"What are you writing?"
"Huh? Oh..." Be honest, she'll know if you lie. Be straight with her and match her irreverence. "...just notes on your condition. I have to make a diagnosis to my instructor. He wants to know what kind of crazy you are."
"That's easy. I'm paranoid schizophrenic. You don't need a degree to see that."
"No, I guess not. All right, tell me about it."
"Basically, what I believe is that the Earth was invaded by some kind of parasite at some point back in pre-history. Probably in cave-dwelling days. It's hard to tell for sure, since history is such a pack of lies. They rewrite it all the time, you know."
Again, Evelyn didn't know if she was being played with, and the thought amused her. This was a complex, tricky woman. She'd have to stay on her toes. That speech had been such an obvious paranoid construction, and Barbara was well aware of it.
"I'll play your game. Who is 'they?' "
" 'They' is the all-purpose paranoid pronoun. Any group that is involved in a conspiracy, conscious or not, to 'get' you. I know that's crazy, but there are such groups."
"Are there?"
"Sure. I didn't say they had to be holding meetings to plot ways to bedevil you. They don't. You can admit the existence of groups whose interests are not your own, can't you?"
"Certainly."
"The more important thing is it doesn't matter if they're really an explicit conspiracy, or just have the same effect because that's the way they function. It doesn't have to be personal, either. Each year, the IRS conspires to rob you of money that you earned, don't they? They're in a plot with the President and Congress to steal your money and give it to other people, but they don't know you by name. They steal from everybody. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about."
Justifies her fear of external, inimical forces by pointing to real antagonistic groups.
"Yes, I can see that. But we all know the IRS is out there. You're talking about a secret that only you see. Why should I believe you?"
Her face got more serious. Perhaps she was realizing the strengths of her opponent. Her opponent always had the stronger arguments, it was the nature of things. Why are you right and everyone else wrong?
"That's the tough part. You can offer me reams of 'proof' that I'm wrong, and I can't show you anything. If you'd been there when I'd killed that fellow, you'd know. But I can't do it again." She drew a deep breath, and seemed to settle in for a long debate.
"Let's get back to these parasites," Evelyn said. "They're men? Is that what you're saying?"
"No, no." She laughed, without humor. "There's no such thing as a man, the way you're thinking about it. Only women who've been taken over at birth by these, these..." she groped in the air for a word hideous enough to express her distaste. She couldn't find it. "Things. Organisms. I said they invaded the Earth, but I'm not sure. They might be from here. There's no way to know, they've taken over too completely."
Leaves flexibility in her rationale. Yes, that would fit with what the books said. It would be hard to stump her, to ask her a question she couldn't answer in terms of her delusion. She admitted not knowing everything about the subject, and she was free to reject whole categories of argument as having been tampered with, like history.
"So how is it... no, wait. Maybe you'd better tell me more about these parasites. Where do they hide? How is it that no one but you is aware of them?"
She nodded. She now seemed totally serious. She could not joke about this subject when they got this specific.
"They're not strictly parasites. They're sort of symbiotic. They don't kill their hosts, not quickly. They even help the host in the short run, making them stronger and larger and more capable of domination. But in the long run, they sap the strength of the host. They make her more susceptible to disease, weaken her heart. As to what they look like, you've seen them. They're blind, helpless, immobile worms. They attach themselves to a woman's urinary tract, filling and covering the vagina and extending nerves into the ovaries and uterus. They inject hormones into her body and cause her to grow up with deformities, like facial hair, enlarged muscles, reduced thinking capacity, and wildly defective emotions. The host becomes aggressive and murderous. Her breasts never develop. She is permanently sterile."
Evelyn scribbled in her notebook to cover her emotions. She wanted to laugh; she felt like crying. Who could figure the human mind? She shuddered to think of the pressures that must have driven this outwardly normal woman to such a bizarre way of looking at the universe. Father? Lover? Was she raped? Barbara had been unhelpful in talking about these things, maintaining that they were no one's business but her own. Besides, they had no bearing on what she saw as the facts of the case.
"I hardly know where to begin," Evelyn said.
"Yes, I know. It's not the sort of thing they'd allow you to seriously consider, is it? It's too alien to what you've been led to believe. I'm sorry. I hope I can help you."
Damn! she wrote, then scratched it out. Puts questioners on the defensive. Shows sympathy with their inability to see things as she sees them.
