The Irreversible Reckoning Read online

  ***

  The door creaked deafeningly, and Janna’s entire body tensed. A long moan escaped her as her midsection pulled upwards towards the ceiling and her knees tried to meet it halfway. Her hands pulled hard against the cuffs keeping them shackled to the iron bedrails at the end of the creaking bed. Her shirt was ripped down the front, and she was only wearing her underwear besides that. Tyre had not been lying about the cloth that was tied in her mouth, either; it was so thick and tied so tightly that when I had approached her and tried to pull it out, it stayed tightly lodged behind her teeth.

  “Turn your head.” I told her, and a soft sob escaped her before she forced her eyes to blaze into mine. Even when I was there to save her after they had hurt her, I was still her worst enemy.

  “Janna.” I said softly, and in that moment, I dropped it. Everything that had happened between us, I let it go. Some will say I forgave her for it and expected her forgiveness because we had both suffered a similar fate, shall we say, a fate that was inflicted on us by cruel and sadistic men. Or perhaps some will say that I had weakened because seeing her in such a vulnerable and pathetic state had made me view her as human. But it was not that complex. I was simply tired of fighting. I had her husband, which was what she had been fighting against. She had my boyfriend, which made me sick. But our fight had been ridiculous, and if I had read about it, I would have promptly declared us stupid women, considering we were fighting each other over men. We should have pulled together in the face of their betrayals, but instead we had gone to war with one another. See, that is the idealistic, quasi-feminist outcome to love triangles, or in our case, a love square. But honestly, if a woman were trying to take away a man you loved, would you form a bond of estrogen-charged sisterhood with her in order to preserve the dignity and righteousness of female relations, or would you have wanted to beat her down and steal her man, but only after she was totally and completely destroyed?

  We all know the answer to that question, if we are remaining honest. I loved James deeply; he was the first man I had ever loved. She loved Adam, and she loved her status as queen. I threatened her relationship with him while she threatened my relationship with James. We were animals after all, and in that way, so are you. We saw each other as threats and wanted to eradicate the threat to prolong our survival and happiness. Happiness, in some ways, is of little concern to animals, but if happiness is measured in terms of fulfilment, animals value it in the same way. For us, emotional attachment, companionship, lust, passion, and sex fulfill us. Besides passion, maybe, and emotional attachment, many animals find fulfilment in the same ways that we do. So when that fulfilment—that happiness—is threatened, they attack. Janna and I had attacked, because that is our nature. That is more than likely your nature, too.

  “Janna.” I said again, and very gently, I reached out and pushed a thick strand of hair away from her face and then reached down to tie the two ends of her shirt closed. It was like déjà vu for me, because I remembered when I had used the same method to keep my breasts covered after they had ripped my shirt, that day out in the woods with Adam. Of course, I had not suffered then what Janna had been suffering over the previous days. She looked at me, her gaze softening as she watched me concentrate on covering her up. When my eyes met hers, I saw that the bright green was swimming behind her many tears, and after a second, they began to leak. Through her nose, she took in a short breath, and the cloth in her mouth barely stifled the cry she let out.

  “Turn your head so I can get it out, Janna.”

  She did, and the movement appeared to hurt her. I assumed she was just stiff from being kept that way for so long, but when I looked, I saw black and blue handprints that wrapped all the way around her throat, and one of her shoulders was disturbingly twisted, which told me it was badly dislocated. My hands fumbled at first with the knot where the cloth was tied behind her head, because I was too weak to make my eyes turn over. But soon, I managed to untie it, and I quickly pulled it from her mouth. She coughed so violently and for so long that I feared she would either vomit or pass out, and after a few minutes, the former splattered all over the floor. It was all water, so I made a mental note to request water for her when we were back in Adam’s room. After the last of it had left her, she moaned and grasped her stomach as she collapsed back onto the bed.

  “I want to get up. Please help me get off of this bed, Brynna. Please.” She pleaded with me softly, and just as Adam had done to me, I placed her arms around my neck and pulled her up into a sitting position. When I pulled her onto her feet, I did so slowly, because by the way she grimaced and moaned, I could tell that her pain was tremendous. When we took a step, she cried out and draped her arm across her ribs.

