Siobhan Bell

Prologue

At birth, each child is given two names. The first is the name of the Inner Being, the conscious eternal entity within; while the second is the name of the Ego, the perceived personality, the imagined self, or the voice inside one’s head. This distinction is made at a Naming Ceremony in the third month of life, so that each person might come to recognize this duality by name.

It is in this way that on the cold, misty morning of December 6th, the consciousness within child 753952 became formally known as Manchester, while his Ego became formally known as Elias.

From The Naming Ceremony, child 753952 was brought home to a clean, wooden-floored house by his two fathers whose conscious names were Edward and Divinity. He was bundled up in a white cotton blanket and taken to the house on More Street that looked identical in every way to all the other houses in the neighborhood. Once inside, one of his fathers carried him up to the top floor bedroom with the big windows and laid him down in a newly arrived, industrial strength, State supplied crib. For a while, his fathers watched him, making sure he was comfortable and listening to the reverberations of his soft, shallow breathing.

“At the Birthing Center, they informed me that he should have no health complications,” Divinity whispered quietly across the crib to Edward.

As he looked over at his partner with a soft edged smile, displaying his affection clearly, filling the room up with a godly kind of warm silence. The little boy between them wriggled, caught in the depth of some dark, dreamless sleep.

“I’ll go and pick up the remainder of the infancy supplies from the State Facility tomorrow morning,” Edward replied returning the smile.

A calm serenity fell across the room, wrapping the two men and the child up inside of it. None of them moved. They did not want to shatter their newly created paradise. Of course, though, this was out of their control.

With a burst of energy, a small girl with black braided hair rushed into the room, panting, and squeezing excitedly past them, eager to see the baby. She placed her sticky little palms on the smooth wood of the crib and peered down at him, standing on her tippy toes to see.

This would be his sister, Emmanuella was her conscious name, Marguerite her egoic name. She was, at the time, only in her third year, and in her uncontrolled excitement she tried to reach down to touch the little baby. Her fathers gently pulled her back, telling her to let him rest and allowing her to stay for only a few more minutes before they ushered her out of the room and then left themselves.

The moment they left the room became intensely, eerily quiet. But Manchester, who was scarcely three months old, did not cry when his tiny eyelids fluttered open, and he woke up. His vision darted around the room, watching the amber light dance above him.

By the time the light faded, the noises of his fathers preparing dinner began to drift up from the kitchen below. And under the peaceful dissolution of a new day, the baby smiled. He had been born into a world where he would never have to unlearn all that was innate inside of him.

∞∞

Manchester

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For the first few years of his life, Manchester did not leave the two-mile radius around his home. Like all other toddlers, he was provided time to develop inside comfortable perimeters before being introduced to the wider world. So, naturally he spent a lot of time within his family unit which included being read stories with increasingly wider vocabularies each night by his fathers and playing outdoors with Emmanuella for two hours and fifteen minutes per day. But he was also given time to be alone: to sleep, to play, to create, or simply to grow comfortable with the idea of solitude. It was essential that children developed the ability to be alone with themselves early.

His parents had given him a paint set a few months before his second birthday and filling a page with swirling colors quickly became one of his favorite ways to spend an afternoon. If not doing that, then he was usually listening to audiobooks on the little electronic player in his bedroom, or stalking around the back garden pretending to be an explorer on a mission to find any kind of bug that might temporarily serve as a pet. Although to him his childhood may have appeared unique, he would come to learn that it was identical in every way to that of every other child.

Children, even young children, in the community were always treated with respect and maturity. They were allowed to choose their own clothes and decorate their rooms how they liked. They were asked their opinions and listened to when they offered them, and they were told about the ways of the community from a young age. Perhaps, for this reason, children tended to develop quickly and could usually fully articulate themselves by one and read and write by three. Manchester was no different in this: from the age of three he began the slow transition from audiobooks to proper books, shifting through the soft, silky pages of an entirely new world.

Edward and Divinity gladly supplied him with all the reading material and art supplies he desired. During the day while Emmanuella was at school, they too would often be gone for long stretches of time. So little Manchester would lie stretched out on a soft nylon carpet, all alone in the empty, hollow house. He liked those moments, when the silence was loud enough to hear, and when he could spread out his things across the floor with no fear of getting in anyone else’s way. He would read for hours on those days, becoming so engrossed in each story that he would forget entirely about himself. His little fingers clutched the edges of a book that was still too big for him to properly hold, until Edward or Divinity would return home and he would get up from his carpeted cocoon to help prepare dinner.

