peaceful. Life would be a dream.

And she’d finally make her Deddy happy.

It was a struggle to maintain my composure. Young Babra’s heart was filled with comfort and grace, and it flowed into me, the phantom conductor at the back of the hall. Both then and now, Babra didn’t understand that she really had been blessèd. The blessing was already there, in Father Ode. From what I knew of the man through Babra’s memories, he seemed to be the paragon of all that was good about the Church. He was kind and wise and patient and noble. When Babra was in Father Ode’s presence, she felt like she truly belonged, and I envied her for that. I’d never been lucky enough to feel that way in my own catechism class. I think my life would have taken a very different turn if I had.

But this was just the first melody; a second one had to follow. It came in a different key, one that had no warmth.

The scene changed. A thousand days and nights rewound before our eyes, carrying us deeper into Babra’s childhood, to when she was little more than a toddler, clad in a little red dress, with little, laughing curls springing all the way around her head.

And then a shoe slammed into her belly.

Babra landed with a thud against the white stucco wall. The bathroom light shone through the doorway out into the hallway. Her soft arms and bare feet brushed against the roughness of the fancy-looking floor rug. But her feet… they were dirty and smelly, all covered in brown, like the filth-smeared tiles in the bathroom floor.

“Stupid girl!” Deddy Yan screamed. “You shit yourself! You shit all over the floor! I pay so much money for the housekeeper to come clean, and you shit over my floor!”

He kicked her again.

“Use the toilet! Use the fucking toilet!”

She tried to tell him she was scared of the toilet; scared of falling in—scared of drowning—but he was so loud. That was what the little girl told herself. Deddy was too loud. Too sad. He couldn’t hear her, that’s all. That’s why he didn’t know he was scared. Or maybe it was because he couldn’t see her; those big, stinky cigars made so much smoke, you couldn’t see anything!

The violence made Andalon shudder and recoil. She covered her ears with her arms and her eyes with her hands, burying her face into my side.

Sorting through the different emotions was constant work, figuring out which reactions were mine and which weren’t. As much as it shamed me to admit it, I had to put some distance between myself and that awful, awful memory. Otherwise, I don’t think I could have gotten through it, otherwise.

I’d have broken down, myself.

The brunt of Babra’s pain made Ileene quaver, but it did not soften the young woman’s heart.

Behind me, Mr. Plotsky’s spirit whispered. “You… you never told me he kicked you.”

Jed’s words shattered the memory. The stream of pain and confusion flowing out of Mrs. Plotsky subsided, even though—just like in her life—it never fully disappeared. It submerged, returning to its lair in the depths of the woman’s soul.