The Left Hand of Memory (Redlisted)

by Sara Beaman

I roll my eyes. I can’t believe this.

  “Well?” he asks.

  “What’s the point?” I ask. “I can tell you I’m sorry, but I’m not, and you know it. You can read my thoughts.”

  He glares at me.

  “For all I know you did betray him,” I say.

  “I’ve told you, I did my best to protect him,” Richard says. “Is my word meaningless to you?”

  “I’d have to be pretty stupid to take you at your word.”

  “Why? What have I ever done to you?”

  “You made me dance in the fucking fountain, for one thing!”

  “Outside the context of a lesson.”

  “What? That doesn’t count?”

  “I needed to motivate you to learn quickly,” he says, pushing a strand of hair behind his ear. “Don’t tell me it didn’t work.”

  I can’t tell him it didn’t.

  “When have I ever lied to you?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I say. “You’re the telepath, not me.”

  He shakes his head.

  “If my education is so important, why are we wasting time arguing about this?” I say. “I’m here. I showed up. Teach me something.”

  “Your mere attendance isn’t enough,” he says. “If you don’t respect me—if you don’t trust me—I’ll be wasting my time.”

  I look him in the eye. I can’t read him. I don’t understand him. I can’t tell if he’s genuinely upset or just playing a game with me. He’s a closed book to me, but I’m an open book to him, and I can’t stand it.

  “What matters isn’t my mindset, but yours,” he says.

  My fingers curl.

  “Think of what I’ve done for you,” he says. “Hasn’t it been useful?”

  I look at the ceiling, clenching my jaw. I don’t want to say yes. I don’t even want to nod. But I have to admit, without his advice, Mirabel would have been able to control me through those music videos in my dreams, and Julian would have been able to order me around.

  “Tell me, Katherine.”

  “Yes,” I say through clenched teeth. “It has been useful.”

  “I want to hear you apologize,” he says.

  “Fine,” I spit. “I’m sorry, alright?”

  He smiles and stands up. “Thank you.”

  I look away. This had better be worth it.

  “Today we’ll discuss how to break a compulsion,” he says.

  “But I already know how to resist them.”

  “I don’t mean one that’s been put on you,” he says. “I mean one that’s been put on someone else.”

  “That’s possible?”

  “It is possible, but it isn’t easy or simple.” He walks towards the revolving doors. “Follow me. We’re going to visit a friend.”

  I stand up, frowning, and follow. “Who?”

  “You’ll see,” he says.

  Richard steps into the revolving door and pushes. I enter the chamber behind him and follow his momentum, wondering where we’ll end up this time.

  ***

  I step out of the revolving door in Chicago, in front of the steps of Markham’s brownstone.

  “Oh God,” I groan. “Not this place again.”

  “What’s wrong?” Richard asks, smiling crookedly. “Markham’s not a Mnemonic, so he won’t be able to use manifestations. And I heard Haruko shot him through the eye, so he’s guaranteed to stay in the oneiroxis no matter what we do to him.”

  “You heard about what Haruko did? How?”

  “From a friend.”

  “Julian?”

  “Your powers of deduction are stunning, Katherine.”

  I give him a pointed glare.

  “On another note,” he says. “Our previous lessons taught me something about your learning style.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You hate having to figure out anything on your own,” he says, smirking. “You want to have the answers handed to you in black and white terms.”

  “That isn’t true!”

  “All right. How’s this. I’ll give you a choice,” he says. “Would you rather I tell you how to release a compulsion right now, before we go inside? Or would you rather figure things out on your own?”

  “I…” I trail off. “Fine. You’re right. Tell me how to do it.”

  He sits down on the stoop. “Let’s start with the basics. What do you think causes a compulsion to take root in someone’s mind?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it has something to do with language.”

  “And why do you say that?”

  I sit down as far away from him as I can. “You have to speak a command in order to compel someone. Or at least think about verbalizing it.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “With practice you can even learn to use written communication. You could even learn to use sign language, but it would only work under the right conditions.”

  “The right conditions?”

  “The subject must be able to understand the command.”

  “Wait. So I can’t command people who don’t speak English?”

  “Well, no. That would only be the case if you relied exclusively on speech,” he says. “But since you can utter commands silently, you could always think about the command in a symbolic way. With visuals.”

  “Like an IKEA instruction manual?”

  “Yes, exactly like that,” he says. “Of course, it would be cumbersome and inefficient. Verbalization is much easier.”

  “Interesting.”

  “On a side note,” he says, “if I were you, I might start learning Chinese.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re aware it’s the most commonly spoken language in the world, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “But back to breaking a Compulsion,” he says. “Let’s say I forced you to learn by doing. What would you try to do first, to break a Compulsion in someone’s mind?”

  “I don’t know. Give them another Compulsion?”

  “Be more specific.”

  “You know, an order that contradicts the other one. The opposite of the original Compulsion, essentially.”

  He nods thoughtfully.

  “So that’s it?” I ask. “What’s so hard about that?”

  “Oh. No. That’s not it at all. But it’s exactly what I expected you to say.”

