First story in the chronicles of the Magid family. Lydia has some beliefs, but it’s nothing compared to what she doesn’t know.

This is background for a character in an Unknown Armies campaign that never really got off the ground. This is also songfic for the Dresden Dolls‘ “Half Jack.” Actual lyrics are interspersed in the story and italicized. The lyrics are by Amanda Palmer, the setting courtesy of Atlas Games, everything else is mine.

Lydia likes her baths. Her husband Sunyata never really understood it, but she liked the safety half underwater, the slouching off the stress and nastiness of the day, and the oblivion of a good wash. She likes the feel of the warm water and smell of bath oils she made all by herself. Today it’s tuberose, gardenia and baby’s breath. Yum. She relied on that non-chemical oblivion since she made a bet with Sunyata she could stop smoking pot. It wasn’t just for the one hundred dollars on the line, but her too. She wants to have a baby, not that she told anyone yet except him.

Her honey-blond bob floats on the water, and sometimes she stretches her arms, but finds them too long to avoid the sides. The long limbs, blonde hair and hazel eyes are from her mother. The small nose, curly hair and arched eyebrows are from her father. I’m half my mother’s daughter, she thinks, a fraction’s left up to dispute. Her grief is her own. It isn’t like her to be so sad, but she does feel it.

Maybe there is a good reason. There were still a whole collection of discords she has from her mother’s death, her counselor warns her. Her Discipline Officer also warns her that her drug use has racked up some discords of her own. Homer K has been understanding in his own way, but gave her a gentle warning to take care of the discords and consider her career path before she takes such a huge step. She is more frightened of the baby getting her discords than her acting career jumping the shark. Thankfully, she got half off the price they’re asking for the counseling.

She misses Mom, even after three months. If she were in tune, she wouldn’t be so sad that her mother left the physical plane. Really, for someone who hasn’t been exposed to Wavelogy, she did what she could. She stayed in the hospital everyday before and after Lydia’s operation. That’s devotion and love right there.

She was grateful to Homer, since she would have never gotten a job or a direction. Just drifting, really. She joined a few dance troupes here, had bit parts in music videos there. Her biggest accomplishment was moving out of her parents’ house. She would go in the halfway house of ill repute, or as other people called it, her apartment in Venice. Late at night, she would wonder what she is doing. Why she is too tired to do all the bohemian adventures she swore she would do? Why was she so afraid to go out at night, afraid of being killed or raped? She felt worthless.

Now she knows she was at the mercy of her own beliefs and half accidental experiences that happened even before she was born. She is learning to forgive that, and be a whole person.

She reaches to get the soap, and her finger brush against the scar on the left side of her chest. She drops the soap, a deep plunk sound echoing in the empty bathroom. The scar startled her, a reminder of where her discords lie. Half pain, full instrumental in her life. She felt fragile as a child, and she is only beginning to feel strong.

It’s to be expected after all, when you are out of breath trying to catch up with the other children. When you felt weak and sleepy, you watch sunny days go by through half-shut eyes. It was frustrating for the little girl Lydia was. She wanted to play, she wanted to be with friends, but it seemed so hard.

She was almost closing her eyes in the bath. I have a lot to think about, she realizes. Never mind she is much more energetic than as a child. Every time she would feel tired, she would panic a little, wondering if the new heart’s improvements were lies.

Ridiculous, she chides herself. Of course she’s tired; she spent most of the day filming the second season of that Fox sitcom. Anyone without her history would be tired too. She has a measure of fame and enough money (if not fortune) and Sunyata (another thing she thanks Homer for–they met at one of his classes). She is not eight. She is not her past.

Last few days have been weird. She forgets things and finds odd items in her kitchen. It’s an on-going joke with Sunyata and Bill, his dad, muttering about missing time and affairs. You think they’re joking? Maybe she is missing time. She has a bottle of single malt whiskey in the cabinet when she doesn’t drink; some summer sausage in the freezer when she is a vegetarian; and pages and pages of undecipherable writings. Some days she even finds it funny.

