Gatac

  “Day Four,” Dolr said. “Time for a walk.”

  She had long since stopped believing him about anything, but mostly the days. He’d told her Day Two and Day Three so many times, it all blurred together. Without a window or sunlight shining into the room, she had no way to confirm or contradict him. But she had also stopped fighting him. Not because she didn’t hate him. She hated him just fine, more than she had ever hated anyone, even the assholes who walked past her when she was hungry and begging them for something, anything. Dolr was worse than a thousand of them even if, as he cimed, he hadn’t left her to die like them. He kept her and tortured her and didn’t flinch from it, didn’t pause, didn’t even try to pretend he felt sorry about it. But she was tired of fighting him, tired in a way she couldn’t recall having ever been, and she had nothing left to fight him with. She was just drained and scared and craving and — having tried everything else — she said nothing and did nothing and just imagined that at some point, the torture would end, one way or another. Eventually, if she stopped moving, she would shrivel up and die from it. She would die and everything would stop hurting.

  She had been shackled to the bed most of the time. That pstic tube in her arm was actually attached to a port with a line running into a vein she hadn’t ruined. The other end of the tube was hooked up to IV bags during the time; that was also how she got her methadone, not nearly enough to feel good, just enough to actually be present for the rest of the torture. It only came off when he got her out of the bed for walking. Walking, walking, walking back and forth through the small room, the door outside locked so she couldn’t run.1If you were wondering, no, this is not an appropriate treatment protocol for substance addiction.While I’ve got your skin crawling, let’s talk about the mental trauma of medical treatment. Even hospital patients with no prior mental health issues can be affected by such things as unfamiliar surroundings, being at the mercy of the hospital’s schedule and having unfamiliar people in their personal space, all before we even add pain, discomfort and the various indignities of medical treatment on top. Then there’s the feelings about the illness requiring the hospital stay, possible side effects from treatment…whatever you call it, post-hospital syndrome or post-intensive care syndrome or just pin PTSD, it’s a real problem that we’re only starting to pay attention to. Again, that’s for treatment that’s not even connected to mental health. Now imagine all this with someone who’s in treatment for a mental illness that might require restraining them for their safety or that of others. So you can add on top the experience of being tied up against your will, possibly wrestled to the ground by strangers and forcibly medicated, all the while being in an altered state of mind that distorts your perceptions of time, space and self, feeling detached from yourself or hallucinating. Sounds fucking scary, doesn’t it?And remember, this is for people we’re ostensibly trying to help. Read up on abuses of quote-unquote psychiatry to imprison and torture political dissidents behind the Iron Curtain sometime. That stuff will make you lie awake at night.

  “You’re gonna waste away if you don’t move,” he told her.2This, on the other hand, is a decent principle. Hospitals today encourage post-op patients to get back on their feet as soon as possible. Bedridden patients are at increased risk of all sorts of physical and mental ailments. It felt like he had told her a hundred times. Maybe wasting away was the better outcome. Better than walking back and forth in this concrete box.

  The walks ended with a little taste of freedom in that very nice bathroom. That’s where she brushed her teeth and showered. He would ask her “Number 1 or 2?” and leave her to it, as much as turning his back to her was leaving her to it. The one thing he wouldn’t let her do was flush. He watched her wash hands afterwards, the st little treat to ring out the nice times. Back to the room, back to the bed, back to hell. Sometimes she wondered if she should put any effort at all into pying along, or if she should just keep sitting on the toilet and refuse him even that bit of cooperation, or if she should try to lunge at him and power past him and run, just run. But on another Day Four, when he actually went outside for a while and locked her in the bathroom for the time, she had a moment to think it through, and realized that no, she wouldn’t try to run, because she had absolutely no idea what she would do next.

  Instead, she walked back with him, back into the room. He made her go inside and locked the door behind her. She moved to the folding table he had set up next to the bed and waited. On one Day Three, she had caught a glimpse of something worse than hell. Another room in the hallway, usually locked but with the door ajar that time. She hadn’t seen much, just walls cd in bck leather and a metal cage bolted to the floor. He hadn’t talked about the cage, or the room as a whole. Not a word. But it was there across the hall, it was always there, and sometimes when she felt like she was starting to drop her guard, she remembered the cage until those feelings went away again. Oh, she knew the cage, had studied every detail of it in her mind. The threat to her was obvious: behave yourself or your situation will get worse.

