My Father’s Mansion…John 14:2
This is my room.
Not the one I live in at the Mansion, the one that’s cluttered with paints and canvases and about a thousand pairs of gloves.
This one is bare, clean, free of even the slightest speck of dust. There’s no furniture, no paintings on the bare grey walls, nothing to break the monotony except the doors.
There are four doors opening into this room. Interestingly, I never think of there being any doors out of the room. I wonder why that is.
I guess because I never leave it. Not really.
This is the room in my mind that the Professor made for me four and a half years ago when he swept all the other personalities out, changed me from a budding schizophrenic into what I am now. I’ve done a lot of research on the subject, and I think the word that describes it best is depersonalization. I memorized the definition. It means an alteration in the perception or experience of one's self, so that the self is felt to be unreal — detached from reality or one's own body or mental processes. That pretty much sums it up. Since that night, the girl that goes out in the world, takes classes, shops, eats, goes to the movies—she’s an artificial construct. A carefully drawn piece of artwork, if you will.
Her name is Rogue.
No one knows this. At first, I thought the Professor suspected. He apologized to me for what he’d done when I woke up, said it was an emergency situation and he wouldn’t ever have done it without my cooperation and consent if there had been a choice. He pressed me to work with him at understanding what he’d done, working towards being able to release the controls he’d put into place so I could handle them myself.
I did some meditation and control exercises with him, but I would never let him into my mind again. Not for the reasons he thought, either. He told me at the start that he understood that I didn’t want to be ‘fixed’, that he was proud of me for wanting to do the work myself. I don’t know how satisfied he was with the work I did do. He’s got a very strict code of ethics when it comes to things like that, and I know he doesn’t “read” people without permission. I sometimes think he knows I didn’t exactly follow instructions, but he won’t investigate without my consent. He thinks my refusal is because of the violation it involves. It’s not. It’s just that if he saw what I’ve made of the room he built, he’d know what I am.
I don’t want anybody to know that. So I created the outside Rogue to satisfy the world, and when I’m alone I live in the room inside. It used to be nothing but smooth grey walls.
I made the doors.
The first one, off in shadows, is achingly familiar. It’s the door to my old room at home in my parents’ house, white-painted wood, a little scuffed-up, with lines along one side where my daddy used to make a pencil mark of my height every year on my birthday.
This was the first door I made.
The door isn’t locked, and if I go over to it, it will swing open at my touch. If I go inside, though, it’s barely the size of a large closet, an empty one swept clean of its contents, like a room in a summer house closed up for the cold weather. I might feel just the faintest touch of a presence there, an echo of feelings or emotions—fear, schoolboy lust, just simple innocent pleasure at being alone with a girlfriend on an August afternoon just before senior year began.
But David isn’t here anymore. My power was just awakening when I touched him and although he was unconscious for three weeks, he recovered, and he’s slowly faded away. Even when I first made the door and dared to open it, he wasn’t really here, though there was more of a presence then, just the faintest shadow of the boy I knew. I don’t think I hurt him too badly; I sometimes come in here and remember that golden afternoon, when I was still alive in the real world. He was a real nice boy, and even though I never saw him again after they came and took him to the hospital, I’d like to think that he knew I didn’t mean to hurt him. He didn’t understand that it was me sending him into convulsions, draining his life from him, so he wasn’t angry at me, even though he was afraid. But he’s gone now.
I’m glad.
The next door I also know from all the years of my childhood. It’s a double door, larger than the first, made to stand wide open on Sundays and welcome in worshippers. There are large handles on the door instead of doorknobs, ornate cast iron with a winding ivy pattern that feels rough under my hands. These doors are bolted, and a heavy chain is wrapped around the handles, padlocked tight so that even if those bolts were thrown back, the doors still wouldn’t open an inch.
I never go into this room.