She showed them to her counselor once. You had to go provoke him, she chides herself. He muttered something about hording knowledge and inference. She wondered if she was due for some counseling. Something to tune the discords into the song of her omega, her higher self. I guess it’s high time you found out, she reminds herself.

The problem is it’s half biology and half corrective surgery gone wrong. Her heart was of a child killed in an accident, or at least that is what she is told. She wonders if she got another heart, the heart of the man she hears as she sleeps at night. Perhaps he is related to the discord.

You’ll notice something funny if you hang around here for too long, she thinks. He whispers things in the middle point of awake and sleep, how he has much work to do. He needs her body, he needs to complete the Great Work, create lead from gold and elixirs that will make him rich and famous. He needs to expose the red-haired bastard who stole his ideas and his girl. He needs, and she is in the way.

Sometimes he grouses that maybe he should go with some bum on the street, he’d give him less trouble. She sleeps only when he screams about the Cruel Ones pulling him away.

Sometimes she dreams about the surgery. She was put under and remembers darkness and warmth long ago in some black hole. Maybe she talked to people in her head. Maybe she talked to no one. There was a man, and she cannot remember her name. He was polite but kept using terms Lydia did not understand: moon children and philosopher stones, rocket fuel and ceremony.

That was why she smoked pot, to help her sleep, or at least give her an excuse not to sleep. She was an utter motor mouth, playing old vinyl for Sunyata and eating pints of ice cream. Straight, she avoids refined sugar as best as she can. She enjoys the in tune mind before they had these pills to take it back. Pills like Prozac. Silly people, she thinks, the problem is cellular not neural.

“I need.” She hears that sentence in a sad and silky voice. She sits up quick and grabs a towel. She huffs when she sees her pruned fingers. Dehydrated, figures, she thinks.

She dries just as quick, carefully avoiding her scar. She sighs in the mirror. “I need to get an appointment. My paycheck will clear; I might get a discount, being so far up the bridge. It isn’t as I used up all my credit cards either.” She blinks and turns away.

Now she remembers. The gentleman she spoke to in her head, that’s trying still to get in, he has a name. His name is Jack. I’m half Jill and half Jack.

“Place your hands on the shells, please,” the counselor with frizzy dirty blonde hair tells Lydia. Two halves are equal, the shells are connected to a meter, and they give off tones of spirits. She feels a slight electric shock when she touches the shells. She shakes it off with a small smile and keeps her hands on the shells.Lydia wasn’t real clear on what it really was. However she figures with a few more classes, she’ll figure it out.

Lydia is momentarily surprised that the counselor is not fawning over her like all the other celebrities that come in here. Wait, silly, she tells herself, you’re not a celebrity. You’re just known. It is good to remind her of that. Not to get too full of herself.

Or perhaps she needs to. A cross between two evils, to be both abasing yourself and elevating yourself when you shouldn’t.

The counselor was business-like, and she looks closer, Lydia can see dark circles under her eyes. She suspects no pity from her. She doesn’t want any. Being a counselor, it’s not an enviable lot.

“You’ll hear silence at first,” the counselor says, “but if you listen, you can hear the meter. Lydia hears a sudden plop-like sound. She sees a rapid back-and-forth dance of the meter’s needle. “Oh dear, it’s a bop,” the counselor murmurs, not thinking Lydia hears.

“Tell me what the discord says.” Lydia says all the things Jack said to her. Jack’s words in her voice, you learn to hear the difference. During counseling, she thinks, I am made to remember names and dates. I repeat everything people say.

“Are you alright, Lydia?” The last words my mom said to me. Every airplane reminds me of her, because she wanted to travel, but all her money and effort went toward my operation, my acting classes and my airplane to Los Angeles.

