They all warned her about Marec Górski…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Two Doctors Górski, a dazzling contemporary fantasy and an exploration of reclaiming personal power in the aftermath of abuse by Lambda Award-winning author Isaac Fellman—available now from Tordotcom Publishing.
Annae, a brilliant graduate student in psychiatric magic and survivor of academic abuse, can’t stop reading people’s minds. This is how she protects herself, by using her abilities to know exactly how her colleagues view her. This is how she escapes the torturous experience of her own existence.
When Annae moves to England to rebuild her life and finish her studies under the seminal magician Marec Górski—infamous for bringing to life a homunculus made from his unwanted better self—she sees, inside his head, a man who is both a destructive force to everyone around him, and her mirror image. For Annae to survive, she’ll need to break free of a lifetime of conditioning to embody her own self and forge her own path.
Chapter 1
They all warned her about Marec Górski. The bursar’s assistant and the registrar’s assistant and the dean’s assistant converged around her like the three witches that they were, and they told her the same thing:
“Dr. Górski is one of our best.” (“One of our best.”) “But he is from an older generation. He’s a traditionalist in how he does things.” (“He’s older, and he can be conservative.”) “So you’ll need to be a little careful in how you present yourself.” (“How you present your work to him.”) “You wouldn’t have got in here if you weren’t very good, and he’ll see that for himself if you just be yourself.” (“And don’t try to impress him.”)
To be careful! These people didn’t know Annae Hofstader, didn’t know how careful she was, at every moment except for the moments when she snapped and let loose all care, flung herself half-crooked into disaster’s wet mouth, simply because caring never made enough of a difference. They didn’t know how she researched each thing she did, how well she had already been warned about Marec. He had been too great in his time not to be awful today, and then, of course, there was the matter of Ariel. First-year graduate students in dark bars still debated the ethics of Ariel; second-years knew better than to admit they were still obsessed.
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The Two Doctors Górski
And yet they insisted on warning her. Oh, she was used to being handed pills like this, compounded of patronization and preemptive blame, with a coating of good advice, just to make you doubt yourself if you hesitated for a moment to take them. If she was in Britain now instead of California, the only difference was the design. But the truth was that they didn’t poison her anymore. She had built up too high a tolerance.
Still, she couldn’t resist the thrill of being warned. It made her feel like an astronaut strapping in, or a soldier loading out. The adrenaline of the drop, floating high above some heady city, your parachute packed by un- known hands, the safety off on your gun, your hands and lips tingling with panic. She was prepared to be afraid of Marec, because she was already afraid of everyone; she’d had practice. What more did he have to offer her in the night market of fear, when she was the richest woman in the world and already owned it all?
But, well. Despite all of it, there was magic attached to his name. Not real magic, but ordinary magic, a medieval touch that illuminated the initial M and G with red and gold. He had been great and he had been finished at thirty, like all the great ones, and there was a magic in that too. The lure of him was the lure of any finished thing: you could look at him and see his full story, with ending.
***
For the first session of the graduate seminar, she wore a brownish lipstick, and her classiest skirt with the big plaid and no elastic, and a shawl she’d knitted from yarn with a dull sugary sparkle, in a pattern designed to look like human DNA. Then she’d taken the shawl off. It was an affectation for the old Annae, the one who had always tried to please—others, and herself. The skirt was dangerously close to being affected too, with its velvet ribbon trim, but it was also uncomfortable, which showed that she was a serious person.
Here, she told herself, she would please no one. She would aim herself at Brandford University, finish her thesis, and then escape with her PhD like a rocket fired out of orbit, evading every empty thing until it came to the greatest emptiness of all. Then she would finally be done.
***
The seminar was in one of those fairy-tale rooms you found at Brandford, walls and ceiling shaped by Victorian trowels that might as well have been Tudor, and a small window of uneven latticework. It smelled like the underfunded library of Annae’s youth, something that made it somehow even more English, damply redolent of Pullman and Pratchett. The table was too large for the claustrophobic space, and the graduate students around it were all young men in Oxfam suits. She sat down, safe but too visible in her heavy bangs and all her woolen clothes. And then Marec Górski came in, and the air in the room sucked into him and vanished.
He went into his lecture before his jacket was unbuttoned, before his bag was down. He was seventy, looked eighty, and wore a loose academic gown as if his body had lain desiccating in it by a remote roadside since the summer term. His lightly fuzzed head was held a bit askew, which completed the picture of a fallen cyclist, neck broken.