  The door reopened, revealing nothing. Even the hallway outside was too far away from the world to see any sunshine, and like always Dolr entered with a prison cafeteria tray containing exactly three things: a bowl with brown goop, a pstic spoon and some bottled water.

  “Lunch time,” he said, plopping the tray down in front of her. The meals only differed by what he called them. Every time he would make her finish the bowl and the bottle. Well, not every time. She knew that she had fought him once — tried to fight him — and had spent the next few meals tied to the bed with him spoon-feeding her. She had denied him even this until he had seized her head by the hair and then, only then, was she so scared of him that she went along with it. Clearly he was capable of everything and she had grown more careful in how she tested him. So, this time, she didn’t fight him. She looked at it.“I’m not eating that,” she said.“It’s just —” he began.“Peanut butter and milk powder,”3One particurly grisly aspect of treating malnourishment is that the human digestive system is a complex apparatus that changes in reaction to what it has to digest. Someone who is literally starving (and not “literally starving right now omg”) hasn’t missed a meal or two, they have been deprived of nutrients to such a degree that they no longer have the capability to digest food the same way as a healthy person. Have you ever been so sick that the only thing you could stomach was something mild and bnd like rice pudding? Yeah, this, but you don’t just feel half-dead, you are.In any event, the category of so-called therapeutic foods generally includes foodstuffs that are easy to digest, energy-dense and packed with essential nutrients. Other requirements can include cheap manufacture and shelf-stability for use as disaster aid. At the low end, therapeutic food frequently resembles trail food favored by hikers, as the requirements are rgely simir; at the high end, you’re getting closer to total meal repcement formutions like Ensure or Soylent. Mind, this is all for milder cases of malnutrition. Beyond that, you’re looking at very invasive treatment like a nasogastric feeding tube and intramuscur injections with around-the-clock monitoring.Dolr’s using his own take on citadel spread, by the way. she cut him off. She remembered, of course. It came bubbling right out of her. She’d heard him expin a hundred times. “I’m not eating it.”“It ain’t negotiable,” he said.“Fuck you!” she screamed. The st time she had screamed at him over the meal, she had also tried to start up off the bed, which had only made her stumble and fall to the floor. She had hurt herself and he had shouted at her about it, carried her into bed and treated her there. So this time she just screamed, screamed until she had no more air to push out of her lungs. She found herself bent forward, sucking in air and locking eyes on him.“Yeah,” he said.

  It confused her. She considered jumping up, considered trying to lunge at him again, but it hadn’t worked st time and she didn’t feel like she had the strength for it anyway. She also considered screaming at him again, but what was the point? She hadn’t wanted to scream at him the first time.

  “I’m not eating that,” she repeated instead, looking down, but she could feel his eyes on her. “It tastes like shit.”“It tastes like peanuts and milk,” he said.“It’s gross,” she said.“Yeah, I guess it is,” he said.“I’m not eating that,” she said again.“What was the st thing you ate?” he asked her. She looked up at him. “Before you came here. What did you eat?”“— a hot dog,” she said. She wasn’t sure, but she ate a lot of hot dogs. Good food, easy to eat on the move, get it anywhere around the city. It seemed as correct as any other answer.“When was that?” he asked.

  She didn’t know. Fuck him for asking that, fuck him for trying to make her remember, because she couldn’t. She honestly couldn’t remember.

  “When was the st time you ate something home-cooked?”4A serious problem facing people in precarious situations is food variety / avaibility of healthy food options. Fresh vegetables are often expensive to get if they’re not grown locally, as is high-quality meat. Even then, many healthy food options assume access to a fully-stocked kitchen and the time, energy and skills needed to prepare the food. This is a not inconsiderable investment that many of us take for granted, but people with limited income, those without a home, those who live in a so-called food desert without the option to venture outside for their groceries or even those struggling with mental illness can all find themselves stuck with eating unhealthily. Hell, be a single parent with a full-time job, see how much time and energy you've got left in the evening to cook a fresh meal. Few of us are under the delusion that 'convenience' food is good for us, but it is cheap and filling and designed to be a certain kind of tasty.Fuck me if I know the solution to this issue, though. he asked. “What’s the st vegetable you ate? Sauerkraut on the dog? You get it with the works? You don’t look like you’ve ordered anything with the works in your whole damn life. So, what else we got? Pickles on a burger? Or maybe you asked for just the pattie, saved twenty cents for your next high? Or a couple of stale buns they were gonna throw out anyway? Thrifty. Who needs vitamins or minerals, right?”“Fuck you,” she said, quietly this time.“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. “How much do you weigh?”