His fathers had never needed to worry about leaving Manchester alone. He was a good child, and they were good parents who very rarely needed to exercise any form of discipline. On one occasion when Emmanuella was six, she had snuck into the kitchen at nighttime to steal an extra square of chocolate. Edward, who was a light sleeper, had caught her red-handed, trying to creep down the hallway and back to her room. He had calmly told her to go back to bed and that they would discuss the matter in the morning.

The next day Manchester had already been at breakfast when he watched her slink down to her chair, not daring to make eye contact with either of their fathers.

“Emmanuella, let’s talk about Marguerite’s actions last night,” Edward prompted without a hint of disdain or anger in his voice.

She looked up sheepishly to meet his gaze across the table.

“I am sorry. I know it was wrong, but Marguerite made me do it!” she protested, already looking ready to burst into tears.

Edward sighed and gazed over at Divinity for reassurance.

“Emmanuella, we are not angry. But we want to understand what prompted you to act in this way. You say Marguerite ‘made’ you do it, why do you say that?”

Emmanuella stopped her blubbering for a moment. She had not expected that question and her small brow furrowed in confusion. Manchester put down his orange juice. The conversation was too interesting to think about breakfast.

“Well, I was laying in my bed about to sleep and then I heard her in my head. But I was tired, so I didn’t really realize that it was her talking and not Emmanuella.”

She looked over at Edward for reassurance to keep going and he nodded.

“Well... she was saying how good the chocolate from earlier was and that she wanted more. And then she was saying how if we snuck downstairs then you wouldn’t notice because you were both asleep already. She kept telling me it was a good idea and so… and so really, she made me do it….” The little girl crossed her arms and frowned as her voice trailed off.

“Ah, I see. Thank you for telling me, Emmanuella,” he paused like he had suddenly thought of something entirely new, stroking his beard before continuing. “I just have a few more questions because I want to understand what happened just as much as you do. What do you think would have happened if you had realized it was Marguerite talking and not Emmanuella?”

“I guess I could have said no and stopped her from making me do that,” she ventured softly, still unable to look Edward in the eyes.

“Because it was Marguerite that wanted to do that not you, right?”

“Right.”

“And what do you think you would have done if we had not found out? Be honest now.”

That caught her off guard again and she bit her lip and thought before answering.

“I guess I would have just kept it to myself and maybe even done it again,” she said, looking back down at her plate.

Manchester could tell she felt ashamed. It was hard for her to admit to this. He watched the scene unfolding in front of him like he was watching a film, hanging on every word that was said, suddenly uninterested in his oatmeal.

“Thank you for your honesty, Emmanuella. I just have one more question: would that have been good for Emmanuella? Not for Marguerite, but for Emmanuella?”

“No, because the chocolate would have been bad for me, and … and she would have made me lie to you. Emmanuella doesn’t like lying. She knew it was a bad thing to do, it was just Marguerite who wanted to. Oh, I hate Marguerite so much sometimes I wish she weren’t inside my head!”

Divinity blinked and sat back, a little shocked by his daughter’s words. A sticky silence passed over the dinner table. Edward and Divinity exchanged several glances, communicating without words, before either of them spoke.

“You should not hate Marguerite. She may be your egoic self, but she is a part of you. We all have egoic selves and we would not be human without them.”

Divinity waited until Emmanuella built up the courage to look at him before continuing.

“The egoic side, in itself, is not inherently bad: it is something to learn from. It is a tool to function in the world. But, yes, it can often become difficult to manage. What we are trying to teach you children,” he paused, turning to include Manchester as well. “What we are trying to teach all children in fact, is how to recognize when the egoic self has taken over. You can recognize it most when you feel yourself as separate from others, when you feel the need to compete and when you want others to be unhappy rather than happy.”

“But Emmanuella,” he said turning to her directly and speaking more seriously, “you can recognize it most easily in hate. Before when you spoke, it was Marguerite talking. I know it was Marguerite because Emmanuella could never hate anything, not even Marguerite. Emmanuella responds with acceptance and compassion, and she loves Marguerite because she knows all Marguerite is a part of her that has become lost.” He paused then, before continuing solemnly, “I want you both to remember this conversation.”

