Existence

Part Seven

I keep listening by the door, apprehensive of hearing Mare's footsteps, but there are still none. She might have slipped into the kitchen to make breakfast, but I'm finding it doubtful. She would have gone looking for my help anyway. For now I'm safe.

I've been locked in the study all night and now for most of the morning. After I realized the power of these "passcodes" Mare was leaving around the inside, I decided to look through everything that had been closed to me. There were books and magazines in storage containers all throughout the inside, with commentary on "climate change", "colonialism", "income inequality", "resource extraction", "industrialization", "post-materialism" and pictures of starvation, floods, forest fires, "mass graves" and "atomic detonations". Then there are paintings, some of which vaporized when touched with the air, that depicted blood flowing in rivers, or people chopping down trees to plant gardens or kill each other with projectiles. And then, finally, in the study, was the computer, a name I have only recently glimpsed from Mare's mind in passing.

There I found the wealth of knowledge that connected these books and photographs and painting and films and poems together. Here was everything that mankind had ever witnessed, studied, accomplished and destroyed and after hours of reading, watching and thinking, I had not even come close to scratching to the surface.

But I was getting the point.

I'm poring over an article on "જૈવિક યુદ્ધ" when I finally do hear footsteps in the hallway, but their pattern is curiously sporadic. They're light and listless, without purpose or destination, and they immediately spell that something is deeply wrong. I shut down the computer and leave the study, rearranging it from memory so that it will appear as if I had never entered.

But there's little point in doing so since Mare confronts me in the doorway. At least, I expect a confrontation, but nothing of the sort happens. She just smiles, a grin that displays every shining false tooth in her mouth and leaves her eyes shining innocent and pure. The grey of her irises seems darker somehow, no longer the colour of brightened ash, but richer and fuller, like the strokes of a fine calligrapher.

She's dressed in a curt fabric that only comes down to her knees, and wearing some sort of white stocking and black leather shoes to cover her otherwise exposed lower legs. She doesn't even bother to cover her arms although the latticework of scars makes a morbid pattern of its own. Her hair is no longer left loose and unattended, either. Instead it's intersected by a poorly crafted network of ponytails and ineptly tied ribbons.

She looks at me in a peculiar way, one for which I cannot easily find a word. It is devoid of all predispositions and predilections, empty of history and memory, open to all new ideas and experiences, curiosity without fear, naiveté without consequence and virtue without pride. Her head is titled up at me, studying my every move, not consciously as I know Mare often does, but involuntarily. She is waiting for something patiently or "sweetly" perhaps is the right word.

Mare makes a sound, "cum enim prandium...ut est prandium pater" and ever so shyly takes my hand. Her thoughts are rambling. I see images of children's toys, birthday cakes and horse saddles, but there seems to be food in almost all the backgrounds. I take this mean that I'm to make breakfast, and so I head towards the kitchen.

Mare's hand doesn't ever leave mine as I move away. She maintains her grip and matches my pace, as if I'm leading her somewhere unknown. Not even when I enter the kitchen does she stop applying pressure for a single moment. I have to physically lift her onto a chair before she bothers to let go. This causes her face to spasm and make some high pitched noises ("giggles"?), but I don't feel like I've done anything incorrect.