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by David Farnell, 7 November 2000
Lee watched his hands folding the multicolored, flower-patterned paper.
His short, blunt fingers, their nails carefully trimmed, moved precisely, smoothly, dancing through the steps he'd done a thousand times each. He kept his left thumbnail slightly long to aid in creasing the folds as sharply as possible. It was a pleasure to see his hands working together so well. Cooperation was key. They would be rewarded for it. He punished them when they quarrelled. He hated that.
*Origami*. Literally, "folding paper." He finished the crane. A thousand cranes. A hundred of them sat on the table next to his bed, the windowsill, the bed itself. Today's work, and a project finished. Cranes, simple compared to some of the things he folded, but these he made for a reason. The other nine hundred he'd given to his doctor, who was stringing them for him like people used to do with popcorn for Christmas trees. Lee wasn't allowed thread and a needle. They'd let him have a spool of thread and a needle a few months ago, and he'd gone and done a stupid thing with them. He spread his fingers wide, gazing at the backs of his hands, feeling a good ache in his joints. The little scars along the inner edges of the first three fingers of his left hand were hardly visible.
He chuckled ruefully. Sewing his fingers together had been stupid, indeed, but it had also worked. Red Thomas had relinquished the hand.
Punishment.
It had taken nearly two years, but Lee was regaining control. He turned his hands over and glanced for a moment at the horizontal scars across the palms, like mouths. Not scars, really, but marks where the palms had gaped open once. He shuddered away from memories of teeth and tongues and feeding, and quickly brought his hands together, used the index finger of his right hand to stroke the ridges of healed wounds on his left, letting Edgar comfort Cordelia. They clasped each other, fingers interlacing, and he brought them up to his mouth, closing his eyes to whisper to them.
"That's it, you two, hold onto each other. You done good work this week. I know you love each other. But you gotta think of the others, too. We all gotta work together now."
Anyone observing him would think he was praying. Anyone but Doc--he could never fool Doc. Then again, he'd never really needed to.
"OK, y'all let go now." Cordelia and Edgar hesitated, but they let go, slowly unlacing their fingers. He picked up a rabbit skin off his pillow, one side soft, soft fur, the other supple leather. The hands caressed the fur, the skin, each other, sensually, almost erotically. He smiled at them, enjoying their love for one another.
Reward.
A soft knock on the door brought him back to the room. Cordelia, the skittish one, flinched, but the right hand, gentle Edgar, comforted her, running his thumb along the side of her, wrist to the first knuckle of her thumb, the rabbit skin between them. Lee waited a moment, glancing around the spartan room, the bolted-down furniture, the sky-blue walls and ceiling. Then with a sigh, he said, "Come in." His voice was low and soft, but it was clear and it carried.
The door opened. It hadn't been locked for some months now, except for a week after the sewing incident, when they'd decided it was important to regulate his movements again. Doc came in. His long, gray hair was tied back, and he wore a tweed jacket that looked almost respectable. Lee smiled at the reddish dog hairs that clung to it. Doc wore his usual little smile, small but with none of that Mona Lisa secret-joke feel to it, pleasant really. It widened slightly when he looked at Lee's hands, but Lee could see a tenseness around his eyes. Something was up.
"Everybody behaving today?" Doc asked. It wasn't in any way intended to be cruel. Doc knew all about it. How Lee had shattered, and why. And why it was very, very important that Lee never reintegrate his personality.
"No problems, Doc. Everyone's happy. Or quiet, at least." Lee held up the final crane. "One thousand. 'Less I lost count."
Doc grinned, but the grin faltered. "That's good, Lee." He looked away, not smiling now, his mouth set.
Lee leaned back on the bed. "Come on, Doc, what's up? Somebody up the chain decided I ain't ready for a day out yet?" Finishing the string of a thousand cranes had been meant as a signal that he was ready for some more freedom, that his clashing personality fragments, what Lee called his "sock puppets," were controlled and working together. Lee and Doc had been planning to take the crane-chains and lay them like flowers on the concrete floor of a basement in an old house a state away. A way of saying goodbye to Lee's cellmates, buried under that floor because their very corpses would have provided proof of things Lee had sworn to keep hidden from the mass of humanity, for its own sake.