“Magic has remained etymologically the same for millennia,” he said—voice rough but surprisingly high, a sandpapered choirboy. “Old French magique, Latin magice, Greek magike, Old Persian magush. What does this suggest about human beings?”
He edged himself around the table, put down his briefcase at its head, looked around the room as if balancing all of them on his tongue. Slowly, almost pityingly, he went on. “That we’ve always known what magic is, whether or not it was understood at the time, whether or not it was considered a superstition or a lie. Those two syllables endure. They’re as hardwired as those almost onomatopoeic Anglo-Saxon words, ‘dog’ or ‘food.’ Magic is more intuitive to human thought than literature. It’s more intuitive than mathematics. Magic is not a hard science. It is a soft field that takes the impressions of everything that encounters it, and uses them to get stronger. Magic is also the only conscious field of study. The only one that talks back.”
He stopped talking as abruptly as he had started and snapped open his briefcase. From it he withdrew a sharp stack of papers and a china coffee mug filled to a quarter inch below the brim. The thick, bodily smell of coffee filled the room and steamed the windows.
“You know me. I was once near great,” he said. “Near great, I say, because fine though my career was, I never found my theme. Melville said that a great book requires a mighty theme. I had the brains and the drive, but not the inspiration. The best thing I ever made was a person, but most of us make people, in the end. I could have done better. I won’t settle for anything less in my graduate students than inspiration, yet so far, I have never encountered it once. None of you seems likely to change that record. Remind me which ones you are? And you”—indicating Annae—“you’ll be last.”
The men in Oxfam suits gave him their names and then, with more prodding, their interests. She tried to make note of the names—Peter, Joshua, Thomas, Gordon, Torquil—but couldn’t connect them to their faces; it was like one of those quizzes you take in primary school, where you have a list of men and a list of achievements and you have to connect them up. Thomas Edison and the light bulb, Benjamin Franklin and electricity. Perhaps there was something contagious in Górski’s indifference, or perhaps they had done their best to become interchangeable.
Górski said, “Now, Annie.”
She straightened up and said, “Annae, Annay.”
“Nay, Annae,” he said. “The plural of Anna? How did you come by that?”
“My parents wanted something unique.”
“Ah, yes. The American mania for customization.”
“Maybe,” she said, and drew back the corner of her mouth until a dimple appeared. “I’m sure English parents make up names too.”
“And what is your field of study, Annas?”
“Mental illness and trauma.”
“Interesting. Are you pro or con?”
“Well,” said Annae, “without wanting to put an ethical burden on the idea of being sick or traumatized—”
“Not at all. I am the last man to put an ethical burden on anyone. But, Annae, I was making a joke.” A gentle lift to the eyebrows, an assurance that nothing could be kinder. “The trouble with curing mental illness is that there are so many more of them now. It’s a moving target. When I was a young man, people did not become manic; they burnt hot.”
“I’ve met some people who were manic,” said Annae, hearing her voice slide higher, “and it’s not heat, exactly—”
“I knew a boy who was taken away for it,” said Marec, “when I was your age. How old are you? You look fourteen.”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
“Ah,” he said. “The age when all the musicians die. You are not a musician?”
“No.”
“Then that’s all right.” Marec cleared his throat. “Do you really suppose that you can do it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to spend my whole career trying.”
“A sound bite,” said Marec, “verily, a sound bite. You are an American. In a few months you’ll be emailing me to talk about ‘wrapping up the term.’”
“Has that happened before?”
“Twice,” he said, and there was a knowing, stifled laugh from Gordon or Torquil, one of the Scots.
“Well, I’m sure they had their reasons.”
“It’s funny,” he said. “You look like such an English rose, but then you open your mouth.”
“American Beauty rose,” chimed in Gordon-or-Torquil. Annae blushed, not from flattery, but from confusion, and the room laughed. If she had ever thought of herself as a rose, it would be a withered one—crisp, dry, delicate. But it was impossible to articulate the thought beyond that image, especially with the laughter gasping at her from everywhere.
“Which is French,” said Górski. “A French cultivar. You should know that, Torquil; you’re a botanist.”
“I don’t know my individual roses,” said Torquil.
“Maybe that’s your problem,” said Górski. “Anno, annas, annat.”
***
Torquil followed her out of the room after the lecture and stood contritely in the damp sunlight outside, after she’d refolded her wet umbrella. He said, “That was rude, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” she said, and thought: That only calls attention to it. Her fingers folded up in their thin leather gloves.
“But I would like to. Sometimes I just free-associate. It’s a thing for which I am known.”
