Assumption Ch. 08

The next morning, I awoke to a voice in my head.

"Come to the mirror," Ambree said.

I did what she asked, and this time, I didn't have to decipher her from my own reflection. She was already there when I arrived, sitting on the carpet in her home with her legs folded in front of her. "This morning, I want to teach you to listen. Sit down, please."

The relationship I had with this woman was difficult to define, but when she told me she was going to teach me to listen I thought she was implying that I had neglected her in some way. "I always listen to you," I reassured her.

"In that case, I would like you to listen now while I show you how to listen to others. Please join me." She pointed at the floor in front of her reflection.

As requested, I took my seat. I wasn't comfortable sitting like she was, but I forced myself into the same position anyway, believing it was part of the process.

"Now, close your eyes and clear your mind. Block out the internal and hear only the noise that comes to you from the outside. Find what does not belong there and focus on it."

"Is this like meditation?" I asked.

"Meditation is about discovering yourself. Listening is about discovering everything else."

Shutting my eyes was the easy part, but once I accomplished that, I was flooded with imagery making it hard for me to concentrate. Scenes from my night with the Princess played out in my head. I wanted to share them with Ambree, but she hadn't given me the opening to start a conversation.

After a few minutes, she broke the silence, "Have you cleared your mind?"

"I can't stop thinking about what happened yesterday," I said, hoping to pique her curiosity.

"Being unable to stop yourself from dwelling on the past is a human condition. You are no longer human. Learn to set aside that weakness."

Instead of thinking about Richard's situation, I began to think about my own. Was I no longer supposed to be human? If I had always been a demon, but just didn't know it, doesn't that mean I was never human, and if that's true, then wouldn't everything I do therefore be representative of the character of a demon? Shouldn't I be the one who is an expert on what my kind does and does not think about? More time passed.

"What about now?" She asked.

I shook my head.

"Focus on a single thought then, one emotion, one detail. Let it fill your mind."

That task was a little easier, initially. The first thing that came to me was the Princess telling me she loved me. I knew it wasn't a declaration of romantic intent, but there was a glint in her eye that hinted that she respected me. I wasn't her boyfriend or even a friend, but her final thoughts before she dismissed me suggested that she was starting to, at the very least, see me as a person. That was more regard than her two colleagues had granted me so far.

Of course, by considering all of that, I wasn't doing what Ambree wanted. Once more, I was lost in the ramblings of my inner monologue.

She didn't need to ask again if I was getting it. "Try this," she said. "Choose a noise from the room and focus on that. Fill your head with that one sound and nothing else. If you begin to get distracted, use your thoughts to say the sound you are hearing. Gag your inner voice with it."

I listened, waiting for a sound to jump out at me, until a bird chirping outside the window demanded my attention. At first, that suited my needs well, but then the bird would stop for a time and I would be stuck on my own. At one point, when it started up again, it chirped too much, leaving me to wonder if I was really listening to one bird or two and if that still counted as one sound. It was an utter failure. If I was going to maintain my concentration, I needed something steadier and more consistently present.

Ambree's soft, even breathing caught my ear. She inhaled for exactly the same amount of time as she exhaled. I took this as another hint and altered my breathing to match. As she breathed in, I breathed in. When she breathed out, I breathed out. Soon, we were perfectly in sync.

That's when she broke the silence again. "Have you found it yet?"

"I think I was starting to," I answered.

"I apologize. Try again."

I listened for the rhythm of her breath, but it was no longer following a consistent pattern. This made it impossible to synchronize myself, and just the fact that I couldn't anticipate where one breath would end and the next begin was distracting in itself. She had lost her balance and I thought I knew why. I was taking too long to grasp the first step. She was frustrated with me.

"Are you focused?" she asked a short while later.

"No. I'm just listening to you breathe and thinking about you judging me."

"It is in your best interest to learn to do this with others present, especially me. How I am feeling is not something you should be overly concerned with."

"Tell me again what I'm supposed to be doing."

"Listening," she reminded me. "That is as apt a term for it as I can give you. All around us is the serous of creation. It touches everything, and everything vibrates against it. What happens inside me is being broadcast, rippling like the wake of a stone dropping into a pond. It reaches out from me to you, just as it reaches out from the woman walking down the street in front of your home and the birds in the trees above it all. You must simply learn to listen to the sounds that nobody else can hear."

"But why am I trying to listen to that?"

"Because if you can hear me when I am not trying to be heard, I am completely exposed. This gives you supreme power over me."

I thought about that for a moment. "Am I supposed to be reaching out with my mind?"

"No. Just the opposite, it is all coming to you. Open yourself and receive it. You have lived as a human for a long time and this has trained you to limit your capabilities only to what can be accomplished through the use of your physical body, but your true strength does not reside there. Your power is not meant to be applied through flesh and bone. Demons do not speak. They listen and manipulate. It is a subtle art that should not be underestimated. There are much better ways to break a man than to physically tear him apart."

Ambree lowered her nose. "When I ask you what you are finding, I am not trying to rush you. Helping you is truly my only purpose now, and I will stay with you no matter how long it takes. This may be difficult, but it is a vital step."

