That Greta, she said, she's just making big. A man full up on beer saying in that beer how big he is. Not knowing that Coyote'll get him just walking round the side of the house to make water.
I don't set no store by Coyote, Theophil said. There's no big Coyote, like you think. There's not just one of him. He's everywhere. The government's got his number too. They've set a bounty on him at fifty cents a brush. I could live well at his expense.
Sheila Watson, The Double Hook
Scott was an early riser, even though he often worked late into the night. The early morning hours at the mansion were the best ones, when all was quiet and the house was full of light. Jean was still asleep -- she would sleep in as late as she could, as if she were always catching up on her rest. They used to stay in bed together late on Saturday mornings, but right now diplomatic relations were a little strained.
Moira, the housekeeper, was opening the dark velvet drapes in the dining hall; it was always a production, as the windows were so big and the draperies so heavy, and Scott liked to watch her do it every morning as he ate. It reminded him of the video for John Lennon's Imagine.
"Scott." The professor. He was an early riser too, although he had been late getting to bed last night. The session in Hank's lab had gone on until one in the morning -- when had they started, noon? -- and when Xavier came out, he had looked pale and shaken.
Xavier looked no better this morning, but he was busy removing the dead leaves from his cyclamen plants by the window, and that was usually a good sign. He wasn't talking to the plants, but Scott had only caught him at that once. "Good morning, Scott."
"That one's purple, isn't it?" They used to play this game a lot, back when Scott first got the glasses. He had never learned to distinguish white from pink unless the two were side by side, but he was good at telling blue from purple.
"A very nice violet. Although I think I still prefer the blue. But yes, you've made great progress with your colours." Xavier pulled a dead bloom off the plant with rather more force than necessary. "I'm glad to see that some people are getting better, if not others."
"It's only been four days--"
The professor held up a hand. "I know. You're right. I wasn't expecting miracles."
Scott doubted that. Maybe not expecting them, but with every new student, it seemed that the professor never got tired of hoping for miracles.
"True," Xavier said with a tight smile. "I have been guilty of, perhaps, excessive optimism. In the past. Well, what do you think? I could use your pragmatism right now."
Scott pulled his mental shields tighter. Usually he didn't mind the professor listening in a little -- they had an understanding that meetings in the office were informal that way. But today he wanted a little distance. "I haven't seen him enough to say."
"Oh, come. You have a quick intuition about people, though you don't always admit your conclusions to yourself. How far do you think I'll get? Could I turn him into a stable member of society? A powerful advocate for mutants' rights? A member of the team?"
The last was a joke, and Scott knew it, but he still couldn't restrain an immediate, "No."
"Interesting."
"He can't talk to one person alone in his bedroom, so no, I don't see him facing down Magneto."
Xavier tilted his head. "We are not our disorders, Scott. Jean spent time in psychiatric hospitals too."
That was different, Scott wanted to say. But he hadn't known Jean then, and what he knew about that situation had come to him second-hand, through stories. Legends, almost: the red-haired girl curled up in a foetal position on the hospital bed, Xavier wheeling slowly into the room...and then light breaking into the room, a speedy recovery, Jean smiling at Scott for the first time through the red haze of the glasses...
Perhaps it had happened that way. The professor was good.
"Has something happened? Between you and Jean?"
Damn. Scott put his shields up again, but it was obviously too late. "No. Nothing out of the ordinary."
"So this...is ordinary for you now?"
"I don't know what you mean."
They always seemed to be just over a fight. It was always Scott's fault -- lately he just felt wound up around her, like a string tuned so tight it would break at any moment. No, not tight. He was more like a muscle, loose and shaking with exhaustion. He would bring up some old hurt, looking for reassurance, and Jean would laugh, or come back with some insecurity of her own, or tell him she really just needed to lie down. Small brush-offs. An arid period in their relationship, that was all.
"You can't depend on the weather in that regard," the professor said quietly. "Maybe you need to find ways to fulfill these needs on your own. Sink your own well."
