Work Text:
Patient Record BILL CIPHER. Day △, month △ of year △.
Medical report, Dr. Axolotl.
Blue, red. Cyan, magenta and yellow. Opposition, tension, generation, convergence to one, to night, the first engine, the beginning. What’s most primary and instinctive. Bill grabbed that crayon, more typical of children’s agencies, squeezing it tightly as if he wanted it to be torn to pieces. Almost completely consumed, the colors extended beyond the limits of paper, flooded the palm of his hands, the floor, the ceiling, his dreams. Everything on the infinitude of the ‘non-place’ he was now inhabiting now existed impregnated in the effervescence of binarism. Of reds and blues.
Theraprism was a pitiful place to be at, an experience even worse than disintegrating and disappearing. Being there he had managed to relieve death, after all, one comes from nothing and disappears into nothing again. And Bill was certain about that, in one’s life, if you were smart enough to capture the very essence of things, everything was nothing more than nothingness. Experiencing your heart beating at the sight of the stars only lasts for a second, accompanied by the most absolute realization of finitude.
Waking up, doing stupid routinely “therapeutic” tasks he lacked will to do, feeling the cold water of the shower against his edges, sleeping, eating. But the worst thing out of everything definitely was that irritating being: Axolotl. His kindness, how he glanced at Bill with compassion, how he tried to understand him when there was absolutely nothing to get. Every time he talked Bill was shaken by a distressing tide, drowned and burned. His only possible response was taking each familiar whisper he could get a grasp of and trample on it, destroy it right in front of his eyes to make him realize how little everything mattered.
What’s the sense in trying to fix someone who had no alternative nor never have had it? Bill’s situation was abominable but that’s everything it could be, no way out and no possible change. Even if he did have the time and faith to do so, he probably wouldn’t choose to be someone else. On the other hand, even opting for metamorphosis, what would he become? What would he mutate into? In what else? Maybe there’s nothing he could be! Maybe he could only be him by being miserable! What’s intrinsic to Bill is being Bill, next topic.
But anguish existence has its funny little moments of enlightenment and gaining that back, his will of creation, his chance of creating, was only a matter of time. Getting out of there, having the world in his hands. He needn’t anything or anyone because he’d have absolutely everything! Impersonal absolute! These binomial tensions were as funny as love and terrible, practically indistinguishable for the human brain! And he could swear his species wasn’t alien to this sweet deception either, having him been conscious since he was just a speck of dust. “Please listen to mommy, Billy, you’ll get better soon if you keep drinking the medicine. It’s for your own good. Look, I even brought funny straws!” Perhaps it was his time to come back to his origin and become one with that recondite microscopic brilliance Euclydia was now.
“Bill, can I come in? It’s time for today’s session.” That irritating tone. It could only be him. How could an omnipotent and omniscient creature be so ridiculous? Compassion makes you weak, he’d end up realizing it.
He sighed: “Why are you even asking if you’re going to enter anyway? I’m very aware I have no choice. As a concept. No matter how much you sweeten it. Gold shackles, Ax. Also, ‘time for today’s session’? What an ironic sentence considering we’re existing outside the margins of the very concept of time. No ‘today’ nor ‘now’, only impertinence managed at your own mercy.”
Axolotl entered the room, adjusting his glasses. He sat down across from Bill, in a newly materialized armchair and took a notebook out of his briefcase. He used it to take notes on his patient’s ‘mental state’ and to keep track of ‘his progress’ and his ‘therapeutic needs’. Bullshit.
Bill was certain, he saw it as clear as daylight; that was nothing more than the manifestation of a selfish desire that resided in the depths of that strange being. Redeeming interstellar criminals? Treating them as if they were nothing else than very sad and hurt people needing help? Looking for an explanation for their actions? Trying to find something genuine and pure within them, a hope for change perchance? Absolutely not!
Axolotl just wanted to place himself above them all, to fill his ego with this ‘kind’ image of himself, to believe that the universe in his hands was good in essence! What’s a bigger disgrace than producing an imperfect creation? And Bill was the living proof of his inutility. He was crazy and had always been a monster just by existing. That surely mad Axolotl ashamed and profoundly uneasy. Just like his parents! Like anyone else, nothing new on the plate! When you place yourself outside the cardinal point, they start treating you like the monster you are, but they won’t let you manifest it! A monster that can’t act like one!
“Is there anything you’d like to talk about today, Bill? Do you have anything on your mind you want to externalize?”
He didn’t answer.
“I see you’ve been drawing.” Axolotl smiled at him, “Can I see what you’ve done?”
Bill grabbed a few papers, snatched them angrily and threw them at him. In response he got a long sigh, still accompanied by a slight smile: “They’re your parents, aren’t they?” Axolotl asked as he tried to stretch those grotesque pieces of wrinkles and smudged paint.
“You have a talent for art, and you’re a very creative person, you know? I’m sure with a little practice…”
“Cut it. We both know that isn’t true. Move topics.”
