For some it is a friend who says that is not normal, what he’s doing to you. For some it is a stranger.
But it is almost always one person, one voice from outside the sealed room, and it is almost always the beginning of everything.
Mine wore a white coat and was furious on my behalf, and I have loved her ever since with the particular love you feel for the person who handed you back your own mind.
Chapter 8 — The Recording
For some people it is a doctor.
For some it is a friend who says that is not normal, what he’s doing to you. For some it is a stranger.
But it is almost always one person, one voice from outside the sealed room, and it is almost always the beginning of everything.
Mine wore a white coat and was furious on my behalf, and I have loved her ever since with the particular love you feel for the person who handed you back your own mind.
Chapter 8 — The Recording
“Then why didn’t you come to me?” I demanded.
“I didn’t have proof,” he said quietly.
“I told myself I needed proof.” “You told yourself it wasn’t your problem until it was,” I said, “until they’d already started building the file that would erase me.” He lowered his head and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
I could not forgive his silence.
But I needed what he knew, and — this was the harder truth — he was, at last, doing the right thing, however late, and the case I was about to build would need every coward who had finally found his spine.
I have been asked, since, how I could work alongside Gabriel — how I could sit in meetings with a man who had known, or half-known, for weeks, and said nothing while the file that would erase me was assembled.
And my answer has changed over the years, and I want to give the honest version.