Inside I know what I’d find: rows of pews, the wider aisle up the middle with smooth worn oaken floors, the spot where my parents and I sat Sunday after Sunday, where I can remember climbing up to stand on the shabby red velvet seat cushions. It would be dark, with cobwebs and dust because no one ever cleans in there. There are no windows. The room stops before the pews end and you would reach the place where the altar should stand; there is no holy shrine there. But there’s an occupant, one who prowls the aisle and the rows, clutching a black leather-bound book and muttering to itself. Its thoughts are black as well, ugly and cruel. They seep through the cracks of the door and give the walls of the room outside their greyish cast, no matter how hard I try to block the edges.
Father Fallon was his name outside. I’d known him all my life; he’d given me catechism lessons and I’d heard him preach almost every Sunday since I was five and my mama told me I was old enough to go to church with them every week. I remember the first time, feeling so grown up in my new white dress and shiny black patent-leather shoes, coming out after the service and the grey-haired preacher shaking my hand with grave courtesy. He seemed so much taller then.
He touched me when he was trying to exorcise me, over and over, and now I know what he was thinking that day, looking down at a pretty little girl in her best dress, and I know I’m not the only one who ever created a false persona to meet the world’s eyes.
In the real world, he died because of what he did to me. What’s left of him only survives in my mind, a chattering, mindless ghoul.
He hates me, and he lusts after me, and I can hear him pacing the floor, muttering Bible verses and foul curses one after the other as he goes. Before the Professor cleared my mind, I didn’t hear his voice, just the thoughts themselves, and I used to try to placate them, tried to read the passages that floated through my head and accept them, to make myself pure and holy again. Now he’s solidified and it’s his voice I hear, but twisted into a bizarre distortion of the rolling vibrant tones I remember.
If I opened that door, he would rush out and try to claim me again, to make me feel that shame and disgust at what I am and what he wants me to be, to use it against me so he could take me the way he always wanted to.
I don’t know whether I would have trouble defeating him if I let him out—I doubt it, actually. But I don’t. I don’t want to go through that, don’t want to bother. There isn’t any point. I can keep him locked away, and feeling nothing is better. It lets me do what I need to do.
Skip the next door for now.
The last one is smaller, almost as though it was built to be the door of a child’s playhouse. It’s gold, and there are beautiful patterns winding up and down its panels. I spent hours and hours creating them. There’s no handle of any kind. I’m the only one who can open this door, and it opens simply at my touch in the right spot.
Inside it’s light. I never know what the room will look like until I open the door. Sometimes it’s my old room at home, sometimes it’s not a room at all but the woods behind my house, bright and smelling of rain and honeysuckle on a summer day. Sometimes it’s a place I don’t even recognize, a place that doesn’t exist anywhere except in its occupant’s imagination.
Marie lives here.
I don’t visit often, but she’s always glad to see me. I think she makes the room different on purpose to distract me. She doesn’t like it when people aren’t happy. She shows me pretty things she’s discovered and takes my ungloved hand and we sit together, feeling the sunshine. It’s peaceful here.
I keep her safe here. I need to keep her secure, untouched, happy. Knowing that she’s there, always, is enough to let me do my work in the real world alone. If she wanted to come out, I’d talk her out of it, because I don’t want her to see those grey walls outside. But she never asks. She seems content in her world. I don’t come in when I’m disturbed or angry; she doesn’t need to see that in me. I don’t want to taint her in any way at all. Today I place my gloved hand against the door, tracing the silver filigree I labored over, sensing that glowing presence within just for a moment. But I don’t open the door. I have work to do today and if I went in she might sense what I’m doing, might want to try and give her golden innocence back to me, let me feel her joy and her happiness. Make me feel her love.
I don’t want that any more than I want to feel the shame Father Fallon pushes at me. Those things are hers.
I’m standing in front of the third door now.
Even as I approach it, I brace myself. The occupant of this room is never quiescent, never still. It knows I’m there and it’s coiled and ready to strike if ever the door opens even a crack.
