Crisis
5. The Shell, Face to Face
It was still raining, and the boy felt large drops of water trickle down his scalp from a tree overhead.
"I don't care what you say." His voice was growing hoarse; he backed up to a low stone fence and sat down. "I feel so small. The whole point of my life..." He held out a hand and clenched his fist. The sleeve of his sweatshirt was too wide; it slipped down, and beads of water slid down his thin forearm.
The hand relaxed. "... just gone. It's like my friends are all dead. They're worse than dead."
He paused, and added, "So why me?"
To him, everything was blurry; he knew his glasses were lying crushed on the nearby sidewalk.
She picked them up and fitted them on his face. She retreated hurriedly. "There are always two. The notebook and the wand, one to write and one to be written on. Matter and mind. The world that shapes the mind and the mind that shapes the world. The man and the machine. Or in our case - the shell, and the spirit that brings meaning to it."
She looked up, towards the blank sky. "'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
"'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.'
"That's a famous quotation from the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:11-12.
"You're just afraid," she continued, "disillusioned by the light you're seeing for the first time. I know how it feels. I felt all those emotions I had written, but looking back is only sorrow. And emptiness. That it was all so unnecessary, so mistaken... All those deaths, all that pain and joy - for what? This?"
They were two people standing in the rain, not having the energy to find a place out of it.
A hard wind rose; she made some sound that was carried away into it, and perhaps the water on her face was only the rain.
Harry touched the glasses, pushing them further up his nose. "Is there magic in the world?" he wanted to know.
Rain and breath fogged up her spectacles; she resorted to looking over them. "Maybe. But I only want to be rid of it."
Harry looked down at the notebook, rain soaking the edges of the pages, filling them with spreading purple-black.
There was no choice being offered to him, but he knew what to do.
The boy held out the notebook.
She looked at it, surprised. "You keep amazing me, Harry... I have all these impressions of you, and every time you manage to break one I feel uncomfortable all over again. But if you'd only stop and think..." She took it from him but did not open it. "Seven years of your life, and more. All the things the people around you didn't do... the other ways things might have happened. And this is only a notebook. It's, what, two hundred, three hundred pages? That's far too little..."
She looked at it fondly, then tossed it to one side. It landed with a soft thump in the leaf-choked gutter. It was only a notebook, mundane and real, its words reduced to meaningless blotches.
She pointed at her head. "The real notebook is in here."