  “Lean into me.” I instructed her gently, “You need to drop your weight onto me, Janna.”

  She was sobbing as she wrapped both of her arms around my neck and let me half-walk, half-carry her along. When we came into the hallway, Tyre’s eyes immediately took on a look of great pity.

  “Janna.” He said softly, gently, and when he reached out to her, her entire body jerked backwards to get away from him. “I know that it was very painful, and it was uncomfortable, and humiliating. But you needed this, sweet child. It is only through experiencing pain and degradation that men and women will learn from their sins. You never wish to suffer that again, do you?”

  She looked at me, and the look in her eyes was so desperate that I reached out and eased her head onto my shoulder.

  “Just leave her be, Tyre.” I told him, “She’s had enough.”

  “Janna.” Tyre said, his tone firmer now, “You never wish to suffer that again, do you?”

  “No.” She answered.

  “And you know that you will suffer it if ever you commit adultery against your husband, James, or if you treat others cruelly, or if you try to assert dominance over any man?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have asserted dominance over men so many times in your reign as queen. You have stood above them, ordered them to do your bidding, to obey both you and your soulless husband. Now you have had a man’s dominance asserted over you. I pray, truly, from the bottom of my soul that I never have to decree you fit to withstand this punishment again. Now, come.”

  Every time I loosened my grip on her even slightly, she cried softly and shook her head.

  “We are so close.” I assured her, “Keep going. You are doing so well.”

  The way she hobbled along, hunched over, grasping me with both hands, breathing heavily and moaning softly in pain, reminded me of an old woman’s arthritic gait. With each labored step, I pitied her more and more, knowing how indignant she would be if she knew I was pitying her. Or how indignant I hoped she would be.

  Tyre opened the door to Adam’s room, and he stood immediately and rushed to us. His lips pressed to my forehead, and then, he gently pried her from me and carried her over to the bed.

  “Adam, you will not bed them both. To do so is a sin; Janna is not your wife anymore, so you will not bed her.”

  “No, I will not bed her, Tyre. But I will care for her while she recovers from all you have inflicted upon her. Leave us.”

  “As soon as he is stronger, James will come to claim her.”

  “Fine. Until then, she is my responsibility. Now, leave so that I may start patching her up, and please, bring her some warm clothes.”

  “And water.” I added.

  Tyre left, and I sat down on the chaise lounge by the barred stained glass window. The spot would be perfect for reading, but there were no books. People like Tyre found few books to which they could not object, and I would have no interest in those few they did find suitable. I could not see anything except darkness through the stained glass, so I simply observed the mosaic: It was an image of a benevolent, bearded man with white hair holding up a staff of light. All around him, little stained-glass goblin-like creatures were thrust backwards, repelled by that bright light he wielded.

  “Gandalf t
he White?” I asked myself.

  “What is that, darling?” Adam asked me softly.

  “Nothing, dear.”

  But still, I could not help thinking how strange it was that these men and women, with their aversion to any literature that did not directly praise and preach their One God, worked out of a building with a stained-glass window whose mosaic uncannily resembled a scene from Tolkien’s greatest work. But then, the series was argued by some (quite reasonably) to contain resurrection metaphors and religious imagery, but there were also elves (who could only be pagans, and they were awesome) and good warlocks (Gandalf), not to mention the alleged phallic and vaginal imagery in the films. Thinking of those books made me sad, and somehow, the tears I was beginning to shed silently over not being able to read Tolkien for the hundredth time when all I wanted was to start with The Hobbit and read through The Lord of the Rings and end with The Silmarillion snowballed into tears for my loss of James.

  “Brynna, come here.” Adam said, and I gasped softly before cursing myself for somehow forgetting that no matter how quietly I cried, he could feel the changing tides in my heart effortlessly. If I began to cry, he knew instantly, because he could see the pain in my heart.

  “No. I am fine. She is not. Run her a bath and sit with her like you did for me.”

  “I will, but first, come here.”

  “Adam.” I said firmly, but my voice softened slightly because I knew he meant well. “She needs you now, and I am just thinking about James. Thinking about him is not going to cause my heart to spontaneously combust, and though my physical pain is severe, it is not going to kill me. I am not totally fragile, at least not yet. I am not going to fall apart at the seams, as they say. Just take care of her.”