I repeat jokes by Bill, grocery list by Sunyata, and questions about horses by Alia, Sunyata’s cousin. Shit, I talk more about the Magids than I do my own family. His cousins are odd. Odette works as a PA and is quiet and dark. Alia just graduated from high school and is talkative and blond. His brother Simonne is a composer still in Paris. His uncle Jacob is a composer, too. He will be getting married again. Sunyata’s grandmother is still active, still writing, though not teaching. My father, my father hasn’t talked to me. Perhaps he figures it is best to be lonely than have me to remind him. Looking at the Magids and my family, Lydia feels between the haves and the have-nots.

I remember the voice and when I let him in, she thinks. “I am Jack. Don’t let the Cruel Ones take me. I need you for the Great Work. Let me in. I could get a body of a drunk, and he wouldn’t give me such trouble. I am Jack. I am Jack.” I talk like a child in the hospital, the girl in the music video, she thinks, I was never twenty-seven.

The counselor doesn’t have to worry about saying someone else’s words. Lydia then realizes she is just doing what all actors do. Does this make all this a more expensive version of acting classes? Lydia pushes that thought out.

If she doubts, she fears. My dissonance is falling apart, she realizes. My counselor says if I don’t go through the scan, I will lose Sunyata, I will never get pregnant, my career will fail and my donated heart will explode or just stop beating. I will not let that happen.

She did this for an hour, remembering everything he said. She is getting tired, and she hasn’t eaten since this morning. I have to do this, this obstacle.

She feels a jab of pain on her right side. She takes her hand off the shells and touches it. “I feel the stitches getting sicker,” she murmurs. Stitches have been long gone, but somehow she feels them.

“Body react. You’ll have to do this again, Ms. Magid.” The counselor squints at her like a cat sprayed with water. Lydia sighs and puts her hands back on the shells.

She goes through an hour of this. After the counseling, she is given a dictionary. Perhaps somewhere, she thinks, I used the wrong word. She looks up ‘clean,’ ‘blood,’ ‘heart,’ ‘mother,’ ‘pain,’ and ‘act.’ Meditating, she sees her mother. She looks up ‘spirit,’ ‘alchemy,’ ‘possess.’ Maybe all that pot is drawing him in, she thinks.

Then she is given juice and vitamins. In a few minutes, she will go into the sauna. After, she will run. This will continue for a few days. Most new members have to go through a week of this, but since Lydia is busy and is more advanced in her studies, her time is shorter. Lydia is a little glad. She still feels infected. After the sauna, she feels disappointed. I try to wash him out, she thinks.

I am tired, she thinks, but I have to stay awake for the cleansing. I have to wait for the pills.

She is in the sauna and hurts all over. This is not what is supposed to happen, she tells herself, but like they say, the blood is thicker. She shakes, her stomach growls and she is wondering if this is really her body, if her voice is going. Discord, omega, what strange vocabulary you learn, she hears herself say. What strange dogma. Where could it come from? I still am in this body. I see my mother in my face, still have my mother’s hair and chin, she tells herself. How do I know? I’ve looked in the mirror, but only when I travel.

Her knee jerks up. Involuntary reflex, nothing to worry about, perhaps just that stubborn dischord trying to . . . I run as fast as I can run, but Jack comes tumbling after, trying to take control of me? What? How is possible?

That was her last thought before she faints.

She thinks she sees Jack now. He is handsome now, with brown hair just shy of collar length and wild hazel eyes. He is staring, standing still in a frozen gasp. He won’t be so handsome, she realizes. He will be burned beyond. And when I’m brave enough, I will get out of this. She jolts at recognition when he does one of his experiments–

Wait, she asks, why I am seeing this? How do I know this?

She suddenly sees the Sailor, the man who founded the teachings she based her life on. He has red hair and is not as doughy as in his pictures, but still a few pounds short of fat. He is staring too, but his gaze is determined, like he wants to be somewhere, somewhere higher. Like he is thinking how to use and find a clever way to kick him out.

