Swansong (32 page)

“Fauré‘s Pavane.  It’s my favorite song.  Just listen.”

I listen to the string quartet, slow and ambling, mysterious.  The violin makes me think of Annwn.  I focus on the cello instead, the viola.  Then come the oboes, the clarinets.  It’s a peaceful melody.  At the same time, it’s tense, self-aware.  That shouldn’t make sense, I know.  When I close my eyes I can see some invisible entity strolling through a willowed park, glancing carefully over his shoulder, certain he’s being followed, but intent not to miss out on the beauty of a rare, cerulean spring day.

The invisible entity becomes Azel.  Because when I think about it, that’s the kind of person he is.  He walks with his shoulders hunched, his eyes on the ground.  He walks like he’s never quite certain where his feet will end up from one moment to the next.  But he doesn’t let that stop him from walking.  He doesn’t let that stop him from dancing.

And then the full orchestra kicks in, sweeping and rushing and elegant and grand.  And suddenly there’s magic; the real kind; the kind that infuses your bones with God.  This is more than a song.  This is somebody’s vision of the world at large.  This is somebody’s pain and anger and wonder and gratitude and awe, sheer awe.  This is one hundred, two hundred, three hundred magicians calling out together for something they’ve never seen with their own eyes, manufacturing that something erstwhile.  Suddenly I understand why we’re seven billion instead of one.  Suddenly I can see how we might all be one anyway.

My eyes feel hot.  I don’t dare open them.  Let somebody else do the crying for a change.

* * * * *

Layla comes home around early evening, when Aisha’s up and playing with her Lovely doll.  I decide I’d better get home myself.

“Let me walk you,” Azel says.

I step into my shoes.  I follow him out the door.

The sky looks like a wet paint canvas.  It aches with shades of garnet.  It seeps with lush persimmon.  A watery white sun touches the opal clouds.  Their lights are dim and flickering, flitting in and out of realms.

“It’s beautiful,” Azel comments quietly.

It is beautiful.  The imprint of a phantom moon shines faintly between the city’s iron smokestacks.  The thick gray smog, ugly, usurping, is a crude contender for the sky’s natural satellites.

The moon rises and the night connects us.

It’s cold tonight.  I zip my woolen jacket closed.  Azel reaches for my hand and I let him capture it, warmth in my cheeks, my fingers curling around his.  We walk past the maisonettes, past Charles Babbage, suspiciously devoid of Listerine.

“Are you doing anything for New Year’s?” Azel asks.

“Church, probably.”  I smile.  I don’t know whether I should be worried, that Judas’ only hobbies are church and that one cell phone game where you pop balloons with a dart gun.

“We follow the lunar calendar,” Azel tells me.  “Our New Year was a couple months back.”

“Does that mean you’re contacting me from the future?  And you said you didn’t have a time machine.”

His mouth flicks into a warm smile.

“What’s the future like?” I ask him.  “Any good?”

“A lot of the same,” he says.  “Only we have jetpacks now.”

“Finally.”

“You can borrow mine.”

“Can I borrow your robot housekeeper, too?”

“He has Sundays off.”

“Robots.  Give ‘em an inch and they want a yard.”

We walk past the gas station.  Cop cars crowd the lot with their loud sirens and flashing lights.  Another holdup, I guess.  I try not to let my gaze wander.  Azel doesn’t spare the mess a single glance.

“Don’t leave your winter homework for too long,” I tell him.  “Okay?”

“Have you already started yours?” he asks.

“Yeah.  We had this take-home test on Vercingetorix.  I don’t know why they bother giving us take-home tests when it’s so easy to cheat.  Everything’s on the internet these days…”

“Don’t remind me.”  I forgot he hates the internet.

We stop for the street light outside the boarded up cinema.  Traffic breezes past us in the streets.  I huddle under my jacket, surprised at the frigid air.

“This world,” Azel murmurs.  “It’s really going to die?”

His eyes are on the smokestacks, the breath of death polluting the sky.

I smile shakily.  “That’s the word on the street.”

“It seems like such a waste.”  His hand slips free from mine.  I don’t think he realizes.  “It’s a waste of a perfectly good world.”

