The Roaring Age (nWoD)

Page 51: The Arts of Mental Wellness, Part 1

He wasn't a tall man, her contact with the Folk, and there was very little that was imposing about him at all. Short, with skin about the color of charcoal, he looked at her with mild eyes and waited for her to say something.

There was little that was imposing about him, but much that was odd. His clothes, for one, seemed very strange indeed. They were red, gold, and blue and green… in fact they were all of those colors and more. It reminded her of a fool's motley, but it was actually some form of formless shift, covering his body but doing very little more than that.

He'd introduced himself as Waywords, and she was glad that she'd had to travel to reach him, rather than the other way around. She could imagine him standing in the kitchen talking to her mother, but only by negation. Only by imagining just how unimaginable that would be.

Not that there seemed to be anything rude about him, it was just that he was so very clearly not an ordinary person. Yet not an impressive one either. "So, how much do you know about… what do the kids call it these days?"

"I… wouldn't know," Miriam said, trying not to react too much to the strangeness. She knew that this was just part of how things went. They were in a small apartment deeper into the south side, an apartment that was apparently mostly a front.

Mostly, because it did certainly smell like someone lived in there. And didn't pick up after himself. It smelled of rotten food and sweat and pollen, and all of it blended together into something more disgusting than its individual parts.

"Sorry, sorry, I assume, y'know, and that's a sin," he said. His accent was pure Southern twang. "But y'all get younger every day. Or perhaps I get older and older every day."

Miriam's second-brain threw up a witty comment about linear time, but then again for all she knew, magic could get around that, and besides this, it was not truly wise to engage in witty commentary when you were trying to be polite instead. She'd seen the way her uncle, when he didn't care, could through one clever joke after another alienate someone else, and also how, when it came time to be serious, he was serious and earnest and convincing enough to sell anything to anyone.

"So, what do they call it?" Miriam asked, honing in on something more concrete to talk about.

"Psycho-surgery or whatnot. But it's such a weird name."

"Well, it makes sense," Miriam said. "In a way. But as for what I know? Not much. How would you do it?"

"Well, you can't fix anything forever. That's one of the key elements. Or rather, it's not easy to do so, because magic fades and weakens over time. And while it is possible to help someone towards working through a problem in their mind without magic, it's magic that does this the best."

"How?" Miriam asked.

"Let us imagine that I wished to make you less Prideful. Pride, I feel, is a sin, and you are arrogant, strong in your conviction that you are a queen among Mages." He shrugged at the look on Miriam's face. "Perhaps it is unlikely, but what happens when I lock up such Pride. When I put bars on it, symbolically that means it is, if not eliminated, at least unable to run free. You can also destroy parts of someone's personality. I could slay your Pride, and then for a number of days, you would be without it."

"Is that a good thing?"

"God, no," Wayword said with a shake of his head. "Without any pride at all, it's just as bad as if you were an egomaniac. Instead, what you do is balance things. You lock away bad memories, and help them work through old traumas. You explore their mind to make notes."

"Notes? For talking about the problems later?"

"Exactly. I be bothered all the time by those youngin's, not getting that sometimes y'have to reckon on something a little less extreme."

"Extreme?"

"Oh, your… Connie, psychologist and all, prolly agrees, but a lot of them just think they wave their fingers and do a little dance and the magic does the work for 'em." His accents was so thick at points that she struggled to pull out the meaning from it and translate it for her ears. She wondered whether she could fix that with magic.

Then again, she'd have to think about how that would work, but she supposed it would be possible. She knew accents could be dealt with, but how to give herself an accent? And would it register?

Could she also create some sort of translation magic that means that everything someone else says comes across as… Chicago English, she supposed it had to be? Or middle-American? There had to be some term for it, that way of talking that a part of her couldn't help assume was simply the way people were supposed to speak English.

"Ah, well I understand it might not always work that way," Miriam said.

"But today, they wanted me to take you through your paces, anyways. Give you a case and see what we can do together. See what you can learn, for that matter. I have the skills necessary to help carry out all sorts of things that you, personally, could not do. But I'm going to try to use my discretion, so if you advise anything too disastrous, do not worry."

"Then what am I doing to help?" Miriam said.

"You're bringing your mind, and your compassion, and your will. And it's not as if you might not have plenty of work to do." Wayword nodded to himself, looking satisfied with this. He had a very gap-toothed smile, as if he'd been in a fight or three.

There was so much about him that she didn't understand, but she did understand that if he was with the Folk, and if he had all of this experience, then she couldn't let him down. She didn't want to fail.

Miriam Green knew a test when she saw it.
She liked to think that she was good at passing and dealing with tests, but this was certainly something new and different. New and different enough that a part of her was afraid that at any moment she'd say something wrong.

Did she want to join the Folk? She wasn't sure, but even if she didn't, she did want to help people and make a good impression on them. So she smiled a little and asked, "Who is it?"

"Well, some prelim work has been done. I'm in charge of this sort of thing, and while I didn't look, we've run across him before… two and a half years ago, when he was just moving into the city. Larry Baker traveled here from down south, right around Mississippi. He got to work in the slaughterhouses, and he's done good work, as far as we can know. He got married two years ago, to Hessie Brown."

