Swansong (19 page)

“No, you don’t.”

“Of course I do,” Annwn says softly.  “After all, I am you.”

10

Schrodinger’s Cat

I lay inside the oxygen chamber, eyes closed.  Air blasts around me, my skin raising in delicate bumps.

Why do they make me endure this?  It doesn’t help with the headaches.  It doesn’t help with the memory lapses.  It’s a waste of insurance money.  Oh.  There’s my answer.

The machine rumbles in my ears.  I open my eyes.

Through the glass lid I can see Judas talking with Dr. Moritz.  Their backs are turned to me.  Dr. Moritz shows Judas something on his clipboard.  He gestures.

I think I want to die.  I feel so confused.  I feel so tired.  Whenever I find myself in reprieve of the exhaustion, the confusion, raw fear take their place.  Then bitterness.  Then anger.  Maybe even hatred.

No.  Nobody ever wants to die.  All anybody ever wants is a way out.

I am trapped in a glass casket.  I am broken and useless and left behind.

There’s no way out.

* * * * *

I walk home after the oxygen therapy.  I can’t bring myself to sit in the car anymore.  Jude has to head back to work, so we part ways at the cold chrome street corner.

On the cold chrome street corner, I open my cell phone.  I bring up the search bar and type in a name.

Ash Galloway.

The usual articles pop up. 
Four Killed in Motor Vehicle Accident.
  I browse past them.  I shuffle through pages of results.

Whoever Ash Galloway was, I guess he wasn’t very social.  I find exactly one webpage belonging to an Ash Galloway—only when I click on it, it turns out to be an Ashleigh Galloway, and she’s looking for hot singles in Miami.  I hit the back button.  I try the SSI death index.

There he is.  Ash Galloway, 27.  Died in Tillamook County, Oregon.  The harsh white screen shows me his expired social security number, but no address.  No telephone.

I want to apologize to his family.  I don’t know how I’m going to contact them if he didn’t leave any information behind.

I close my phone and stuff it in my jacket pocket.  I breathe the toxic city air.

The library’s just north of here.

I cross the street when the light changes.  Dozens flocking across the crosswalk.  Pedestrians’ heads tilted down, because God forbid they interact with another member of the human species.

Never mind the universe.  This planet is screwed.

* * * * *

Kory’s in the library, on the first floor.  I knew he would be.  Last night he told me he wanted to look for the
Lost Dead Chronicles
series.

He’s the only occupant of an empty white table.  I sit with him.  He lays his battered book on the table and smiles a goofy smile.

“Tired,” I tell him.

“Want to go for a coffee?”

I don’t drink coffee.  “Okay.”

He tucks his book under his arm.  We walk out the sliding front doors.

The tepid air smells like rain and rust.  It hasn’t rained in three months.  We head north and pass the apartment building.  We walk a couple blocks east.

“Kory?”

“What is it?”

“Is it true that we’re all the same person?”

I can hear the frown in Kory’s voice.  “You know I’m no good at philosophy…”

“I mean atoms.  We all share atoms?”

“Oh.  Well, technically speaking, yes.”

We cross the street.

“Therapy no good today?” Kory asks critically.

“I hate it,” I tell him.

“Then rebel,” he says.

“They’ll take me away from my brother.”  Being a minor sucks.

“Rebel with a chainsaw,” he clarifies.

“Where would I even find a chainsaw this time of year?”

The cafe’s squished in between a deli and a video rental store.  Big potted shrubs stand on the sidewalk outside.  Somebody wanted to give the illusion that there’s life in this city.

We go inside.  The aroma of burnt coffee beans tastes acrid in the back of my throat.  Kory orders an iced coffee.  I buy an iced tea.

We carry our drinks outside.  We head off for the recreational park.

It costs fifty cents to walk through the recreational park.  That’s how money-hungry this city is.  People will pay it, though, because it’s hard to find a place in The Spit that doesn’t make you want to spit on yourself.  The park itself is no more than tiles stretched between malnourished trees.  Kory and I pay our fare at the front gate.  We step onto the tiled walkway.

“You told Annwn where I live?”  I start the conversation.

Kory looks sideways at me.  “Was that the wrong thing to do?  She seemed concerned.”

“She’s not.”

“Something happen?”

This is so crazy.  This is so messed up.  “She…  I think she has out-of-body experiences.  She knows I do.”

“How did she guess
that
?”

“I don’t know.  Kory, this is insane…”

We find a bench underneath a withered oak.  We sit on it.  I adjust my knees, wary of splinters.

“Of course,” Kory muses out loud, “OBEs are one of many strange events linked with brain damage.  Lucky guess.  It doesn’t mean anything.”

He says it doesn’t mean anything.  I’ve seen planets and stars, but it doesn’t mean anything.

I know that’s not what he means.

“She talked about the universe dying,” I say.  “She said I was lucky.  Because I might get to see it.”

Kory’s face turns green.

“Isn’t there anything we can do?  To stop it?”

“Wendy, I don’t know…”

“You have to know.  You know everything.”

“Well, that’s true, but…”

“Azel said something about mass,” I tell him.  “If it’s mass the universe is running out of, then—I mean—how did it get its mass to begin with?  There’s got to be a way to get more, hasn’t there?”

“That’s a very naive way to look at cosmology, you know.”

A dull pain starts in my forehead.  I pinch it.  As much as I admire Kory, he’s a headache and a half.

“All the mass in this universe,” Kory says, “comes from a tiny subatomic particle called a Higgs boson.  Do you know what that is?”

“No.”  It sounds doofy.

“Then picture a walnut that has cracked itself open, only for novas and asteroids and entire galaxies to pour out of its shell.  If you want to be technical, the Higgs boson is the Big Bang.”

“But wasn’t there a bang…?”