His blue-green eyes locking into Manchester’s for only a split second before he sighed, letting out a deep breath like a man who had been travelling for an exceptionally long time and only now had arrived at his destination. Suddenly, all his former seriousness evaporated away.

“So, shall we finally get started on this mountain of breakfast we have in front of us?”

∞

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Almost as soon as he learned how to talk, Manchester learned this distinction between his two names. When he cried about not getting his own way, his fathers would address him as Elias. Or, when he accidentally used an adjective to describe himself, his fathers reassured him that those beliefs were coming from Elias. With children this was simply a normal part of development, but he soon found it was different for grownups.

For grownups, it was hardly common to hear one’s egoic name spoken at all. If your egoic name was spoken publicly, you might at first consider it an embarrassment. Until, of course, you realized that it was only the egoic self that felt this embarrassment and then you would usually burst out laughing at the irony of it all.

Mostly for grownups, the second names were reserved for personal use, or journaling practices. Grownups could usually recognize when their egoic selves came out, so they did not need it pointed out to them. They were, however, used regularly at fortnightly Group Therapy meetings, which everyone in the community attended no matter who they were or what they did.

Group Therapy began when the child reached four and each child, just like each adult, was assigned to a public group no more than five miles from their place of residence. Manchester was filled with nervousness before his first session.

He held Divinity’s hand tightly as they walked through the hallways of the dimly lit elementary school where his sessions for the next six months were to be held. His sweaty little palm kept slipping from his father’s and he could feel his heart beating like a caged animal. The sensation of nervousness was new to him, an extra experience he could add to his ever-increasing four-year-old repertoire. As they walked, he asked himself what it meant.

This was the first time he would properly interact with children outside of his family unit, but it would still be another four months before his official schooling began. He had seen other children before, at the end of his street playing, or through the window as they walked past his house. But he had never spoken to another child besides Emmanuella. Already as they walked through the colorful hallway, he could hear the laughter of other children up ahead, growing increasingly louder as if someone were turning up the volume with every step he took. The moment they turned the corner he knew the other children would come into view and he almost wanted to ask Divinity if they could turn around and go home. Breath, he told himself, it is Elias that is nervous, not you. It was a pleasant thing to realize, and with this realization he felt his shoulders relax.

Group therapy was held in the dimly lit gymnasium at the end of the hallway. He stood in the line of children that were slowly beginning to file into the gym. He grasped firmly Divinity’s hand. Up ahead the other children were beginning to say goodbye to their parents before going inside. He stared up at Divinity with large, terrified eyes.

“Have fun, I’ll be back in an hour,’ his father firmly said before kissing him on the head and dislodging his hand from Manchester’s.

Now he was all alone. He was in a world of people he had never met. He had never seen so many strangers.

Each child looked strange, an unknown entity, and no two were the same. Half were girls and half boys. Some had skin as pale as snow, while some as dark as night, and one girl’s hair was even a reddish color that Manchester had never seen before. It was all strange and overwhelming. He was far too shy to talk to any of them, and far too confused to even believe that they were real.

The group was led into the gymnasium by a middle-aged man with long hair and were seated in a circle on colored plastic chairs that looked as if they may be about to give way at any moment. The chair was too big, and Manchester’s feet did not reach the floor. He stared at his blue, Velcro strapped shoes as they dangled down below him. He did not want to have to look at anyone else in the room.

“Well, welcome everyone to your first Group Therapy,” the long-haired man spoke.

He sounded friendly but had a strange accent that Manchester had never heard in any of his audiobooks. He was the only adult in the room.

“My name is Theodore and I specialize in Group Therapy for ‘fours’ to ‘sevens’. Now that you are all very mature and finally ‘fours’ you get to start your first Group Therapy.”

Manchester watched the other children as Theodore spoke. A girl who wore braids like Emmanuella sat across the circle from him. She frowned as she listened to Theodore. The boy next to her looked exceedingly small and Manchester wondered if he was really a four at all, he looked much more like a three, or even a two.

“There is no need to be nervous. I realize this is all very new to you, but soon it will become as natural to you as afternoon play and you will look forward to group therapy. Now you will be with this group for the next four months and we will meet every week, so it’s important that you get to know each other. Let’s go around the circle and say our names. How about we start with you?”