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On our world, Lagash, darkness exists only in theory, what with the six suns in the sky. Usually at least three of them are up. But I, more than anyone, know that theory might spring into practice just meters away from where I sit. Even if darkness is no longer in our closets or cupboards, it is still in the attics and basements. We live in an uneasy truce with it, this mind-killer that we can never see. As soon as you open a door into a windowless cubby, light enters and that which you feared is gone. You could be excused thinking that darkness doesn't really exist.
I was not excused from that.
For the last twenty years the law has prohibited closets with doors, even though hardly anyone needed this to be legislated: most people realized what a reckless idea that would be. (My parents are not most people.) Feuding siblings could shut one another in a dark closet, and within minutes you, a parent, would lose both children. One locked up in prison for years, the other's mind gone, staring at a blank wall for the rest of their life, needing a physical therapist's assistance just to swallow his spoon-fed gruel.
The law is named after my older brother Dovret.
It is now two decades since I lost him and my oldest brother Virek, and we are told that the whole humankind is going to be locked in one dark cosmic closet. It's coming in a year. By the whimsy of astrophysics, all six suns will be eclipsed by a moon for several hours.
The clergy and the government tried to keep us calm. We have to train for this, they said. A year should be enough. We have to befriend the mind killer that lurks in the pockets of our own houses, unseen and harmless unless you are pushed into its arms. We all have to face it and realize: it cannot do anything to us. We have to allow it to cradle us.
"Which of you will volunteer for darkness-training?" a priest asked.
The congregation froze in shock. Nobody dared to breathe or rustle. I caught a few sidelong glances directed my way. Some were morbidly curious; I did not dignify them with a response. Family tragedy is a juicy fodder for everyone's self-rigtheousness. But when the priest singled me out with an openly pitying look - that's when I raised my hand.
The training facility was a humble container sitting on a warehouse floor, elevated to historical significance by all the top psychologists of the world gathered nearby. They offered me pinched smiles concealing their relief that it wasn't them having to get in there. The container door slid open; its interior bathed in the soothing, soft-edged twilight like when the Triplets - Beta, Delta and Gamma - line up above the horizon. Nothing to fear, not until I'm inside.
My knees turned to jelly. Two assistants, one on either side of me, gripped my elbows and half-walked, half-dragged me in. The chief psychologist reminded me I can back out of training at any moment, even now. What a fool. The eight-year-old me who clawed at Virek's shirt, who had her head slammed on the floor but still managed to rise and bite him in the shin, had been inexcusably weak. Too wimpy to wrestle Virek away from the closet door and let Dovret out. I still haven't received proper punishment for that. I have to go through what Dovret went through. If I happen to survive it, I may be forgiven.
The assistants lowered me on the container floor like a sack of potatoes. They proceeded to close the door slowly, "so my mind could adjust". What a joke. The comforting dimness gave way to unease, then alarm; the thickening umbra inside the container might have been reminiscent of the Eta twilight that my great-grandma Nereth lived through as a child; her whole generation was marked by that experience. I briefly regretted not asking her how they kept their minds intact as they sat around the fires until Alpha rose. My thoughts fled when the door slid closed.
I can't breathe. I can't breathe. It's only the light that's gone, not air, but it makes no difference. Unseen, the space itself ceased existing. There is no room for my lungs to expand in this complete vacuum.
"Remember: deep breaths," said a voice outside the container. It's one of the scientists. "Breathe in: one, two, three, four. Out: one, two, three, four. In..."
My chest inflates and deflates to the rhythm of that voice, because it is the only thing that exists right now. The mind killer is all around me, but it is inert. My mind is hanging on by a thread, but the thread is solid. Dovret did not have that. The darkness cradles me. Protected from anyone's prying eyes, for the first time in twenty years, I cry.