T ied up in my straitjacket, I walk down the hallway to meet with this Pillar. It's a much cleaner and broader hallway than mine downstairs. All cells are empty. All except the one with a shimmering yellow light. I hear music faintly playing in the background. As I walk closer, I recognize the tune. It's "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane. Smoke circles out of the cell as I stop in front of it, ready to meet him. Pillar the Killer himself.
The Pillar's cell is luxurious in a mad way. Its floor is raised almost a foot above the hallway's floor. It makes it look like a performer's stage. The Pillar is sitting, legs crossed, on a huge couch. He is smoking his hookah with one hand and holding a jar with a butterfly inside with the other. The butterfly crashes against the glass, wanting to be set free. The Pillar doesn't care.
Silence creeps into the place, and I don't feel like starting the conversation. The Pillar's eyes scan me in a most unusual way. It's as if he knows me, has known me and is making sure it's really me. Although mad people don't intimidate me, I feel mysteriously uncomfortable. He has such an unexplainable presence for such a short and average-looking man.
There is a chair in the hall facing the cell. I sit on it, not taking my eyes off him. His eyes are beady as he waves the hookah's hose in the air. He does it like a maestro orchestrating the song's unusual melody. It takes me a while to discover he is writing words with his hookah's smoke in the air. The smoke magically sticks. It's a question, one that may have been easier for me to answer more than a week ago: Whooo are you?
This isn't happening, right? This is too surreal, even for my insanity.
"I'm not sure who I am," I say, wondering why I feel the need to comply. "People around me seem to have an idea of who I am, though."
"Who do they think you are?"
"They say I killed my friends." I raise my eyes and stare in his, realizing that, in the weirdest of ways, we're both killers.
"Why haven't I ever thought of that?" He sucks on his hookah.
"Think of what?"
"Killing my friends." He puffs a ring of smoke back into the room. "But then again, you can't kill something you don't have."
"You don't have friends?" I didn't expect him to open up to me. Or is he?
"Neither have you."
"Actually, I do."
"Ah, you must mean your Tiger Lily. A very interesting species." He sounds either sleepy or too comfortable in his skin. An apocalypse wouldn't shake him off his hookah. "I heard you messed up your escape because of it."
"She is the first thing I remember seeing from a week ago. Since then, she has been my only friend."
"I wonder if it meant more than that in the past." The Pillar takes a long drag.
I stop and think about it. Was I attached to it because of an older suppressed memory, maybe? "Is that why you wanted to meet me to ask about my flower?" I ask.
"Of course not. I am here to talk to you about Wonderland."
"Then, you better read the book." I'm tired of talking about Wonderland. "Because it doesn't exist in real life."
"That's strange. I am quite sure your mother and sisters repeatedly mentioned you talking about Wonderland. A real one." His eyes pierce through me. I am not even going to ask how he knows about my mother and sisters.
I am not comfortable with him knowing about my family, but something makes me keep talking to him. "My mom says I escaped from my sister Edith when I was seven and came back blabbering about a scary place called Wonderland," I say. "It's a crazy story. I think it was my childhood imagination after reading Alice in Wonderland . It's just silly."
"What's life but a big, silly book?" he says. "You've answered the question I sent you. It means you must remember something."
"I don't know how the answer came to me, but I assume it's because it was written in Alice in Wonderland ."
"No, it's not. The fact that four times seven is fourteen is only hinted at in the book. It's never mentioned. You remember more than you think you do, Alice. It's just the shock therapies and medicine that made you forget," the Pillar says. "Seriously, Alice. Aren't you curious about the things you don't remember?" He places his hose on the edge of the hookah and leans forward. It's the first time he gives me his full attention. "I can make you remember amazing things."
"Like what?"
"Like who the Red Queen really is. Why she chopped off heads. Who the Rabbit really was. Where the real rabbit hole exists. What a raven and a writing desk really have in common. Why Lewis Carroll wrote this book and a lot of the other things," the Pillar says. "Basically, I can tell you who you really are. And you know what happens if you know who you really are?"
"No, I don't." I think I am better off not knowing who I really am. I don't know why I think so.
"You get to know if you really killed your classmates. And if you did, you get to know why you did it." The Pillar stops for effect. I am almost sure of what he will say next. "Don't you want to know why you killed the boy you loved?"