By week six Kaminski’s group therapy sessions had begun to blur into one another, repeatedly hitting the same notes, a tedious litany of “Do you admit that you were wrong?” and “You do see that you were being used by other people, right?” and “Do you really think that causing traffic jams is going to change the world?”
So Riley wasn’t surprised when he began their next session by handing out questionnaires for the group to fill out. Most of the questions were straightforward and appropriate to a mental health facility: Do you feel nervous or depressed? Do you have suicidal thoughts? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you sometimes hear voices when no one else is in the room? Do you want to get better?
And then there were these:
Do you think the government is evil?
Do you think people in the government are persecuting you?
Do you believe the United States Government is engaged in a conspiracy against you?
Do you blame the president of the United States for your incarceration?
Do you agree that preemptive compassionate arrests can be used to help people?
Do you feel you were led into your negative behavior by others?
Riley declined to answer any of the questions, but did find the form useful for its aerodynamics as she crafted it into a paper airplane and booped it across the room to a three-point landing under Kaminski’s chair.
“Tell me something, Riley” Kaminski said, nodding to the airplane at his feet. “Would you have done that if it was just you and me in a room, without an audience to show how brave you are?”
She looked away, refusing to give him anything to work with.
He pressed on regardless. “Then let me ask the question a different way. What is more important to you: winning their approval or earning my disapproval?”
“If it helps you feel better,” she said, her long-brewing irritation stepping firmly into the light, “—and I say this with great sincerity, from the bottom of my heart—absolutely nothing about you is important to me.”
“So you don’t care what people think about you?”
“Nope.”
“So you’re okay with the distance I’ve noticed between you and the rest of the group?”
Another trick question. If I say yes, the others will feel like I’m dismissing them; if I say I’m not okay with their distance, then I’m agreeing with him.
Exactly. So don’t engage. Don’t let him sink the hook.
I’m trying, but I’m tired, and he’s seriously pissing me off.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You sound angry.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“And my opinion doesn’t matter?”
Don’t engage.
“Nope.”
“Do the opinions of other people matter to you at all? Because that question is really at the heart of what we’re trying to accomplish in these sessions. You’re here because you fell under the influence of other people—”
“Nobody influences me, okay? I make my own decisions!”
Shit. You engaged . . . you cracked the door. Now he has something to work with.
“Really? That’s an extraordinary thing to say, don’t you think? At one time or another, aren’t we all under the influence of other people? Our relationship to our parents—”
“Don’t go there.”
“—teachers, friends, and other family members shape us in a million ways. I’m a better person for the relationships I’ve had because they’ve helped me grow. Even casual relationships can affect us. When someone in the office is in a bad mood, pretty soon the whole place is on edge. We look to others to inspire us, to give us hope, to encourage us to be more than we think possible, to say to ourselves, ‘I want to be like that.’ Or the reverse happens, and we look at someone and realize that’s not who we want to be. A negative influence is still an influence because everything we see and hear affects us. That’s what it means to live in the world.
“But here you are, insisting that none of this happens to you. So what are we to make of that? Do we take you at your word, that you really are completely isolated from the rest of the human race, including friends, family, and loved ones? Because what you’re describing is the textbook definition of acute psychological withdrawal. There are two outpatients and one inpatient suffering from exactly that disorder on the other side of the hospital. If you’re telling the truth, then we need to begin treating you for this as soon as possible.”
She looked to the others for support. No one looked back. Unwilling to dive into the line of fire.
Can you blame them? she thought.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “maybe you’re not telling the truth when you say none of us matter to you. Maybe you’re lying, not just to me but to everyone in the group. You can treat me any way you like—I’m used to it—but why would you lie to the members of this group, your peers and, potentially, friends? What does that say about you? More to the point, what does it say about how you see them?
“But here’s the thing: I don’t think either of those possibilities are correct,” he said, leaning forward, his voice low and intense. “I don’t think you’re telling us the truth, but I also don’t think you’re lying to us. I would suggest that you’re telling us your truth, because you’re lying to yourself. I offer that possibility because I believe in you.”
“Totes moved by your belief.”
Remember what Julian said. Don’t let him inside your head.
Fuck off. I’ve had it with this asshole.
