X. before:encephalopathy

“Why were you at the library so early yesterday?”

“I needed to study.”

“You? Study?”

“I’m not my brother, remember?”

Mr. Caraway heaved a great big sigh.

“Let’s take another break,” he said.

Mr. Caraway sat up from his couch with yet another empty cup of tea.

We had been engaged in this back and forth for several hours now.

It all started after campus administrators cordoned off the new fountain. Not even an hour later, I received a call from Mr. Caraway asking for an appointment the following morning.

“I thought our sessions were scheduled on a biweekly basis,” I said.

“It’s urgent,” Mr. Caraway replied. “Come tomorrow morning, please.”

“I have classes until evening.”

“Come after class then.”

Classes over the next two days were sparse with attendance. It seemed the Bergerac’s infestation had finally struck the student body with slow wrought bouts of illness. When I ate lunch at one of the cafeterias, I even spotted that the usual lush yellow skins of marinated chicken on several tray tables had been flushed with patches of fusty green.

Professor Medea looked, in particular, unwell.

She was agitated and lashed out at students for even using their laptops to take notes.

“Turn off all your electronics!” she shrieked. “Don’t you know they’re harmful?”

She fidgeted nonstop as she inscribed logical operations and propositions on her blackboard and dropped her white chalk whenever it screeched. The mere sight and sound of it hitting the floor caused her to recoil.

I pitied her for not having the privilege of missing class like her students did.

Of course, the girl with the tourmaline eye was also absent, but I assumed her disappearance had little to do with any mycology related affliction.

I took her spot at the back of philosophy class the day of my appointment with Mr. Caraway. The knife marks were still etched on her desk. I half expected a new message to be engraved there, but my original discovery must have dissuaded Valerie and her ilk from carving another warning.

In fact, there were no signs of the film club anywhere, not in class, not even in the clubroom upstairs, where the projector, clothespins, aluminum sheets, and soundproofing had all conveniently vanished.

Only Professor Medea remained, and she was reluctant to disclose any details to me.

“I don’t know where they are,” she had said. “Rosalyne, I’m just their club advisor.”

“So when are they meeting next?” I asked. “And where?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You don’t sound like much of an advisor then.”

“I don’t have time for this!” she snapped. “Please, Rosalyne, I’m begging you. Either ask me about today’s lecture or leave me alone.”

When I finally arrived at Mr. Caraway’s office that evening, it was my turn to be on the receiving end of a battery of forensic questions.

“Where were you yesterday around noontime? You were at the library? Really? Where were you exactly? The seventh floor, you say? Did you see anyone there? No one? Really? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I responded to that last one. “Is this why you had me come in today? To answer questions about my whereabouts yesterday?”

“Not just your whereabouts,” Mr. Caraway replied. “Did you happen to be with the girl you were with the other night? Her name is Natasha Yu.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“... Then what about the girl you were with?”

“I saw her.”

“Don’t be difficult,” Mr. Caraway said. “Were you with her yesterday or not?”

“I was.”

“The entire time?”

“What do you mean by ‘the entire time?’”

“Rosalyne,” Mr. Caraway said. “There’s a limit to how much I’m willing to put up with this whole charade of yours, especially when there are lives at risk. I need you to answer me seriously.”

“And I am answering you seriously,” I shrugged. “If you don’t clarify what you mean by ‘entire time,’ we’ll be stuck here forever with conflicting paradigms of what unit of time constitutes an ‘entire time.’”

This recursive exchange went back and forth for quite a while before we ended where we were now, with Mr. Caraway requesting yet another break to refill his tea cup.

Despite how forthcoming I had been during this unsuspected interrogation, I had not been allowed to leave. There was nothing strictly speaking stopping me from leaving, but Mr. Caraway had threatened to end our other sessions if I wasn’t cooperative.

This, of course, I couldn’t allow, because the time and place of the end of our arrangement was up to me.

Mr. Caraway swapped out a bag of earl grey for chamomile. He had been swapping herbal mixes during each break. He must have thought a specter haunted his study, and only the right combination of scented teas could thwart its presence.

“Let’s start this from the top,” he said, sitting back down.

“You can ask the same questions all night. My answers will stay the same,” I replied.

“No,” said Mr. Caraway. “I’ve decided to take a different approach.”

“Try me.”

“Do you know why your parents pay me so much money, Rosalyne?” Mr. Caraway asked. “Do you know why I’m even here?”

“They think I need to see a shrink,” I shrugged. “Unsolved trauma and all that.”

“The first time they put you in front of a clinical psychotherapist,” Mr. Caraway replied, “you went catatonic for a week. Wouldn’t get out of bed. You would barely eat. Last I heard that clinic now operates on the other side of the country, thanks to you.”

