Trev in the shower
looking at shampoo bottles
and the clutter
overwhelming desire to throw them away
to declutter
and feel the peace of clutterlessness
he is losing his mind as they return to Kulmyk
and in losing his mind, he does two things
first
he completely declutters his quarters
and second
he plays the same song over and over again
he invites Mairi over
he is proud
and she sees he is losing his mind
he asks her to dance
she says you don't dance
he says I do now
and holds out his arms
they step into the center of his room
and he takes her arms
he is lost is his world
in a room barren of anything
and they dance
to the same song
over and over
and he never tires of it
in fact, he seems to enjoy it more and more each time
she sits him down
he doesn't see the problem
he gets upset
tells her Rog called her a whore
she says the farm breeds ignorance like rats in a sewer
Trev repeats that he called her a common whore
Mairi says his ignorant head is up his arse
then Trev says he said she was not worthy for Bravo
Mairi says nothing
then Trev says he said she was not worthy for evacuation, period
Mairi slaps him
hard
Trev spits blood on the barren floor
Mairi starts crying
Trev reaches out to touch her
She screams for him to take his hands off her
Trev looks shocked
Mairi comes back at him
Tells him she saved him
When no one else was there
she was
she was the one that succored him when he was dying
He says that Rog says she is a liar
a lying whore in fact
he says you are lying about Dr X
and that you are putting us all in danger
he says you are selfish
a selfish whore
a lying selfish common whore who shouldn't even be here
Mairi stands up straight
shoulders back
she pulls a small disc from her pocket
a hologram
sticks it in his face
and says
this won't lie
and walks out
Trev is left standing alone
disc in hand
he plays it
it shows Mairi holding him the day he was left for dead
he watches the whole scene
begins to tremble as it plays out
falls to his knees as he realizes
Mairi is telling the truth
that he is the arse
for most of what he said he made up
to hurt her
he wants to hurt her
and he doesn't know why
he knows she helped him
but he wants her to feel pain
so he lied
Rog did call her a whore
did say she would lie
but everything else Trev made up to hurt her
and he couldn't stop himself
each lie built
and grew to the next
he embraced the hurt he was giving
he felt it leaving his body and into hers
yet the pain didn't leave him
it only grew
and when he watched the hologram
of him in the street
unconscious
beaten to within an inch of his life
the faded colors
the wind
the dirt on his face
and the way she held him
succored him
whispered to him
kept him alive
that is when the pain became too great
and he falls to his knees
arms outstretched
head thrown back
eyes looking up
and he cries out
My Janus, My Janus
and the camera pulls away
and the scene ends
and there you have it
looking at shampoo bottles
and the clutter
overwhelming desire to throw them away
to declutter
and feel the peace of clutterlessness
he is losing his mind as they return to Kulmyk
and in losing his mind, he does two things
first
he completely declutters his quarters
and second
he plays the same song over and over again
he invites Mairi over
he is proud
and she sees he is losing his mind
he asks her to dance
she says you don't dance
he says I do now
and holds out his arms
they step into the center of his room
and he takes her arms
he is lost is his world
in a room barren of anything
and they dance
to the same song
over and over
and he never tires of it
in fact, he seems to enjoy it more and more each time
she sits him down
he doesn't see the problem
he gets upset
tells her Rog called her a whore
she says the farm breeds ignorance like rats in a sewer
Trev repeats that he called her a common whore
Mairi says his ignorant head is up his arse
then Trev says he said she was not worthy for Bravo
Mairi says nothing
then Trev says he said she was not worthy for evacuation, period
Mairi slaps him
hard
Trev spits blood on the barren floor
Mairi starts crying
Trev reaches out to touch her
She screams for him to take his hands off her
Trev looks shocked
Mairi comes back at him
Tells him she saved him
When no one else was there
she was
she was the one that succored him when he was dying
He says that Rog says she is a liar
a lying whore in fact
he says you are lying about Dr X
and that you are putting us all in danger
he says you are selfish
a selfish whore
a lying selfish common whore who shouldn't even be here
Mairi stands up straight
shoulders back
she pulls a small disc from her pocket
a hologram
sticks it in his face
