Page 111 of Thief of Night
Around the room, people were frowning. Most seekers would have heard of bifurcated consciousness, but not the bicameral mind.
Posey hadn’t so much as glanced at her phone.
“Okay, right, so does anyone know what the bicameral mind is?”
The room was silent. After a long, awkward moment, Red cleared his throat. Malhar swung his attention toward him gratefully.
“The early Greeks—and I guess other people—believed their thoughts were gods speaking to them in their minds,” Red said. A moment later, heseemed to realize the way Charlie and Malhar were staring at him. “It was in a reading on the origins of theater when Re—whenIwas at NYU.”
Malhar nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, exactly! The bicameral mind is thought to precede our modern idea of consciousness. In some ways, shadows reallyarein that state, right?” His gaze flickered to Red and then away. “They act at the behest of the person controlling them. The voice they hear isn’t their own.”
Malhar held up his hand. “I can see you all want to argue with me. But I’m obviously not saying that shadowscan’thave individual consciousnesses—what I’m trying to trace is the path they take to arrive at that consciousness.”
“I think therefore I am,” Red said.
Malhar smiled, as though the words meant something different to him. “Green eggs and ham.”
This had stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like something else, something more dangerous. Areal theory.
“Where are we going here?” a guy in the audience interrupted. “You were shrooming and you talked about deep shit, just like everyone else who’s ever shroomed. So what?”
Charlie tried to catch Posey’s eye, to indicate that she needed to look at her phone. It didn’t work.
Malhar answered the man, not seeming at all nervous in the way he had the night before. “After I explained about the bifurcated consciousness that gloamists cultivate, she insisted that it sounded like what gloamists were doing was inducing mental illness. That pissed me off.”
“You were bothso high,” one the people in the crowd said, and a few more laughed.
Malhar laughed along with them, not seeming at all rattled. “She said that the bicameral mind sounded like people with schizophrenia and that the bifurcated consciousness was just disassociation. The argument went on. It was a wild night but that’s the part the stuck in my head. Disassociation.”
They were quiet as an indrawn breath.
Charlie glanced into the hall again; it was empty. If they could keep enough of these rich folks near them as they walked out, Archie might hesitate to stop them. Since he didn’t stop the speech, it stood to reason he would be loath to openly disavow the speaker.
Malhar paced back and forth. “Tell me how you’ve heard people attempt to trigger their own shadow quickening.”
“Swimming with sharks,” Lars said.
Malhar nodded. “Smart. In a cage, that’s scary, but not particularly dangerous. It might be more likely to work on someone with a phobia. But what does it mean? Why does it worksometimesonsomepeople?”
Another person spoke up. “I did that thing where someone strangles you with a belt during sex. Highly recommend, but it didn’t work.”
That got a few murmurs and titters from the audience.
“It’s like looking death in the face,” that guy went on.
A person next to him spoke up. “I set part of my arm on fire with rubbing alcohol and then put it out fast. Oh, and got punched in the face.”
Red snorted.
Charlie shoved his shoulder.
“How about a demonstration?” someone called from the other side.
A couple of people laughed.
Malhar must be a very good teacher. In front of this “class,” he was animated. He made her believe that he was teaching them something secret.
“The other thing you can do—is drugs.”