  She didn’t know.

  “You wanna guess, at least?” he said. “Big prize if you guess it.”“Fuck you,” she said.“Close, but jury says no,” he said. “83 pounds soaking wet when you came in.5If you were wondering, that’s not even 5th percentile weight for her age. Ky is dangerously underweight here. Bet you five bucks you wouldn’t break 85 if I weighed you after this meal.”She said nothing.“You know who else eats this?” he said, pointing at the bowl. “Famine victims. Little kids in Africa. Yeah, it’s not fun, but I don’t give a fuck if you think this is fun. It’s gross and it tastes weird and you’re sick of it, I know all that. It doesn’t matter. You’re a fucking twig and the first strong wind could snap you right off, I am not fucking kidding. So you need to get back to a healthy weight. This is how you do it. Nothing fancy, nothing heavy, just good pin spread with what your body needs. You’re gonna eat it until you’re at least in the triple digits.”She said nothing, just looked away, at anything but him or the food or the bed.“You know what?” he said. “Fuck it. We could py a little game to lighten the mood in here. Don’t worry, it’s a real simple game. You just tell me what you want to eat and I go get it for you. You want a deli sandwich, the blue pte special, shit, you want lobster thermidor? Tell me and you can get it. You ever feel sick when you skip a meal or three and then get some in you again? That’s a warning sign, girl. But fuck warning signs, right? Let’s just do it, my treat. We can both share the wonderful experience of you spraying it out on both ends. Does that sound like a good time to you? I bet it does. Being miserable seems like your main thing, so you gotta like it, yeah?”She said nothing.“But, sad news, I can’t let you py,” he continued. “So sorry. You must be at least this far from death to ride. ‘But how close to death am I, Dr. Dolr?’ Girl, you’re retaining water like a fucking camel. You’re just this side of needing a nephrectomy.6Surgical removal of a kidney. And I can’t imagine your liver’s doing so hot, either. If I feed you a turkey dinner with extra gravy on the side right now, chances are it’ll give you a heart attack.7There are, of course, psychological challenges such as possible ck of appetite or food aversions as a result of the trauma of starvation. Vomiting, diarrhea or internal bleeding in the digestive tract will all further weaken the patient. And because all that’s not quite nasty enough, there’s also a way that a previously starving person could literally gorge themselves to death just by giving them a normal amount of food. That’s called refeeding syndrome. Basically, their depleted stores of essential minerals can’t keep up with the demands of digesting all that food. If it’s caught in time, reducing food intake for a few days and supplementing minerals and vitamins is the proven treatment. If it’s not, they’re on the highway to acute heart failure. In medical terms, that’s bad news. Ain’t that the most fucked up thing you’ve heard this week?”She said nothing.“Bottom line, you want to eat real-deal food, you can’t,” he said. “You want to flush the toilet, well guess what, I need to get eyes on your shits because that’s the only clue I got to how healthy your guts are. I love doing it, couldn’t think of a better use of my fucking medical degree.8The appropriate measurement would be the Bristol Stool Scale, if you’re curious. Which I imagine you’re not. Welcome to the razor’s edge between TIL and TMI. You don’t want to fucking know what I do to keep you alive.“

  She looked up at him. Anger was almost as good as strength and it poured out of her.

  “And for what?” she growled. “I’m not worth shit.” She lowered her voice. “And I’ll die before I’ll let you sell me.”Dolr stared at her. “Sell you?”“Don’t fuck with me!” she yelled. “I saw the cage! I saw the fucking cage, you sick fuck!”Dolr stared at her for a while longer.“Don’t you fucking touch me again,” she said, quieter now. “You try anything, I swear I’ll give you a fight you won’t forget.”

  Dolr folded his hands in front of his face and closed his eyes. She tensed to pounce at him, stopped only by not yet understanding why he was giving her an opening.

  “It’s fantasy,” he said, muffled by his hands. He put them down on the table and looked at her again. “It’s fantasy. Pretend. Okay? Fuck, what do you think I do here?”She had no answer for that.“That’s my pyroom, girl,” he continued. “I’m not pying with you, girl, and I’m not getting my rocks off, believe it or not. I’m keeping you locked up because I can’t trust your scrawny ass to stick to screaming at me instead of hurting yourself worse. You got a talent for it, you know that?”“…fuck you,” she whispered.