“...”

“You were brought into a psychiatrist’s office for another appointment,” Mr. Caraway said. “Within a week, they had declared you fully sane. Your parents couldn’t believe it. So they tried again, and then again. You were registered sane by a half dozen medical professionals.”

“Of course I’m sane,” I scoffed. “Sanity and trauma are two very different things.”

“Oh I agree,” Mr. Caraway replied. “But you know, Rosalyne. Your parents don’t care about your supposed trauma. They care that you are sane. They care that you’re sane, because if you’re sane you’re a credible witness. And if you’re a credible witness, the details you divulge about the circumstances of their son’s disappearance to a private detective are all of a sudden, less the whimsical fantasies of a crazy young woman, and suddenly, hints at a possible new truth.”

“...My brother is dead.”

“And you know that, because?”

“I saw him in his room.”

“I’m sure you did,” Mr. Caraway said. “Did you see his face?”

“And why is that important?”

“If you didn’t see your brother’s face on the body, how do you know it was your brother and not a similarly built young man?” Mr. Caraway asked.

“My brother’s clothes…”

“Men are often not as fashionable as women,” Mr. Caraway answered. “Even if I believed you, Rosalyne, and I’m not sure that I do, if you walked outside, how many men would you find not wearing simple monochromatic polo shirts and short khakis?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” I twitched. “Why do you care so much about my brother? What about me? Did my parents pay you to act like them, to care about my brother more than about me?”

“I do care about you. I also care about the people here who are still alive, but in order to protect them, I need to find out more about your brother, now more than ever,” Mr. Caraway said. “Do you know why I know Professor Medea, Rosalyne?”

“Why are you bringing up your dating history now?”

“I’m flattered, but I’m a bit too old for her,” Mr. Caraway replied. “No, I know her, because Professor Andrea Medea is a survivor of the original Cult of the Electromagnetic Man. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”

“You were a member?”

“Very funny, Rosalyne,” Mr. Caraway sighed. “Andrea’s case is… complicated. Unlike most cult members, she was kidnapped by the Electromagnetic Man himself. But after being rescued, Andrea returned an adherent, a devoted follower in spite of what she may have seen during her kidnapping.”

“Maybe the Electromagnetic Man isn’t as bad as people say then.”

“Maybe,” Mr. Caraway shrugged, “and I profess I don’t know much about cults. I’ll leave that to the investigators who dismantled the C.O.E.M. What I do recognize are patterns, and it is a concerning one that a former reverent disciple of the Electromagnetic Man is teaching at this school during this very time.”

“I don’t think we should be discriminating based on our past affiliations, Mr. Caraway.”

“...You’re dismissed, Rosalyne,” Mr. Caraway replied. “Get out.”

I swallowed a deep breath and exhaled. I wiped my palms on the armrests.

“Just one last thing,” Mr. Caraway turned to me. “Did you know, Rosalyne, that your brother and Professor Medea were high school sweethearts?”

I hadn’t known. I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.

I replied to Mr. Caraway by slamming his door shut again. I sprinted down the stairs from his office on the second floor of a four story office building.

For the first time, I realized the walls there were laid with glass windows. With the sun setting on the horizon, the transparent view began turning inward, changing the function of the glass into that of a mirror.

A hollow visage reflected off the mirrors.

My eyes swept across the walls, searching for the exit. Instead I spotted slender arms. Loose white sleeves waved above them and arced over the shoulders then dipped below the collarbone to form a pale half moon beneath the neck.

My sight traveled vertically, but before I reached the contours of the throat, the stairwell tilted, and I lost balance. The walls around me began to spin. Caught like wet clothes in a gyrating hot dryer, I tumbled down the steps.

I reached for the guardrails, but their steel handles had been ignited by a day’s worth of sun. My palms ripped away from them at first touch. I tumbled until I reached the bottom, where my hands scraped against the concrete and red scrapes surfaced on my wrists and knees.

I didn’t have time to lick my wounds. I picked myself off the floor and ran. The office building loomed over me. I knew now that black moss had found new refuge within its shadow.

Each step wore me down. Even at sundown, humidity fell upon me like a weighted duvet. My soles burned. The rubber from my shoes softened and melded with an earthly adhesive, leaving behind me a trail of long strings, strings of melted cheese punctured with black mold. I could feel something else from the shadow, licking at my heels, but I dared not look back at the mirrors from where the world would be reflected back to me.

As I reached the doorsteps of my apartment, I tore my shoes off and flung them into the trash bin. My socks were okay, so I dropped them in the hamper.

Afterwards, I went to check on my brother’s monster figurines by the window.

They had all melted.