Swansong (26 page)

“Sorry,” Azel says, rubbing his arm.  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Why not?” I ask.  I want him to be honest with me.  I want to be a place where he can store his feelings.

“Because all I’m doing is excusing my own shortcomings.  You didn’t come here to get grandstanded.”

When I said that he was forthright…

“You know,” I say, after a moment’s worth of thought, “you and Kory should be friends.”

Azel blanches.

“I’m serious,” I say, although I can’t help laughing.  “If you boys have anything in common, it’s that you both make me think.  A lot.  I’ve done more thinking this year than I’ve done in my entire life prior.”

“He’ll turn my hair gray.”

“And you’ll look very distinguished,” I say appreciatively.

Azel’s face spasms exactly the way I wanted it to.  I burst out laughing.  He slaps his hands against his forehead and turns his head away.

“You don’t play games,” I muse.  “But you put up with me.  You’re a brave soul.”

“You are not a game.”

Blood rushes to my face, my ears.  I can hear my own pulse.

I remember seeing the sun from outer space.  I remember the way it peeked out from behind Earth’s shadow.  It was cleansing, bright, even as Earth tried to hide it from view.  Its rays crept and scattered along the edge of the dark planet like an aura of redemption.  It was a cosmic sunrise.  It was the kindest thing I had ever seen.  I had to look away to preserve my senses.

Azel smiles at me.  I don’t look away this time.

“Winter break soon,” I say—just to have something to say.

“Yeah.”

“Can I see you again?”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“I won’t make you watch wrestling this time.”

“I didn’t really mind.”

* * * * *

Winter break becomes synonymous with Azel.  I visit him twice more at his home.  I bring him peach cake and almond croissants.  I promptly run out of recipes.

“You don’t have to keep baking for me,” Azel says.

“Yes, I do,” I say emphatically.  A little gilded swan hangs around my right wrist, wings folded, neck arched.  As long as she hangs there, I’m giving him presents.

He takes me into his kitchen and shows me how to bake coconut-lime rice pudding and raspberry chocolate parfait.  I have never wanted to hit a boy more.

“Stay for dinner.  I’ll make shawarma wraps.”

I take that back—yes I have.

The third time I visit him, I don’t stick around.  I head out the door to the Charles Babbage memorial site.  He follows me, a satchel full of books hanging from his shoulder.

“Where are we going?” Azel asks, nonplussed.  He straggles at my side.

“You’ll see,” I tell him, and turn to show him a smile.

We reach the rusted Babbage statue.  We trek north.  Highrise apartments clump together, uniform, desolate.  Empty black windows decorate the cement slabs like sleepy, snuffed-out eyes.

“I’ve never been to this part of town before,” Azel remarks, sounding quiet, pensive.

“They built it as fast as they could.  Then they forgot about it.”  We pass a gated fire hydrant.  Why it’s gated is beyond me.  “It feels like everyone’s in a rush to get somewhere.  By the time they get there, they’ve forgotten why.”

Azel looks at me.  I can see him out of the corner of my eye, the sharp lines of his prestezza face, angular, elegant.

Eventually we come what would have been a factory if the lease hadn’t run out.  Azel tilts his head back and inspects the monster of a building, twenty-five stories of coal-colored iron, windows free of framework and glass.  Urban refuse fills the front areaway in the form of scrap metal and torn girders.

“Is this safe?” Azel asks warily.

“Sure it is,” I tell him, smiling.  “Joss and I came here all the time.”

His face is guarded, respectfully closed.

We walk around the back of the building.  The ladder to the fire escape hangs close to the ground, wrought-iron and rusted.  I jump and catch it.  I’m not as strong as I used to be, the wind knocked out of me, cold weakness trickling down my legs.  I suck in a forced breath.  I pull myself up onto the rickety landing.

Azel follows me up the ladder in half the amount of time.  “Are you alright?”

“Yeah.”  I smile.  I tell myself I shouldn’t look down.  Lately when I look down, I think about falling.