“Which is why I also believe that you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been led astray by other people. Helping you to recognize and acknowledge that fact is going to be crucial to helping you get better.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“But isn’t a decision not to get better ultimately self-destructive? Who do you think you’re hurting? It’s not me. I get to go home at night. You’re the one who’s stuck here, and the irony is that you’re holding the key that opens the door. If you tell me that you’re here because you were influenced by others, used by others, well, then it’s really not your fault, is it? That provides a basis for you to go free. Everyone else in this room certainly understands that, which is why they’re inching closer to release every day.
“But if the violent, subversive acts you committed outside were entirely your idea from start to finish, without any cause-and-effect relationship to what’s being done by anyone in the outside world, well, that not only makes your actions arbitrary and unjustified, it’s clear evidence of a pathological obsession, an irrational hatred for people who want only the best for you.
“You seem to think that I’m a bad person, that the government is evil. Which means you must be on the side of justice and righteousness. But is that really true? You say no one influences you, but we both know that’s not true, so that’s lie number one. You said you don’t care what others think of you. But I’ve seen how the distance between you and the others hurts you, so we both know that’s lie number two. I, on the other hand, have been absolutely honest with you from the start of this discussion. So which of us has the ethical high ground here, and which of us is being deceitful?”
Riley felt her cheeks flush with frustration at letting herself get outmaneuvered. Idiot. My own fault. Walked right into it.
“I’d very much like a response to my question, Riley.”
“Okay, then here’s my response,” she said. “Go. Fuck. Yourself.”
Kaminski sighed and looked to the rest. “I see we’re about out of time. The rest of you can turn in your questionnaires now.”
And every one of them did as he asked.
* * *
Every Friday was Barbeque Day, a welcome break from the usual diet of flavorless meatloaf, fish, or sliced chicken, overcooked vegetables, and any other foods that could be eaten with blunt plastic cutlery and chewed without expending the slightest energy. Barbeque Day was their sole respite from the barely edible horror of the rest of the week, offering up pork and beef ribs that were thick and chewy but soft enough to be eaten off the bone, along with catfish, Cajun cauliflower for the vegetarians, sweet potatoes, and beans and rice.
Barbeque Day also gave the cooking staff a break from having to wrestle with the massive and outdated oven that dominated the kitchen. Rather than struggling to coax it to life then keep it from sputtering out a minute later, they were able to cook over a grill in the parking lot, waving away the haze of tangy smoke as they flipped and braised and seasoned. “That stove’s a damn beast,” one of the cooks told Riley on the occasion of her first Barbeque Day. “Gotta know how to come at it just right or it’ll bite you. It was part of the original installation, back when this was an assisted-living facility, and I hear it was trouble even then. Dr. Kim’s been saying we’re gonna get it fixed for almost a year now. Gonna see the Second Coming before that happens. But I’d come all the way from Heaven for these ribs, so who am I to complain?”
Patients sometimes skipped therapy sessions, or declined to use the exercise room, but nobody missed Barbeque Day, or as Danny put it, the happiest day of the week.
But in the aftermath of Riley’s latest skirmish with Kaminski, ‘the happiest day of the week’ this most definitely was not.
“We told you before, you have to stop making trouble,” Jim said. “All you’re doing is making the group look bad.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Just roll over and bark whenever he says so? I want to get out of here as much as you do, but I’m worried about what we’re giving them on the way out. Signing papers that say we were wrong gives them ammunition they can use to go after the next bunch. If they want to call us crazy for protesting, fine, but that doesn’t mean we have to go along with it. I refuse to sign a bunch of papers where I admit that I was crazy but that I’m much better now. If we were sane out there, if we were right out there, then we’re sane and right in here, and we can’t back away from that.”
“Fighting them doesn’t prove we’re sane. That comes from being able to have a calm, reasoned conversation, so that’s what we’re doing, gaming the system to beat the system.”
“What if they want us to think we’re beating the system because otherwise we’d have no reason to cooperate and give them all this stuff.”
“You’re starting to sound paranoid,” Becca said.
“If you’re not paranoid in this place, you’re not paying attention. I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to all this than what we’re seeing. Something’s wrong. There has to be some reason they’re so intent on creating a paper trail—”
“It’s easy to play the what-if game when you don’t have to back it up with anything,” Lauren said, eager to join in the fight now that Riley was being dogpiled. “If there’s some scary reason behind why they want all this stuff, then what is it? Tell me, Riley. What’s the big fucking conspiracy?”