She looks where they are looking. She expects the ceiling and jumps back at what she really sees.

Perhaps we gave birth to something. It’s a dark, roiling sea high above, waves crashing over the people standing. Bright shapes are moving through the sea, shadows and light. Not even any sea creatures she knows. Some are like birds, some like eels. Black waves crest into light gray. They were once human, Lydia could see, but what are they now? And I’m so high enough to see, she thinks.

The Harlot is scuttling under the table, terrified. She knows she is called that, that she is naked and her red curly hair is hanging loose and wild. Her slanted green eyes blink at the sight. Jack and the Sailor just stare in wonder.

Lydia hears Jack speak in his own voice. “What is this?”

“I want to be there,” she hears the Sailor whisper. What does he mean?

What does all this mean? She knows of a failed immaculate conception, of rumors of a UFO and a girl disappearing, but how?

She feels panic in this strange place, this place with a calendar set in 1951. Sunyata? Sunyata? Where are you? Not even you and all your love can bring me down. She doesn’t hear herself talk, but she knows she said something.

She sees Sunyata and herself on a street she has never seen before. Sunyata leans his tall, lean body against a street sign saying ’83rd.’ They are down on 83rd. His hair was less dark brown and more golden brown. That’s not how she remembers his hair.

She couldn’t hear the words, but somehow, she knew they were talking about mothers. He stopped seeing his mother when he was ten. She was addicted to heroin. His father took Sunyata and his brother Simonne and moved to the United States. He wanted to save his sons, not wanting to be dragged down with her. He felt sad, as any child would, but he had his father, like he always had. He had nothing to say when you lose a mother close to you. He never found the magic words to assure her.

Still the scenes change. She recognizes landmarks from Pasadena, but she was never from Pasadena. What to do to change this fact, she wonders.

She recognizes a diner she saw in Ohio in the middle of Los Angeles, and a transplanted bodhi tree, now covering the city and branching from the smog. I’m half Jill, she thinks, wondering what she is talking about.

She realizes why she is thinking of Pasadena. That’s where Jack was. And half Jack, she realizes.

A scream broke through landscape. “Someone call her husband!” “Get her out of here!” “No hospitals, we can take care of it.” Someone lifts up her body, then silence.

Sunyata picked her up. She regains consciousness as soon as he hears his voice. “I got the car. I’ll take you home.” She leans into his shoulder as he walks her out. I’m half-way home now, she thinks.

She sits limp in the back seat, staring at the setting sun and yet staring at nothing really. She wondered if Jack is really gone. She is half hoping for a showdown, and half hoping for peace.

Perhaps it was an overdose of vitamins, like the sauna attendant studying to be an EMT said. She overheard two counselors discussing dismissing the sauna attendant for ‘verbal teachings.’

She’s too tired to think now. Cause I’m not big enough to house this crowd, she thinks. She is thinking she is going straight to bed. In the morning, she will drink plenty of water, take a shower and break her fast. Cinnamon toast sounds good. Eating toast as Lydia sounds better.

But what if he comes back, she wonders. Discord, he is not; he is no lost soul. Possession, a less-dogmatic part of her brain whispers. Someone who is so convinced he is a whole soul and now wants a whole body.

Maybe she needs to take more classes, more counseling. Or maybe they know nothing? No, that would downgrade the years of training the counselors go through. That is not cool.

Perhaps she can fight him. If he comes back, she can . . . it might destroy me, she thinks. Can she really break her physical shell?

Most people call it suicide, the less-dogmatic part of her brain says. But I’d sacrifice my body, the still-loyal to the teachings part retorts. I am more than my brain and body, she thinks.

If it meant I’d get the Jack heart out, I’d do it, she thinks. If it is successful, I’ll never have to fear Jack’s return again.

She falls into a deeper sleep, and sees a brief flash of Jack, now older and balding, running from a fire. He is burning now, she says to herself in a cool inner voice. See Jack run.