We climb the grated staircase one—two—three flights up.  We climb two more.  I push aside the bloated board in the oriel window.  I climb inside the factory.

Azel coughs when he follows me.  It’s dark in here, dusty, winks of light flitting feebly through the far windows.  I grab Azel’s hand.  I lead him to the personnel staircase.  A draft floods up the concrete steps.

“Wendy.  Are you
sure
this is safe?”

“Yes.  Why?”

“I think a rat brushed past my ankle.”

“He’s just trying to be friendly.”

One minor eternity later, a stitch in my side, Azel’s hand clammy around mine, I shoulder open a half-finished door.  We emerge on an unfurnished landing.  The walls are peeling, the ceiling rafters exposed.  Gray, chilly sunlight gusts through the wide, north-facing window, a railed balcony beyond it.

“A hideout,” Azel realizes.

My easel’s still standing where I left it.  Dirty bulk canvases lie in a pile on the floor, paint cans sealed, paintbrushes stained.  Mismatched kerosene lamps stand scattered around the rest of my junk; I used to buy them at the wharf when Dad’s friends sailed in with their wares.

“Joss and I practically lived here,” I comment, smiling faintly.  “That one summer when she found out she was adopted.”

Chairs stand against one wall, one on top of the other.  Hanging from the chairs is Jocelyn’s pink, zebra-striped curtain.  She liked her privacy.  My throat tightens at the sight of it.  Even now I can’t bear to pull the curtain aside.  It’s a shame, because I’d really like to see what she left behind.

“That’s remarkable,” Azel says suddenly, his eyes on the opposite wall.

I realize he means the mural.  Chipping wood isn’t exactly the best canvas for a painting, but the bareness was bothering me.  A lit lighthouse emerges from rocky ocean waves.  A small boat tugs itself across the sea, to the safety of the glowing beacon.

“That’s the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse,” I say.  “Have you ever seen it?  In person, I mean.”

“I haven’t.”

“Come here,” I say.

Azel lays his satchel on the floor.  He follows me to the wide-open window.

We’re nineteen stories up.  The city below looks like a cardboard construct of gray spires, white plastic, glass panes, toy cars tugging slowly along the streets. 
Don’t look down
, I tell myself.  I look out at the horizon instead.  The ocean glitters brightly, seraphic blue-gray, fingers reaching hungrily for sandy white shores.  Jutting silver cliffs dip into the waters, rock surfaces shimmering coldly under white winter skies.  The sun is weak, but generous.  It paints the wandering clouds in soft pools of robin’s egg blue, dashes of scarlet, coils of creamy yellow.

“That’s Cape Meares,” I say.  “See the white fleck standing on the waves?”

Azel stands close to me.  “Yes.”

“That’s the lighthouse.  If you’re out here at night, you can watch it light up.”

“You come out here at nighttime?”

“Used to.  I haven’t been out this way since Jocelyn died.”

I can feel Azel looking at me.  I don’t want to return his gaze.  I killed my best friend.  My mother, my father.  It’s weird how I’ll forget myself and start expecting that truth to go away over time.  It never goes away.  It can’t.  It wouldn’t be the truth if it could.

“Thank you,” Azel says.  “For trusting me.”

“It’s probably just selfishness,” I say, smiling at the horizon.  Tiny little houses clutter around the far side of the Cape.

“How can that be?” Azel asks.

I don’t tell him how.  I don’t tell him that whenever I talk to him—even if it’s trivial—I feel as if I don’t mind staying in this world a little longer.  I feel as if the inevitable can be postponed.

I don’t mind the part of this world that Azel inhabits.  I wish I could hold onto that part of the world when the rest of it falls into the sea.

* * * * *

Azel moves some of his books into the hideout.  By unspoken agreement, neither of us strays near Jocelyn’s part of the floor.  I brush the dust and grit off of one of my bulk canvases and set it up on the empty easel.  The paint cans are still good; I must have mixed them with coffee the last time I came out this way.  All I need to do is bring my palette out here, some vinegar for the brushes.