This time Scott didn't bother being offended at the intrusion. "We always brought our problems to each other before. It's not even as if anything happened. It's just...I keep on being needy and she keeps putting me off. Lately. And it'll pass. I'm not worried about it, Christ. It's just not the most comfortable phase."
Xavier steepled his fingers and peered at Scott, giving him that I know better look. Scott resisted the impulse to just give him something, make up troubles to confess. Anxiety, or worrisome dreams, or secret arguments between himself and Jean.
At last, the professor said, "Faith, in a relationship, is a wonderful thing."
"Right."
"Not blind faith. Informed, mature understanding of patterns. Acceptance that things won't always be perfect."
They had talked about this before. Scott felt himself getting fidgety and folded his arms to hide it.
"But faith needs a back-up plan. You can't just resign yourself to suffering. What do you intend to do during these bad patches, Scott, until the rain comes? What does Jean intend to do? It's no accident, you know, that the Holy Land is a dry country."
That afternoon, Charles saw Joel in his office for their first real therapy session. The boy had the blank, preoccupied look of someone still working off the effects of sedatives, but he was mostly solid -- Charles could hear, faintly, the slow murmur of his thoughts. He didn't press, and promised himself he wouldn't probe too deeply, nor be caught by surprise if there was another overflow of that scalding pain.
"I'm sorry that the tests yesterday caused you so much distress," Charles said to Joel. "But I wanted to compliment you on your remarkable memory. That's a long poem to memorise, especially considering it isn't in metre. I'm quite impressed."
Joel shrugged. "It's just parroting. It's not like actually being smart."
"What makes you think so?" Charles asked.
Silence; Joel did not respond.
"You did very well in school. Dr. Visineau's records say your test scores are well above average."
"I can do school stuff," Joel said, as if it were insignificant.
"But you don't think that makes you intelligent?"
The boy shook his head silently.
"What would be a sign of intelligence, for you?"
Joel started to answer, but then it seemed to be too much for him and he only shook his head again, and shrugged.
"Ah, well." Charles smiled, to reassure him. "Time for that later. The first thing I would like us to explore is how your powers first manifested."
"Didn't Father Gilles put that in my file?"
"Yes, he did. But humour me -- I'd like to hear the story from you."
"But you already know?"
"I do."
"Okay." Joel licked his lips, staring at his hands. The backs of his palms had red welts across them, from his habit of digging his fingernails into the skin, but he wasn't doing that now.
He spoke slowly, sometimes pausing as if his throat was too constricted to keep talking. "I started having blackouts when I was fifteen. Syncope, actually, not blackouts -- that's just what my mother called them. She said it used to happen to her, just part of being a teenager. I didn't go to the doctor until the first seizure. They said I was epileptic, gave me medication. I didn't have seizures for two years after the meningitis, but they said sometimes it happens like that, sometimes you have delayed reactions. I wasn't so sure. The medication didn't stop the seizures."
Charles had heard all this during Jean's medical examination, but he didn't interrupt.
"They had to pull me out of school, because I started having them every day. Not always grand mal, but I would just lose the time for awhile."
A long pause, this time. Charles prodded him lightly. "And?"
"And I went in the hospital," he said. "The neurology ward."
Charles caught the glimmer of a memory, as Joel became a little more solid in the chair. Four old men in the ward, and a sitter reading under a light in one corner. A stubborn smell of feces that never went away, from one of the patients who couldn't control his bowels, and the more depressing hospital-smell of...skin.
Xavier remembered that smell, very well indeed. "Go on."
"I woke up -- I think I woke up. And I wasn't anything. I couldn't see myself, feel anything. There were always these loud buzzing sounds from the nurses' station down the hall, but I could hardly hear them. Or I could, but it was like being underwater, it wasn't clear."
"You didn't fall through the bed, of course," Charles said, thinking of Kitty Pryde.
Joel shook his head. He was slipping away again, getting blurry. "That never happens to me, no. I was just hanging there. The bed was all rumpled. Then the sitter happened to look up from her book, and she ran to press the call button. When the nurse came, the sitter said I was gone. That I slipped out somehow. 'Well, what, were you asleep?' the nurse asks. The sitter starts crying. I tried to say I was there, but nothing happened. And then everything got fuzzier, until I couldn't see or hear anything at all.
