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TWILIGHT STATE

Gemma Files

In "Twilight State", by Gemma Files, a person undergoes experimental therapy that involves deep sedation—a twilight state. It's a story in which neither the protagonist nor the reader knows who to trust or what is real, and it's a story in which many relationships and locations seem trapped in an in-between space.

The term "twilight state" in medicine refers to a state that can be achieved through drugs, hypnosis, or some medical conditions. In surgery, this term refers to a state in which a patient is anesthetized to the point of being heavily sedated but not fully unconscious. The patient is deeply relaxed but is able to answer questions and perform actions at the surgeon’s request. "Twilight state" usually results in amnesia—the patient can't remember the operation. The advantage of this kind of anesthesia is that it doesn't require breathing tubes and the recovery time is quicker than that of general anesthesia.

In nature, twilight is the time when the sun is below the horizon but its rays continue to illuminate the sky. It's an in-between time, neither night nor day. Similarly, the person in a twilight state is neither awake nor asleep. In mythology, twilight is a particularly magical time, when the border between the mortal and magical world is porous. In either sense, a person in a twilight state is "betwixt and between". This is a time when great truths can be revealed, if not recalled or understood.

***

“You don't have to look directly into the light,” Dr Karr tells me. “In fact, it'd be better if you didn't.”

I nod. “How long will it take?”

“Today? Eight hours, tomorrow six, the day after that four—the whole idea is to start high, then move down by increments. One way or the other, if we see good results at the end of this session or the effects aren't quite up to plan, we'll adjust accordingly.”

“Just lie here, all that time? I'm not sure I can hold still that long.”

“Oh, we'll secure your head, prop the chair up, and then there's this—” She raises a thing like a cone, white and stiff, a human-sized version of the sort of collar dogs wear after surgery, to keep them from biting at their own sutures. “It'll diffuse the light, somewhat, but also direct it. And better yet, it keeps you from seeing the restraints.”

I swallow. “I've…never been good with confinement.”

“Well, that's what the anesthesia’s for, Mrs. Courbet.”

They call it twilight sleep, she says, a twilight state. Level Two on the descending scale of sedation. Just enough drugs, in just the right combination, to keep me from forming new memories. It nips the fear in the bud, supposedly, by not allowing me to notice exactly how long my “momentary” discomfort has already gone on, or speculate on how much longer it might continue.

“Now, we'll be using this IV rig to administer a cocktail of several agents to induce and maintain a light sleep, anxiety relief and short-term amnesia: Propofol and Midazolam, along with a narcotic/systemic analgesic such as Demerol or Fentanyl. Of course, everyone responds differently, so we'll keep a close eye… but really, in most cases the dose is so perfectly calibrated that although you'll respond to vocal commands and light touch throughout, I very much doubt you'll even remember we've started, by the time you wake up.”

“You've done this before, I take it.”

“Many, many times. Shall we begin?”

I cast my eyes over the set-up again, so clinically neat and clean, especially when juxtaposed against the Modern Rustic interior of my family's cabin. It was built back in the 1920s by my great-grandfather Courbet, and re-done many times since. This latest iteration is my mother's work, mainly, and I think I may have spent more time here than anywhere else, over the years. It is bred as much from memory and dream as wood and stones, refuge crossed with mystery, a human oasis amidst the oddity of nature, its constant push and pull—all that life, and none of it your own. In an outcast world, it's as close as I've ever come to home.

What we do today may ruin that, I suppose. But frankly, I don't see any other way forward.

(Just do what it takes, Briony, I hear my father whisper, in my mind's ear. Seize charge, for Christ's sake; these people are experts, so let them do their job, and pay them for it. What else is money for?)

Soon enough I am laid back and tied down, ruffed like an Elizabethan, sinking fast. I feel the IV jack's needle prick as it goes in. Just past the cone's outermost edge, Karr turns the light on: 10,000 lux, green-bulb spectrum rather than blue, to manipulate melatonin and seratonin levels without doing damage to the photosensitive ganglion cells in my retina, or the cones behind my eye. Gauze provides a secondary lid of sorts, penetrable but protective, as Dr Karr murmurs that I need to try and keep my eyes open, but also remember to blink at regular intervals. Three breaths, Mrs Courbet…Briony. One, two, three, then blink. Repeat. Yes, that's right. One, two, three…

It may register as quite similar to daylight, she's told me, and it does, though not exactly; softer, hazed and vibrant, on the very edge of fading. That one last shred of bright, bravely overwhelmed, which comes before dark.