“But I mean it. Since you arrived you have shown yourself to be… very reluctant to collaborate in improving your psychological wellbeing. However, you’ve attended to our scrapbooking, painting, creative writing and music lessons. I believe without a doubt that artistic expression is the ideal means for you to express your feelings, and you’re great at it!”
Again, there was no response.
“Please, Bill. I’m trying my best to help, but I need you to trust me. I know there’s a lot locked inside you that longs to get out. You were just a kid back then. Please try to express what you feel about it.”
Bill had no intention of talking about it, wasn't it enough to never be able to get it out of his head? Needed this guy to constantly remind him about it? What was he supposed to do, tell how the world vanished in incandescence in his hands, the genesis of a monster that he had always harbored in the closest and most primal part of his being? No one was going to understand it because there was no possible form of empathy or meaning.
He closed his eye and saw himself there, surrounded by distant figures, his people, just like him, completely different from him. Pointed isosceles triangles relegated to the lowest tasks of the social ladder, running anguished from one place to another wielding a weapon or carrying a sack of cement for construction. The conceited equilaterals, feted in tight ties and business briefcases, unaware of their misery wrapped in the happy wish that their children could have a better life than theirs. Obtuse quadrilaterals, discarded trapezoids, intellectual polyhedra and shamanic circles. Everyone looked at their families. A twenty-faced prism, barely a few years old, embraced their mother. The hexagons played in the park.
He would sit in a corner. He spent most of his time looking at the sky, filling his eyelids with celestial residue, blinded by the stars. The more aware he was that his sight was barely enough to discern more than sinuous stellar trails, distant and unknown silhouettes, the more he longed to know, to be brilliant, to shine like a luminary. Then he heard his mother's voice pronouncing his name in that usual tone of concern. Looking at her made him aware of what he was.
Back then he could cry crouched in the corner of his bed, clinging to the sheets, medicine spilled on the bedside table, funny straws torn to shreds waiting for a new expedition. The tears he shed carried stars and trail that ran down his cheek carried a clear design; he would leave that place, and he would free everyone from the yoke of simplicity, of seeing in a single dimension, of thinking flat and dreaming plainly. That way he would free himself, that way he would find stars within a span of his fingers. The day he rose as one everything was burning.
“I saved them all. As only a monster can, annihilating them, reducing their existence to ashes” he laughed. He kept laughing: “Com on. I’m prepared for moralism or irony. Spit a smart phrase, smart guy. ‘If you try to forcefully change people’s perspectives you may destroy their individuality’ or ‘curiosity killed the polygon’. How about ‘altering the essence of things ends up in their destruction’? The more essentialist the joke, the funnier it is.
Axolotl shook his head gently, his eyes downcast. He tried to reach out to Bill’s shoulder but was greeted by a dismissive jolt, which added distance between them.
“Nothing more to say by my end. I never regretted my actions. That’s it.”
“Trying to find a place to belong, you ended up destroying your own home.”
“I appreciate that astute reflection.” Sarcasm was so evident he didn’t even made an effort to accompany the sentence with a proper intonation.
“There’re two things you need to learn for being able to move forward. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness, even if you’re not granted with it. And that includes yourself.”
“What’s your suggestion then? That I "forgive myself" for having extinguished my entire dimension? May I find peace in the idea that killing my parents and everything I had known was unintentional? I think the one who can't understand it completely well is you. For an omniscient being capable of perceiving the very fabric of the universe, you seem rather naïve. I released them. I freed myself. So what? Is it worth living a life without any meaning or depth? If wanting more is monstrous I’ve always been one.”
“Not everyone thinks you’re a monster, Bill. They lack understanding.”
“You think so? The reality is that even Ford considered me a monster. And he wasn’t wrong, what else could I be. Nothing more than an innate product of the deepest subsoil. I confess that hearing it from his mouth for the first time generated an implacable excitement in me, an ironic confirmation, as if he were giving me genesis even though I have always identified what I was. A muse or a monster, love or terror, beginning or end. Everything is lax and malleable, a constructed determination, but ultimately and in a way that I cannot escape, it is.”
He continued, letting out a loud chuckle: “His only and one fatal mistake was to believe that I was looking for a devotee in him. I didn't want him to flatter me or adore me unconditionally, although all those statuettes didn't hurt, you know, the more eyes you have... I wanted a puppet. Someone to use, a being under my complete control and domination, an extraordinary and easily manipulated individual, who would immediately succumb to the subtle sound of flattery. Oh, if you had seen it, how Ford would look at me when he was convinced that a deity had chosen him, when I fulfilled his need for validation, when I dropped my eyelashes and told him he was exceptional. It was ridiculous! Pathetic! I had him in the palm of my hand!”
If longing for a puppet, why did he find comfort every time Ford spoke to him as just him? As Bill? Someone as weird as convoluted as him, as dissonant, as special and as pitiful. Looking at Ford, for a second, he was that kid again, looking at a sky where stars rose like a threat and overflowed like torrents.
Session concluded.