Bernard could almost feel his floating mind beginning to work apart from him, to think and answer on its own as it drifted and swirled about the darkness. His mind seemed only to be using his body as a vehicle for speech. “Harper,” it answered—he answered—hoarsely.

“Harper, that’s right,” said Iago, well pleased. “Harper, who was mine, who begged to be mine at the cost of any degradation. Who begged for the degradation to prove to me that she was mine. And who now can’t stand the thought of herself as she was with me and so takes her revenge by trying to destroy what there is of me in you. Because that’s what it’s all about, really. These abstract ideas of hers—wrong, right, good, evil—where do they exist? If you can show them to me, I’ll bow down to them, I swear. If you can hand them to me, Christ, I’ll eat them. All right? But they exist nowhere. Except in Harper’s vengeful mind. So what are her notions of good and evil but just her way of training you to repress the part of you she’s afraid of? I mean, I see this every day, Bernard. The weak teach the strong to be afraid of their own strength—why? So that the weak won’t have to suffer at the hands of the strong—more than that, so that they won’t have to face their own natural propensity for suffering. You, Bernard, have to walk through the world repressed and stunted and twisted inside so that Harper can be free of the memory of her own desire, so that Harper doesn’t have to face herself. If you want to talk about truth—that’s the truth. And it isn’t fair. I mean, I asked you if I’ve hurt you, and you know I haven’t. Now I ask you: Has she hurt you? Harper. Has she hurt you personally? Not abstractly, but really.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I think she has,” he said. “I’ve shut you in a box, in a coffin. But she’s turned your whole world into a coffin. She shuts you—your true self—inside it every single day. I’m not only offering to set you free from this box, Bernard. I’m offering to set you free from the box she’s put you in, the cage of Harper’s ideas that has your true nature crouching like an animal inside. Because you’re more like me than you are like her. You’re more my son than hers.”