Like dusk, I think, and shiver.

This cabin is where almost every impression I have of Ontario outside Toronto was formed, over years of cyclic pilgrimage: the huge channels of moss-covered rock through which roads run like black-tarred veins, the foliage gummed with a year's worth of spiderwebs, pine needles carpeted ankle-deep upon the earth so they kick up like dirty brown snow with every step—a permanent shadow under every tree, air bitter with gnats and mosquitos that sip the corners of your eyes, where even the weeds can sting. And beyond all that the lake, overcast even on fine days, sun leached to white over grey water; sand and silt in the shallows admixed with great, trailing ropes of weed rooted deep in the dark portions, beyond the drop-off.

One time we accidentally arrived during caterpillar breeding season, and found the whole place boiling black and green with fuzzy, juicy, far too easily crushable crawlers: roof, walls, foundations all alike, the path itself squishing beneath our feet. Every morning we had to pound the screen door 'til it cleared, simply in order to see outside. But the next visit, the plague was gone, without a trace—vanished, nothing left behind but memory, and that fast-fading. As though it had never happened.

The silence, at night and otherwise. The complete darkness, once the porch-lights are off and the moths disperse. These are what stay with me. Time at the cabin has always been less a place, to me, than a method of being, never entirely lost, no matter how much distance put between; as though I leave part of myself there with each visit, to be recovered on return, if only briefly—rented, never regained. And I can never stay away for long.

To arrive here, always, is to step back into a dream I was born dreaming.

There is a thing you must watch for, Bri-oh-nee, Stana told me, as we sat near the lake together, the summer of my eighth year. The mrak, we call it. This means dark, or dusk—twilight. The time between.

She was a tall girl, Stana, very spare and severe, as if God had cut corners to make her: frowning lips, dark hair, cheekbones like eskers, set at a slant. A glorious bosom, kept well-leashed. Only later did I realize how she must have encoded herself onto my desire's DNA, forever pushing me towards women who looked like they might hurt me, if I only paid them enough for the privilege.

Stana came to Canada from Serbia, with her parents, and settled in Toronto. She had medical training, or so she said…not quite enough to requalify and complete her degree, but certainly enough to be somebody's glorified nursemaid. And she didn't hate children, though she often seemed indifferent. This in itself was so unlike my parents' attitude towards me that it probably would have made me think I loved her one way or the other, my eventual sexuality notwithstanding.

Does it live near here, the mrak? I asked her, mainly to keep her talking, as I spooned silty grey sand into my bucket, digging my toes deeper. Stana shook her queenly head, braids lightly swinging.

Here? I suppose so; it likes places neither one thing nor another, sand and shore, water and land. But everywhere else, too. The mrak is not bound by distances. It lives inside a moment, as sun dims and night comes on. Before the Morning Star rises.

Beneath the lake's shallows, my feet looked pale, green-tinged, faintly swollen. A ripple rolled back and forth over them, wetting me to mid-calf as the clouds massed overhead, turning the afternoon light sour.

We should go inside soon, she told me, while I upturned the bucket onto the shore beside me and made a teetery, decaying tower of its contents, already starting to wash away with the tide. This is no good time for you…for people like you. Of your age.

Because of the mrak?

The mrak likes to touch little children, or the things that belong to them. Sometimes it is a woman, huge and dark, sometimes a giant man with a rotten face, and always its hands are glowing—this is how it sees its way, in the darkness. And when it lays these long, bright hands on you, or even on your toys, your books, your clothes hung out on the line to dry, then you become not truly sick or ever truly well, not sleeping, but not waking. You fall between and stay there, for so long…

Here she broke off, staring out across the lake, where raindrops were beginning faintly to pock its waves. And I remember how I shivered, deliciously—frightened, or playing at it, for the sheer excitement of being so. Felt the wet hair rise up on my neck, my thighs all gooseflesh, as I asked her—

As long as what, Stana? Tell me, please.

As long as it takes, of course, Bri-oh-nee, little silly girl. For the mrak to eat you up, from the inside, like bugs eat a tree. Like ants in a hill, tunnelling in and in and in, 'til at last the hill falls down.