and says
this won't lie
and walks out
Trev is left standing alone
disc in hand
he plays it
it shows Mairi holding him the day he was left for dead
he watches the whole scene
begins to tremble as it plays out
falls to his knees as he realizes
Mairi is telling the truth
that he is the arse
for most of what he said he made up
to hurt her
he wants to hurt her
and he doesn't know why
he knows she helped him
but he wants her to feel pain
so he lied
Rog did call her a whore
did say she would lie
but everything else Trev made up to hurt her
and he couldn't stop himself
each lie built
and grew to the next
he embraced the hurt he was giving
he felt it leaving his body and into hers
yet the pain didn't leave him
it only grew
and when he watched the hologram
of him in the street
unconscious
beaten to within an inch of his life
the faded colors
the wind
the dirt on his face
and the way she held him
succored him
whispered to him
kept him alive
that is when the pain became too great
and he falls to his knees
arms outstretched
head thrown back
eyes looking up
and he cries out
My Janus, My Janus
and the camera pulls away
and the scene ends
and there you have it
9 comments:
Tree,
If only every man who ever hurt a woman who loved him felt like that, realized the truth after all..
I wouldn't give Trev too much credit. He's still pretty much wrapped up in himself. :-D
All of the following is just disjointed notes under the title of 'Hmm, I wonder' rather than 'Finished thoughts', but what it does is show to small extent what happens to one reader at least upon reading the chapters of this story. :-D
I've been trying to get a feel for what Trev might be thinking at this time, an impossible thing to do, but all I really wanted was to touch the outskirts, take a little peek that wasn't shown to us directly in the story, but even attempting such a thing is too dubious. I was thinking too about the expression that talks about tidy surroundings pointing to a tidy mind, which at first glance has no place here, but on second one might say that this is exactly what is happening to him. His mind has been tidied, uncluttered, due to the magnitude of one event, so that all he has left, all that he has room for is essentially trying not to fall off what he knows is the very tenuous perch, one he believes will keep him safe, and in these rituals, in his efforts all he is doing is putting off the inevitable.
Trev since Sal, to compromise him with a classification, fascinates me and eludes me simultaneously. Not least, always an engrossing thought, just how hard the mind is able to fight to protect itself, to heal itself. The magnitude of this chapter is really too great. I've sat here for ages already and I haven't even gotten started on where I would like to go with commenting upon Trev for the simple fact that I'm almost certain I would never get there. At the same time, it's comical that this is actually worrying me. :-D I should just leave a 'wow' and be done with it.
I was thinking about bereavement and the grief that follows, how it can be fragmented into stages and how it is entirely possible to become stuck within one of those stages. I'm generalizing here, or more accuarately thinking of specific examples, of becoming stuck through the fear (or unwillingness) of moving to the next stage, what that fear is of could be a number of things, of wanting simply to hang on to that person harder or the fear that what comes next will be even more detrimental, more painful. To suggest two examples. How in doing so essentially one elogates the process, and I realize it's wrong to simplify grief in this manner and I am not suggesting it is something a person does through choice, quite the opposite, but in short there is no escape, there is no lessening of it, no shortcuts. In trying to deal with unmanageable pain, the mind does what it needs to do in order to protect, even if in the long run it becomes a longer run.
I was thinking too about how one survives ongoing traumatic circumstances and again to go into specifics within one area, how it is quite possible for the mind to separate itself, split itself, so that it operates on two levels. One that carries on the normality and one that deals, or at least is the part that is directly affected, when the two begin to merge once again that is when the danger of both being lost begins.
And finally how everything must be at odds throughout, as the mind fights to preserve, there must be an almost equal part that urges that person to just let go, to find what must seem and perhaps even be the relief at the very bottom of that deep, dark pit (to use a cliched expression).