"Call it the new biology," Barbara said, getting up and slowly walking back and forth in the confined space. Her loose slippers slipped off her heels with each step. "I began to suspect it several years ago. The world just didn't make sense any other way. You've got to begin to doubt what you've been told. You've got to trust the evidence of your intellect. You've got to allow yourself to look through your woman's eyes as a woman would, not as an imperfect man would. They've trained you to believe in their values, their system. What you begin to realize is that they are imperfect women, not the other way around. They can't reproduce themselves, shouldn't that tell you something? 'Males' live on our bodies as parasites, they use our fertility to perpetuate their species." She turned to Evelyn, and her eyes were burning. "Can you try to look at it that way? Just try? Don't try to be a man; redefine! You don't know what you are. All your life you've struggled to be a man. They've defined the role you should play. And you're not made for it. You don't have that parasite eating at your brain. Can you accept that?"
"I can, for the sake of argument."
"That's good enough."
Evelyn was treading cautiously. "Uh, just what do I have to do to... 'see things as a woman?' I feel like a woman right now."
"Feel! That's it, just feel. You know what 'woman's intuition' is? It's the human way to think. They've laughed at it to the point where we automatically distrust it. They had to; they've lost the capacity to see a truth intuitively. I can see you don't like that phrase. You wouldn't. It's been laughed at so much that an 'enlightened woman' like yourself doesn't believe it exists. That's what they want you to think. All right, don't use the word 'intuition.' Use something else. What I'm talking about is the innate capacity of a human being to feel the truth of a matter. We all know we have it, but we've been trained to distrust it. And it's gotten screwed up. Haven't you ever felt you're right for no reason you could name except that you knew you were right?"
"Yes, I guess I have. Most people do." Rejects logical argument as being part of her oppression. She decided to test that.
"What I've been... trained to do, is to apply the rules of logic to analyze a question. Right? And you say it's no good, despite thousands of years of human experience?"
"That's right. It's not human experience, though. It's a trick. It's a game, a very complicated game."
"What about science? Biology, in particular."
"Science is the biggest game of all. Have you ever thought about it? Do you seriously feel that the big questions of the universe, the important truths that should be easily in our grasp, will be solved by scientists haggling over how many neutrinos can dance on the head of a pin? It's a tail-eating snake, relevant only to itself. But once you accept the basic ground rules, you're trapped. You think that counting and sorting and numbering will teach you things. You have to reject it all and see the world with new eyes. You'll be astounded at what is there, ready for you to pick up."
"Genetics?"
"Hogwash. The whole structure of genetics has been put there to explain an untenable position: that there are two sexes, neither of them worthwhile alone, but together they're able to reproduce. It doesn't hold up when you think about it. Genes and chromosomes, half from each parent: no, no, no! Tell me, have you ever seen a gene?"
"I've seen pictures."
"Hah!" That seemed enough for the moment. She paced the floor, overwhelmed by the scope of it. She turned again and faced Evelyn.
"I know, I know. I've thought about it enough. There's this... this basic set of assumptions we all live by. We can't get along without accepting almost all of it, right? I mean, I could tell you that I don't believe in... Tokyo, for instance, that Tokyo doesn't exist simply because I haven't been there to see it for myself. The news films I've seen were all clever hoaxes, right? Travelogues, books, Japanese; they're all in a conspiracy to make me think there's such a place as Tokyo."
"You could make a case for it, I guess."
"Sure I could. We all exist, all of us, in our own heads, looking out through the eyeballs. Society isn't possible unless we can believe in second-hand reports of certain things. So we've all conspired together to accept what other people tell us unless we can think of a reason why we're being lied to. Society can be seen as a conspiracy of unquestioning acceptance of unprovable things. We all work together at it, we all define a set of things as needing no proof."
She started to say more, but shut her mouth. She seemed to be considering if she should go on. She looked speculatively at Evelyn.
Evelyn shifted on her cot. Outside, the sun was setting in a haze of red and yellow. Where had the day gone? What time had she come into this room, anyway? She was unsure. Her stomach grumbled at her, but she wasn't too uncomfortable. She was fascinated. She felt a sort of lassitude, a weakness that made her want to lie down on the bed.
"Where was I? Oh, the untested assumptions. Okay. If we can't accept anything that's told us, we can't function in society. You can get away with not accepting a lot. You can believe the world is flat, or that there are no such things as photons or black holes or genes. Or that Christ didn't rise from the grave. You can go a long way from the majority opinion. But if you evolve an entirely new world picture, you start to get in trouble."
"What's most dangerous of all," Evelyn pointed out, "is starting to live by these new assumptions."
"Yes, yes. I should have been more careful, shouldn't I? I could have kept this discovery to myself. Or I could have gone on wondering. I was sure, you see, but in my foolishness I had to have proof. I had to see if a man could live with his head cut off, against what all the medical books had told me. I had to know if it was the brain that controlled him, or if it was that parasite."
Evelyn wondered what to ask as Barbara quieted for a moment. She knew it wasn't necessary to ask anything. The woman was off now; she would not wind down for hours. But she felt she ought to try and guide her.