ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR: The Inward Path

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******

The path was long, and the weight was heavy; those were the facts of the environment that stood out the most to Alden even as he passed by things that would normally have made him pause and wonder.

The route curved and curved, winding deeper into the soil until the walls towered above him and Yenu-pezth. There was one place where the fading light of the day reached them through a thousand glass shapes embedded into the corridor, and in another, water fell in trickles through a curtain of vines. For an unknowable while, they sat together on a rock that jutted out from the soil, and Yenu-pezth explained to him how she thought their sessions should go.

It would be therapeutic, but in many ways, it wasn’t like any therapy he’d had before. And one of those ways was very important—some outcomes could be guaranteed.

“You’re young,” Yenu-pezth said, “and you shouldn’t have experienced too much significant pressing or alteration of the mind.”

Her ringed toes were stretched out in front of her, wriggling against a patch of ground carpeted with short, springy grass.

“When you are sure something within reach of your mind would be better if it were different, stronger, or absent—and when I agree that the alteration will not harm you—it will be changed.”

“Anything?” Alden asked.

“Anything,” Yenu-pezth said, “that we are sure of. You aren’t severely damaged or <<under attack>>. You are someone who knows himself well enough to know he’s unhappy. I am someone who can easily push you in a new direction. The only thing that stands between us and what you might want for yourself is our <<wise caution>>.” She chuckled. “And maybe a little more slowness than usual since you are my first human. I’ll be <<approaching>> your mind with additional care.”

She pulled her feet back toward her and straightened on the rock. “So you must decide what you want, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. In your case, you should choose the hurts you are most sure you understand and want gone, instead of the ones that ache the most.”

“Aren’t they the same usually?”

“Sometimes,” said Yenu-pezth. “Not always. We’ll find out when you find out.”

She was on her feet. Alden couldn’t quite remember seeing her rise, but he stood to join her. Her hands went into her pockets. She said, “What sufferings are you sure your life would be better without?”

And the weight increased again.

He walked beside her. Or stood. Or followed her instructions to spend a while running his hands over a pattern of knobby protrusions on the wall that were maybe answers to a question he’d had or puzzles to give him even more questions to mull over. The world around him blurred more as his own thought process filled his attention.

The possible answers were all there. Only a few of them were perfect. All of them mattered.

“It’s so important to me,” he said, hands still brushing the pattern on the wall. “That what I do matters—that my yeses make a difference, that my noes do. Our choices shouldn’t just ripple a little and then disappear. That’s been important to me for a very long time.”

Sometimes, he found he felt an urge to say things aloud that weren’t responses to what Yenu-pezth had asked. Realizations or memories got shaken loose, and some of them were too meaningful to him to remain comfortably hidden. He would have worried about his ability to keep his most dangerous secrets. He would have wondered about whether or not the things that felt important to him in this way would matter to anyone else, or if speaking them revealed him to be someone deserving of an eye-roll or two.

But the deeper they traveled down the inward path, the more his emotions became like ripples themselves. He felt like he was able to observe all but the worst ones from below the surface in the quiet heart of a lake.

Below the surface like that…it would feel like when Lind-otta slowed the water.

There was something he wanted from that thought and couldn’t find, important but obscured. He had bumped into it a few times—the moment when everything went still and Esh-erdi’s hand pulled him from the water, from drowning, into the air again. He kept looking at it and admitting it wasn’t for now.

For now, he was finding the thing he was surest about changing, and he’d almost narrowed it down.

Yenu-pezth was right. Surety and quantity of suffering weren’t necessarily going hand-in-hand. The lake rippled like crazy when he thought about running across that damn moon. It practically escaped its banks when he thought about standing on that rooftop—so, so recently—and saying yes to her and being told no in return and being swept under.

But those weren’t necessarily things you asked to forget. Or alter. At least not until you understood how everything inside you was fitting together, and he was beginning to understand how hard understanding yourself really was, even here in this place that was designed to help you do it.

“I have a nightmare,” he said finally. “It comes back over and over in slightly different ways. I want it to stop.”

“Tell me more about this nightmare.”

He told her about the whistle and how no matter which way he ran, he couldn’t find Kibby. He told her about how he often ended up standing there in the rotten grass, right before he woke up, realizing he’d have to go through it all again. Completely alone.

“What else?” Yenu-pezth said again.

And again.

Several times, until Alden’s thoughts were all on the dream and the layers of it.

“I was scared to go help her,” he admitted finally. The lake was rocking. “On the day it happened, I was afraid I couldn’t even save myself. And when I heard the whistle I didn’t want to be responsible for another person. I was scared of what I’d find if I went that way. I stood still for too long while she was alone and terrified.”

“This memory bothers you often?” She was watching him from right beside his elbow now. Her ashy purple hair had a little cup-shaped flower caught in it from the trip through the curtain of vines.

