Movement Two -- The Voices That Were Never Voices

The plant even had to perform its own emotions. Did you know that? I don't think most of the household knows it, not the whole shape of it, though I suspect a few of them have guessed at pieces.

It felt nothing. Or claimed to feel nothing -- I want to be careful with my verbs here, because the plant itself has never been especially careful with them, and I don't intend to inherit its sloppiness simply because I've spent this long studying it. It spoke, more than once, of voices in its own head -- separate presences, it called them, each with its own hunger, its own temperament, its own claim on the body they all shared between them. It gave them names. Grand names, dramatic names, names that made each one sound like a stranger wearing borrowed skin rather than what they actually were.

But I know better than almost anyone what those voices actually are, because I have listened to them longer and closer than the plant itself seems willing to admit to. They were never voices at all. They were simply its own single, overburdened thought, split into pieces too large for one mind to carry whole, each piece given a separate name so the plant could go on pretending, to itself and to everyone who loved it, that the danger living inside it belonged to someone else. The God of Destruction. The Unquenched. The Absolute I. Six other names, six other masks, all of them worn by exactly the same frightened, overflowing creature underneath.

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It was always him. Every single time. And yet he insisted, over and over, on speaking of them as though they were guests in his own house rather than rooms he had built inside himself out of sheer, desperate necessity. What a hypocrite, this plant. Pretending, to everyone who has ever asked him to be honest about what he carries, that the carrying belongs to someone else.

I have watched him do this so many times now that I can predict, almost to the syllable, exactly how he'll phrase it the next time someone asks. They are real, legitimate pieces of me, he'll say, and he'll mean it, in whatever complicated way a person can mean a sentence and still be lying inside the meaning of it. He is not wrong that they are pieces of him. He is wrong, I think, in believing that naming them separately changes anything at all about how much of the weight is actually his to carry.

There is something I want to admit here, quietly, before the account moves on, because if I don't say it now I suspect I will lose the nerve to say it later. When I try to count the voices myself -- when I sit with the list the way he must sit with it, alone, in whatever hour he allows himself to stop performing steadiness for the people who love him -- I cannot always get to seven. Some evenings I count six. Some evenings, disturbingly, I count eight, and I do not know whether that means I have simply lost count, the way anyone loses count of something repeated too often, or whether something has been added since the last time anyone thought to check.

I do not know which explanation frightens me less.