Another cure for depression
I knew a girl whose heart was made of stone. We were friends. She showed it to me once: this was a chunk of black stone that she kept on her coffee table.
She told me, “I used to be very depressed. I didn’t see any point in life. I hated and loathed myself. Thought I was ugly, didn’t see why anyone would want me.”
Sometimes, with medication, her sadness went away for a while, but it would often come back, worse and more prolonged. During these periods, she would fantasize a lot about not feeling this way anymore. And one of her fantasies was that her heart would turn into stone.
This girl spent a lot of time, in her early twenties, mentally constructing this stone-heart daydream. It would be a Dorian Gray scenario, obviously. She wouldn’t feel anything anymore, she’d be beautiful and well-loved, but very cold and empty inside, so nothing would be able to touch her.
And one day, the wish came true.
I knew the girl back when she was really depressed. I’ve known her for twenty years. And then at some point she seemed to get a lot better, and I heard, through mutual friends, that it was because her heart had turned to stone.
You know, we don’t live that close, this girl and I, so it was only a few years ago that I actually got to see the heart. I was in her city for a book tour, and she invited me to crash on her coach. That’s when she led the conversation around to that period when she was depressed (in retrospect, I think she had a well-practiced ‘coming-out’ routine she would trot out to confess to friends about her stone heart).
As I said, she described to me this stone-heart fantasy she’d entertained in her youth, and then, “the wish came true,” she said.
“How?” I said.
“You know how,” she said. “There’s a demon, Valac. Have you met him? He’s the demon who gives people exactly what they want, with no catches or strings. I met this demon one day, and I explained my fantasy to him, and he said that makes sense.”
“So now what?” I said.
“Well...now,” she said. “I have this stone heart. And I keep it on the table. And...I’m immortal, I’m beautiful, you’ve seen me, you’re a writer, how would you describe me?”
“I’m not great with that kind of thing,” I said. “Physical descriptions. You’re thin. You have long hair—you’re definitely looking great.”
“But you’d fuck me.”
“Well, I’m married,” I said. “And monogamous.”
“Anyway...I am everything that I could’ve wanted to be. I have lots of money. Sometimes, once a year, I get the urge to travel the world, and I’ll book a trip—I saw Machu Pichu last year. And I think that I enjoyed seeing it. It was definitely worth the visit. Anyway, sometimes I go on dates, and some of the men are okay. It’s hard to pick. Regular women actually need a man—I don’t need one. And no man can ever really know me or provide me with anything, but still I suppose at some point I’ll pick. And that’s my life. I experience boredom sometimes, but no real pain or anxiety or insecurity.”
“That sounds great. Like...very ideal.”
“Yeah, of course. People act like happiness and contentment aren’t possible. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve experienced real suffering. The cessation of suffering—that’s happiness.”
“Okay, but...isn’t there...I don’t know…You have a stone heart. What’s the broader meaning here?”
“Sometimes I go and I touch the heart,” she said.
And while she was talking, she had the heart in her hand. She was weighing it, jogging it up and down slightly. “And when I’m holding this stone, I remember that suffering. How I was all alone and nobody helped me—nobody could help me. But they didn’t try very hard. They left me alone and went about their lives. And I feel this terrible anger, and I know that if I went and found those friends, from my old life—if I killed them, then nobody could stop me. I could kill anyone, and nobody could stop me. Even if they shot me or exorcised me—somehow got rid of me, so what? I am not afraid of non-existence anymore. But luckily there’s no need to hurt them. It’s not even that I’ve forgiven them—there’s just nothing to forgive. Nothing anyone could’ve done. Suffering just exists. But when I hold this stone, I feel that suffering again—it’s always waiting for me there, if I want to experience it, for whatever reason. And sometimes I do.”
“You do?” I said.
“Sure. Just to remember what it was like. It’s a really powerful feeling. I don’t know...sometimes in the news there’ll be a person who does something antisocial. They kill someone, or they post some manifesto. And, whatever, I have a good life. I’m part of the system now, with my stock portfolio and my stone heart. These sad kids with their manifestos, I just shrug my shoulders, because my solution, finding a demon who could give me a stone heart—it obviously doesn’t scale.”
“No,” I said.
“It doesn’t scale. But...I just don’t know if human society can really continue when so many people are so miserable. And...if they’re so miserable in our society, then I don’t know...like can we really affirm this existence where so many people are so sad?”
“You affirm it by having a child at all, I guess.”
“Which I am not going to do,” she said. “I just don’t have the spark of life. That’s what I realize, holding this stone heart. That something died in me back then—I saw something—I saw death. It touched me. And it won. It didn’t claim my body, but whatever good was in me, it destroyed.”
“Come on,” I said. “Isn’t this a lot of drama?”
“What?”
“Look...maybe you’ve been touching that thing too much. Like that stone heart. That’s no good. Get rid of that thing. Throw it in the ocean. You don’t need it anymore—I know Valac—this magic isn’t going to go away if you don’t hold onto that black heart. Just get rid of it.”
She said, “This stone heart reminds me of the truth, which is that our society is not good.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“It’s not good,” she said. “My own existence is about the best that anyone could hope for, and it’s not good. Can you really say differently?”
“What?” I said. “Say that our society is good? I do think it’s good. My existence is good.”
“This stone heart will get thrown through your window one day,” she said. “And then what’ll you say?”
“I don’t know.”
“People who are suffering, you’re going to tell them...what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I see what you mean. This stone heart is really a problem. Like it’s got so much metaphorical weight! What’re gonna do with it? Let’s just put it back on the table for now.”
There was a table! I’m sorry, I’m not conveying very well the mechanics of my encounter with this woman. The truth is, I am just not very good at that kind of thing. Like, explaining where we stand in a room. Making a room come alive. Making a scene come alive. I am really not good at it. But you’ll have to trust me that I was in a very awkward encounter in this woman’s living room. And it was really my fault, because you know...I had questioned her pain. Like this woman had trusted me with her stone heart, and I had not behaved well. That was the root of our conflict.
“Look,” I said to her. “This stone heart thing...it sounds incredible.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Like, you can relive your worst pain whenever you want, by touching this rock?”
“Yes...I mean it’s complicated, but I get transported into...like I am that person again.”
“That sounds great,” I said. “I honestly wish that I had that, because it would make writing stories so much easier.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Better than therapy, honestly,” I said. “Like what’s therapy going to do that touching your stone heart won’t do.”
Anyway, in real life this woman was not convinced that it was a good thing to have a stone heart that she could touch whenever she wanted to make her relive this horrible despair she’d once felt. She didn’t think that was good at all. She really disagreed with me on this point and felt quite vehemently on the matter. She felt like having a stone heart was actually very extremely terribly bad.
P.S. This is the second tale to feature Valac, the demon who gives people exactly what they want, with no hidden catches or tricks. The first was posted about a year ago. I also have a third Valac story coming out in Lightspeed magazine at some point.