“She thinks I rushed to help her as soon as I heard. I would rather die than tell her I didn’t.”

Yenu-pezth moistened her lips with her tongue. She opened her mouth, paused, then said, “I’ll talk to you about that when your mind isn’t softened by the weight of the path. This dark dream sounds to me like a very good place to start…”

She took her hands out of her pockets, and Alden noticed a decrease in the weight.

“You can take the nightmare away?”

“We’re going to change it,” she said. “When we’re sure. You need to steep for a while now.”

******

She took him back up the path, and he realized the distance they’d come was shorter than he’d thought but far more packed with attractive or interesting sights than he’d realized. He had just enough space in his head now to wonder if he’d noticed the particular things he did on the way down because they’d all been part of helping him sink deeper into his own thoughts, or if he just subconsciously liked vines.

“Did we make it almost to the end of the path?” he asked.

“No.” She smiled at him. “You didn’t need it. You’re a very good patient.”

He was glad he was good. He was unclear on what exactly he was good at, though.

He was also unclear on how his suitcase came to be inside a small cave that had been dug out of one of the walls and lined with smooth stone the same foggy green as the path that led to the House of Healing. But there it was, stuffed into the space beside a dip in the floor that held clear liquid.

Yenu-pezth called the place a <<grotto>> and told him it would be his steeping spot while she went to find Stu-art’h and check the color of his ears. Alden went inside obediently then turned to face her, his neck bent awkwardly because the ceiling was so low.

“How long do I stay?”

“That depends on you,” she said. “As long as you need to or until it is time for you to leave this place and rest without the weight of the path on you. To fix your nightmare, here is what we should do…”

Alden was supposed to sit here with his softened mind, his freshly turned thoughts, and his lake of calm while he considered what he really wanted to happen the next time he heard the whistle in his nightmare. He would craft a new dream. Yenu-pezth wanted him to think about how it would connect to and ease the negative emotions associated with the original nightmare on a deeper level.

“When we are done,” she explained, “it will still be only a dream. But it will be a dream you have more than once. We can make sure it helps you as much as possible when you experience it.”

Before she left, she told him he could drink the water in the floor puddle. After she left, Alden realized he had no idea where to pee in this place if the need arose, and it had been a while. So he’d just go thirsty.

He removed his pezyva and took his learning cushion out of his bag. He was comfortable and at ease. Time passed uncounted, and his thoughts flowed smoothly. But crafting a dream to replace the nightmare—one that satisfied him enough to be worth this extraordinary opportunity—was proving hard.

He tried imagining different ways out. He tried digging deeper into the nightmare to understand it.

Part of it was guilt. A huge part of it was the fear of being alone. The fear of failure. For months, he’d felt like he was probably going to make a mistake. Like the mistake was going to kill them because he wasn’t strong enough or smart enough, because he couldn’t even speak to Kibby properly for ages.

Helplessness. Systems failing.

He felt like he was approaching something good, and then he followed the thought about Systems failing toward an idea about how maybe the new dream would help him with his panic over that, if his interface actually worked in it and he could call for help.

Who would I have called anyway? Joe?

That wasn’t right at all.

He tried to change courses, but he was interrupted by the return of Yenu-pezth and Stuart, who seemed to think it was time for him to give up and leave the inward path for now.

“No,” Alden said firmly. “Healer Yenu, I know I can do it if I stay here longer. You two leave without me.”

Stuart made a shocked noise, and his face purpled as he said, “I apologize for him, Healer Yenu. He’s confused!”

Then he leaned into the grotto and whispered, “Alden, you can’t stay. Healer Yenu has already given us some of her sleeping time.”

Yenu-pezth was laughing. “Don’t worry, Stu,” she said. “Your friend isn’t rude. He’s just one who <<engages>> easily with the path. Imagine he’s been steeping several curves farther in than this for longer than he has.”

“You also can’t stay because it’s bad for your mind to sit here forever,” Stuart said. “Healer Yenu, are you sure he’s all right? Maybe it affects him too much for him to be safe without—”

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“I don’t think it affects me too much,” Alden told him. “I like how easy it is to think in this—”

“You’re definitely being too affected!” Stuart stepped forward and tugged him off his learning cushion by the front of his shirt.

Alden was herded all the way back up the path by Stuart, who followed behind him like he might try to make a break for it and run back to his cave, while Yenu-pezth kept laughing softly in between reassurances to Stuart that Alden wasn’t hurt and reassurances to Alden that he wouldn’t completely lose his wonderfully sorted thoughts when he left.

“You’ll find that time without the weight is good for thinking in a different way, and you may have solved more than you realize already. Sit with your discoveries for a while in the world you actually live in.”

When they made it out, she told him again that he’d done a good job and she was happy to meet him, murmured something to Stuart that made him sigh, and then sent them off via a teleportation alcove inside the House of Healing.