“Yeah…”

What’s so good about this world?  Mom and Dad aren’t in it.  We’ve killed the planet we’re living on.  This time next year, maybe we’ll get to kill Europa, too.

This world.  This world was the one that gave me Mom and Dad to begin with.

I never even said thank you.

Thank you.  Thank you for giving me a family.  Thank you for letting me grow up a happy little girl.  Thank you for brothers.  Thank you for friends.  Thank you for showing me that I was loved.

This world is a world of water.  65% of the human body is water.  71% of the planet is ocean.  95% of the ocean remains uncharted.  Five hundred million years ago, we stepped out of the sea.  We were young, and timid, and didn’t know what waited at the surface.  We didn’t know we could go home anytime we wanted.  We still don’t.

I am the ocean.  The ocean is in my veins.  It’s the blood that runs from my heart to my fingertips.  It’s the water that fills the space between my cells, my synapses, my thoughts.  It’s the tears that fill my eyes when I forget where I came from; when I delude myself into thinking that I can never go back.

There’s never going to be another you.

I wait for the traffic light to change.  The planet around me holds its breath.  The first gray stars take to the darkening horizon, shadows spreading across the bloated sun.  A gust of wintry air caresses my face, a father’s gentle, weather-beaten hands.

Snow falls slowly from the sky.

14

The Battle of Alesia

I lie in a glass casket, fluorescent lights pouring through the lid above my head.  My back and my shoulders have gone stiff.  Warm air rushes at the scar on my face, my chapped lips.

How much money does the hospital make when I come in for oxygen therapy?  That’s what I want to know.  It’s not like the therapy’s helping at all.  If anything, I feel disjointed, disillusioned, at the end of each session.  A paranoid, wriggling presence in the back of my head wonders whether that’s not the point.

My eyes are glassy.  Affixed to the glass lid, they water and burn.

A face looms above me, distorted through the hazy casket.  Sleepy eyes.  Rosy curls.  Hint of a smile.

Lady Lazarus arises from her own ash, red-haired, tired.  Sick to death.

Sick of her.

Sick of me.

* * * * *

In my bedroom I hang clean clothes in my closet.  I take the medicines lined up on my nighttable.  I scribble notes to myself and stick them to the stucco walls.

Annwn watches me from the bed, beret sitting sideways on her hair.  Jocelyn’s swan bracelet hangs from her left wrist.

She’s not here.  I know that.  I have a head injury, a bad one.  My brain doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.

How is the brain supposed to work?  Did somebody come up with a written set of rules?

“That’s a very good point,” Annwn says.  “You know, there are eighty-six billion neurons inside the human brain.  Sixty-nine billion of those are inside the cerebellum alone.  The cerebellum has a processing capacity of 0.1 quadrillion tasks per second.  That’s faster than the modern computer.  But at a mere 10% of our total neurological output, the cerebellum is the part of the brain we use the least.  Seems like we’re busy squandering our potential, doesn’t it?”

How can somebody who isn’t here know all these numbers?  Unless she’s lying.  She could be lying.

“I’m not lying, Wendy.  You can look it up, if you like.”

I pick up a pillow lying on the floor.  I throw it at her.  She catches it.

She smiles.

“Leave,” I tell her.  I’m tired of hallucinations.  This world is dying.  I want to enjoy what’s left of it.

“But you admit there isn’t much left.”

I have Judas and Kory.  I have Azel.  I have my artwork, my school.  It’s not what I want, but…

“But beggars can’t be choosers?”

In other words:  They can.

I want Azel.  I really do.  I don’t want him more than I want my parents and my best friend.  But while I’m here—while he’s here—

“We can take him with us,” Annwn says softly.  “We can take everyone with us.”

We.  There is no we.

“Of course there is.  We are all one.”

There’s never going to be another you.

“There doesn’t have to be,” Annwn says.

My head hurts.  I cradle it in my hands, begging the pain to stop.  I wish I could take painkillers.  The doctor won’t let me.  Something about blood thinners.  Something about statins.

“Let’s leave this world,” Annwn says.  “Let’s abandon it to die its natural death.  Or did you think it was a coincidence that you and this universe are ready to die at the same time?”

She’s crazy.  I’m crazy.

You are at the center of the universe
.