“Then apology accepted,” she said, and turned to walk away.
“Wait,” he said, and kept pace with her, his stride lengthening. “You need to get out while you can. I mean it. Whatever your reasons for coming here, I guarantee they’re not as good as the reasons to leave. Do you realize he makes a show of having us introduce ourselves every year? There’s always the five of us and one American girl that he expects to be grateful.”
“Perhaps I am grateful,” she said.
“Are you quite sure you’re American? I never heard an American say ‘perhaps.’”
“Of course I am.”
“Why are you grateful?”
To her it had the feeling of a Zen koan: some crucial word missing. Does a dog have Buddha nature? Or the Marx brothers: What’s the difference between a duck? “I had a bad time in my previous program,” she told him, her head and mouth full of air. “It wasn’t the best fit for me.”
“Oh,” he said, a little too wisely.
“You know my reasons for being here, don’t you? You’ve Googled.”
“No,” he said, although there was a narrowing about his eyes. The rain started again, a slow rain that hissed through the trees and didn’t drown out the cars. She could hear their motors just over the high, well-shaped berm, like the bone of a hill, that was supposed to block the road. The narrowing in his eyes really was quite pronounced, a soft tension that showed you what he’d look like in twenty years. Despite herself, she liked his taut young face, which had the capability for disguise but not for affectation. His Oxfam suit was brown, but not brown tweed.
“The job didn’t end well,” said Annae. “As a result of which I’m in no position to negotiate. I’m well aware Dr. Górski is a hard bargain—”
“You can call him Marec. He prefers it anyway, and it’s half as many syllables wasted.”
She put her umbrella back up. Torquil didn’t have one; he put up the collar of his jacket and made a grimace, and she raised the umbrella up to cover him too. The hard dirt of the path around them barely seemed penetrated by the rain. The shadows of his face were softened by the umbrella, his body close—then the smell of him, exhaled from the drooping collar of his shirt, that familiar deodorant, the black-and-white bottle and the name vaguely reminiscent of Vichy France, the smell of Jonathon’s house. The perverse nostalgia of it. Under the layers of insults, under the cruel emails, under the private harshness of Jonathon’s manner, there lay the earliest tight-furled memories of his house, before everything had gone wrong, when his house had felt like a refuge from everything. A humming fridge full of expensive treats, wine in pink cans, rosemary and cheese; the quiet lights caught in the gray carpets; the smell of the right products for his skin and hair.
A tiny voice somewhere near the top of her skull asked: Why this? Why now? How is it so easy to bring you so low? Surely it isn’t this obvious—a smell and then a feeling; a feeling and then the pop of a flashbulb or a bullet, and the smell of something burning out? Surely you are not so simple a creature as this? Then she closed her eyes, feeling once again the mortification of that final onslaught, of standing at the sink washing perfectly good oil and pepper out of a salad bowl, the sleeves of her vintage angora sweater getting sopping wet, as Jonathon told her in the kindest possible terms that he was done with her childishness and desperation to be loved, tired of humoring her intellectual pretensions, tired of pretending her work was serious—
How she had let the bowl fill up with warm water, then seized magic and heated it to boiling around her fingers—
Mortification, Latin, to make dead—
Torquil was still there, somehow. He must have said something. He was looking at her, pinched and expectant. And all of a sudden there was nothing to do but to rip open a little corner of his mind and slip inside, to look at herself through his eyes, because she could not bear to be Annae anymore, and because he probably deserved it.
***
Torquil shuddered in his skin. Her look in that moment sank too deep into him. He looked down at her too, the skin stretched taut but matte over her cheekbones, the bend of her elbow in its pressed blouse, the hair a shining solid mass, like hair in a movie. A too-perfect woman, with nothing the eye could catch on, as if all the obvious work of perfecting her appearance were not toward the purpose of beauty, but of invisibility. She was a feast for Marec, someone so well put together that she had surely learned it from being taken apart.
***
“Are you all right?” she asked him. She had jerked out of his mind suddenly, because it had been so unsoothing—it had been sharp in her mouth, it had tasted bad. A bath of anxiety, with stagnant water and green flotsam beneath its surfaces.
“I’m fine,” he said, and attempted a quirk of a smile, the corner of his mouth twitching like a live wire. “It’s been a long day. A day with Marec is a day without sunshine.”
“How did you start working with him?”
“He charmed me,” Torquil said quietly, the wind playing with his thin hair. “He wanted to work with me. God knows why. Look, Annae, I have looked you up, all right? I wanted to know who would be joining us.”