This door is smooth, gleaming metal. It’s barred by long, thick, sharp shards of the same substance, three on each side, embedded in the walls on each side of the door and crossing at an angle at a point in the center, forming an upside-down V that matches the arch of the door itself. There is no handle and the walls blend almost imperceptibly into the door, keeping it sealed.
It doesn’t matter. I can feel the rage and anger of what’s in there, the frustration at being trapped and the desire to escape, to fight, to destroy its prison. I can’t even come close without its knowing, and it batters against the door, trying to get to me.
I don’t know what the room looks like inside. I’m sure it’s hellish. Nightmares exist in there, much worse ones than the ones that flutter in the eaves of the church. Those came of commonplace, mundane evil, and these are twisted and dark, made of coldly planned tortures in medical labs and intended murder and destruction. This is the presence that almost destroyed my mind, the one that would have taken me over if the Professor hadn’t locked it away. I could never control it if it got out. I’m not sure I’d even want to, and that still scares me.
The Wolverine lives here. I use the word advisedly. This is no faint shade or walking corpse like the first two rooms; inside I hear his growling and pacing, the distinctive metallic sound as he unsheathes his claws, looking for something to sink them into. I think he fights demons in there, the other nightmares trapped inside with him, and I’m sorry for that.
I would let him go if I could, but there’s no way out.
But there is one thing I can do, one small comfort I can offer, though he always fights it. I focus, gathering myself, and I feel him, snarling at the touch of my mind reaching towards him. I can make him quieter, just for a little while, and in that short space of time other memories come up, memories he doesn’t want because they remind him of the world outside, of the face he once had.
Logan’s memories.
I wonder sometimes if everyone, ultimately, is only a façade. But the memories calm the animal for a moment, they still the creatures that torment him, and I reach for one last scene. I’m almost finished here; this is the last time I’ll ever need to do this, and I’ve been saving this one moment for my final work.
I’m so tired.
New Orleans. Late at night. Lights are strung along the street and they glitter over the brightly colored gaudy storefronts. People everywhere, laughing and dancing in the streets, drunk and carefree.
I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m sixteen, I’ve been away from home three days and Logan is with me. I haven’t had time to think about anything since we left; I’m too overwhelmed by the newness of the world and what he’s showing me. I run ahead of him, down to the end of the street where it ends on the waterfront. I step up onto an old iron railing and lean over it, taking deep breaths of the air coming off the water, dark and thick with vegetation, trees and fish and a touch of decay, but alive, so alive.
I turn and Logan’s about fifteen feet away, watching me and actually almost smiling. He reaches into his jacket pocket and comes out with the little disposable camera he bought me earlier.
“Don’t move,” he tells me, and I stay where I am, twisted around to look at him with my feet stuck through the palings of the fence. He raises the camera and I smile at him.
That’s it. That’s the last picture I need in my mind. And strangely, Wolverine doesn’t want to let his/my/our memory go this time. He tries to hold my mind there, instead of racing away as usual as soon as I release him, and I’m so startled for a moment that I can’t pull away. Then something changes, something reaches into my thoughts and it isn’t quite the animal I’m controlling, it’s something else, something that’s almost—
I yank myself away and the door shudders as Wolverine throws himself against it again and again, his fury rising with every blow. I’m shaking too much to even step away for a moment, and I know it’s not only his demons he’s raging against inside. He saw. He knows, now, what I’m doing, and he’s furious. But he can’t break through; adamantium can’t cut adamantium, and he howls his anguish and rage.
A voice that’s not quite his, not quite Logan’s, spoke three words to me before I broke the connection.
Don’t do it.
I open my eyes and look around at my bedroom/studio, awash with late-afternoon sunlight. A fresh canvas is set up and waiting, and I lift the brush that sits waiting by my hand and begin mixing together blues and purples and greens on my palette, creating the color of the lamp-lit nighttime New Orleans sky.
It won’t be much longer, but I have to finish.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Rogue's view, five years down the line.