  “You are not fragile now, nor will you ever be.” He told me, “But you are right.”

  “Brynna.”

  Her voice startled me, partly because I had thought now that I had rescued her, she would simply ignore my presence. I had laid down my arms, as they say, and she had, too, but we were not going to become best friends overnight. I could not have her trust, and she could not have mine, until we worked persistently to be kind to and tolerant of each other first, and then, maybe, we could become something close to friends. But her voice also startled me because she had exclaimed more loudly than she needed to there in that room that held silence in every corner even when we spoke. She repeated herself, her voice a little quieter, and I looked at Adam, my discomfort evident.

  Believe me when I say that my obvious physical and emotional discomfort was something about which I sometimes felt a great deal of shame. Violet, in her training with Dr. Miletus, had encountered every patient malady possible, and in those encounters, she had not just helped heal the physical trauma but also the emotional. Whether it was a broken wrist or an instance of spousal abuse, Violet had found the right words to comfort her patients with ease, and not only was she able to find those words and wield them carefully, she was effective; Dr. Miletus had told me that in her two hundred-plus years of service in the medical field, she had never seen someone so attuned to patient needs, so aware of what they needed to hear, and so able to comfort them without patronizing them. I could not even patronize a person who needed my comfort; I was too busy squirming and looking for a window out of which I could jump so I could flee the uncomfortable situation. So, when Janna called me over, I turned my head on the side slightly and looked at Adam for help. He gave me none, because like my former love, he wanted to break me of my habits of avoidance, which could be viewed as cold, detached, and cruel, and which, I suppose, they were. At first, I wanted to stomp my feet as I walked over to Janna, sighing heavily, and rolling my eyes to the heavens, but I did not want her to feel ashamed for the emotions that she was displaying, nor did I want her to feel guilty for putting me into this tight, uncomfortable space in which I had to comfort her. I did not know if she would actually feel guilty or ashamed, but I assumed she would, so I favored maturity over immaturity, and kindness over discomfort-induced coldness.

  Adam was sitting beside her on one side of the bed, and I was sitting beside her on the other side. I looked at Adam, telling him without words to give us a minute alone. It was more for my sake than for hers; Adam was my husband by the laws of the Old Spirits, but I still did not feel comfortable displaying even my limited store of softness in front of him. This reluctance to demonstrate that I could be very kind if I tried very hard was not the result of a fear that he might manipulate it, but more the result of my long-running fight with demonstrating any kind of weakness. Sure, I had cried in front of him, and I had made love to him, and before that, I had stood totally naked in front of him and let him look my body up and down, which was as intimate and passionate as the sex had been, but for some reason, those weaknesses were not the same as demonstrating kindness. Analyze that all you want, because I know that I have analyzed it, and in my analyses, I have determined that my parents were more than likely correct, however slightly, when they called me a sociopath. I could be loved, and God or the Gods knew that I loved so intensely, it sometimes caused me physical pain, but my love created madness, as proven by the many brutal murders I had committed of those I deemed threats to my loved ones. That had to be some form of insanity, if not sociopathology. But the fact that I viewed kindness as more of a sign of weakness than I did sex and tears (which, if you recall from long ago in this re-telling, I absolute abhorred the idea of both before I met James) had to mean something terrible for my mental state, and perhaps it was the one true sign of the sociopathic tendencies my parents swore I had.

  Once the bathwater was running again, my eyes finally fell onto her, and for the first time, there in the dim light of the torches in the four corners of Adam’s room, I saw the damage done to her. I could feel the puffiness of my lips, so I knew they were split and swollen. I was seeing only through a slit out of my right eye, but both of her eyes were black and blue, and her lips had not only been split by a fist but had been bitten, too. My wrists were cut through from the cuffs, but not only were her wrists mangled, there were deep cuts extending several inches from her wrist wounds, telling me that she had come close to escaping. The strangulation marks around her neck were dark, grotesquely perfect handprints; I could see where the thumbs pushed in at the base of her throat, and I could see the spaces of unbruised skin between where each finger had been squeezing.

