The Quiet Man

Wish Fulfillment

Alone isn’t good for either of us.

I don’t understand. I’ll never understand, will I. And Ella will keep telling me I need to get closure, but closure is impossible. I’m just not clever enough, am I, Sherlock. I’ll never be clever enough to understand you.

I thought you’d leap on that.

Of course I’ll never be clever enough. I’m an idiot, aren’t I?

Almost everyone is. Compared to you.

I think I’m going mad when you talk to me in my head, but I miss you when you don’t.

Well. I’ll put the kettle on, then.

I think this story is done. I’ll have another look over it tonight, then send it in. The best one so far, I’d say. Lots of dead ends, things coming clear to us in pieces. You would have hated it, I know you would have. It’s one without a proper conclusion. No one gets caught, we’re too late. The evidence goes up in smoke. You were so miserable about that. You didn’t say anything for three days. Remember that?

Sherlock?

Ah, back to blessed silence again, are we. Great. You talk to me when I don’t need you to, you interrupt me and enrage me, but you’re silent when I ask you things. Not much has changed there, I suppose.

I remember: you standing in the middle of the sitting room, your eyes focused on nothing. You were flipping through imaginary file folders, reaching up toward imaginary shelves. You stood on tip toe to see over some sort of imaginary obstacle. Your mind palace. I know what you’re doing, and I know not to interrupt you. So I just sit with a cup of tea, read the paper a little, check my email, but mostly I watch you.

I didn’t realize having someone watch you could be a problem until we went to Dartmoor. You don’t let other people watch you do this, but you’ve never asked me to leave the room. You just go, you wave your hands in the air and stare at things that aren’t there, with warning or without. You don’t mind me seeing. It’s a sign that you trust me, isn’t it? That’s how I’m going to parse it. That’s how I like to think about it.

You can root around in there for hours, your eyes shifting all over invisible things, your hands batting at nothing. Once, you started singing: it was a snippet of pop song from the 60s. That was a surprise. I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes. I almost didn’t recognize it. I think I laughed out loud, but you didn’t notice. Your perfect concentration filters me out. Or you didn’t mind. I don’t know.

You have a nice singing voice. You could have been a musician, if you’d wanted to. You’re very musical.

I moved a chair out of your way, once. You were pacing around wildly and I was worried you would trip over it. You didn’t notice. You don’t notice mundane things like that when you’re in your mind palace. They don’t exist.

You’re mesmerizing to watch, really. It reminds me how complete you are in yourself; the rest of the world just melts away for you when you want it to. Right now, the world only exists to store the information in your brain, that’s all. A structure to hold what’s actually important, what really has value. I wonder if I’m in there, holding on to some marginally useful evidence. A bag of potting soil and a bloodied hammer, probably. Things of moderate use.

Or maybe I’m a sort of shelving unit for social interaction. How to deal with a kindly-meant gift in one hand; how to apologise when you hurt someone’s feelings in the other. How to smile when they lift a camera into your face, you could keep that on my shoulder; how to react when people start to applaud for you in the crook of my elbow. I could be the hat tree of appropriate social responses in your mind palace, standing somewhere near the front door. Or in a dusty corner somewhere. In a corridor. I bet that’s what I am.