People tell children all sorts of things, I suppose, and who on earth ever knows why? She might have been angry with my parents, for exploiting her so shamefully, or with her parents, for making her play along. Perhaps she was home-sick, mourning the loss of her true place; Canada must have seemed strange to her, impermanent yet impossible to dismiss, a species of waking trance. Like being forced to dream someone else's dream.

She was gone by the new year, at any rate, just after Christmas holidays. My mother claimed she caught her stealing, but I never saw any proof that Stana coveted our possessions, and I'd spent far more time alone with her, at that point. In fact, I not only probably knew her better than either of them ever would, but also knew her better than I knew either of them…

This last truth, unfortunately for all of us, would never really change—not that they seemed to care at the time, or even later, when it was all too obvious I'd be their only child, their only heir. Cancer took my mother, then moved on to take my father, preventing him from running completely through the family fortune before I reached age of majority.

I didn't much care then, and I certainly don't care now it's all mine, to give or withold as I please to whomever I find least unfavourable. If I'd had the inclination, I might even have tried to track down Stana and deed some of it her way, instead of wasting my largesse on cheap imitations of her melancholy charm: my femme fataliste, dead end of all my childish fantasies. But…

No, it never seemed likely. What's past is past, gone forever, with no recall.

Yet here I am again, after all these years: up past Gravenhurst to Muskoka, back to familiar territory, the family cabin, the woods, the looming sky. The lake.

My wife didn't like the cabin, a difference of opinion that festered, the same as any other wound—the same as our marriage, in the end. And the infection left behind worked on me, slowly, in ways I became unable to ignore.

I brought her up here on our honeymoon, hoping she would love it, or at least come to understand why I did. But she never took to the place, not even at first, and later began to actively loathe it, lobbying me to do the same. It was as though she not only resented my affection for it, but eventually started to consider me just as innately toxic—poisoned, and therefore poisonous. My very touch tainted, by association.

It seems to watch you here, Briony, she told me, finally, by way of an explanation. To which I replied, perhaps foolishly: Yes, of course. And personally, I find that very comforting.

She dug her nails into her own palms, trying not to react, and failing. And right there, even so very early on…that was the death of us, summed up in a single moment. I watched our marriage wither, knowing it coffin-bound.

The truth is, I suppose, I've never felt entirely happy or entirely well, anywhere—not even here. But when I'm not at the cabin, I just feel so much worse. There's no comparison.

The cabin is where my mother chose to go, when she got her final diagnosis. It's what my father was on his way to, the night his chemotherapy-weakened heart gave out at sixty miles an hour, spinning the car 'til it rammed a guard-rail and bloomed into a warm orange ball of flame. But when I unwisely chose to tell my wife how fitting I thought those two facts were, given my own deep love for our perch near the lake, recurrent centrepiece of our shared lives—how oddly beautiful, in context—she made a face, lips twisting. Her hand all but slapped up to cover her mouth, as though she were about to vomit.

Christ, Bri! she managed, eventually. That's just morbid. What the hell do you see in that place, anyway?

How well it sees me, I answered.

And that was that. As the old song says, I was alone again, naturally.

For some time before attempting this procedure, I only realized in retrospect, I'd slipped into some sort of all-over malaise with no apparent cause, but also no apparent cure. Constantly tired, I still couldn't sleep, or overslept, but took no particular good from making up for lost R.E.M. My dreams were multi-tiered and repetitive, forever revolving around commonplace moments somehow imbued with inexplicable terror, familiar faces rendered alien and malign, until inevitably I woke knotted from head to toe, in a cold sweat, suffering heart palpitations. Nothing pleased me, and I—in turn—felt incapable of pleasing anyone else.

Once it was my mother I dreamt of, washing dishes while discussing how disappointing my latest report card was even as her bald and nodding head raised a fresh crown of tumors, each pulsing slightly, a death-filled flesh-sac. Another time it was my estranged wife, dressing for some fundraiser, spraying perfume on her thighs and smiling at me in the mirror; I saw her pupils square themselves and catch fire, put forth a slick green nimbus that spread across her face like grave-mould, bearding her crown to chin with decay.

And once, predictably enough, it was Stana, faced into the sun with her back turned, shrunk to nothing but one long-braided shadow in the bright haze of its fast-eclipsing corona. Telling me, without much hurry—

You should go now, Bri-oh-nee. Before it comes, since it comes so soon, now. This is its time.

Bright Morning Star on the rise above and creeping dusk below, with the lake itself suddenly humping up all over like a submerged monster's back, dim water rolling free. The air itself one invisible chime of pixels and atoms, every particle set vibrating at the very same pace. A moment caught between, hovering on the knife-point verge of becoming something else.

