No, no, nononononono.
That way lay madness. To remember was to be Philip and to be him was to be a weak and selfish man, one who had abandoned his...
He raged around the room with renewed vigour but no greater success.
He was Becoming Invested and he was Paying Attention and he needed to jump off of this hurtling train of thought because Becoming Invested and Paying Attention were stops on the way to Remembering Everything and he knew that Remembering Everything was not a place for him to even pass through, never mind visit. He wanted very much to go back to the Oblivion of Omnipotence, please and thank you.
"Look dear, if you don't want to tell me then perhaps we might let this spirit go and call another one. We don't want to keep him here all night, do we?"
"Oh, come on, there's nobody here except us! This is just a silly sideshow in a barely above average Halloween carnival and I'm only in here wasting five quid I could have spent on something useful like candy floss or salted rock because my friends are idiots."
"Hey!" Devil Boy exclaimed somewhat half-heartedly, as if deep down he had always suspected he might well be an idiot.
He turned away from Devil Boy and the rest of the kids and shifted tactics, stopped raging. Moving closer to the woman, he spoke into her ear.
"Look, just let me go, alright? I can't be here, I can't see this, I can't remember." He sounded so pathetic and wheedling and he didn't care, he just needed to get away. "I want flight and movement and freedom and not this...this. You can –" but he stopped himself there because the next words out of his mouth were going to be "You can fool her or them all you want, say anything you like, just let me go" and he understood that this would not have been the first time he had said this or thought this or allowed this to happen in order for him to make his escape.
Like an irresistible and immense body of water, memory pushed against the dams he had built around him and threatened to surge over the top, to burst right through.
He still wanted to say those words, his little prayer, "Say what you want to them, just let me go" because it would only be one more betrayal and why not, really? One more for the road but then...
"We just thought it'd be a laugh, Soph," Thank U, Next said. "You didn't have to say your dad's name."
"Well, none of you were saying anything, were you?" Sophie said, looking around at her friends who all looked away rather sheepishly. "Besides, you have to say someone you actually knew or they trick you. You have to know what the real person would have said when they were...they were alive like."
Her voice had broken a little near the end but to avoid any appearance of weakness she had thrust out her sharp chin, a challenge to the world. He listened to her and he watched her and a heart he no longer had broke for her and then, before he could do anything, it was too late.
If he was anything in that instant other than himself, he was the hammer, the nail and the dumb brute thud of one on the other.
ns 15.158.61.12da2