His listening to the same song over and over again seems so desperate, like he himself is as he occupies this time and place is a scratch within a song that the needle has been pinned into. There is still noise coming through the speakers, but it is as stationary as it is loud. Why Mairi panics, panic being my word, why Mairi is roused to the surity that Trev is in real danger by the way that he is acting now one can watching sense this would be the only interpretation possible, and that is without knowing what the song is or if what it is even has bearing.
And speaking of songs, there are a couple of lines from T&R that come to mind, the wishes associated with the doors of my mind and darkness from cold, spoken with an understanding that Trev does not have, seen with the benefit of hindsight at least in the second instance.
What is so fascinating about this topic is what people (or hynerians as the case may be) are capable of enduring. How it is that they are able to not only endure but to overcome. Trev is of course a very, very long way from overcoming and may never, but by the very fact that he is still present, he has already moved from that day to this. This day where he is acting and speaking and thinking and doing differently than he did on that day, to make even less sense I fear.
Another thing that in at least one respect points to his fighting rather than succumbing is that he is in this interaction with Mairi, not embracing his pain or even trying to escape it as much as he is trying to eradicate it. Perhaps too noble a spin to put on it, noble used lightly, and there is nothing other to his lashing out at Mairi than anger and revenge, again, revenge used lightly. Anger that she sees that he is tethering on the edge, when he was managing to camouflage that fact to himself, or trying to. All in all, there's a sense of relief that he snaps, that he attacks rather than dances. His desire to hurt her could as said be the mistake often made that in hurting someone else it will bleed some of the great suffering that he is undergoing, where all it does is breed more. The revenge theory is more interesting in that the basis for it could be several things. It could, and I like this one best, be the simple fact that Mairi is the only one connected, the only one with whom any part of what happened has been shared, the only one who saw him in the physical aftermath, the only one who has seen anything other than who he woke up to be. If that is the case, is it simply that she is a part of what is hateful, the only simple alternate that I can give being the desire to shoot the messenger of bad news, that though he understands that her role was as the only sanctuary, it is nonetheless a role within the whole. To go back to the temptation mentioned above, Mairi must also be the one physical anchor that eliminates that option, whether or not he would have 'chosen' that route would be irrelevant, he would still resent her for snatching the option away from him. Worst perhaps, and most dangerous, would be the aforementioned nobility seen from the drowning light of of wanting to simply cause pain for the purpose of causing pain and for the reason that he was caused pain, though a diminutive action in comparison to what he endured, the intention is undiluted.
Interesting also it is to explore the word 'whore' seen in the context of the heretofore and exactly what lanes Trev's thoughts might run along as they spiral into madness. Whatever he is thinking, I would imagine that the linking would disgust him, not because of content (reality, truth), but because of the wrongness of the association. If, it would be involuntary, he would by that route feel even more violated, feel even more changed and lost to who he was before, stained, and yet it ties into what happens here as what I imagine would happen if he indeed was thinking along those routes. The disgust with himself would only spur him further down the road of destruction, his, hers.
Above all I'm certain this chapter is much more 'simple' (simple being a very good thing) than the above credits it with.
In the simplicity of style, no explanations, just words and actions, it succeeds just as well in opening the floor for pondering as you have so often done when providing voiced questions and answers within.
There is a slight sense of exasperation to that, having less limits. :-)
And Trev up until he sees the disc is the easy part, Mairi and Trev after the disc are more difficult.
Mairi mostly because we know so little about her compared to everyone else. There was the chapter where, if memory serves it was Yul and Rog that listened as she spoke a little about her time at the hands of Dr X, and there are other significant chapters, when she attempts to relieve (to put it simply) Yul in hospital, her conversations with Kyra that show her to us, and I'm trying to remember chapters before that that might have allowed us into her phyche, but until I go back and read all chapters relation to Mairi as I am now longing to do, there doesn't seem to be in my memory at least any real instance that gives reason enough to trust there could be any truth found within imaginings about what she may be thinking or feeling in response to Trev's account of what Rog has said. In other words, it really would be complete guesswork based not on what might be true given what we know about her, but what might be true if I were in her shoes. In short, there is no telling how much she cares, not about the fact that Rog (and Trev) should brand her a whore, that they would express negative opinions about her would hurt, this we know through the fact that she cares about them, but about how she feels about her past as a chatelaine as this would have bearing on the balance between hurt and anger.