“I don’t know, because I can’t see the play! But my gut keeps telling me there’s more going on than they’re saying.”
“And what if you’re wrong?” Hector asked. “Sooner or later you’re gonna push Kaminski too far and he’ll come back guns blazing, and the rest of us are gonna get caught in the crossfire.”
“The sweet potatoes are especially good today,” Angela said, trying to deflect the conflict before it could escalate further.
But Riley would not be deflected. “If I’m wrong, then it’s my problem, not yours; I’m the one that’ll get dinged, you can do what you want,” she said, tired of the back-and-forth. Worse still, the ribs were getting cold. “Look, I understand that you don’t want to inherit secondhand shit, and I’m already on the outs here. You gave me fair warning. If you want to stay out of the line of fire, fine; if you want to disown me or kick me to the curb if this goes bad, also fine. You do you, I’ll do me, and we’ll see where the pieces land.”
“Suits me down to the ground,” Jim said. “Anybody got a problem with that?”
No one at the table said no. But they didn’t have to.
After a long silence punctuated only by the sound of plastic cutlery on plates, Danny looked up at Callie. “Angela’s right. The sweet potatoes are really good today.”
* * *
“Shall I respect man, when he condemns me?”
They were getting near the end of the book, and she still had no idea if the words were doing anything to encourage Frankenstein to start communicating in more than grunts, and abandon the monosyllabic movie monster he had bonded to for the more talkative one in the book. But he remained silent. Maybe it really was all for nothing. Maybe he was incurably what he was and would never change, and she was only providing a moment’s distraction.
Then it’s a distraction for both of us, she decided, and kept reading.
“Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries.
“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”
She closed the book. “I think we all know how that feels,” she said. “When people disappoint us, when the world hurts us, we want to hurt it right back, and pretty soon we’re all about the anger because there isn’t room for anything else. But here he’s saying that he’ll only cause fear if he can’t inspire love. That means love came first, so despite all the shit he’s been through, he still considers love a possibility, and that’s amazing. All he’s asking for is for someone to care for him, so he can care for them, to get love so he can give love back. He doesn’t want to be a monster, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone, he just—”
“Riley Diaz?”
One of the orderlies stood in the entrance.
Frankenstein turned, lips curled in a feral snarl at the interruption.
“You gotta come with me,” he said, keeping a wary eye on Frankenstein.
“Why?”
“Above my pay grade. Someone says get so-and-so, I get so-and-so, and right now you’re my so-and-so.”
She looked to Frankenstein, who was becoming increasingly agitated. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll pick this up later.”
Accompanied by the orderly, she stopped by her room long enough to drop off the book before being taken to the first floor, passing cubicles until they reached Kaminski’s office.
The orderly knocked, then opened the door. “Diaz,” he said, and opened it wider.
Riley stepped inside. Kaminski was sitting behind his desk, filling out paperwork. “Thank you,” he said without looking up. “That’ll be all for now.”
The orderly nodded and stepped out, closing the door behind him.
“Please sit,” Kaminski said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
Riley took a seat on the other side of the desk and counted five minutes before he set down the pen and sat back in his chair.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“It was going great.”
“How’s your friend?”
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“You can’t help him, you know. I’ve dealt with expansive delusion cases before, and they’re immune to talk therapy, especially if they’ve based their alternate personalities on fictional characters. If a patient thinks they’re the president, or the queen of England, you can turn on the TV and show them the real thing, and sometimes that can make a dent. But it doesn’t work if someone believes he’s Don Quixote or Zorro or Superman or—”
“Were you his doctor before coming over to ARC?”
“One of them,” he said, “and I have the scars to show for it. Then again, so does he, so I guess we can call it a draw.”
Prick, Riley thought, and wondered what he’d done to Frankenstein to merit the word scars. Topic for another time.
“So what made him like he is?” she asked, trying to seem only casually interested.
“It’s not important, and ultimately neither is he. He’s not my problem anymore. I just hate to see you wasting your time on someone who clearly doesn’t deserve it.”