The mrak, I thought, in the dream. You mean the mrak.

Yes, of course. What else?

(What else indeed?)

It knows you, you see. Your name, your face, and all of it because…I told it about you.

But why would you do that, Stana? I never did you any harm. I love you.

So easy to say, in a dream, but she simply nodded, or seemed to. Did I make her? Well, of course I did; it's not as though she was actually there, after all. Or me, either.

…perhaps that's why, then, she replied, after a moment. And stood there silent, no matter how I begged and pleaded, 'til I woke up.

“Sometimes I want to say my body isn’t trying to kill me,” I told Dr Karr, during our next session. “But whenever I stop to think about it, I remember that's really just accurate. Isn't it?”

“You could see it that way, Mrs Courbet,” she agreed. “And—do you?”

“Increasingly.”

“Well, we should probably talk about that.”

The common cry, the human dilemma; animate meat, expiry dates encoded, all too aware for comfort. So we stave it off with various emollients, until (one day, inevitably) those become equally ineffective, necessitating something…more.

Nothing so very irreparable, in the end, Dr Karr hastened to assure me; nothing so very transformative, at least physically. And nothing, in the end, that money wouldn't solve—like most of my problems, I'd hitherto found. Yet probably best done in private nonetheless, I decided, once she'd outlined the idea in full—away from the public eye, with as few co-conspirators involved as possible.

“We could meet at my office, easily,” Dr Karr pointed out. “Say three times a week, or even every other day, depending on how fast you want the treatment over with.”

“I'd prefer not to, if you don't mind. I need to be absolutely sure this is kept discreet.”

Polite as she was, she tried her best not to laugh, though I could see it was a bit of a struggle. “It's just light therapy, Mrs Courbet,” she said, eventually. “Not exactly controversial.”

“Oh, I understand, doctor. But you see, it's more about what the mere fact of any sort of therapy implies, to an outside eye.”

“That you're unhappy?”

“Clinically so. It's not something I want widely known.”

Here she narrowed her eyes slightly, and nodded. Because of your impending divorce, she might have said, if she'd been a different person. Because you fear the judge will think worse of you for being depressed, seasonally affected, sleepless to the point where you'd register as drunk on most tests, breathalyzer content notwithstanding. That you'll be forced to settle for less than you want to, because your wife will make it look as though you're not fit to handle other people's money anymore.

And: yes, doctor, I might have replied, without resentment. Given that's the only job—the only skill—I've ever really had.

But she didn't, and I didn't. Which, seeing how I'd never have employed that sort of person in the first place, if I could at all help it—the sadly frequent kind who apparently just has to open their mouth while thinking, or else their brain doesn't work quite as well—made me willing to trust her. On the matter of therapy, that is.

Eventually, we agreed on terms.

It's unseasonably warm and bright for an October weekend as we arrive at the cabin, yet still raining, as it almost never entirely ceases doing; typical fall, a border season, neither one thing nor the other. Within hours, this rainbow glitter will dull back down to a comfortable grey, but even now the air feels thick, smelling mildly of wet dust, or sodden, half-rotten pine-cones. You can taste it in the back of your mouth, a mint-wrapped stone. I haven't been here for nearly two years, though my people traveled up last week, stocking supplies, cleaning and airing out, the whole nine yards. Thanks to their efforts, we find the place in good repair, welcoming mat well-brushed, with deep drifts of dead leaves already gathered into piles for the mulch-pit.

Later, I stand at my bedroom window, sipping tea, listening to Karr's team set up her equipment, before the long drive back to Toronto. Soon enough, it'll be just her, me and the plan of therapy, or at least seem so—an easily-dispelled illusion, given that if you walk far enough in either direction you'll reach somebody else's dock, somebody else's beach, somebody else's equally “secluded” home away from home.

But this is the off-season, boats idle, lake stilled almost motionless whenever the rain slacks to drizzle. And while I might not feel entirely safe, given what's about to take place, I certainly don't feel observed, at least by human eyes.

In the chair, laid out, encollared, gauze over my eyes; the light snaps on, flooding my mind with sunshine. Then, what seems like mere seconds later—

“All right,” I hear Karr say, from far away. “We're done for today.”

I lick dry lips, tongue gone equally dry. “But…you haven't even started yet,” I hear myself say, voice gone hoarse and querulous.