My mind wanted to be clear, but it was too easy for it to become cluttered. I understood fully that she was trying to help me, and I needed that help, but despite her insistence that she was patient, a kind of performance anxiety was working against me. I wanted her to feel like I was worth her time and felt guilty that I wasn't doing better. "I really think I need to try this on my own, at least at first."

I thought she would argue, but she didn't. "Very well, I am not here to make demands of you. I trust your judgment."

There was no implication delivered with that statement. She was not being passive-aggressive or sarcastic. Her tone didn't suggest that she was glad to release me to practice on my own so she could get back to her own life. As adamant as she had been that I needed to practice this right then and there, with her in the room, all day if necessary, she genuinely backed down immediately.

This was my first real glimpse of the passive side of Ambree. She was not a weak woman and had proven that by standing up to the Matron right in front of me. There was absolutely no fear in her of retribution from someone that was demonstrably capable of terrible things and had a demon under her command. Yet, when I pushed, she bent without hesitation.

"Practice it when you have the time to do so, and if you need my help, I will gladly return. Is there anything you want me to do for you before I go?" She asked.

Her question reminded me of the last time we parted, bringing back to the surface a question of mine that desperately needed to be answered. "Why are you helping me?"

Ambree had been forcing her face into a pleasant expression, but when I asked that question, every muscle in it let go, restoring her grim resting face. "You deserve to know the truth. I am not a good person and I will not insult you by pretending my intentions are noble. The reason I am teaching you to use your gifts is that I want something from you. You saw a glimpse of that when we kissed."

"You want me to make you younger?"

"I need you to separate me from the forces of nature that steer all things to a bitter end. Only you can stave off the wound that fate aims to inflict on me."

It didn't surprise me that the answers she gave led to more questions, but it did surprise me that I wasn't sure what those questions were. She wasn't talking about eternal youth, nor was she talking about something so simple as cheating death. Her answer was honest but incomplete.

Before I could figure out what I needed to know to make more sense of things, she spoke again. "This link that allows me to reach you stretches both ways. When you reach the level of awareness I have been guiding you toward, listen for me. You will see I am not hard to find."

"Thank you, Ambree," I said. As soon as I finished saying her name, she was gone.

Instead of spending more time dwelling on past events, I decided to take my teacher's advice and try to move past them. This would be my first step in a new direction. If listening would make me a better demon, I would learn to listen. I relocated myself to the couch and into a more comfortable seating position to try again.

Quieting my thoughts was no simple task, but as I concentrated, I found that it wasn't necessary to free my mind entirely. In fact, when I was able to hold back all thought, I felt less in touch with the world around me. There was a state, much dimmer than my normal level of consciousness, but still active, where I felt my control was the strongest. In this state, I could tune out all of my other senses and listen.

I had assumed she meant listen on some spiritual level and maybe she had, but when I listened, not with my heart, soul, mind's ear, or whatever metaphysical organ you might imagine but with my own physical ears, I could separate the layers of the world around me. Sounds that existed which I had never acknowledged before could be amplified and picked apart.

My refrigerator was making a low, steady hum, the cable box emitted a high-pitched whine, and the wind hitting the side of my apartment building issued an irregular pulse of shifting vinyl siding. The true listening began when I chose to block out those noises and search for the quiet that lay underneath them.

Just like all those other things I mentioned, silence had a sound of its own. Once I caught on to that, I could will my mind to slip into the cracks between the commotion of the world and immerse myself in it. There, in that strange place between sounds, I could force myself to hear almost anything, though not directly.

If I thought about a car horn, eventually it would ring in my ears. It wasn't exactly how I imagined it. I couldn't speak in my mind's voice and have it manifest as a vibration over my eardrums, but I could dream of a noise and it would come, however it wanted to come. It might be quiet, loud, carry a familiar melody, or be something decidedly more foreign.

It was those noises that pushed me to the next level. As soon as I realized they had a life of their own and couldn't be bent precisely to my will, I knew they were something special. This was the level of awareness Ambree had wanted me to reach. She had told me to look for her, so I pushed my mind in that direction. I tried to picture her, but I could only do it a piece at a time. At first, I saw her arm reaching toward me and away, then her lips clenched tightly together, and then her bright green eyes piercing mine.

That's when I heard her. When I thought of her eyes, I could practically see them staring back at me from the inside of my eyelids, and her voice rang in my ears. It wasn't a memory of something she had said in the past. It was new. "Don't," was the first word, said plainly.

It caught me off guard. Instead of registering the success, I thought she was really talking to me.

"Don't what?" I asked, but no answer came.

The distraction had effectively broken my trance, but I knew what I was looking for and soon found my way back into it. I focused again on the old woman, trying to picture her eyes while I listened for her voice. It came again, just as clear, "Stop talking."

I fought the instinct to answer her and more came. They were splintered words that didn't go together, blended with complete sentences and phrases directed at no one. "More there -- Do not forget -- No -- Yes -- Pulling -- Please -- Not this again -- Is it -- That is all I need, thank you." It had taken me the whole day, but whatever it was I was supposed to do, I had done it. I just wished I knew what it meant.