Tabula Rasa(48)

Being with him made me wish I’d majored in psychology rather than botany. Knowing with more authority than hunches and mere guesses how the human mind worked might come in handy here. But if it was like the other sciences, nobody really agreed on any but the most basic principles. There were theories and notions and people in this camp and others in that one. Nothing prepared one for the live study of a thing or person right there in front of you.

I was beginning to firmly believe that Shannon did in fact feel real emotions, and not just selfish ones that only pertained to himself and his own outcome. He might not have a big circle of people he would protect and defend, but he had one. I still didn’t fully understand—and I don’t think he did either—how I came to be in it, but nevertheless, there I was.

And despite his warnings to scare me before going to his parents’ house, I was convinced he felt more than casual disinterest toward them as well, even if the feelings were vague and not strong enough to fully quantify. Like he’d said, their parenting had made a difference in the type of monster he’d grown into. He had to feel something with regards to that. Didn’t he? Also, I was pretty sure if his house were on fire, he’d grab the white cat on his way out the door.

Shannon sat in a sleek gray chair across the room, quietly observing me while I had my coffee and toast.

“Thank you,” I said.

He just nodded.

The tray was a simple white porcelain. Plain. Zen. Minimalist like everything else he owned. The plates were square and white as if ready for gourmet edible art to be splashed across them to the delight of some food critic somewhere. The coffee cup was plain and white as well, steam still rising up off the hot black brew.

Along with the toast, he’d brought raspberry jam. He’d already slathered the butter on, so that it would soften and melt against the heat of the bread. I spread the jam on top and poured some cream he’d brought in a tiny white creamer into my coffee. He knew by now that I didn’t take sugar, so he hadn’t brought any.

Shannon watched me like this for a while, but he didn’t speak until I had finished both my toast and my coffee. When the last crumb of toast and the last drop of coffee were gone, he finally spoke.

“What was it about this new nightmare that was bad enough for you to come to my room? You never came to my room before.” His words didn’t seem accusatory or annoyed, merely curious.

I looked up, startled. “You knew I had nightmares before last night?”

He nodded. “I’ve heard you scream in the night.”

I hadn’t realized I’d called out in my sleep.

“And you didn’t say or do anything?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You didn’t call for me. You didn’t come to me. I assumed that you wanted to deal with it on your own and that you required space.”

This was exactly why I wasn’t a useless ball of human rolled up in the fetal position on the floor all the time. Shannon had the most amazing sense of space I’d ever encountered in another human being. It occurred to me that some measure of his coldness wasn’t garden variety coldness because he was dead inside or whatever, but was instead an expression of trying to project what he would want onto someone else. It just seemed to him like the natural thing to do.

I had the sense that, in general, Shannon didn’t give a damn what other people wanted in any circumstance really, but if he did give a damn, it seemed more likely he’d think about what he would want instead of trying to guess at how other people’s minds and emotions operated.

It was only the fact that what he wanted was so very different from what the general population wanted that someone could interpret it as a total lack of empathy—or at least this was what I kept telling myself.

“What was different about this nightmare?” Shannon asked again.

I hesitated, unsure if I should tell him. But in the end, I faltered beneath his hard, expectant stare. “The other nightmares were about the park. This one was something that happened in my life before the park.”

His position against the supple leather shifted ever so slightly, his calm exterior disturbed by the tiniest ripple... of something. “You remember? Your life?”

I nodded. “A lot of it is still fuzzy, but I imagine that’s probably true of a lot of normal people, too. Nobody remembers everything that ever happened to them. But I remember who I am, and all the major highlights of my life, and all the important things leading up to the accident.”

The thought suddenly struck me that before my memories came back, I had been a pure human expression of minimalism. Just like his house. Simple. Clean. But now I was complicated and messy, and I wasn’t sure how Shannon would take that.

“And this dream...” he persisted... “What happened in it?”

The way he asked the question was as if the option not to answer him didn’t exist. He expected to know. He demanded to know. And yet I knew that if I told him, I would be at least partly responsible for what happened next, because I couldn’t pretend there wouldn’t be something that happened next. Shannon loved to kill people, and he had a whisper of feeling toward me. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where that magical combination would lead. Telling him would be like giving him a big present with a giant red bow on it. I might as well gift wrap Professor Stevens and hand Shannon a knife or a gun or whatever it was he liked to kill people with.