She laughs, closer now, fingers light on the ruff's fastening. “We started this morning, Mrs Courbet. That's the twilight sleep for you.”

“No memories.”

“As advertised. Now—be careful getting up, hold onto my arm. Here's some water, drink it slowly. Yes.”

“I don't feel any different.”

“You might not, immediately. It's not an exact science.”

I take another sip, cough a bit to clear my throat, but the roughness doesn't go away. “That's…very reassuring,” I manage, finally.

That night, when I close my eyes, I find myself back by the lake in full restraint, the base of Karr's chair plunged deep enough that my heels touch wet silt, with my face angled out towards open water. The straps dig my wrists 'til they start to numb, and through the cone's white flare I can just glimpse a silhouette I suspect must be Stana's to my left, hair unbound and whipping in the mounting wind.

Can you see it yet, Bri-oh-nee? she asks. Poor little girl. It is so close, now—very close.

The mrak? I ask, trying to crane my neck further, to finally see her, after all these years…all I have is memory, a bent mirror, and the warped reflection of her I've courted again and again, chasing it through a chain of equally unsatisfying women. And for a moment, fear grips me, bowel-deep: what if I do manage to catch a glimpse, at long last, only to find it's just yet another variation on a theme—so close to my wife, that unwittingly pale imitation, as makes no difference?

But: No one knows how the mrak is made, Stana continues, though we all wonder. Is it always the same? Or is it made anew over and over, every sunset, the same way day turns to dusk?

Perhaps it was a person, once. A child, even.

Perhaps it is the mrak's own touch, itself, that makes another mrak.

Out on the water are islands, the nearest of which sketches a cool curve furred with trees, a skeleton eyesocket of rock, a jutting cabin-cheekbone. And as the sun sets, as twilight falls and dusk creeps up, draining the world of colour—I watch the whole thing lurch and rumble, earthquake-shifting. See it re-orient itself, submerged portion slick and streaming, to form a massive, bisected face which turns my way, blindly seeking, like some sleeper fresh-awakened. Like a hunting animal, roused by the scent of prey, who sniffs into the wind to discover exactly which way it should turn, and pounce.

Phosphorescence spreading, a rotten green creeping up over its domed hillside skull, blooming all over. Its concave features, decay-blurred, algae-encrusted. Soon, I think, a pair of similarly glow-palmed hands will break from the lake, reach out to seize me, lift me whole and struggling to its gaping, rock-toothed shore-mouth…

The false sun that doctor shines will never keep it away, poor girl, Stana tells me. Only the Morning Star's true light can do that, and I do not see it rise, not now, not here. Not for you.

Oh, but surely, I want to shout in return, you will save me, Stana—you must. Because you love me, don't you, just a little? The same way I love you?

No reply. The straps bite deep; the mrak's green light fills my cone-collar like a cup, drowning me. I gasp and take it in, lungs filling cold as lake-waves, deep and murky, each lung set outlined and glowing in the red darkness of my chest—

—'til all at once, I feel Stana's hands on my shoulders, pressing me down, her hair falling 'round me, soft and dark, like earth into an open grave. Saying, as she does: But perhaps I should not have worried, Bri-oh-nee, all this time. For see, in its eyes—how it recognizes you? Perhaps it has touched you already, long before, without either of us knowing. This would explain much, yes?

So you belong to it already, and always have: never fully sick, never fully well. Never fully asleep, and never fully waking.

(Never fully loved, I think, helpless, at the same time—no, I know: unloved, loveless, unable to love. And never fully loving.)

At this, Stana nods, probably. Pronounces, as though passing sentence—

Now you are mrak, and this love you want so badly…this love you offer…pollution, only. Danger. Just as this hour is yours, this time between. Just as this place has always been your place.

Now, as then. Then, and always. Always, and forever.

(So I was right to send my wife away, after all, I think. I was being kind, keeping her safe. Because I loved her.)

(Because I still do, and always will.)

The island, looming, cliff-mouth wide, water streaming like a beard, and the lake opening too, right below it—lips of foam, teeth of bone, grim grey sky for a jaw-hinge, eternally poised to bite. A double devouring.

But before either mouth can quite close over me, I rocket up from sleep in one great, wracking leap, lie drenched and sleepless 'til dawn. Wait, with a pounding, skipping heart, for the moment when I can at last tell Dr. Karr: It wasn't enough.