"I came out of it, a while later. It was still dark, and I went to the window -- I couldn't feel my body, but I could move. It was weird. My hand went through the glass. I decided I must be dead."
"And what did you do?" Charles knew the story from the file, but he wanted to hear it.
"I went down...through the hospital. I was afraid of the elevator, because I couldn't push the buttons and saw the empty shaft through the doors. So I found the fire stairs. It took a long time. Neurology was on the seventh floor.
"It was snowing outside, but I couldn't feel it. I didn't know what to do. But I thought I was dead, so I went to the church near the hospital. I don't know what I thought that would accomplish. There wasn't anybody there. For a long time I just waited there, to see if anything would happen. Then the whiteness came."
"The deepest phase of your power."
"I guess." Joel did not seem to like that phrasing. "It was...just nothing. When I came out of it, daily Mass had started. There were a few old people there, and the priest, I think. You don't get a crowd at that hour. I was in the back, so no one was looking but the priest. He acted casual, until the Mass was over. Then he came up to me and...and asked what I was."
Charles let that hang in the air for a moment before prodding. "What did you tell him?"
"I told him I was dead."
"And?"
"He asked for my name and called the hospital to find out."
"Practical man," said Charles. "What did the hospital do?"
Joel started, as if he had been thinking of something else. "Oh, nothing, they just said I had escaped and put me back in the ward. Then they said I was psychotic, transferred me to the Royal Ottawa and put me on AP's. But I kept disappearing. Finally it happened while someone was actually watching me, so they checked my DNA."
"And found the X-gene. What did your parents think of all this?"
Joel shook his head. "You don't understand. They mean all that stuff they say. They were glad just to know what was wrong, and Dad had already been working on a commission about mutants. He was sad, at first, because he knew it was hard on me. But he found out about St. Rita's and pushed to get me in there."
"And that was all?"
"That," Joel said with unusual firmness, "was all."
That, it seemed, was all -- Charles could not find any evidence that the McCrees had been anything but compassionate and accepting. Nothing was mentioned in the file, and there was nothing in Joel's responses and the tiny radar blips Charles picked up from his mind. And the McCrees, he thought, were trustworthy.
So why this little shoot of doubt?
A few weeks after Joel's arrival, Charles received a long-distance call from Ottawa. Dr. Visineau did not waste much time with pleasantries. "So, how is he doing?"
"Quite well," Charles said evasively. "I believe we've already made some progress, at least."
Dr. Visineau laughed on the other end. "Have you? Well, I would be interested to hear what you've managed to do for him in three weeks."
"If you think it's so early, why did you call?"
"I wanted to know how Joel was doing, not what progress you might have made. Although I'm pleased to hear about that, very much." He pronounced the name as two syllables in his French accent, in which words seemed to be suspended, weightless, without English's emphatic rhythm. "Is he settling in all right?"
Charles reigned in an utterly selfish burst of temper. Point to Visineau. "Well, he's eating better."
"Ah, ouais? That, that was always a problem. He's told us that he doesn't get hungry at the bottom, but evidently his body is suffering even so. We just...it was very difficult to get anything into him. He would emerge, we would rush to get him fed, and he would disappear."
"He doesn't want to be a bother," Charles said, more to himself.
"Exactly, yes. It isn't pride, of course. He doesn't believe he's worth the trouble. Unless one takes the view that low self-esteem is merely another form of pride, a belief that one must be perfect..." Visineau trailed off.
"Well. I'm afraid I don't know how to treat anyone for the deadly sin of low self-esteem, Doctor." That was harsher than he had intended. "Once he learns to control his gifts better, his view of himself will probably improve. As it is, his lack of control is interfering with therapy and, it seems, with ordinary physical health."
"Oh, I agree with you," Visineau said mildly.
"For once."
"Yes, for once. So he's eating better, that's wonderful. What else?"
Charles told him about Hank and Jean's theory that Joel was not epileptic, and ran through a quick version of Hank's notes on the boy's powers. "Dr. McCoy has termed it the aphanes, or the aphanic state. He hasn't decided which he likes better yet."
