I had gotten through the membrane. I was in another person's mind! I was in my wife's mind.
I passed the secret place where she kept her ideas about herself. I was tempted to look at them and do a little rearranging. But a tact I hadn't thought myself capable of kept me from it. I continued down the corridor.
Soon I came to where her memories of me were stored. These I scanned with some care.
I felt horror at the interlocking logic of those thoughts, those impressions. I knew she had once loved me, once thought highly of me. How could it have changed into this? How could she have thought I thought that? I would never have accused my worst enemy of the thoughts and emotions she assigned to me. "Cold" and "prissy" was the least of it.
Very gently I began readjusting her attitudes toward me.
"Basic liking" needed some tweaking to bring it up to a proper level. "Appreciation of his looks" needed a little more adjustment. "Approval of deeds as understood from motives" required a lot of attention. "Perception of gallantry" also took some work.
There were other things to adjust. I reversed a number of her perceptions so that she would wake up realizing they were misperceptions. I wanted her to think, "Oh, I don't know how I could have gotten him so wrong..."
Frankly, I wasn't too sure I had indeed meant what I wanted her to believe I'd meant, but if I was going to err, it would be in my own favor.
I saw her turn in her sleep, smile, reach toward me. For a moment I thought there was hope. But then a spasm shook her body. She rolled away, and still asleep, her face twisted in disgust. She shuddered.
"Get out of me!" she cried, still asleep.
Obviously, my actions had stirred up a rebellion in her. In the unconscious, I suppose. I watched her reject the alien thoughts. My thoughts, my adjustments!
She couldn't bear to see me through my eyes, from my point of view.
I realized that even if I had created a truer version of myself, it wasn't her truth, wasn't true for her, and maybe had never been true, maybe never could be true. This despite my good intentions.
The repair work I had done in her mind began to shake and quiver. Each place I had touched turned a dark and unpleasant color. In that darkness I saw the rejection of my own valuations, my own desired self-images that I had tried to impose on her. She threw them off as alien matter. Shame-faced, my self-conceptions had crept back inside of me.
In the midst of this, I had another vision. A vision within a vision, as it were. I caught a glimpse of that universal mind, owned by no one and everyone, to which few are given access. I saw all our differences reconciled. But this too faded away. Apparently this ultimate reconciliation with the person I loved was not allowed by the ground rules of existence.
Shortly after that, I was expelled from her mind.
Her interior filing cabinets were shaking and quaking. The corridor itself writhed. The interior of her mind suddenly semed to knot, then explode outward with an irresistable force. I was thrown from her mind against the membrane. I passed through as before, and came out the other side intact.
Someone was standing there, waiting for me. It was the Ahriman, the subgod who had given me the parchment. Now he plucked it out of my head.
Ahriman said, "Apparently you didn't understand the gift. It's not to be used for yourself. You give it to someone else. The gift to give is to be able to understand, not to be understood."
"You didn't tell me that."
"You didn't ask. You said you knew what to do."
"Why did you give it to me in the first place, among all the people you could have given it to? You must have known from the start that I was damaged."