“I'll need to send you deeper,” Karr says, as I frown. Explaining, gently: “In order to add auto-suggestions in on top, so I can guide you through the process. These dreams you describe—to me, they almost seem like your brain revolting against the twilight sleep, reframing your lack of new memories into some sort of phobia. I mean, you've been put out before, yes, completely? For surgery?”

“…now and then.”

“And how did you react to the general anesthetic process, on those occasions?”

The frown spreads, becoming a full-bore shudder; I've always dreaded “going under,” how consciousness simply drops away without warning, nothing left behind but a black hole of non-being. That total disappearance. That emptiness.

“I fought it,” I tell her, finally. “The same way I would have fought death.”

“Well, then.”

I sigh. “But I've had these same dreams for years, doctor, especially here. It's all part of the pattern: nightmares, insomnia, depression…”

“Interesting that you chose to come to the cabin for therapy, then. Isn't it?”

(In context? Yes.)

“At any rate,” she continues, “your body's obviously so used to these symptoms, it sees our attempts to cure them as an attack. Has it ever been this bad before?” I shake my head, reluctant. “So why do you think that is?”

“This place,” I say, shrugging. “The situation… my divorce. Stress.”

“Ah, yes—the prime exacerbation.”

When looking for causation, always start with whatever's newest—Karr's not wrong about that. “My wife,” I find myself saying, “had expectations, I think, about how matrimony would change things. Change me. I'm still not sure why. I was like this when she met me, after all. But…”

“Love cures all?”

I nod. “It doesn't, though.”

“People are bad at distinguishing manageable behaviours from pathological ones,” Karr agrees. “To grasp that it's not a question of 'getting well,' but of incremental steps towards long-term maintenance. It can be difficult to accept the essential uncertainty of that reality, especially when you have no opportunity to contribute. Significant others appreciate being given the chance to at least try to help—it makes them feel valued. Needed.”

“But she couldn't help,” I point out. “Nobody can. You can't fuck a crazy person sane. Why waste time trying?”

“It was hers to waste.”

“I was trying to be…considerate.”

Karr sighs. “I wonder if she'd think so.”

Soon, twilight sleep gives way to twilight state. The lake, the grey sky, white sun hanging in dimness: so small, so bright. Is that the sun, or the Morning Star? It hurts my eyes to look at.

Deeper, Mrs Courbet, deeper. Briony. Can you hear my voice? Speak freely.

(Yes, doctor.)

Good. Can you move your head, your hands? Nod, if you can. Give me some sign.

Nothing happens. The lake laps the shore. Inside the cone's curve, my field of vision shrinks, restricted: lake, sky, star. My own shallow breath, my blood, my skull set singing, an empty shell's dull roar. My slack body, tied down, motionless as stone.

Speak freely. Are you awake, or asleep?

(I…don't know.)

Can you see?

(Only the lake.)

Can you move?

(…no.)

That's good. That's very good.

I hear Karr take a breath, then say: Open your eyes now, Briony. There's someone here who wants to speak to you.

So I do, and the first thing I see is a woman, standing over me: tall, spare and dark, curvaceous, queenly. She studies me the same way she did for most of our marriage, with a bitter fascination. As though I promised her something without meaning to, then never quite delivered on it.

“Hello, Bri,” she says. “Been a while, hasn't it? You can answer freely.”

“Hello, Heba,” I reply, surprisingly unsurprised. But that's not enough for her, apparently. “Answer the question,” she snaps back, an angry crack in her voice, as though she's testing something. Then relaxes just a bit when I answer, with only a second's pause—

“Yes, it has been.”

Heba looks to Dr Karr, who's standing beside her; Karr nods, slightly. “Just like you wanted—total suggestibility, but without the amnesia, this time. Ask her anything.”

“…all right.”

Heba Gilroy Courbet, my wife—ex-wife to be, that is—takes a moment, maybe to think over what exactly “anything” should consist of; her hair hangs heavy, framing a pale, fatigue-smudged face set with eyes so deep blue they seem black. And: You don't look good, sweetheart, I catch myself thinking. Almost as bad as me, and that's saying something. Don't tell me you can't sleep now.

Heba leans in, studying me, as Dr Karr stands with arms crossed, nervously tapping one foot. I'm not sure what she thought would happen once Heba got what she must have paid for, access to me in this useless, curtailed state, but perhaps this wasn't it.