  “Does this make you pity me?” She managed to whisper through her mangled lips.

  For once, I did not know what to say. I knew that she was like me, in that she absolutely loathed having anyone’s pity, because she was strong, defiant, and proud, and having someone’s pity implies that you are weak. But her skills at heart-reading were legendary, and if I lied, she would see it, even in her state. So, I told the truth.

  “Yes. But what does it matter? You pitied me, out in the forest, after they had killed James.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, what does it matter?”

  “It does not.”

  “Okay.”

  “This would make others pity me. Our people, not theirs. Their people will celebrate it. It is what they do. I have been saved through brutality so that I may better appreciate God’s benevolence, correct? As have you. Did you hear what he said to me?”

  I knew exactly to which of Tyre’s many statements she was referring, because that same statement was stuck in the back of my mind like an eerie song that prickled my skin.

  “‘You asserted dominance over men, and now a man has asserted dominance over you.’” I said.

  “Yes. Like it is so simple. And now you pity me, and I pity myself. I feel so weak, and so broken, and this will make them all pity me, because they hated me before. I have been effectively martyred.”

  “You are not a martyr, Janna, and no one has to know.”

  “They will all know. They will spread news of the queen’s rape from here to the ends of our land. And some will pity me, while others will celebrate it, a
nd I prefer the celebration to the pity.” Tears began to fall from her eyes, and her voice broke, and never did I think that I could have pitied her more, but I did then. I felt awful for pitying her, because she was lamenting the pity she would receive, but God or Gods, I pitied her.

  “This always happens to women like us, Brynna. Unlikable women.” She whispered, “It humanizes us. It brings us down to size. It allows men like Tyre and women like Mary Bachum to believe, as they have believed for so long, that a woman who is not delicate will be made delicate after she is broken by a man’s strength and power. It is the inevitable consequence they inflict upon women like us. It is the recurring story-line we share.”

  “It is not a story-line, Janna.” I told her gently, “You are giving it far too much power. You are giving them far too much power, and you know that they already have too much. It happens because it happens, to use a very annoying tautology.” She actually smiled slightly when I said that. “It might make people sympathize with you, or pity you, or whatever. But what does it matter? They didn’t do it so people would sympathize with or pity you, they did it so they could feel superior. They are evil, and this is what they do, and they don’t just do it to women like us, who are vastly unlikeable.” This time, her smile turned to a very weak laugh. “This is who they are. And I have been unfair in my criticisms of them by focusing only on the torments to which they subject their women. They hurt men, too, albeit in different ways. I have heard their screaming thoughts over these past several days, and so I have seen the mutilations, the beatings, and the disfigurements of men they deem lesser, or men they deem dangerous. One boy was seventeen, and very handsome, and he was getting too much attention from young women. He was distracting them, and tempting them, just by being so handsome, and they burned his face, Janna.”

  She winced when I said it, and her hand reached down to squeeze mine. Her mind told me that they had threatened to do the same to her, and that she almost suffered the same punishment was part of the reason for her sudden tension and the sudden resurgence of her tears, certainly, but the larger reason was that she pictured them hurting one of her sons that way, and it made her sick. It made her cry for the young boy who had been maimed.

  “I am sorry.” I whispered, and I reached out and rested my hand on her face, “I should not have brought it up. It was a strange and random mental path that my mind traversed quite randomly, so let me arrive back at the point: They are just evil, and we cannot give them more power than they deserve by implying that through their abuses of us, they are acting in favor of some complex plan. They are not trying to humanize us, Janna, they are trying to dehumanize us. They do not want people to pity us. They are just evil. This is what evil people do. They hurt other people, and they have their reasoning behind it, but it doesn’t matter how other people—non-evil people—view what they do to us, or how they view us after it is all over. All that matters is that they are evil people, and this is what evil people do. Okay?”

  She nodded, and over the course of my speech, I had not noticed that I still had not taken my hands off of her face. Almost compulsively, my thumbs were wiping her tears away, and as I spoke, her hands had come up to cover mine, and I could see that somehow, my whole speech on the deeper meaning (or lack thereof) of what had happened to her, or the intentions of it, had comforted her. I do not know if I addressed any of what was truly bothering her in that speech, but she seemed calmer.