“It’s my time to waste. It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”
“That’s the reason I wanted to see you. We’re over a month into your treatment, and so far we haven’t seen any improvement. You continue to resist every attempt to help you, even from Dr. Nakamura, who is just here to be your advocate.”
Riley shrugged and said nothing. Where is this going?
He templed his fingers and tapped them against his chin. “I understand that you intend to keep fighting every effort to outgrow the behavior that brought you here because you’re afraid that the government will use any act of compliance on your part against others.”
On the outside, she held his gaze, determined not to give him any sense of her reaction.
On the inside, her brain raced through possibilities like an overclocked hard drive.
Option One: someone told him what I said, meaning there’s at least one person in the group who can’t be trusted.
Option Two: nobody told him anything, and he’s making an educated guess. He’s a shrink—that’s what they’re trained to do.
Option Three: the cafeteria is bugged.
“The problem with most people,” he continued, “is that they tend to think in binary terms. The light is either on or off. Things are good or bad, fattening or healthy, positive or negative. But you and I know that’s not true. There are all kind of gradients. People sometimes do the right things for the wrong reasons, the wrong things for the right reasons, and everything in between. Right or wrong isn’t even the point. Living in the world is about being strong enough to do what it takes to achieve the result you’re aiming for.”
He stood and turned his back to her, looking out the window. “You’re a bright young woman, Riley. That’s evident in your records, your session with Dr. Nakamura, and the way you present yourself in group therapy. You volunteer nothing, watch everything, and say little when asked. But what you do say reveals a strategic thinker, and I admire that. Which brings me back to the fallacy of binary thinking.”
He turned from the window and walked slowly to the other side of the desk. “One side of binary programming is, ‘I have to fight everything and everyone, even if that means I get stuck here for the rest of my life.’ Which is what you’ve been doing ever since you got here. The other extreme is, ‘I have to cooperate with everything so I don’t spend the rest of my life here.’ Which is what the others are doing.”
“That’s their choice.”
“Exactly,” he said. “But as I said, both approaches are predicated on a binary assumption, which means it’s a false choice. There are ways to get out of here that don’t involve having to fill out forms the way some bureaucrat in DC wants them filled out. The government only cares about the final result: Is this person cured, or not?”
He stepped up to her chair. “I’m the one who gets to make that determination, Riley. I make that call. And there may be a nonbinary way to get out of here that you haven’t considered.”
His zipper was at mouth height when he said it.
And just in case she missed the message, he put his hand on top of her head, and left it there.
Okay, she thought, here we go.
She glanced up at him, because she knew they liked it when you looked up at them, and served up an obviously forced smile, because they really liked it when they felt they were making you do something you didn’t want to do.
She pushed her left hand up his leg.
Glanced up again as she took firm hold of his belt buckle.
Then she brought up her right hand.
And punched him in the dick as hard as she could.
Twice.
He screamed and fell to the floor, clutching his groin as she jumped on him and got in a few more shots to his face before the door flew open and three orderlies rushed in. Two of them pinned her to the floor as the third dragged Kaminski out. “I was just walking past her, and she punched me in the goddamn nuts!” he yelled.
“Is that why you had your hand on the back of my head, asshole?” she yelled back, struggling with the orderlies.
“She’s violently out of control!” he said. “I want her sedated! Right now!”
“No! He’s lying! Let me go!”
A syringe flashed. A sliver of cold metal slid into her arm.
Then everything went soft as she fell backward through the floor and into the dark.
* * *
Riley floated through pools of darkness punctuated by fluorescent light.
Then: voices, distant and indistinct, giving and receiving instructions. She wondered if any of it had something to do with her but couldn’t be sure because her eyes refused to open.
The elevator jostled and rose.
Cold. So cold.
For a moment she was seized by the sense that she had to be somewhere else, but let the impulse go when she couldn’t figure out what happened to her feet. Maybe she’d left them in the other room.
Then: lifting and floating and lying flat again.
Heaviness on her arms. She tried to raise them. They wouldn’t move.
She glanced up.
Biedermann.
There was a pinch of pain in the back of her hand as another needle found a vein.
Then with a sudden, precipitous crash, the world went far, far, very far away.
* * *
Slowly, gradually, Riley became aware of the whir of cool air moving through ducts, and conversations taking place at the other end of a thousand-yard hallway.