  He sighed.

  “Eat your fucking lunch,” he said. “Jesus fuck.”

  Day Ten with the girl didn’t start much better than Day Nine, or Day Eight. Dolr felt it his bones, how tired he was and how angry he was and all that. It’s the disease, he told himself every time before he went into the girl’s room, but it wasn’t easy to keep telling himself that. He could deal with her hating him, or at least he thought he could when he started, but it was wearing him down just like the ck of sleep. Back in the day, he hadn’t seen eye to eye with ‘the team’, bunch of mighty whitey know-it-alls having a ugh pying soldier in the ‘nam. But as useless as they were, at least it meant he got to take a few hours off every day. Here by his lonesome, though, he only had himself to clean up the clinic, deal with the customers and take care of the girl, a girl that produced abusive verbal diarrhea and actual literal shit in seemingly equal measure.

  He was starting to wonder if he ought to make good on his threat and Ket her again, if only to get some peace and quiet. It wasn’t a nice thought; it was a wildly irresponsible and unethical thought, and he took it for a sign of how tired he was that he had even had it in the first pce, but being that it was there, he couldn’t just ignore it. He knew he had crossed several lines already, but he couldn’t let it show, couldn’t apologize, couldn’t expin — it would only give the disease more leverage. He’d have to find some way to make the girl less…stressful. And the best idea he had come up with so far was the calendar, a big calendar he had hung up on Day Eight in direct sight of the bed. With a bck marker, he crossed out the events of each day as they happened. He hoped it would at least convince her that he wasn’t lying about the dates to mess with her head. She still couldn’t account for her dark moments and memory distortions, but maybe, if she wracked her brain on how he could cheat her and came up empty, she would at least accept that the problem was in her head.

  Yeah. Fat chance.

  “Hello?” came a call from the front desk. It was Mary-Anne Simmons. Fucking hell. That woman just couldn’t take a fucking clue, and hadn’t he locked up anyway?“Yeah, yeah,” Dolr shouted back, then trudged to the waiting room. As he came down the hallway, he saw Simmons close the door behind her, still dangling the emergency key from her right hand. Fuck, Dolr thought. You trust one person —“What happened here?” Anne asked, nodding toward the taped-up windows. “Is anybody giving you trouble? You should have called me.”“I don’t like owing the Thieves,” Dolr said.“Not for pay — as a personal favor,” Anne said.“I like owing you even less,” Dolr said. So much for that topic. “You got a medical emergency?”“No,” Anne said. “You haven’t been answering my calls. What is going on?”“What’s going on is that you’re leaving,” Dolr said. “I don’t do social visits. Next time you walk through that door, you better be bleeding all over my floor.”

  Just then, the girl screamed. Shit. She must’ve heard the conversation.

  “And who exactly is that?” Anne asked.“A patient,” Dolr said. “She’s dealing with some shit.”“Help!” the girl howled from the back room. “Help! Let me out!”“Christ,” Dolr said, pinching the bridge of his nose. The girl must have rubbed her two brain cells together to listen for customers coming in. Just his fucking luck she’d picked Mary-Anne Simmons to perform for.“Dolr,” Anne said. Her voice dropped low like he’d never heard it before. “Who is that?”“Look, why don’t you just —” Dolr began. Anne started for him and he took a step back before he even realized he was moving. By the time he had his hands up, Anne had already seized him by the colr of his shirt.“Who is that?” Anne demanded.“None of your goddamn —” Dolr began. Anne shoved him away and he stumbled to the floor, barely catching himself. “Jesus Christ,” he coughed, then he felt her fingers slide down the back of his neck. Anne grabbed him by the shirt colr and dragged him with her. “…fucking…let me…” he choked out.

  He did the best he could with it all, filing his arms as if hitting her on the leg would do a damn thing, but it didn’t take her very long to haul them both into the hallway. She followed the girl’s cries all the way to the back room, where she shoved him up against the door.

  “Help!” the girl screamed from inside.“Open the door,” Anne said. Dolr scrambled for purchase against the wall while he tried to sort out standing up on his own. He could do nothing against her and he hated every second of it.“Fuck!” he shouted, but not at her.“Open the door, Dolr,” Anne said, “before I put you through it.”“Jesus,” Dolr said, fumbling for his keys. “Alright, alright! You wanna see a zombie, I’ll show you a fucking zombie.”9Also not a very nice thing to say about victims of substance abuse.