  It would have seemed utterly impossible to me a few hours earlier, but I was not angry with her anymore for all that had happened. I did not dislike her. In fairness, I did not like her, either, but I did not severely dislike her as I had only a few hours before. So maybe what they had done to her did humanize her. Maybe I was taking this softer approach towards her because she had been sexually assaulted and physically abused. Maybe when this happens to women in stories—any woman, not just unlikable ones—it is supposed to make us pity them, and as a result, we like them. The writer of the storyline wants us to start liking the character, so she gets raped. It is the only storyline, as Janna had said. Or maybe it is because men like Old Spirit men are evil, and this is what they do. There is no deeper significance behind it, no intentions. It is the world. Not only that, but cruel, brutal violence is genderless. It dehumanizes men, it dehumanizes women. But still, it means nothing other than that evil people commit evil acts. All evil people can do is act cruelly, and instead of pitying those against whom those evil people commit evil acts, we should pity them. The evil ones.

  Or we should kill them. Or perhaps we should do both, though it is complicated.

  “Try not to think about all this right now.” I told Janna, “God, woman, you can barely move, and you’re contemplating the philosophical significance of what they did to you.” She laughed softly again, “Let’s get your eyes open, and your wrists bandaged, and your shoulder back in place, and some food and water into you, and maybe a full night of sleep, and then we can talk for hours about it, if you want.”

  “I will not want to. I just want to pretend it never happened.”

  “Okay. We can do that, too.”

  “You are not going to argue that it is unhealthy to never speak of it again?”

  “No, because when you want to speak of it, you will. That was my experience. Plus, never underestimate the power of avoidance. Sometimes, it results in disaster, and the person doing the avoiding explodes, but sometimes, it just holds things off until you feel better able to handle them, or until you have someone who will help you handle them.”

  I looked off towards the bathroom as I said it, just as Adam came through the door. I knew that the tub had been full for a while, and he had spent the last fifteen minutes eavesdropping, so when he came back to us, I punched him in the arm.

  “Ow!” He exclaimed, “What was that for?”

  “Eavesdropping.”

  “I did no such thing!”

  I punched him again.

  “Lying.” I said.

  “Is this a sign of what our marriage will be like? Abuse goes both ways, Brynna Olivier. You just said so.”

  I looked at him, blinking slowly. Then, I sat up and punched him in the arm for a third time.

  “Ow!”

  “Irrefutable proof of eavesdropping.”

  Janna was giggling softly, and yet her laughter was more hysterical than it had been before. He looked between the two of us suspiciously.

  “Why do I get the feeling that a friendship between the two of you is a direct hazard to my wellbeing?”

  “Oh, because it is.” She said.

  “Indeed.” I agreed, “Now, go. I am feeling emotions coming, and I am more than capable of dealing with them on my own for now. Take care of my new friend, Janna.”

  “You are so bossy. What if I say no? Which I would not, but…”

  I stared at him, blinking slowly again. He tried to dodge but I still punched him.

  “Disobedience!”

  Janna was laughing so hard as he carried her into the bathroom that I feared she would hurt herself. I did some eavesdropping of my own from the bed and heard their conversation from behind the closed door.

  First it was silent, except for Adam asking if she was alright as he took her clothes off. Then he asked if the water was sufficiently hot, and she said it was. But once she was settled in the water, there was silence for a good long while, and it was Janna who broke it.

  “I should apologize.” I heard her say.

  “As should I. And we will, later. Once you are well again, Janna.”

  “We have been over for so many years, Adam, but she and James were not. They are so in love, and they have taken him away from her so they could give me to him.”

  “I know. But things are very strained right now between them. They used Contact.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “I feared that they had. She has those terrible puncture wounds at the top of her spine. For how long?”

  “Days.”
>
  “No!” She said again, “People normally cannot last hours, let alone days. God, it is irreversible, Adam. You know that.”

  “I do. And I feel nothing in regards to that except sadness, and it is not just sadness for her, it is for both of them. They were never going to last, but they did not deserve to end that way. Even he did not deserve what they did to him.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “And you, madam, did not deserve what they did to you, either.”