  I give him a flat look.

  “What it is is a quick way to break someone’s brain,” he continues. “It’s like saying ‘Obey the following command: Disobey this command’.”

  “Great. Okay,” I say. “How do you do it, then?”

  “There’s only one foolproof solution, but it requires a strain neither of us have. The strain of Lethe.”

  “Lethe? Like the river?”

  He nods. “Using Lethe you could force someone to forget they were compelled to begin with. It’s a perfect solution. It never fails. Which is likely why Mnemosyne very rarely gives it to any of us.”

  I frown. “Could you use it on yourself?”

  He nods, smiling.

  “But like you said, neither of us have it,” I say. “So I’m assuming there are other solutions?”

  “There are,” he says, “but they’re inelegant, inconsistent workarounds.”

  “Okay.”

  “For example, let’s say I go inside and tell Markham to pick up a book from the shelf and hand it to me.”

  “Sure.”

  “You would have to set up an intervening compulsion. Such as, ‘Before you reach Richard, turn around and put the book back on the shelf’.”

  “But that’s a direct contradiction!”

  “Not quite,” he says.

  “I don’t see the difference.”

  “The second compulsion makes it impossible to accomplish the first,” Richard says. “But it’s not so simple as ‘Don’t pick up a book from the shelf and hand it to Richard’.”

  I furrow my eyeb
rows. “Wouldn’t it result in, like, an endless loop?”

  “Depending on how you phrase the compulsion, yes. It could.”

  “Great.”

  He shrugs. “I told you it was inelegant.”

  “What if the compulsion I’m trying to break is simpler than that?” I ask.

  “Give me an example,” he says.

  “‘Don’t move’.”

  “Hmm. That is a tough one,” he says. “It forces someone into a static state, not a process you could interrupt and redirect. In that case I would go after the source of the compulsion. Compel the compeller.”

  “To do what? Release the original compulsion?”

  “Exactly.”

  I nod.

  “Come on,” he says. “That’s enough of an introduction. Let’s go inside.”

  We both stand up.

  “So Julian was your teacher?” I ask as we walk up the steps.

  “Yes, he was. A very long time ago.”

  “So you’re British?”

  “British is an awfully broad term.”

  “I mean English,” I say, annoyed.

  “Yes. I was born in England. Though I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”

  “What happened to your accent?”

  “I lost it.” He sounds like that’s the last he’s willing to say on the matter.

  He reaches for the door and tries to open it, but the knob won’t turn.

  “Well,” he says. “Let’s hope Adam got around to teaching you at least this much. The door, please.”

  I close my eyes and picture the door being jammed, not locked. When I open my eyes, I reach out and give the door a hard shove as I turn the knob. It swings open.

  “Excellent,” says Richard. “After you.”

  I step inside the brownstone to find it completely transformed, nothing like the reproduction I visited in Mnemosyne’s labyrinth. It’s brightly lit, clean, and new. A fire burns in the fireplace in the sitting room. The portraits of Mariah remain, but there are fewer of them. Hearing heavy footsteps on the stairs, I look up to see a gangly, boyish man in an ill-fitting suit, holding on to the banister as he runs down the steps.

  “Kate?” he demands. “What are you doing here? Who’s this?”

  “Richard Stone,” Richard says, extending a hand.

  Markham doesn’t shake hands. “You didn’t answer my question,” he says. “What are you doing in my house?”

  “We were hoping you could help us with something,” Richard says.

  “What?” Markham asks.

  “A project,” Richard says. “An educational project.”

  I give Richard a sideways look. I’m starting to feel really uncomfortable with this idea. I’m especially uncomfortable not knowing what he plans to do with Markham.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, do we really need help? You explained things to me pretty well already. I think I could figure it out if I had to.”

  “What’s all this about?” asks Markham.

  Richard gives me a cold smile. “Would you rather wait until one of your friends is being forced to do something against their will to figure this stuff out?”

  Markham asks, “What stuff, exactly?”

  “No, I mean, I wouldn’t want it to work out that way,” I tell Richard. “But this seems wrong.”

  “Why on earth do you care?” Richard asks.

  “Whatever this is, I don’t want any part of it,” Markham says. “You’re not welcome here. I suggest that you leave.” He points to the door.

  “Or what?” Richard asks him.

  Markham sputters.

  “This man—if he can be called a man—is guilty of kidnapping an adolescent girl, enslaving her, and murdering her in an attempt to initiate her against her will,” Richard says, pointing at Markham. “He isn’t worth your consideration. He isn’t worth anyone’s consideration. He’s worthless.”

  “I just don’t like it, okay?” I say. “I don’t like the idea of using him as a guinea pig.”

  “What, you don’t have the stomach for it?” Richard folds his arms across his chest. “That’s completely unacceptable. Not to mention stupid.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “What, that I have moral standards?”

  Richard laughs. “Moral standards?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  He turns to Markham. “Zenas, tell Katherine how you murdered Mariah.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone,” Markham says, offended.