  He managed to unlock the door only to be pushed aside. Anne went in and he followed her. Predictably enough, the girl shouted one more time and made a show of fighting against the restraints, then turned on the waterworks.

  “Help me, please,” the girl breathed between sobs. “Please. Help me.”“What’d I tell you?” Dolr said, coming up at Anne’s side. “Simmons, zombie, zombie, Simmons. Charmed, I’m sure. There, are we happy now? Can we stop this bullshit little spot check now?“Please, you gotta help me,” the girl cried.“I am helping you!” Dolr shouted back. “Jesus.” He closed his eyes, took a breath, counted to five: ūnus, duo, trēs, quattuor, quīnque.“How long have you been here?” Anne asked the girl. Her voice was even. Not calm, Dolr noted. Distinction with a deadly difference.“I don’t know,” the girl said.“Ten days now,” Dolr cut in. “Ten days! I told you! See the calendar on the wall?” he said, for both Anne’s and the girl’s benefit. “Ten days. Ten days of helping her. She broke in, by the way. Wrecked that window and a door so she could try and steal from me. But she needed help, so I’m helping her, Simmons.”“Please,” the girl said. “He drugged me and he keeps me here, and he does these things —”“Oh no,” Dolr said. “Hell no. Not with a ten-foot pole.”“What is her name?” Anne asked him. Still even.“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Dolr said. “You think spun-up jailbait carries ID?”“Ky!” the girl shouted. “I’m Ky! Please please please, you have to help me!”

  Anne harrumphed. Dolr had never heard her harrumph.

  “Ky, I am very sorry we had to meet this way,” Anne said to her, then turned to look at him. “I will go outside with Dolr now, but I promise I will be back in a few minutes to talk to you.”“No, no!” the girl shrieked. “Please! Help!”“I will be back,” Anne said. Then she looked at him and turned away.

  He went with her, too afraid not to.

  Dolr locked the door behind him, locked the screaming and wailing in with the girl, while Anne loomed over him. He was burning with anger, but anger wouldn’t help anything, so he choked it down and locked the door up tight before he turned to the killer.

  “Thanks for making this a hundred times harder,” he said. It was easy to be angry at thin air so he went with that, not looking up at her. “Just had her fucking settled down, but no, here comes Swinging Dick Simmons busting down my door, drop everything right now, she wants to know what’s going on. So gd I could educate you! Now are you gonna fuck off and ruin somebody else’s day, or do you want to push me around some more?”“We should talk about this situation,” Anne said. She paused, as if the muffled screams behind the door still held valuable clues. “Your office?”“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Dolr said.

  They went down the hallway and around the bend and up the stairs. Dolr walked up front, not entirely sure if Anne wasn’t aiming that gun of hers at his back. It sure felt like she was, so he led her quickly through his living space. He didn’t need her dwelling on all the shit that was piling up, garbage bags he hadn’t had time to take out st Tuesday, dishes in the sink, the boxes of takeout he’d ordered in rather than cooking. He led her into his reading room, which doubled as his office by dint of all the paperwork he had stored in it. He plopped himself into his leather chair, while Anne pulled up an ottoman from the corner and sat on that. It wasn’t made for sitting on, least of all by somebody her size. If only he had had the leisure to ugh at her.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dolr groaned. At least up there, he couldn’t hear the screaming anymore. “I can not deal with your shit right now. Say what you’re gonna say, I got work to do.”“I reacted too harshly in the moment and for this I owe you an apology,” Anne said. “I am sorry, Dolr. I should like to know more about the situation, then, if I may.”Dolr sat up at hearing that. He wanted to smile, but he wanted to y into Anne more, now that it seemed safer to do so.“Maybe next time you’ll let me expin all the way first. Jesus fuck —”“Dolr,” she said, and he stopped. “I appreciate your aggravation and I consider it well-earned. Let’s leave it at that.”“Let’s not,” Dolr shot back. “And don’t you fucking cut me off again. I got a lot of words for you but the problem is, I ain’t got the time. You think I got the fucking time to be mad at you? Do you know when I st got some shuteye? Wasn’t st night, I’ll tell you that for free.”“That is my concern exactly,” Anne said. “While I am not qualified to assess the medical merits of your treatment, this is obviously not a one-man job and running yourself ragged trying to do it by your lonesome won’t come to a good end, by my estimation. Further —”“Get to the fucking point,” Dolr said.“Further,” Anne said, leaning forward, “that girl clearly does not care for your efforts and I don’t believe she brought her own hospital gown. Where are her possessions?”“Possessions?” Dolr said.“Her clothes,” Anne probed. “Or do you mean to tell me she broke in here bare as the Lord made her?”“Nah, just the rattiest shit you’ve ever seen,” Dolr said. “Could stand up and walk outta here without her in it.”“So?” Anne said.“Threw it out,” Dolr said.“You threw away her clothes,” Anne said.“I tossed out the trash,” Dolr said. “The puke stains were structural. Would’ve been lucky to pull a handful of buttons out of the washing machine. What, you think I was gonna keep her like this forever? I’ll get her some new stuff when she’s ready to leave the room.”“You have, of course, calmly expined this to her,” Anne said.