She's a hard one to trust, doctor, I try to project, unable even to meet her eyes. This circumstance alone should tell you that.

“Why do you think I'm here?” Heba asks me. “Speak freely.”

My lips are so dry. “Therapy?”

“That's funny, but no.” She sighs. “To find out why you're really here, I suppose. Mary told me you were sick, that you'd opted to come up to the cabin for treatment, and I…I remembered those stories you told me, about your parents. Stupid, right? But I know you, Bri. I know what this place is to you.” She waits, as though expecting me to answer, then realizes her mistake. “Oh, for Christ's sake! Speak freely.”

I clear my throat. “I don't know what you want from me, Heba.”

“Four years, Briony. I just want what's mine.”

“And what would that be exactly?”

“Think back: when we stood up in front of all those people, you promised me love, fidelity, loyalty…that we'd always be together. That we'd be like one person. So why did it take me reading Mary's session notes to get any sort of an idea about exactly how fucked you are, let alone why? You never even told me something was wrong, until it couldn't be fixed anymore. You never told me anything.”

“Maybe I wanted to…protect you.”

“From what?” I hesitate, drawing a bitter laugh from her. “You won't say, right? Even now. Well, Mary here can make you, if I tell her to, or even if I don't…make you do anything she wants. Hurt yourself, maybe. Stare in that stupid lightbox 'til you go blind. Jesus, Briony, how desperate would you have to be, to try a treatment this outlandish? To trust Mary couldn't be bought, when she very obviously can?”

(There's only one real weakness, Briony, I hear my father say, from somewhere down deep inside, universally shared, and nothing ever changes but the currency involved. That's why you have to hold onto money so tightly, because it'll leave you in a minute, for the first open hand. And all you really have is more of it than most people, at least to begin with.)

(But: No, Bri-oh-nee, Stana's voice points out. You do have one other thing, and always did, just as it has you. Even though you may not want it.)

The dusk deepens, clouds of mud roiling up through lakewater, disturbed by a delicate footstep; as much smell and sound as something seen, the susurration of wind on water, acrid tang of mouldering wood and leaves, an insectile buzz felt in the temples and fingertips… Oh but wait, no: that's Karr speaking, her too-calm clinical voice gone brittle, disturbed. Saying—

“…enough. Let me get her to sign the documents and send her back down; we can be over the border at Sault Ste. Marie in four hours—”

“Shut up, Mary.” Heba is only a cut-out silhouette now, black on black on black, and I find myself smiling at her sharp command, realizing exactly where she must have learned that tone she's trying to mimic. “You'll get your money. Money's nothing. Briony taught me that—and I'm a fast learner, as even she'd agree.” Swinging back to me, her bruised eyes suddenly visible again as they meet mine: “Wouldn't you, darling?”

“Very fast, yes.”

“Thank you.” Her shadow-self shifts, clenched fists kissing over her breastbone, as if to help her hold herself together. “Money's nothing, love is… well, it's something, but I was never going to get that, was I? So that doesn't matter either. Satisfaction, though… that's something, too.”

“Do you want blood, Heba?” I ask without being prompted, and watch Dr. Karr jump, just a little—mouth opening and closing like a fish, making little o's, tongue-tied and maybe thinking: no no, this shouldn't be. She's breaking free, Heba, coming back up—anything could happen now—

“What I want is for you to look at me for once, straight on.” I do. “Yes, just like that. Now tell me, for the last damn time, before you make me do something I'm really going to regret. Tell me…”

…what? I want to ask. But really, all I have to do it wait.

“…why I was never enough.”

It's not that I don't want to answer; a blessed relief, in a way, simply not to care any more. Yet the words logjam my mouth, along with half a dozen others: Because/Because nobody could have been/Because I'm not enough, not you/Because you wanted to change me, or me you/Because neither of us could have known what “for better or for worse” might mean for us/For me…

Too much, and not enough, so in the end I don't say anything at all. Just let my eyes drift past her to the window, deep blue with autumn nightfall now, a cold yellow half-moon rising beyond the black curve of the islands—that one island, closer than any should be, already half-turned in its socket. Already humping up, poised to rise, and walk.