“Well, sort of.  A Higgs boson forms when a trillion protons smash into each other.”

I sit back on the bench, lost in thought.  “If we could find another Higgs boson…”

“You don’t just
find
another Higgs boson, Wendy, think about it for a second!”  Kory’s earrings jangle with righteous indignation.  “Mass is nothing but energy in solid form.  And you can’t create energy from nothing. 
Everybody
knows that.”

“You can,” I say quietly.

Too quietly.  Kory doesn’t seem to hear me.  A bird skitters past overhead, crashing noisily from tree branch to tree branch.  Kory turns around to yell at it.  My thoughts weigh me down with gravity.  My thoughts bind me to the park bench.

You can create energy from nothing.

* * * * *

Kory leaves the park before me.  Apparently he has a date.  “She’s
very
pretty,” he makes sure I know.  I conclude that she’s probably his mother.

I toss my empty drink in a trash bin.  I walk down the tiled park lane.  Strangers wander past me like aimless specters.  I think I feel sorry for them.  I’m one to talk.

The trees open up on an artificial pond.  A peeling swingset stands abandoned, empty chain swings fluttering in the warm breeze.  It shouldn’t be this warm in November.  A lot of things shouldn’t be the way they are right now.

A little girl and her older brother play together on the whirring, bright red roundabout.  The little girl’s shrieks of laughter are like a song.  I smile.  It almost hurts.  I remember Jocelyn’s song, the one she sang last year for her semester project.  Stuck On You, by Elvis Presley.  She shimmied around on stage in a tutu skirt.  It was ridiculous.  It was beautiful.

The roundabout stops spinning.  The little girl turns and points at me.  “That’s our girlfriend!” she shouts.

I stir from my reverie.

“
Mashallah
,” her brother says.  “Go say hello, then.”

Aisha Asad runs over to me.  She pulls on my hands.  She’s as bright as a ball of energy, her wild hair framing her face.

I laugh.  “What’s this?”

“Wanna push me on the swings?” Aisha tempts.

“You don’t have to,” Azel says, hands in his pockets.

“I wasn’t talking to
you
,” Aisha rallies back.

Azel’s smiling.  He looks so content.  Why can’t I feel that content?  Aisha pulls me over to the swingset.  My hands feel warm where they touch hers.  She’s so little.  Children love the most, I think, until somebody teaches them how to hate.

“Here,” Aisha says, climbing on the chain swing.

It looks brittle.  It looks like it will give way.  “Are you sure…?” I ask.

“Just push!  You can’t hurt me.”

See what I mean?

I give Aisha a gentle push.  She sticks her stubby legs out as she sails over the ground.  Her hair is like the wind, messy, soaring around her without direction.  I want to catch it with my fingers, find out whether it feels like clouds.

“She always gets her way,” Azel remarks.  At some point he must have come to stand next to me.  His voice is close to my ear, soft, warm.

“I don’t mind,” I promise.  I like it.  I think—I might as well be floating.

“Can I jump off the swing?” Aisha asks.

Azel twitches.  “No!”

“He’s no fun, huh?” I joke.

“Nope,” Aisha agrees.

She puts her heels down in the dirt.  I let go of the chain swing.  She jumps up—just like that—and runs back to the roundabout.

“I don’t know how she does it,” I swear.  “The swings always made me throw up when I was little.”

“Motion sickness?” Azel asks.  He watches his sister vigilantly.  It makes me want to put my arms around his neck.

“Probably,” I agree, when I remember he’s waiting for a response.

“And you tease me for the airplanes.”

“You’re right.”  I turn my head to hide my smile.  “Sorry.”

“I’m not saying I mind.”

The sky is flushed with early sunset, soft red and petal-pink.  Even here, the horizon’s not exempt from the shadows of greedy skyscrapers.  I want to escape, I think.  I want to get away.

“Are you busy tonight?” Azel asks.

My face heats.  “No.”  Jude’s working late.

“Do you want to have dinner with us?”  Azel keeps his eyes trained carefully away.  “Dad’s home.”

My pulse dances and my stomach flips.  I am delightfully stupid.

“If you don’t want to,” Azel begins.

“Yes,” I say.

Gray floods quietly into the sanguine sky.  The sun sparks behind the hungry shadows.  My head doesn’t hurt.

* * * * *

I slip out of my shoes when we step inside the maisonette.  Aisha kicks hers off with zealous aplomb.  Azel catches one of them as it soars through the air.

“Dad!  Dad!  Dad!” Aisha croons, like an excitable goose.

Azel closes the door.  We head into the sitting room.  Layla’s sitting cross-legged on the carpet, her chin in her hand, ennui in her eyes.  Next to her sits Kory, slack-jawed, fascinated with whatever’s happening on the tiny television set.

“Kory?” I blurt out, surprised.

“Hi, Wendy,” he says, but doesn’t look my way.  “Don’t interrupt my date.”

I turn questioningly toward Azel.

“What?” Azel asks, blank-faced.  “I told you she’s seeing a boy I don’t like.”

The side door bursts open.  A large man with a beard waltzes out.  He’s wearing an apron and a keffiyeh.  He mimes playing the harp with a sauce-laden ladle.

“Dad!” Aisha croons again.

“I seem to have fathered more children while I was away,” Mr. Asad says, looking between Kory and me.  “Bless the velocity of my swimmers.”

“Dad,” Azel says through gnashed teeth.  Somehow it doesn’t sound as celebratory as Aisha’s.

“You there!”  Mr. Asad waves his ladle at Kory.  Sauce flies at the wall.  “Have you come to steal my eldest daughter’s innocence?  Why would you do such a thing?”

“Dad!” Azel warns.

“Don’t worry about it, Dad,” Layla says.  “He couldn’t find it even if he tried.”