  Dolr said nothing.

  “My perspective, then,” Anne said. “You stripped her of everything she owns and are keeping her prisoner. In this manner you have told her all too clearly that you see nothing worth keeping about her in particur and that you only desire that she emerge from this ordeal to your complete satisfaction, if indeed you have given her cause to believe she will emerge at all. Given these impressions, I should doubt your promises just as she does even if I knew you to be a saint, and I do believe that you have shown yourself to her as less than such.”

  Dolr said nothing.

  “How did you even get her to agree to this treatment in the first pce?” Anne asked.

  Dolr said nothing.

  “I see,” Anne said. “Who is paying you to hold her captive?”“…what?” Dolr said. “Ain’t nobody paying me to do this shit. You couldn’t. I’m doing this because she needs help.”“I have not known you to do charitable work and if you have, such experience does not show here,” Anne said. “Excuse my skepticism.”“I’m not gonna excuse shit,” Dolr said. He bared his teeth. “If the next words outta your mouth are not ‘Sorry to bother you, Dolr, goodbye’, you can go right ahead and tell the Thieves that they’re cut off. See how they like it when you fuck it up for your whole crew.”Anne gred at Dolr. After a few seconds, she nodded. “Sorry to bother you, Dolr,” she said, getting up from the ottoman. “Goodbye.” She turned away from him and walked toward the door.Dolr ran his hands over his face. “Wait,” he said, as quietly as he could remember ever saying a word. This was broken. It was his calling to fix broken things. He couldn’t leave it like this so he didn’t. “Wait,” he said again, louder this time.Anne stopped in pce, but didn’t turn around. “Is there business left to discuss?” she asked.“…no,” Dolr said. “Okay, fuck. Looks like I started giving a shit about your opinions and didn’t notice. Just one thing I gotta get off my chest first.”

  Anne turned her head to look over her shoulder.

  “Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, Simmons,” Dolr said. “You got your life narrowed down to who needs to get capped and who doesn’t and fuck, whatever works for you, but shit’s a little more complicated over here. You got no right to stroll in here acting like it’s all so fucking obvious. Yeah, so I got her to shoot up with K instead of the dope she wanted and locked her in while she was out. I ain’t saying I was fucking nice about it, but the girl was gonna get herself killed out there. The fuck else was I supposed to do?”“Well,” Anne said, turning to face him. “You could have asked her if she even wanted your help. Instead, you deceived her and took her prisoner. You could have offered to send her to a treatment facility that specializes in addiction and pay for it. Instead, you assumed you could do the job here all by your lonesome. You could have called me for assistance. Instead, you poisoned your mind with the notion that I would seek to profit off the most selfless act I have seen you commit. Is this truly how you conceive of me?” She let it hang in the air for a moment. “I don’t condemn your earnest impulse to help her. Beneficence is a godly act no matter whence it may stem. But you have gone about it in a decidedly poor way.”“O-kay,” Dolr said. “You got this shit all figured out in a second. You’re right, charity ain’t my style. Read you five by five, next little girl needs help, I’m sending her straight to you.” He sagged back into his chair again. “Sounds like you got a pn. Now you wanna be all Mary Seacole and wipe her ass for a change, be my guest, but I guaran-fucking-tee your heart will bleed a little less for…”“Ky,” Anne threw in.“For poor little Ky, after you’ve wasted ten days having that banshee screaming how much she hates you while she’s trying to slow-motion kill herself, you feel me?” Dolr continued. “That ain’t a little girl down there, it’s a disease. All she wants — all she says and does — is to get outta here so she can keep shooting up. I ain’t gonna let that happen.”“I understand that,” Anne said. "But I don’t believe she does, not truly. Let me speak to her. Her opinion of this…treatment can only improve from here.”Dolr scoffed.“Now, I should like to see you get some sleep,” Anne said. “I will handle Ky while you rest up.”“Handle her?” Dolr asked.“I have been taking care of Alexander for eleven years,” Anne said. “Do not mistake my concern for pity. I can weather a few hours of being screamed at. Should there be an actual emergency, I will come and wake you.” She sighed. “Not a service, not a favor, no strings attached. Consider it part of my apology, instead.”