“Come away with me,” she says.  She’s the Pied Piper of Hamelin.  She’s the Lost Boy in Kensington Gardens.  She doesn’t want to grow up.

Wendy, come away with me.  Come away to Neverland.

“I won’t go.”  I won’t die.

“Dying is just like everything else,” Annwn tells me.  “That is: an artform.  You’d probably be very good at it.  You are an artist.”

“You are not real.”

“You don’t know that anything’s real.  Everything, absolutely everything, happens inside your head.  There is no way to observe phenomena outside of your head.  That is the universal truth.”

What I know is that my head is fractured.  My skull perforated my brain through the temporal-parietal-occipital junction.  The temporal lobe runs the gamut between short-term memories and long-term memories.  I’m always forgetting things.  The parietal lobe codifies pain receptors.  I’m always having headaches.

What does the occipital lobe do?  I think it might have something to do with vision.  I’m always seeing things that aren’t there.

Should I call for Judas?  Should I tell him I’m seeing things again?

“You can, if you like,” Annwn says.  “That doesn’t mean I’ll disappear.”

Who’s to say they aren’t there?  The things I see.  Somebody else might not see them, but does that mean they aren’t there?  A colorblind man can’t see green.  Does that mean green doesn’t exist?

Green, green like Azel’s eyes, green like stellar dust—

“Your mind is quite fragmented,” Annwn says.  “I won’t deny that that’s true.  It’s true of every human mind.  Id.  ‘I want to live.’  Superego.  ‘I want to die.’  Those two opposing forces ought to have nothing to do with one another, and yet every human being is made up of both.  Being human is a horrific struggle, don’t you think?  The Ego is nothing more than a ceasefire between warring parties.  You are your own battlefield.”

Azel called it
jihad
.  I remember.  Everybody goes through the same internal struggle.  That’s how we know we’re human.  That’s how we know we’re real.

“I don’t want to die,” I tell Annwn.

Nobody really wants to die.

Annwn lets out a gentle sound—like a breath, only—only she’s not here, so she shouldn’t be able to breathe.  This is insane.

I’m insane.

“Is it possible,” Annwn says, “that you’ve forgotten something important?”

I stop in my tracks.  “What do you mean?”

Of course I’ve forgotten something important.  Lately that’s all I know how to do.  I can’t remember the accident that ruined five lives.  I can’t remember putting my arms around Mr. and Mrs. Jordan, telling them how sorry I am, telling them how much I loved their daughter.

“Not that,” Annwn says.  “Something else.  Something right in front of your eyes, only you can’t see it.”

What?  What’s in front of my eyes?  There’s Annwn.  Nothing else.  I’d forget her in an instant, if such a thing were at all possible.  But my mind doesn’t seem to like me enough to grant me that small respite.

Is there no escape from the human mind?  Is there some way—any way—that I can get away?

“You’ve forgotten something,” Annwn tells me.  “It’s small, but significant.  When you remember it—if you remember it—everything is going to change.  I’m sorry.  It can’t be helped.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about.  I don’t know what she could conceivably mean.

Hasn’t enough changed?  I’m tired of change.

“Maybe,” Annwn says, “that’s the precise reason why you’ve managed to forget it.”

I pick up the water bottle on my nighttable.  I throw it at her head.

* * * * *

“You got me a cat?” Judas asks, stunned.

It’s Christmas Eve.  A fuzzy calico kitten leaps in and out of the litterbox on the sitting room floor.  She’s so tiny, I keep expecting her to disappear.

“It’s Christmas,” I argue, smiling.

A small, fiberoptic Christmas tree sits on the server beside the paint-splashed wall.  No use going overboard when it’s just the two of us.  I rip open a package of PetLac and read the instructions on the back.

“Wendy,” Judas says.  I can’t really decipher the tone of his voice.

“We’ve been here half a year, and the super never looks in on us,” I say.  “We’re not going to get in trouble.”

“You think I’m worried about the super?  Hell.”

I realize he’s saying thank you.  I realize it’s not something he’s had a lot of opportunity to say.

I tuck my hair behind my ear.  I smile, feel it tugging at my lips.  “Thank you,” I say.

“What for?”

“For the palette, dummy.”  He gave me a new lacquer palette for Christmas.  They’re about a thousand times easier to clean than the wood ones.  “I’ll paint you something with it.”