As for Trev, left with nowhere to turn except right into the eye of the storm, to use your recent expression, as he watches the hologram at the same time as he is physically moving towards the place of these memories - and on a sidenote to that, is the interesting question of why Mairi had this disc on her, whether as would be the obvious conclusion she was planning to show it to him and what her reason then would have been, presumably in the hope of helping, in anchoring him so that he would be unable to drift too far or to show him that she was and is willing to take care of him (so to speak) - there's a sense of this being make or break time, though just one in a sequence.
Poor Trev, Poor Mairi,
and poor you for having to read all of the above. LOL
Ooops, great chapter btw. :-D
Random thoughts on having read the first half of your tome of a comment: :-D
Trev's mind is working 24/7. His head hurts from trying to understand what has happened to him and try as he might, he cannot make sense of his shattered self, but like an itch in the middle of your back that you cannot reach, he is unable to either let it go or relieve himself of it. So, in essence, his own thoughts are driving him mad, or, one could say, his own thoughts, which he is seeing as if observing another and not himself, are showing him that he is insane, that he is losing his mind, that there are two Trevs now (the one with all the pain and endless thoughts and the one who is observing this). The thought/observation alone is enough to crush him.
So, he decides he must eliminate all other distractions, that the rest of his life must be a clean slate with nothing unpredictable, hence the playing of one song over and over again. Now, he knows the playing of one song over and over again is not right, but he can't resist doing it (the two Trevs--one doing, one observing) and so in the playing of that song repeatedly, part of him sees the downward spiral, and like a medieval flagellant, he continues to beat himself mercilessly and to no purpose and when the desired result doesn't happen, he just beats himself harder, as if he needs to break himself, as if if he pays a high enough price, he will be absolved.
Of course, all of this is insane to one degree and I'm almost embarrassed to say I can almost understand what is happening and what he is doing and I wish I was better at explaining the behavior.
Back with more in a bit. ;-)
Sweetest, I think we need to spend some time with Mairi. As you mentioned, we've seen snapshots but we still know so little about her background other than she is a Châtelaine, something else that bears further explanation.
Here is what we do know. She has a posh accent and when Kieran was alive, she seemed to have more in common with him than anyone else--so we assume she came from money. She seems to be an intuitive, which plays in line with being a Châtelaine, or at least a good one. We know she was a child of the shells and that her deformity was not a physical one, but a physic one--She is a Null. We know she was captured and "abused" at the hands of Dr X yet she also formed some sort of bond with her captor. We also know Dr X has been educating her in the ways of telepathic healing and that it was through her, with his help, that Mairi was able to "save" Yul. We know she has tremendous guilt over what happened to Trev and that she feels deeply obligated to help him recover. And we know, there seems to some sort of resistance, at least from Rog, to her being onboard. Beyond that, she is a blank slate. :-D
:-D Put like that, we know quite a lot. And as posh as her accent is, lovely too I imagine, a voice soft and clear, which makes those verbal retaliations that she delivers pack even more oompf. Perhaps the greater part of Rog's reasons have to do with not understanding her and perhaps among all these strong women that surround him, strong men too, she is the only one whom he suspects might actually be the least vulnerable. Right or wrong though that suspicion may be. Maybe. :-D
Very much looking forward to getting to know Mairi better, as much as any of the others, she intrigues. :-)
Thanks for the clarification on Trev, I could very well have been back with more otherwise. ;-)
Hope the game went well and that you guys had a ton of fun as always. Let me know if the double pompoms worked. Sweet dreams when you get that far, x
It happens
You tend to hurt & betray the people who are closest to you
Its like they reflect your own bitterness which you try to efface with a single stroke of your hand without realizing that you are actually striking out at them
& when you do realize.. it is too late..
Mona, perfectly said. Pain warps perception. Hurt colors our view. And we lash out in a cry for help. Only the wisest among us can see the cry and not the lash.
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