Lexicon

grainy, and not only time but everything: the walls and mirror and air, all undergoing a slow disintegration that she could see and feel with every molecule of her being. She felt fear, because she didn’t want to see what was underneath the world. The sound of her voice fell to pieces and the silence between them froze over. She regained consciousness. She realized this in retrospect. Her fingers and toes tingled. She closed her mouth. There was drool on her chin. She felt bruised in the brain. She walked to her bed and sat. She put the words back in the envelope, because fuck doing that again.
    But after a while she returned to the mirror. Her mind revolted. It did not want to be bruised again. But she sucked it up. “
Varrrrrttt
,” she said.
    • • •
    “We got words,” she told Jeremy on the grass. She was being less cautious about being seen with him, because he was graduating soon, and what could they do? “We have to read them to ourselves.”
    “How did that go?”
    “Badly.”
    He smiled. “Attention words are the worst.”
    She leaped on this. “Attention words? There are types?” She knew he wouldn’t answer. “What are the others? What are attention words for?”
    “You’ll learn soon enough.”
    “I want to know now.” But the truth was, she had just figured it out.
Attention words.
A single word wasn’t enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received
attention
. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way down: There must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind’s last door swung open.
    • • •
    That night she went to brush her teeth and there was Sashona, wearing blue satin pajamas. “Are you still doing it?”
    “Doing what?”
    “The words. You know.”
    “Oh. Yeah.”
    Sashona sighed dramatically. “It’s foul, right?”
    “Most foul,” Emily said.
    “There had better be a good reason for it,” Sashona said, pulling back her hair. “Otherwise I’m going to be pissed.”
    Emily nodded. It seemed pretty obvious to her that the reason was to build up resistance. This term she was taking Drama, puffing herself up and shouting at people in a voice that began in her gut, which the teacher called
projecting forcefully
. It was all because people were animals, analogue rather than binary, and everything in nature happened in degrees. People could be partially persuaded. They could be shocked into letting down their guard. You practiced saying the words so that if anyone ever said them to you, you would stand a chance.
    “I can’t remember mine,” Sashona said. “They keep falling out of my brain.”
    Sashona left. Emily brushed. Walking back to her room, she heard the TV burbling and saw Sashona in the rec room. She hesitated, thinking about what Sashona had said. About not being able to remember her words. She went to Sashona’s door and tried the handle and it turned.
    Sashona’s room was super neat. Emily went to the bookshelf and stood on tiptoe to peer at the books.
Socratic Debate
was sitting out half an inch, but they hadn’t studied that one for a while. Emily pulled it down, balanced the book on its spine, and let it go. The pages fell open. She saw three slips of paper. Three words.
    She closed the book and returned it to the shelf. She was trembling. When she stepped into the corridor she was sure somebody would see her and ask what she was doing. What would she say? She didn’t know. She had no idea. She was just curious.
    But there was no one. She closed Sashona’s door and returned to her room. She climbed into bed and lay there, thinking about Sashona’s words.
    • • •
    Over time she found five more sets of words. She didn’t go looking for them, exactly. But if someone left their room unlocked when they went to the bathroom, she would notice that. And she might wander down to that person’s bedroom and see if anything looked like it was hiding words. She didn’t intend to use them for anything. But