But she couldn’t see anything.
She turned her head. Maybe that would help.
Nothing. Only darkness. She squinted harder. Still nothing.
Ohmygod, I can’t see, she thought, and a part of her brain started screaming. I can’t see I can’t see Ican’tsee—
Then the part of her brain that wasn’t screaming said, Your eyelids are closed.
Oh, the rest of her thought back. Thanks.
De nada.
She spent the next several centuries trying to remember how to open her eyelids, which now weighed about a thousand pounds each.
With one last effort she managed to open her left eye just enough to see that she was back in her room. Then it slammed shut again, exhausted by the effort. While her left eye took a well-deserved nap, the right eyelid skinned back a little but fell back before she could focus on anything useful.
Come on guys, she thought angrily, let’s get organized.
She decided to sneak up on her eyelids by pulling her forehead upward. They’ll never see that one coming, lol. She tugged and pulled and with a slight pop managed to open them both at the same time long enough to confirm that she was on her bed. She tried to turn her head for a better view of the room, but all of her available neurons were too busy trying to keep her eyes open to even try to deal with neck muscles.
Then a shadow fell over her as Biedermann’s assistant, Nurse Sanchez, approached the bed. She checked Riley’s vitals, then moved off for a moment before returning with a white paper cup. “Open.”
Riley didn’t.
“It’s just ice,” she said. “You’re probably feeling pretty dehydrated.”
Riley opened her mouth, and Sanchez fed in several slivers of ice. They felt good. She hadn’t realized how dry her tongue felt until the ice began to melt.
Once the ice slivers were gone, Sanchez pulled a cell phone from her smock and walked out of the room.
Riley let her eyes slide shut again, saving them until there was something to look at.
I don’t know what the hell they hit me with, but this is some pretty amazing shit. Somebody ought to package and sell this stuff.
Pretty sure that’s how the pharmaceutical industry works, the logical part of her brain shot back.
When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.
Fine!
Fine!
Her nose itched. She tried to scratch it, but nothing happened. She tried again and came to the drug-slowed realization that her arm was trying to accommodate her but kept bumping into something in the way.
She slitted her eyes open again and saw heavy cloth restraints pinning her arms to the bed rails. Her legs were also restrained.
Okay, this is officially bad.
The door opened and Sanchez returned, followed by Biedermann.
And McGann.
He started in on her before he even reached her bedside. No greetings, no “So, how are you feeling,” just, “Let me explain what you’ve done to yourself. You attacked one of our doctors.”
“He tried to assault me,” she said—though with her tongue numbed out and half-asleep, it came out as, “He tra da azult muh,” but she was pretty clear he got the gist of it.
“Then why isn’t there a single mark on you, except from where the orderlies had to subdue you, while Dr. Kaminski is upstairs being treated for penile trauma?”
She hadn’t meant to laugh at penile trauma, but she did it anyway.
“Sorra,” she slurred. “Izza meds.”
“Get used to it. Until now you had the right to refuse medication on your own recognizance. But that right applied only as long as you obeyed the terms of the consent decree you signed when you were transferred to our care. By acknowledging that you were convicted of a violent crime, you waived your right to decline medication in the event of further violent acts. This incident confirms that you are a threat to the safety and well-being of everyone in this facility, which gives us the authority to administer medication without your consent.
“As a formality you will be given the opportunity to take those medications orally, but if you refuse, they will be administered intravenously. We also have the right to restrain you under staff supervision for up to twelve hours per day, during which time you will be catheterized to minimize the number of times the restraints will have to be removed and reapplied. This will continue for as long as we deem it necessary to moderate your violent impulses and guarantee the safety of the staff and patients.”
Penile trauma! Penile comma! No! Penile Comma OwOwOwOwow!
“Do you understand me, Ms. Diaz?”
“Unnerstand. Peenee drama.” She snickered despite herself.
Just a thought, but maybe we should be paying attention to what he’s saying.
Shuddup. Peepee karma. Hah!
“The destructive behavior you engaged in outside these walls will not be permitted inside them,” McGann said. “I regret the necessity of escalation, but you’ve left us no alternative.” He turned on his heel and walked out, Biedermann following close behind.