Heba doesn't see it, of course; she's far too busy suddenly shaking me hard by my shoulders, snapping my slack neck back and forth inside the plastic cone like a marble rolling 'round a funnel, shrieking: Talk, I said! Speak freely, goddammit! And Dr Karr at the same time, yelping over her, trying to break my trance: My voice, rise up, four three two one and wake, you will wake refreshed, you won't remember any of this, you won't remember—

Two sharp clicks. The therapy lights snap off, the living room track lighting on. But the dusk is thick now, everywhere, like air, covering both women in shapeless sacks through which I see only their eyes, beach mirage bright overtop as some bleak and alien desert. Sound bleeds out to silence. I stare past them, to the rising moon overlaid with sun, the silty sand, the lake.

And then I see the mrak, rising out of the water, stepping ashore. A mountain-tall figure, a giantess, yet still vaguely shaped like that girl I fell in love with, so very long ago: Stana, done up in draped and blurry shadow, reaching out, feeling her way by the uncertain, ten-fingered light of her own glowing hands. Her hair is ivy and pine needles, her skin weather-yellowed birch bark, her massive teeth made from the quartz-streaked sedimentary grey rock of the islands' shores, and she moves like rippling water as she strides silent towards the cabin, towering up into the dark.

Close enough, now, that those hands can light up its great face, so raw and unfinished. Close enough for me to finally see who it really does looks like: not Stana at all, in the end. No. Not even close.

I have never seen a mirror so tall, I think. Nor one so terribly, terribly…accurate.

Time has slowed, as it always does, in dreams. Heba and Dr. Karr move as if caught in treacle, turning upon one another so slowly that their conflict will not even have time to begin before this is over. And behind them, the mrak dips down, re-sizing itself; looks in through the window, a curious little girl surveying strange dolls. Without visible transition, it has already slipped sideways to the door, opening it, crossing the floor like a shadow. It climbs onto the chair to peer down at me, then slides down along my body, entwining with me, one glowing hand on my heart. Pressing down, hard, 'til it feels as though my breastbone will crack.

She kisses me, the mrak, with her rotting tongue. Pares the conical therapy ruff away gently, as her huge, bright hands brush me up and down. Then melts away, leaving me stretched out in its wake as a discarded husk, stuffed full and sodden. The straps holding me down burst, rotted instantly. I twist my hands free, raise them, and watch them start to glow—no surprise there. Just that sole unsteady, doubled light in the darkness, outside and within.

Sitting up, I seize Heba by her face, hauling her 'round; Dr Karr skitters back in shock, colliding with the wall, but I ignore her. Force Heba to look deep into my eyes, as I tell her, with the mrak's voice: “Answer? Oh, I can do much better than that.”

She struggles, keening, a broken-winged gull, but those hands are irresistible. They bring her closer, closer. Until, at last, I can whisper, into her mouth—

“Let me show you.”

The Morning Star rising, or perhaps setting, somewhere above. Impossible to tell which, from this angle: not here in this place, at this hour. Not that it really makes a difference.

What happens to Karr doesn't concern me, much; she stays stuck, I assume, unable to move, unable to flee. But you, my dear Heba—you will meet me halfway, from now on, as you always wanted. Absorb my tainted touch. You will stay with me forever, neither waking nor sleeping, neither sick nor well; I will give you what I can, and use you up 'til there is nothing left, for either of us.

That's love, isn't it? Or if it isn't, it should be. Since, after all…

…there's really nothing else.

Later, on the beach, I hear what might be Stana come up behind me. Maybe she'll put her hand on my shoulder, I think. Maybe we'll walk into the water together, submerge, never to be seen again. Sink until only the tops of our skulls are visible, just two more islands in a dim grey lake under a darkening sky, horizon lit by one bright sliver.

Where I come from, Stana's voice tells me, we use a certain herb with yellow flowers and leaves like rosemary as incense for a mrak-touched child's relief. But this does not grow here, unfortunately.

I know, Stana.

I would find some for you, Bri-oh-nee, if I only could.

I know.

On Krk, an island in the Adriatic, Stana continues, they tell how the mrak fights the sun, every day at dusk. How during the day the sun gets the better of his opponent, using flaming arrows to drive the mrak into the deepest, darkest gorges, but at night the mrak emerges once more, to chase the sun with a great net. But every time he is about to close the net over his prey, the Morning Star draws near, its light cutting the sun free.

So the mrak loses.

So far, yes. Yet the islanders know the mrak will win, eventually. And so the fight goes on.

I'm tired, Stana. So tired.

Then sleep, Bri-oh-nee, silly girl. Close your eyes. Let go…

(…until tomorrow.)