"How old is he?" Miriam asked, making mental notes.

"Twenty-eight now. Hessie's about… twenty or so? She was the younger sister of another migrant, and she moved up here for schoolin' and also because she'd heard that there were chances in the city."

There were, at least a little. But most women didn't exactly have all that much chance at them. "And met him?"

"Yes. They got to datin', and then they got married. He's a hard worker, but silent. Quiet."

"Surly, or shy?" Miriam asked, well aware that which was which could sometimes be a matter of who you asked.

"Some say one, some say the other. But he wasn't a troublemaker. The kind of Negro who keeps out of the limelight. Had few enough hobbies besides working. He sometimes watched baseball…"

Wayword trailed off, and Miriam nodded, trying not to show any of her curiosity about this little detail. It wasn't new or important, but it did give her a better picture of him. At least a little bit. He'd come up north, found a job that paid better than down south.

"Any trouble adjusting?" Miriam asked.

"Why do you ask that?" Wayword's smile wasn't changing at all. It was too blank to be entirely real, but not drawn enough to obviously hide any sort of judgement.

"I know some of the workers coming up from the south had trouble with the northern… schedules." On a farm, you could take a ten minute breather and just work harder to get the day's work done, or work twice as hard and then, the way Virginia explained it, take a long lunch. Plus of course there were times that you didn't have as much to do and spent the time together with the community.

The rhythms of rural life were another unfamiliar thing to her. But she knew that employers had complained about the work ethic for a time, or maybe even still… she heard about it indirectly, when her father's church had helped people find jobs. Not that it was hard, once upon a time.

"He came from a southern city. Moving in stages," Wayword pointed out. "No complaints about his work, even now. If you'd asked me six months ago, then as far as modest ambitions go, he'd done right by himself, I'd reckon. He wasn't ever going to be a supervisor, but you know they don't let many Negroes rise that high, anyways, and he made decent enough money. Though his wife still worked--"

A pause, for disapproval. But Miriam nodded, not willing to show any disapproval, and having far too much experience with what poverty would look like to think as some did, about the impropriety of women working when they had a husband whose job it was to manage things.

"His wife worked. She works in a garment factory. Hard, long hours, not a happy story, but… not a sad one, either. Particularly at least. But three or four months ago, he started drinking and going out. All of a sudden. It was just a little at first, but last month, or so, it started to get a lot worse. We heard about it when she came to us."

"You knew her?" Miriam asked, curiously.

"Of course. We know everyone, and we helped her out once, I think, when there were a few odd… spirits following her around. Not that she knows that's what we were doing." Wayword nodded, pacing a little bit. "He'd started hitting her when drunk."

Miriam winced. "Out of drunken fury?"

"It clearly wasn't correction," Wayword said.

Not that Miriam could personally imagine either without wincing, since her father and mother had never been anything like that. But one was clearly worse than the other, just as it was, if not always wise, at least justifiable to lay the lash upon an erring child--another thing Miriam had never gotten, though mostly by luck in some cases, for her father's disappointment was its own weapon--but not to hurt another just for the joy of it.

Drinking, though. It was almost expected that such a thing would lead to chaos and ruin. Thus always was the trend when people took up the devil rum and threw their lives down the drain faster than they could throw a shot of grain whiskey down their throats. Sure, Uncle Jack had managed not to be ruined by it, but that didn't mean that alcohol wasn't ruinous.

"Ah, a temperance woman, I see," Wayword said. "Or maybe even Prohibition."

"We outlaw other evils," Miriam said, not wanting to get into a large debate.

"Well, whether it is an evil or not in an absolute sense,... it's changed him. Or something changed him and now he's drinking. There's no sign of a spell or spirit on him, nor any whiff of Paradox, or the haunting of ghosts."

"What about… vampires? Or Demons?" Miriam asked. "Can we know that magic has nothing to do with it?"

"In my experience, magic is rarely needed to ruin someone's life. But it could. If so, you'll discover it soon enough," Wayword said. "Until then, you should probably assume it's something more innocuous than that. But either way, the first question of course, and the one you'll have to ask tonight… and I'll need permission to enter your mind, is…"

"Permission granted," Miriam said. Then she frowned, thinking of all of the ways that could go wrong. "Just this once, and just to grab me."

Friday night would take a little while to come.

"Very well, I accept all a' this." He nodded. "And my question: where to look first? If you were to ask yourself why he got to drinking, what would you say, as a fast guess?"

Where to start?

[] "Work. Perhaps something happened to stress him out, or perhaps he's more tired. Either way, that'd be a good place to start."
[] "His married life. Is there something there that's going wrong? I'm not sure, I don't want to suspect…"
[] "I've heard it said," by her Dad, she didn't say, "that when someone's troubles come creeping up, it's often their past that's catching up to them."
[] Start with the alcohol. Once that's fixed, once one understands the drinking and can get rid of it, however, then things will be better. Obviously.
[] The violence has to stop, no matter what else is fixed…
[] Write-in.

******

A/N: And here we go.