  Dolr considered it.

  “Two hundred,” he said.“Like I said,” Anne repeated, “consider it part of my apology.”“No,” Dolr said. “You got it twisted. You apologize by paying me. You disrespected me, you intimidated me, you put hands on me — that shit ain’t cool. But I ain’t feel like arguing about it no more. I’m fucking tired of her and you both. If your pn keeps both of you out of my hair for a hot fucking minute, I’m down. So, two hundo and we’re cool and you read her a dictionary or whatever you do for funsies while I catch some Zs. Deal?”

  Anne reached for her money clip.

  “Deal,” she said.

  “Oh, please,” Ky said, before Anne had even finished walking through the door into her room. “Please, you gotta help me.”“I suppose I do,” Anne said. She closed the door behind her, then walked toward the bed, scooping up a folding chair on the way. “I am Simmons, if you didn’t catch it before,” she said, setting the chair next to the bed.“Please,” Ky mewled.Anne moved around the chair; looming over Ky made the girl flinch away, and only then did Anne sit down. “I am sorry,” she said.“…what?” Ky said.“I am sorry that you are in this situation,” Anne said, “and I am sorry that I can’t do what you are begging me to do.”

  Ky turned away from her. After a moment, she squeezed her eyes closed.

  “That doesn’t mean I will be cruel to you,” Anne said, to no apparent reaction from Ky. “Dolr is going to get some sleep. I think it is for the best. So the two of us will have plenty of time to talk.”“Go to hell,” Ky said.“Why do you think I came back?” Anne asked.

  Ky said nothing.

  “I came back because I involved myself in your situation by forcing my way in here,” Anne said. “That gives me responsibility for what happens to you.”

  Ky said nothing.

  “I have a proposal,” Anne said. “I propose that while I am here, talking to you, I will leave your arms unshackled. In return, you behave yourself.” She paused. “Do you accept this?”

  Ky said nothing.

  “If I don’t hear a ‘yes’ from you,” Anne said, “then I will stop talking and you may continue screaming at your own leisure.”

  Ky took a breath. Then she said “yes”. She didn’t fight it when Anne reached for her right arm and undid the cuff around her wrist. Her arm kept lying at her side when Anne walked around to work on her left arm, but it afforded Ky the opportunity to take another look at Anne. Anne didn’t smile, maybe never had, and Ky flinched when Anne’s thumb touched her above her wrist, just beyond the reddish band of skin that had been hidden by the cuff.

  “Does it hurt?” Anne asked.“Duh,” Ky told her.“I shall see if I can find a balm for it when I fetch us some water,” Anne said, then met Ky’s eyes. “Now, did you mean to rub your wrists raw?”Ky said nothing.“Do you think it is unjust to be pced in a situation where you have no good options?” Anne asked her.Ky said nothing. She nodded, though.“So we agree on that,” Anne said. She rose from her crouch and walked around the end of the bed again. “Do you remember when you ran out of good options?”Ky shook her head.“It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?” Anne said.“You ask a lot of questions,” Ky said.“You don’t give a lot of answers,” Anne countered. She sat back down on the folding chair. “But that is alright. I prefer my privacy, too.”

  Ky hesitated.

  “Why do you have a gun?” she asked.“Don’t imagine you can seize it,” Anne said. “That wouldn’t end well for you.”“…are you some kind of cop?” Ky asked.“No,” Anne said. “I am not.”“Oh,” Ky said.“If I was,” Anne said, “would you still want me to help you?”Ky considered that. “I don’t know,” she said. “So, what are you?”

  Anne paused.

  “A violence professional,” she said.10My apologies to Rory Miller for appropriating his term.