“So you’ve seen the article.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And what did you think?”
He blew air out of his mouth and she plunged into his mind again, this time feeling as if she were yanking handfuls of it away. The sheer frustration, the weariness of this moment.
***
Think? Think? He’d Googled her late the previous night, the unusual name having been familiar. Then he’d dug deeper and deeper, fascinated and depressed. All that seemed to have nothing to do with the woman in front of him now, who was once again giving him that look, that brass thumbtack of a look that pinned him crisply up. A cautionary tale, the article. About the dangers of elevating people too soon in their careers, lest they prove flashes or frauds.
In a video from a morning news show, a much younger Annae—bangs longer, makeup darker, the red of her sweater bleeding through her thin white lab coat—had demonstrated something shocking: removal of fear in the rat. She showed how she’d trained them to be frightened of a red laser-pointer dot, then explained the little tweak— just a small nudge to the electrical pattern of the brain, based on Taylor’s work with spine and nerve pain—that made it go away. Torquil was a plant specialist and did no work with animal physiology; all he could tell was that the work was either a massive step forward from Taylor’s fairly basic 1980s experiments, or a step that had nothing to do with them at all, done by a thinker so original that any attempt at citation was basically a falsehood. Annae stroked the rats’ little heads, and then—presto—no fear! They had chased the dot like kittens.
“They don’t live long afterward,” Annae had explained apologetically to the audience. “Work like this always has consequences for the body; the change in the charge poisons the system, and it breeds cancer or anemia. The real brass ring for a scientist like me is to turn it into something else— some harmless chemical that I can drain off. But with magic like this, it would theoretically be possible to edit our response to trauma, to cure mental illness of all kinds—just a little change in the way we feel, and that makes all the difference.”
The country had been briefly fascinated by Annae, who was an undergraduate at the time and had a shy grin of which there was no evidence now. A certain kind of science writing had clustered around her, the kind that takes the scientist’s simplification and simplifies it further—a little change in the way we feel! How simple, how graspable, how elegant. Perhaps it really could be done. Torquil had felt the pull of the demonstration too, imagining his life without antidepressants, without anti-anxiety drugs, without their side effects and long trial periods, imagining himself changed with one clean stroke. The thought was dystopian—but how appealing it was, as dystopias are.
But then Annae had fallen silent. It seemed that things weren’t that simple after all. And then this article had surfaced, heavily quoting her former supervisor, Jonathon Bayer. Annae had been raised too high and too quickly. She had only had one idea, and that an incomplete one. “To be honest,” Bayer had said, “I think that it was partly because she was a woman, and everyone wanted a woman to come along to save advanced magic from being such a boys’ club. That doesn’t mean that the right woman couldn’t excel in this field, or rather that many women could not. But everyone wanted Annae to be another Meril Meyerfeld—they wanted to see gravity reversed—and that’s not her. The only reason I don’t call her a fraud is that I sincerely think she believes that she’s a genius.”
Torquil had looked at her Facebook, to see if it seemed like a fraud’s Facebook. Bayer was all over it. He was youngish, good-looking, with a square face and an expansive look. In one photo he had his arm slung around her shoulders. She was wearing a white shirtdress, very crisp, and dragged to greater crispness by the tightness of his grip on her shoulder. When you scrolled past him, all that was left was the kind of Facebook page that’s staccato and mostly full of other people’s happy-birthdays, photos of Annae at parties with women she didn’t appear to know well. He’d scrolled to the very bottom, to the formation of Annae’s account. But there was nothing there except a note that she had been born.
“What do you think?”
All of this had gone by in a moment, a microdot of thought. He felt his face convulse, compress. She looked mildly horrified, as if she had seen everything he’d thought, everything he was thinking now, every nasty misogynistic intrusive thought about the way the girls in the photos had looked like dead sunflowers, the way they would gangle and stretch. Their raw skin under the flash. All the ways he’d believed Bayer’s words, because Torquil, a known fraud, believed in frauds.
“I think you’re hard done by,” he said to her quietly. “And I think you should watch out for Marec, anyway. No doubt you’ve been warned that he’s unkind, and obviously he is that, but it’s worse. He will either try to stop you from ever leaving this place, or destroy your career entirely.”
“I don’t have a choice,” she told him, flinging the words suddenly into his face. “Don’t you know? Marec is the only one who’d take me. Leave me alone. Don’t pretend you don’t know everything.”
“Know everything? I don’t know anything. I’m—I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
Excerpted from The Two Doctors Górski © 2022 by