Doc shook his head. "No, man, that's not it. There's someone here to see you. A Ms. Verde."
Lee's brow wrinkled for a moment, then cleared when he remembered something from the semester of high-school Spanish he'd taken over a decade ago. He chuckled again and shook his head. "Well. A night at the opera, huh? Which one's she taking me to?"
Doc shrugged. "You know they don't tell me shit about operations. Not till after it's over and I have to put people back together." He looked significantly at Lee. "Or not, in some cases." Lee laughed, deep and easy. Doc had never played shrink-games with Lee--he'd always been straight about what was wrong and what needed to be done to fix it, after they'd figured it out. Doc had known from the start that it wasn't childhood trauma that had turned Lee into a spasmodic freak, limbs each possessed by a different personality fragment, warring to control more physical territory. It wasn't multiple-personality syndrome at all, not as it was conventionally understood.
The trauma had come from a book, a photocopy of a handwritten manuscript that Lee and his partners had been tasked with finding. Or rather, what came after, when Lee had unwisely read it. His partners in W Cell were dead by then, and he'd thought he hadn't long to live himself. And despite the warnings from Alphonse, he'd wanted to *know*, to know what they'd died for, what he was going to die for. Well, he'd learned all right. And he'd lived.
It's not easy to kill a god, after all.
The words of the book had introduced a virus into his mind, an information virus that had rewritten some of his thought patterns, allowing them to come in tune with those of an ancient being from another reality. Well, that was the analogy that Doc used, and it was just a hypothesis, after all. Lee had become a door, a vessel, for a god--a god in the old sense, a thing inhuman and powerful and capricious, to be avoided and propitiated and warded away, never loved. It had lived in him, warping his body and making him feed its monstrous hunger.
But he'd found a way to force it out. It couldn't control a mind broken into more than two dozen pieces. And after he'd been identified as a weeks-missing BATF agent, he'd been transferred here, under Doc's personal care. Doc had listened to and believed Lee's insane story, and had developed the therapy that allowed Lee to reconquer his body, through threats and kindness, and eventually get himself to a state where he could function in a semblance of normality. Doc had never tried to heal Lee, because healing would only make him vulnerable again to possession by the thing that still sometimes whispered abominations to Lee late at night, until he turned Red Thomas loose on it to chase it away.
Thomas was a nasty son of a bitch, but he was damn good in a fight.
Lee brought his attention away from his internal politics and back to Doc. "All right, then. When do I meet her?"
"She's waiting in my office. You don't have to see her, you know. And you can say no, even if she says you can't."
"Doc," Lee smiled, "you oughtta know better than anyone that there ain't nobody in the goddam universe can make Lee Burroughs do what he don't want. Not for long, anyways."
Doc smiled back, the tension mostly gone. "Yeah, don't know what I was thinking."
Lee looked down at his body. He'd lost weight, but he was still big, and he'd been exercising a lot in the past few months, the full-body physical activity forcing his internal rabble to work together, just as the origami did in finer detail. "All right now, let's go," he told them. He stood smoothly, a good sign. He'd been worried that some rebel had taken over a leg when he wasn't paying attention. His body politic was an unruly confederation with frequent attempts at seccession. He forced his hands to drop the rabbit skin. "And you two," he told them. "Don't embarrass me, OK?"
He and Doc left the room together. Lee wondered if he'd ever come back to it, and whether he'd miss it. They walked through the halls of the "rest home," the walls clean, relaxing blues and greens, no obvious institutional abuses. Lee knew they had a lot of rich patients--he could only imagine how his care was being paid for. "I guess I'm not gonna have time to visit Walter and Wei with the cranes, am I? You'll take care of that for me, Doc?"
"Let's wait and see what Ms. Verde says. Maybe you'll be able to take care of it yourself after all."
Lee shrugged his big shoulders. "It's OK, Doc. I said goodbye to them every time I finished one of them birds. I don't really need to go the place itself now."
"Well, you know better than me." They paused before Doc's office door. Doc gave him a sad look. "Lee, don't let them just use you up and toss you aside, OK?"
Lee grinned, making his ugly face light up, charming. "Hell, Doc, maybe I'm using them." Doc couldn't help but smile in return.
Doc opened the door, and Lee went in to meet his new CO.
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