One day I catch Azel sitting on the floor between unlit kerosene lamps, flipping through an enormous, leatherbound book.  I squint in the winter sunlight and sit at his side.

“Is that an anthology?” I ask.

“This?”  It’s well over four hundred pages.  It looks like he’s struggling just to hold it on his lap.  “This is not a collection.  This is one poem.”

“You’re kidding me,” I gape.

He flashes a quick, dark smile at my expression.  “It’s the
Rubaiyat
.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s an epic set of quatrains by Omar Khayyam.  He was a Sufi mystic.  There’s a planet named for him.”

“In this galaxy?  Really?”

“In this solar system.  It’s somewhere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.”

Mars.  Jupiter.  The asteroid belt.  I’ve seen all of those with my own eyes.  It’s so surreal.

I can accept the surreal these days.

Azel’s face goes blank and smooth with contemplation.  “Bet you’d like its neighboring planet even better.  Raffaello Santi?”

“The painter!”

“A painter and a poet share the heavens.  There’s something lyrical about that.”

“Have you ever written any poems?”

“Nah, I suck at syntax.”

“Oh.  Me, too.”

The light’s no good in here.  We head out onto the balcony, the sun a little stronger, cold air stinging my face.  We sit on the smooth concrete, a thin metal rail dividing us from the landscape far below.

Don’t look down
, I tell myself. 
Don’t look down.

Azel props the book open on his knees, long legs stretched out in front of him.  The wind whips and tosses his long hair.  I lie on my back so I don’t have to face the city.  I watch his curls instead, the way the air current carries them like banners.

” ‘One moment in annihilation’s waste,’ ” he reads from the
Rubaiyat
.  ” ‘One moment of the well of life to taste.  The stars are setting, and the caravan starts for the dawn of nothing—oh, make haste.’ “

My back is on the balcony terrace.  My eyes are on the domed sky.  The sky looks like it wants to swallow me up.  I don’t think I would mind, somehow.  It’s mesmerizing.  The sky.  Azel’s voice.  They blend together in the chambers of my mind.  The clouds shine with a sumptuous translucence, wet and delicate, gentle, august and all-encompassing.  Celestial baptism.  Azel’s voice is baptizing, calm and low and self-assured.

” ‘For, in and out, above, about, below, ‘tis nothing but a magic shadow-show played in a box whose candle is the sun, round which we phantom figures come and go.’ “

Phantom figures.  That’s us.  We’re already gone.  It’s a scrapbook life filled with scrapbook memories.  Most of the stars in the sky are already dead.

” ‘Listen again.  One evening at the close of Ramadan, ere the better Moon arose—’ “

He really likes his Moon, doesn’t he?  Azel.  The moon rises and the night connects us.

” ‘—in an old Potter’s shop I stood alone, with the clay population round in rows.’ “

Clay.  Kory works with clay.  Clay and sugarglass.  The whole entire universe inside a glass snowflake.

” ‘And, strange to tell, among the earthen lot, some could articulate while others not.  And suddenly, one more impatient cried, “Who is the Potter, and who, pray tell, the Pot?” ‘ “

If nobody knows, then what difference does it make?  If there isn’t any difference, then aren’t they both the same?

You are at the center of the universe.

” ‘Ah, my beloved, fill the cup that clears today of past regrets and future fears.  Tomorrow?  Why, tomorrow I may be myself with yesterday’s ten thousand years.’ “

* * * * *

The stars leave smoke trails in the sky.  The night sky is deep and wet, blotted black ink.  I wonder why the air’s so cold up here.  I thought heat rises.  Or is that just indoors?  I’m glad I’m wearing a woolen jacket.

The stars burn beauty into my eyes.  My head feels warm.  Azel’s legs are warm.  He brushes his fingers through my hair, my head on his lap.  Now and again his curls obscure my vision.  I don’t mind it.  If my arms didn’t feel like leaden weights, I’d try to catch them as they sail on the wind.