"Dr. McCoy knows his Greek. Joel was always very good at Greek and Latin, actually. We only offered it through tutors, to select students." A pause. "It's a small place, St. Rita's. I miss having him around. Or not around, as the case may be. Perhaps I should have kept him here and given it another go."
"If I may ask..." Charles said, and then stopped. Was it politic to discuss this with Visineau?
"Yes?"
"Why did you refer Joel to me?"
Visineau laughed in surprise. "I'm sorry? Why do you think? You're the best. The foremost expert on treating mutants in North America. The only other choice was Donald Morrison in Vancouver, and frankly he's a distant third to you and me, hein? Too far away, besides. I'm surprised you had to ask -- did you honestly think I had that much, ah, mépris, disdain for you?"
"No, I'm just..." Charles exhaled and turned his chair around to look out the window. "I was wondering if there was any other reason."
A long silence on the other end of the line. Charles wished he could probe the priest's mind from here, or at least pick up the flavour of his feelings. Finally Visineau said, "If you are referring to the rumours and the communiqué from the CFH, yes, I've read it. It was in the Citizen this morning."
The CFH were a small anti-mutant group from rural Eastern Ontario, of whose existence Charles was only barely aware. "I don't follow you."
"They sent some rabid scribblings to the paper, who decided their nonsense deserved a platform. You know the kind of thing. Unelected senator sends mutant son to New York to be trained as secret operative against our country! 'Dr.' Charles Xavier a known mutant sympathiser, probably a mutant himself! Stop these politicians from enslaving us all! It got a bit violent at the end, but the RCMP are on it."
"I should hope so!" How had that news got out so fast? Maybe the senator had some false friends, but surely he and Jean had been discreet, and quick besides. Of course anyone who defended mutants was thought to be secretly one of them, and Senator McCree had never hidden the fact that his son was a mutant...in staid, peaceful Ottawa, mutation was treated like Down's Syndrome -- unfortunate, certainly nothing to be ashamed of, but not to be discussed in public. "I had no idea this CFH had sources so close to the senator. I didn't even know they were still active. Canadian Friends of Humanity, isn't it?"
"Front for Humanity, I believe. Alors...that's what I thought you were asking, but I see it's news to you. In any case -- did I think you might be a mutant? Yes. It's rumoured. Certainly it's known that your teachers there are mutants. Is that why I sent Joel to you? Not really. I referred him because I was tired of dealing with him. And because I was tired, we weren't making progress. Nothing more exciting than that."
Charles had certainly heard that before. Sometimes a psychologist would say there was a failure to create a therapeutic alliance; sometimes the patient was resisting therapy, as Joel had been accused; but between themselves, colleagues would say, "I just ran out of ideas." Or, "We didn't get along." Or, "I was tired of dealing with him."
It was common. But mutants didn't have enough friendly mental health professionals to shop around, and Xavier was often a last resort, the point where referrals stopped.
"Joel," Visineau said, "Is a good boy. I like him a lot; I like his family. But he is hard to help."
Charles's frustration overflowed. "I can't even get to square one with him. The only time I got him to talk was when he was heavily medicated. The rest of the time I have to just assume that he's there and listening to me...and if he can't speak, I don't know why we should bother with the pretence of a session. Meanwhile, his physical health is a mess and he spends half his time in that -- that comatose invisible state of his. In the Aphanes, as Hank would say. We haven't even had much chance to talk about controlling his powers, since he always seems so close to some sort of crisis. I don't know where to begin."
"But you are medicating him?"
"No. That is, I had him sedated the other night," Charles admitted. "And the night after that, because he asked for it. Dr. McCoy and I were hesitant, but--"
"Do it," Visineau interrupted. "I know it's not usual practice, and that's why I avoided it. I regret that -- he wouldn't have lost so much weight. As I said in the file, SSRIs don't have any effect, but he's very sensitive to benzodiazepine and similar drugs."
"I don't believe in treating patients that way. Especially not mutants. The effects of psychiatric drugs on mutants haven't been well-explored."
