Page 20 of Rage
Transfer.
Doesn’t look like a student. Maybe an athlete. Looks like he’s done things to people.
That last one is accurate.
But I am not here for any of them. I am here for the girl in the sixth row who holds her pen too tight and takes notes like she’s afraid that if she stops moving her hand, the world will close in on her. Like staying busy is the only thing keeping the walls from pressing in.
Victor Sokolav is just collateral damage. I have zero fucks to give when it comes to the Order.
She doesn’t look back for twenty minutes. I’ll give her credit for that.
Most people last about eight. The awareness of being watched is a biological fact. The human nervous system picks up sustained attention the way skin picks up heat, and she feels it.
I can tell by the way her shoulders draw together by degree, the way her pen slows without stopping, and the way she breathes too carefully.
She’s been taught to ignore the warning signs.
I wonder who taught her that. I think I already know the answer.
People train you to distrust your instincts by punishing you for acting on them. You learn to question the alarm system until it goes quiet. I just don’t know exactly why…yet.
When she finally looks, I don’t look away.
Most people would. Most people caught staring perform the social theater of sudden interest in the middle distance.
I watch her find me in the back of the room, and I watch her flicker of recognition before she knows what she’s identifying, and then she snaps her eyes forward like a hand snapping back from a hot surface.
Good.
She felt it.
She doesn’t know what it is yet, but she felt it. The reason she is the center of someone’s full and absolute attention.
The lecture focuses on obsessive thought patterns. The professor is a soft-spoken man in a beige cardigan, using a pointer to tap his slides like a metronome. He talks about intrusive ideation. Compulsive cognition. The neurological loops that form around unresolved emotional stimuli.
I lean back in my chair and listen carefully.
Not because I’m a student.
Because he is, unintentionally, describing me in clinical terms that I find useful to understand.
The unresolved stimulus becomes the organizing center of the obsessive pattern. The mind returns to it not only from pathology but also because the loop was never given a conclusion. Resolution isn’t the goal. Proximity is.
I write this down.
The first thing I’ve written that didn’t come from the dark recesses of my mind since I was sixteen.
I leave before the end of the lecture, before she can notice.
I need her to be the one who goes out into the air and breathes relief into her lungs and believes she’s put distance between herself and whatever she felt in that room.
Relief is a useful thing to give someone. It makes them feel safe enough to stop watching so closely.
This is not cruelty. This is patience.
I take the south stairs and come out on the colonnade, which runs along the east side of the main academic building. It’s cold. The kind of cold that is wet and ancient, the stone itself seeming to exhale it. I pull my hood up and walk.
Being outside during the day is still strange. After years in Unit 9, the sky feels like a provocation.