  “Adam…”

  “No. I will not allow you to believe it, and I can see in your heart that you do.”

  That conversation seemed personal, and unlike my new husband, I did not want to eavesdrop on emotionally loaded, private conversations. Besides, Janna’s words had joined Tyre as the eerie tune stuck now at the forefront of my mind instead of the back. “It is irreversible.”

  Irreversible. I would never, for the rest of my immortal life, feel James’s hands on me again. I would never kiss him, or lay my head on his chest, or wrap his arms around me. That desire I felt for him so intensely during every single day of our life together would remain, I knew, and it would torment me, because I knew that the second his hands touched any part of my skin, but especially the parts they had targeted with their torture, I would be besieged by awful pain and violent convulsions. That was what they had done to break us of our love for each other: They had conditioned us to feel pain at each other’s touch. It had taken days and days of relentless torture, but they had managed it. They had ended mine and James’s “infatuation” in the most final way. It was also the absolute cruelest way. The pain alone would be enough to end us, but the fact that the pain had unhinged his love for me and replaced it with hate… That would certainly end it forever. They had been able to break his mind through torturing his body, and they had irreversibly taken him away from me.

  I turned on my side away from the bathroom door, because the tears were flowing. There was no slow start-up with just one or two trickling out of each eye; they fell in huge rushes, streaking down my cheeks and splattering into the pillow case, which was soon soaked with them. The light was dim, but still, Adam and Janna would see that I was crying when they came out, and even though I had sworn that I could deal with it all myself, Adam, especially, would want to comfort me, and there was no comfort.

  So I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep. But all I could remember was how every time either James or I had begun to doze while we were in that room, they delivered a jolt to both of us. When it became obvious that we were both going to pass out, they injected us with Wake, and though it was never enough to paralyze us, it was enough to keep us painfully, cruelly alert. I remembered how during one of the first brief reprieves, James had whispered weakly to me, so weakly that I could barely hear him.

  “Hey.” He had said, “Come here.”

  It had taken quite a bit of strength, and it had pulled against the tubes that they had implanted into my back, but I had pushed my body forward and waited while he found the strength to do the same. His lips pressed to mine, and already, we both felt a slight tinge of pain, but as his kiss deepened, that pain began to dissolve. The warmth that always started in my heart and spread delicately throughout me every time he kissed me eradicated that pain completely, and as his lips moved against mine slowly, and his tongue gently pressed into mine, my hands, by their own will, twisted against the ropes, because I wanted to wrap my arms around his back and hold his body to me hard. I wanted to feel his hands on either side of my face, or running slowly down my arms, or over my back, or even cupping underneath of my butt, which he tended to do either when we kissed in public because he knew that I would smack him in the chest and call him a pervert, or when he was feeling particularly frisky and wanted our kiss to turn spontaneously into a sexual encounter, which they tended to do anyway.

  His lips had broken from mine, and he had kissed my right cheek, then my forehead, and then my left cheek, and then he had kissed my lips again. I had raised my head, expelling slowly a deep breath as his lips moved down my skin, as I felt the scratchiness of his beard-moustache-goutee-five-o-clock-shadow-perfect-thing against my neck. That scratchiness always aroused me as intensely as his lips did, and even there in that awful place, being tortured in that awful way, my breathing was deepening, and I had wanted him.

  “I love you…” He had whispered breathlessly as his lips kissed mine, “…so…” He had moved back to my neck and kissed me slowly again, “…much.”

  “I know, baby.” I had whispered back, and for the first time since we had been put there, I had let two tears fall from my eyes. “I love you, too.” My voice had broken as I had asked, “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know it. And God, you beautiful, saucy minx…”

  I had laughed.

  “I love every last thing about you.” He had said. He had nuzzled his face against mine, and before he spoke again, his voice had broken. His words were a trembling whisper that had made me cry harder, when he was finally able to say them.

  “Stay with me, sweetheart. Stay with me.”

  That moment with him would destroy me for years after that. To this day, and it has been many, many years, it pains me. To this day, somehow, it hurts as deeply as it did then.