  “Give me a truthful, detailed account of the murder,” Richard demands. “Tell me everything that happened. Everything.”

  Markham brings a hand to his stomach and bends over as if he feels ill. He closes his eyes.

  “It was the year 1895,” he says, coughing the words out. “December thirty-first. Mariah’s fifteenth birthday. We’d been together three years by then, three years to the day. It seemed like the right time to me. The perfect time.

  “I went to the market and bought chocolate and oranges, her favorite foods,” he continues. “I brought them home to her. Before she ate I offered her my blood for the last time, and for the last time she rejected me. She’d rejected me so many times before. She always said she was afraid of dying.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to hear this,” I tell Richard.

  “Then stop him from talking,” Richard says.

  “But I don’t know how!” I say, starting to panic.

  “I didn’t want her to be afraid,” Markham continues, wringing his hands. “I didn’t want her to have a painful death. So I poisoned the chocolate, that was all. Arsenic. I thought it would be an efficient, gentle way to die. But I was wrong. She suffered terribly.”

  “This is sick,” I say. “You’re both sick.”

  “Do you know what death by arsenic is like?” Markham asks. “I didn’t. Now I do.”

  “Stop,” I command Markham.

  “At first she developed a severe headache,” he continues. “It was so intense she became blind, and cried out. I tried to get her to stay still, to lie down. Then the vomiting started and I—I was out of the room. I went to her as fast as I could when I heard the crash. She’d stumbled into a table and fallen. I found her there, lying in a pool of ejected chocolate and bits of orange. I remember the rancid smell of it. It was horrid, but the worst was still to come—“

  “Stop it!” I shout. “Before you say another word—“

  “When the convulsions began she jerked as if having a seizure. Her heels drummed on the floor. The stink of her vomit mixed with the stench of her voiding bowels.”

  “Richard, tell him to stop!” I demand.

  Markham looks like he could cry. “She began slipping in and out of consciousness,” he says. “I couldn’t stand to watch her suffer any longer, so I put my hands around her throat and—“

  Richard! Make him stop!

  Richard ignores me, smiling to himself.

  “I strangled her,” Markham says. “It was awful. She woke up and tried to fight back, but she was too weak to stop me. She died early in the morning, down in this very basement.”

  Markham sits down on the stairs and puts his head in his hands.

  “Well,” Richard says to me, still smiling with bitter humor, “I’d call that a failure.”

  I look away, embarrassed, disgusted and demoralized.

  “Let’s try again,” he says. “Something else this time.”

  “No,” I say. “I’ll wake myself up. I don’t have to stay here. This is wrong.”

  “You act as if we’re torturing him,” Richard says. “All I did was force him to recount what he did to that poor girl.”

  I hesitate. Maybe Richard is right.

  “You have to learn on someone,” Richard says. “Better him than anyone else we have on hand.”

  I shake my head no, but I’m beginning to see his logic.

  “Let’s see,” Richard says. “What should I make him do this time?”

  “Please just leav
e me be,” Markham whimpers.

  “I don’t think I will,” says Richard.

  Markham weeps softly.

  “Stop it,” Richard commands. “Stand up.”

  Markham stands and looks at Richard through reddened eyes.

  “Show us where you hid the amulet,” Richard commands.

  Markham points to his own chest. “Here.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Richard says, frowning. “Unbutton your shirt.”

  Markham complies, opening his shirt to the navel, exposing his bony, hairless chest.

  “I still don’t see anything,” Richard says.

  “Here,” Markham says, pointing to the center of his sternum. “It’s, uh, beneath the skin.”

  I squint. A very faint welt is visible right underneath his fingertip.

  “Ah! I see it now,” Richard says. “All right. Get it out for us.”

  “What?” Markham says. “How? I don’t have a knife—“

  “Then go get one,” Richard demands, irritated.

  Markham pushes past me and walks into the sitting room.

  “No!” I shout.

  He keeps going, totally ignoring me.

  I run after him. “Before you get a knife, come back here!” I command.

  Markham stops, turns around and walks over to me. Then he turns around and starts walking away again.

  “Wait!” I shout. “Richard, it didn’t work! What do I do?”

  Richard shrugs.

  “Come back here and sit down!” I yell to Markham.

  Markham comes back from the sitting room and sits down on the ground in front of my feet.

  “Now stay there,” I command.

  He complies, staring up at me with a mix of spite and shame.

  “All right,” I say to Richard. “I did it. That’s it. I’m done.”

  “But there’s so much else we could work on!” he says with a vulpine grin.

  “I don’t care,” I tell him. “I just can’t handle any more of you right now.”

  “That’s a shame,” he says. “I have to say, Kate, I thought you had more of a backbone than this.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I say, laying the apathy on thick.

  “All right,” he says. “One more thing before I go.”

  “No—“

  “Calm down,” he says. “Just a piece of advice. Not a training exercise.”

  “All right…”

  “I know you’re proud of your ‘moral standards’,” he says. “And I guess it’s all well and good to act according to a code. But trust me on this one—never let your morals cloud your judgment.”