“Paint me a gin and tonic.”

“Jude.”

Judas kneels on the floor.  He takes the kitten in his hands.  It’s unbelievable how gentle he is.  Those are the hands that took another life ten years ago.  Those are the hands that whittled knives in prison, built cars and built bombs.

The kitten licks Judas’ knuckle.  I don’t think she knows the difference.

“I’m calling you Maurice,” Judas decides.

“Jude!”

“What?”  He looks at me, stymied.

“You can’t call a girl cat Maurice,” I argue.  “You’ll give her gender dysphoria.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

Maurice opens her mouth in a wide yawn.  I guess it’s settled.

“Think we can take her to mass with us?” Judas asks.  “Could hide her in my pocket or something.”

I roll my eyes.  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“We can’t just leave her alone.”

“She’s not a human baby.  I covered the garbage disposal.  There’s nothing she can get into while we’re out.”

“What if she gets lonely?”  He notices she’s fallen asleep.  “Huh.”  He puts her down in the nesting box.

“Big baby,” I tease.

“Am not,” Judas counters.  “Just never seen anything that small before.  Or furry.”

“Not even when Mom and Dad brought me home from the hospital?”

“They didn’t bring you home from the hospital.  They found you in a dumpster.”

“You’ve gotten more consistent.  When we were little, you told me I was a vegetable.”

“You do look kind of leafy.”

I stand from the sofa.  I put my hand on his shoulder.  He looks up at me from the floor.

For a moment, I think, Judas looks like a stranger.  It’s a strange and fleeting sentiment:  I can’t find myself in his face.  It’s a scarred face; a haggard face.  But my freckles are on his cheeks.  My eyes are in his eyes.  This man is the only family I have left.  It’s still so surreal.

I smile; even if I don’t mean it.  “I made torrones.”

“Yeah?” Judas asks.

“Like the ones Mom used to make around Christmastime?  I don’t think they turned out the same.”

“I bet they turned out fine.”

“We’ll have them after mass.”  Mom and Dad.  Mom and Dad are dead.

Judas puts his hand on mine.  His hand’s so big.  The scar on his heel is rigid against my fingers.

My brother is my world.  I don’t think I’ve thought of it that way before, but it’s true.  There’s the world I can escape to with Azel, a world-within-a-world that lets me get away without getting away; there’s the world Annwn wants to take me to, a tempting, dangerous world I’ve never seen with my own eyes.  But this world—right here—right now—I’m still in it because of my brother.  That much I’ve known all along.

You are at the center of the universe.

Those are the words I don’t tell him.  Those are the words that comprise my reality.

* * * * *

I wrap myself in wool and warm leggings.  I follow Judas down the sidewalk, past the ramshackle trailer parks and the sleazy dive bars.  Snow falls around us, quiet and white.

The entire universe sits inside a macrocosmic snowflake.  I catch the snowflakes on my bare hand.  Each one might as well be a separate universe.  It’s strange to think of something so grandiose fitting inside something so small.  Maybe it’s true nonetheless.  Maybe it’s true that we’re bigger than the universe around us.  So much of the universe around us relies on where and how we perceive it.

Just how many realities are there?  We are consciousness.  Consciousness is energy.  Energy can’t be destroyed.  To be conscious, you need something to be conscious of.  If consciousness can’t be destroyed, then reality, to some degree, can’t be destroyed, either.  Does that mean reality goes on forever?  This universe will die someday.  Reality won’t.  So there has to be another universe.  And if reality goes on forever, then so do those universes.

Infinite universes.  Infinite snowflakes.  Up until about 2010, one septillion snowflakes were falling on Earth’s surface every year.  Earth has been around for billions and billions of years.  The number of extant snowflakes is so large, it surpasses quantifiable observation.  You could say that number is infinite.  Each of those unobservable snowflakes has its own unique pattern.  That shouldn’t be possible.  It shouldn’t be.  But it is.

One hundred and eight billion people have lived on this planet.  Two hundred and sixteen billion completely unique eyes.

It’s impossible to see this universe through any pair of eyes but your own.

One hundred and eight billion universes.

That I can never see those universes for myself is unfathomable to me.  How can there be anything outside of what I’m capable of seeing?