A long sigh. "Well, think about it. You know all the arguments as well as I do. And you also know the effects of untreated depression."
Yes, he did.
The sky was cloudy outside, and it looked like rain. Charles gazed out at the woods that surrounded the mansion's grounds, at the creek that wound through. Not deep enough for drowning, unless Joel did something creative.
"Tell me," he asked the priest. "Does he play chess at all?"
Charles did try chess. He thought it would be a good experience, something to bond them outside of therapy and classes. Being back in school didn't seem to agree with Joel. He never spoke and spent most of the day just over the edge of the Aphanes, often disappearing during class. By all reports (Ororo kept close tabs on the social relationships in her history classes), Joel never got much past basic introductions with the other students.
Charles hoped the chess would be more helpful, giving the boy some confidence; Xavier intended to let him win a few times, when he deserved it.
It didn't work out like that. Joel knew how to play, but wasn't especially suited to the game. He was too wary to use his strong pieces well, and always played as if he were conducting a siege: pawns in an unbroken wall across the board. Breaking through the screen with a knight was laughably easy. The games also suffered from inertia (boredom was too unkind a word), for if the rules of the game had been up to Joel, nobody would ever have to make a move at all, and he took a long time deciding. There was one exception: he could be thrown off-balance easily by the loss of a favoured piece, and would react emotionally, trying to get revenge for the loss of his queen rather than thinking about his moves.
Charles tried to teach him, and didn't play with anything like the aggression he would have used against Erik, or even Scott. But eventually Charles decided that demolishing a poorly-constructed defensive screen twice a week just wasn't creating the sort of bond he desired.
When Joel came into the office and saw that the chessboard was empty, wheeled away in its customary corner, the boy breathed an audible sigh of relief.
"You didn't seem to enjoy it much," Charles said by way of explanation. "Perhaps there's something else we might do together. Any suggestions?"
Joel, of course, just shrugged and began to dig his nails into his hands.
"What do you like to do?"
Still too general. Joel retreated into his faint, flickering state and said, "I don't do anything. I'm just...I'm really boring."
"Now, you must do something. I saw that the piano in your house was in use. Do you play?" Charles asked.
"I'm not good."
"Well, perhaps we could--" Charles stopped, as he decided that the antipathy towards the piano was probably genuine. "Well. What did your parents send you in those boxes, if you don't do anything?"
There had been six boxes, all small. "Just books."
"So you value your books, or else you would be content to leave them at home, correct? What were some of the books that your parents sent you?"
That cut a little close; Joel's form became still more dim. "Just books."
"Name me one. Humour me."
"They're stupid," Joel whispered. "They're just books."
It was like pulling teeth, and Charles began to wonder if those six boxes were in fact chock-a-block with pornography. Finally, however, Joel caved in and confessed that one of the books sent was a collection of the plays of Sophocles, a gift from his father. He sank into complete imperceptibility.
"Perhaps we could study some of the plays together," Charles suggested to the empty air, wondering if the boy was conscious or if he had fallen all the way into the Aphanes. Of all the things to be ashamed of, honestly. "I'm quite fond of Sophocles."
Joel made no response for several minutes, but at last solidified enough to accept the arrangement. "I guess."
"Would you rather start with the Oedipus cycle, or one of the others...?"
He dug his nails into his skin. "I like Antigone."
It was textbook avoidant behaviour; Charles knew that. Joel resisted giving up information and believed any special attention was bound to be negative -- the more Charles pushed to find something out, even if the questions were harmless, the more alarmed Joel became.
That didn't make it any less wearisome. As the weeks went on, Joel seemed to deteriorate. He disappeared more and more, and Charles was beginning to suspect it was deliberate. The few things Joel said in therapy were cryptic, with occasional flashes of nasty imagery. Charles struggled to understand, but he had no context for the images, no mental pictures or memories with which to compare them. He kept notes by his bedside, in case he should wake up from a dream with some inspiration.
A bird hitting a window, meat rotting in an art gallery, a tumour.
Quotes and Notes: In case it wasn't clear from the context, the Royal Ottawa is a psychiatric hospital. "AP's" are anti-psychotic drugs.