Sanchez adjusted the restraints on Riley’s arms, then rolled a stainless steel cart over to the bed, pulled aside a cloth to reveal a catheter, and began gloving up.
Don’t think about it, Riley told herself, people get this done all the time. They even did it to Dad after he had his appendix removed because they didn’t want him pulling the stitches out. Focus on something else. Anything else.
The phrase penile trauma rolled through her head again.
That could be a bit snappier. How about PTSD? Post-Traumatic Stress Dick?
“This will feel a little cold,” Sanchez said, “but it won’t hurt.”
Riley nodded distantly, suddenly very tired.
Won’t hurt.
Won’t hurrrrt.
Hurrrrr.
Maybe that’s what he was trying to say. Not hurrrrrr.
Hurrrrrrts.
Hurts. He hurts.
Then she closed her eyes, and the world went away again.
* * *
She was dreaming.
Again.
About the day it.
Happened.
In her dream instead of staying home she went with her parents to see the vice principal and was sitting in the back of the car for the ride home. Since it was Friday, her dad was trying to figure out which movie they should watch that weekend. He loved the movies, and when she was younger he would sometimes let her stay up past bedtime if they were in the middle of a good one.
Her mother was in the passenger seat, red hair cycloning in the breeze from the open window, arm thrown across the back of her dad’s seat so she could gently stroke his neck as he drove. Feeling physically connected was important to her, and Riley loved the feel of her hand as it casually rested on her back or leg while they talked or watched TV.
But now they were driving home, and Riley was trying to remember something she wanted to tell them, or warn them about, something important, but she couldn’t call it to mind. She checked her cell phone in case she’d written a note to herself about it but couldn’t remember the unlock code, and for some reason it wasn’t recognizing her face, so she put her face closer, but she couldn’t see herself reflected in the glass, as if she wasn’t there and—
—and her dad was talking about movies—
—and her mom was stroking his neck—
—and Riley remembered what she was supposed to tell them, what she was supposed to warn them about, but as she tried to form the words her mouth went numb and she screamed as loud as she could but nothing came out and they raced toward an intersection and she knew this street she knew this street she knew—
—and her mother turned just in time to see the truck blow through the stoplight, her eyes widening as the window shattered and—
Riley started awake, breathing hard. She could feel tears on her cheeks, but there was nothing she could do about them, her arms still restrained. To fight down the adrenaline and push the dream away, she tried focusing on every item in the room, but it was still half-dark and frankly, there wasn’t much to work with. She couldn’t tell if it was coming up on dawn or dusk, which only added to her disorientation, and she fought back a wave of panic.
Then suddenly there was a shadow, deeper than the darkness, and she realized she wasn’t alone.
She turned her head as far as she could and saw a familiar silhouette standing silently beside the bed.
“Hey,” she managed, remembering the moment she had wandered into Frankenstein’s room to see him similarly restrained. “Guess we have more in common than I thought.”
Silence.
Moving slowly, he raised his hand in front of his face, looking at it with eyes that were dark and dead, as if it belonged to someone else.
Then he reached toward her neck.
Oh shit, she thought, terrified. Oh shit oh shit ohshitohshitohshit—
She was about to cry for help when he raised his hand slightly and, instead of going for her throat, stroked the tears on her cheek. Then he pulled back his hand, rubbing the wetness between his fingers with almost childlike wonder. His eyes, so lifeless a moment earlier, showed a strange, sad curiosity, as though he had never seen tears before and wasn’t quite sure what they were for.
Then he glanced up, and his expression turned shy when he caught her watching him. Perhaps hoping to console her, but without knowing how such things were done, he put his hand on hers. His touch was cool, almost cold, but strangely, not unpleasant. With stiff outstretched fingers, he patted the back of her hand four times, watching himself do it each time, as though working hard to commit to memory a moment when he was gentle and capable of giving comfort, when he was not the monster he believed himself to be.
Then the moment passed, darkness returned to his eyes, and his hand fell loosely to his side, as though some part of him refused to allow even that simple human contact. This is not for you. This can never be for you.
His face lost to shadows, he walked out the door and down the hall, his footsteps gradually fading away in the distance.
What happened to you? she wondered, saddened by what she had glimpsed in his eyes. Who or what made you into this?
And why?