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If I were orchestrating Rehab, it would have a whole different outcome. Anyone sent to this place would immediately be rendered into fertilizer and sprinkled somewhere they could make people sick. Obviously we are all failures in our chosen fields, both because we are vulnerable to something as lame as an intervention, and because someone felt they could subject us to such a thing in the first place. Failures deserve no mercy.
I’m not sure how I would spin the whole thing to the media, which I would absolutely control. Probably I would use one of the lesser euphemisms. I like “aneurysm.” I enjoy words with y in the middle.
I have big plans for someone in denial about his own shortcomings.
Just now I’m in art therapy, supposedly drawing pictures of large-scale destruction to reinvigorate my imagination with possible future triumphs. I never drew anything before, but I find I enjoy art therapy, even though I demonstrate no real skill. Mostly I like it because I’m using it to mask a couple of other activities.
The art therapy dictator is staring at me, but I don’t think she can read this particular code, which I’m writing in red, part of a large picture of a village in flames.
My mind has been fragmented while I stay here; I can’t concentrate with my usual focus and finesse. I suspect some sort of drugs in our water or food, though what the aim is, I don’t know. Somehow it helps me think to use art therapy this way. I’m the only one who will ever know what I write here, and I will burn this picture as soon as I finish it.
The art dictator just came by and castigated me for not creating a picture with more scope. Why did I decide to destroy a mere village instead of a major city, or even a planet? Such thinking demonstrates how reduced my ambitions and abilities are. I’m behaving in a self-limiting fashion, she said.
I told her the scene I’m painting is not just any village. It is the village where I was humiliated as a small child, and I set it on fire when I left town. I am using it to build up my anger at my past so I can reinvigorate my tyra
She believes this fabrication, which demonstrates how incompetent she is. If she had read my file, she would know that Rusty and I grew up in the megalopolis called Tourist Trap on the planet Sanitation.
She allowed as to how painting the destruction of a village where I was tortured might be a legitimate use of my art therapy time, and moved on to harass Alan, Supreme Leader of the Dark Legions of Destruction. He was painting giant flowers. I, too, considered his project an exercise in lameness, until he told Supervisor Susie he was imagining flesh-eating flowers with concealed teeth, his favorite tactic for use in subduing inferiors: lull them with a false and pleasing surface, and when they least expected it, leap out with teeth and chew them in half.
This place is full of useless, time-wasting activities, like meditations in the blood chapel to attract a new and more ruthless personal god. I think gods mix everything up and get in the way when you least need their help. Sometimes they switch sides in the middle of the battle. Once I had a personal relationship with Krrgoth the Blood Reaver, and the Hero I was opposing, who professed to honor life in all its forms, even the lowliest, grubbiest churls, sacrificed six beautiful virgins (where he found them in that particular kingdom I don’t know; lord knows I had scoured the hills for them before he got there, and used up all the ones I could find) to Krrgoth in one big bloodletting gorefest, and the damned god helped the Hero overthrow me.
That Hero went on to be a worse tyrant than I ever was. The peasants used to whisper my name (Darkblood, not Spiff) longingly years after I had left. Some even hung tapestries of me in their living rooms-tapestries that could be reversed to show the image of a popular clown figure if any government troops dropped by for inspection.
Rusty told me about the aftermath of my overthrow. He survived the coup in the palace and hung around looking enough like a halfwit that the Hero recruited him as an informer. This is one of our tactics in the event of revolutions. Whoever isn’t in power does their best to undermine the other’s successor, as long as it is no risk to life and limb. This Hero needed no help in driving the populace to accomplish his downfall. One of my more satisfying aftermaths, I must say, and much of its success due to the machinations of Rusty.
Rusty! My rage at him resulted in me smearing several plumes of flame. I can’t think straight enough to encode for a few minutes. How could he speak of Ellen in Group this morning?
After art therapy I am scheduled to visit the cryptic chapel. They’re going to have a prognosticator there who will select an appropriate god to get me out of my slump.
I hate fortune-tellers. Too many of them have given me false tales, accused me of having a kind heart. They sang a different tune when I applied red-hot irons to various portions of their anatomies.
I ended up having to torture them all. Except that one woman, Blind Mariah, who saw all too clearly. She accurately predicted the entrance of a particular Hero, and told me how to foil him. For that, I let her go. I thought about sending an assassin after her, but in the end decided against it. A good seer is hard to find, and I might need her again.
She left me with several uncomfortable utterances. I remember a portion of her prophecy that made no sense at the time, but now that I think of it, it probably predicted my sojourn in this place. “Down the darkest well,” she said, “one can see daylight stars.”
I wish I had my crystal pear. I acquired it on a short stop on Lymaztla, where they specialize in hidden dangers. At home, I affected the quirk of always having the pear in my left hand, and sometimes tossing it. I found it soothing, in truth, though it started as a calculated affectation. At the pear’s heart is a toxic vapor for which I have taken the antidote. I could shatter it on the edge of the table here during a meal and kill half the evil dictators in Rehab, and most of the Rehab staff. A lovely prospect.
Group this morning was more distressing than usual. Rusty has totally betrayed me, I fear, a slow and fiendish betrayal I would have thought beyond him: each secret he tells in Group makes me that much more vulnerable to an assortment of other evil people, including the staff at this institution. This morning he revealed that I had cried when the Hero killed my consort Ellen, several kingdoms ago.
This sounds like a more egregious weakness than it was. Everyone who knew Ellen, my Peerless Enchantress of the Darker and More Secret Passions, cried after her death. Possibly all of them had been intimate with her before she hooked up with me. That would explain their copious tears; she was the best lover I ever knew. Even the damned Hero who killed her cried (she had seduced him, at my behest; things were going well before he figured out she was still loyal to me and was telling me everything he revealed to her during their intimate moments).
He was one of those self-hating heroes who believe chastity is a gift to his prudish god, and to violate his vow of singularity was a mortal sin; he punished Ellen because he could not punish himself enough. I did it for him after he killed her. Once the bones are carefully broken, there is not much a Hero can do to evade repeated blows from a meat tenderizing hammer, spread out over several hours, applied with a precision that does not allow him to die with any speed.
At the time, Rusty told me anybody would cry at a loss like mine. Or ours, I suppose. Ellen was generous with her favors. In Group, fifteen years later, when he told everyone about it, it sounded much more pathetic than it had been.
He is weakening me an increment at a time. At first I did not understand. I thought he had my welfare at heart; it’s the only reason I agreed to give up my defenses and come here. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I thought this place would strengthen my skills-that’s what Rusty told me-but I see now it isn’t so. This place is a prison. I am certain now that all the news Rusty relays to me about Ruritraya in my absence is false. He has told them I am dead, and stepped forward to steal my country. Perhaps he presented himself to them in the guise of a Hero. We know how they operate. He could easily act the part.