Swansong (21 page)

I laugh.  “He sure looks Friendly.”

“You can play, if you want,” she says casually.

“Aisha, she doesn’t want to play with those stupid dolls,” Layla says.  She strides into the room and collapses on the sofa.

“Of course I do,” I say quickly.  “They’re having a tea party, right?  Is it Lovely’s birthday?”

We play together on the soft gray carpet.  Friendly is twelve and likes swimming and drives trucks for a living, because everybody knows twelve is a very grown-up age to be.  Lovely is his neighbor and an astronaut.  The way Aisha plays, the way Aisha giggles, she’s just the same as any other little girl.  I wonder if she remembers her mother at all.  I think it’s a cruel world where there are children who can’t remember their mothers.  I think it’s even crueler when there are children who can.

“I don’t feel so good,” Kory groans.  He staggers into the room like a wounded veteran.

“I’ll drive you to the hospital,” Mr. Asad says, standing from his armchair.

“No, it’s not that,” Kory says.  “I’ve been away from my polymers all night.  They tend to grow rather temperamental if we’re apart for too long.”

“You’re nuts,” I say, laughing.

“No,” Kory laments.  “I’m allergic to those, too.”

“Well, then,” Mr. Asad says, “I’d be happy to drive you home.”

“Would you mind driving me, too?” I ask.  If we’re going in the same direction…

“Of course, of course!  So formal,” Mr. Asad says.

“Thank you for having us, Mr. Asad.”

“Let me go get my jacket.”

Mr. Asad heads out into the hall.  Kory sits next to Layla.  Layla scoots away.  Kory whimpers.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Azel asks me.  He’s leaning against the wall.

“Okay.”  I stand.

“Don’t go,” Aisha whines.  “You’re my girlfriend.”

I reach for her hair, touch it with my fingertips.  I think—in some peculiar way—it does feel like clouds.

“Thank you for letting me play with you,” I say.  “We’ll play again next time, won’t we?”

“If you want,” she says sullenly.

I follow Azel into the kitchen.  The sink is bursting with dishes.  I fight the compulsion to turn the water on and start washing them.  It’s not that I really want to, but I think it would only be fair.

“Are you coming back to school on Monday?” Azel asks.

I don’t know that it’ll do me any good.  If I fail this semester, it’s my own fault.  I smile.  “Yeah.”

“Good,” Azel says.  “I want to see your painting.  I’m sure everyone does.”

I doubt that’s true—but it’s nice of him to pretend.  “Can I see you dance?”

“Probably.”

I start to smile again.  The memory of Azel’s lips stops me.  My face flushes until I can hardly see straight, until I think I might lose balance.

Azel stares at the ceiling.  His face has gone red.  That’s always a good sign.

“Anyway,” I start to tell him, nervous.

“I would buy drugs from you,” Azel blurts out.

“I should—sorry, what—”

“Not that I’m a drug user,” he assures the ceiling rashly, hotly.  “But when we went to the library and you said—”

“Oh—the thing about the cute face—”

“Right—that’s—”

“Oh.”

“If I were a drug user,” Azel says evenly, “I would buy drugs from you.”

In a really, really weird way, it’s the biggest compliment anyone’s ever given me.

“Wendy?”  And that’s Mr. Asad.  I can hear him calling me through the kitchen door.

“Don’t, uh,” Azel says.  His shoulders slouch forward.  His hands find their way into his pockets.  Bad posture for a dancer.  “Don’t be a stranger.”

I stand on my toes.  I kiss his cheek.  His face is so hot, his skin burns my lips at first touch.  I don’t think I’ve ever known a boy like this before.

“See you in school,” I say, laughing around my words.

He smiles.  He turns his eyes away.  It’s the kind of gesture that leaves you short of breath; because it’s honest.  So few people are honest in this world.  Not to each other; not to themselves.

* * * * *

Judas arrives home about an hour after I do.  He’s so tired, he scarcely manages to drag himself into his bedroom before he collapses.  I wish he wouldn’t work so hard.  I don’t know what they’re making him do at that computer repair joint; but with the money we got from the house closing, it’s not as if he can’t afford to calm down.

It’s late, but I feel energized, fresh in body and mind.  If I had to hazard a guess why, I’m sure it would start with
A
and end in
Zel
.  It’s strange.  Joss was the one who was boy-crazy.  Joss was the one who had a different true love every month.  I never understood why boys and girls liked each other so much.  Joss used to tease me for that.  I understand now, and she’s not here to tease me anymore.  It’s so surreal.

If I’m awake, I reason, I might as well try and finish the rest of my semester project.  I retreat into my bedroom, change into pajamas.  I pick up the palette on the floor and scrape the old paint free with my palette knife.  I unwrap the covering from my canvas.

I’ve said it before, but if you’re painting with watercolors, the paint itself does most of the work; it drips and bleeds in whichever direction it likes; your only job is to accommodate it, to try and predict which path it will take the before the brush even touches the canvas.  In some ways watercolors are like diffusing a ticking time bomb.  That’s what makes them exhilarating.

I sit cross-legged on the floor, paint cans open around me.  My brushes glide across the unfinished fabric.  I alternate between sable for broad strokes, squirrel mop for short curves.  A lot of people just use taklon, I guess, but synthetic hairs leave weird streaks.  I think the art world isn’t very kind to animals.  Musicians want their stomachs for string instruments.  Painters want their hairs for paintbrushes.  If I consider it for too long, I’ll depress myself.  I’m sure that makes me two-faced.  I wish it didn’t.

By the time I’ve filled up the canvas my arm is cramped, my eyes are bagged; I couldn’t possibly say how many hours have passed.  Paint dries on my fingers and cheeks.  My head is full of silence and completion.

The cosmos stare back at me.  The dark sky is lit with hanging lights, white-gold, bursting with brightness, tinged with hidden layers of jade green.  Stardust scatters behind the universe’s nightlights in a glittering, fiery gold trail.  I almost forget myself.  I almost reach out to touch it.  It’s still wet.  But alive.  Beckoning to me from twelve billion light years away.

The room collapses around me.  The walls fall away.  The ceiling, the floor.  I can’t say that I didn’t expect this.  I can’t say that I’m afraid.  Ethereal space is blue-black around me.  Galaxies glimmer like distant stars on the far-away horizon.  Giant, universal nightlights hang suspended all around me like quivering spirits.  They’re so bright, cleansing to my eyes, flickering, hot gold searing into cool white, cool white speckled shimmering green.  They’re so intense, staining the welkin behind them with faint red-violet-red.  They’re stars.  Newborn stars.  Lustrous, like unearthed treasure.  Alive.

The air ripples around me.  I turn.  Saffron stardust converges and bursts in cosmic waves.  A new nightlight emerges.  It rockets up into the sky.  It finds an empty place and takes it and hangs there, white-gold, blue-green, a yawning, feckless newborn.

Again.  It happens again.  Everywhere around me, new stars rocketing into the sky, eating away the darkness.

“This is the Lynx Arc Supercluster,” says a voice behind me.

I turn, startled.  Space is supposed to be soundless.  Who—why—

“Every five seconds,” Annwn says, “a new star is born here.  This is the only supercluster in the entire universe that can make that claim.”

She looks blurry to me.  Everything else is crystal-clear, achingly beautiful, but Annwn is blurry and ephemeral.  I can’t tell if she’s sitting.  I can’t tell if she’s standing.  Am I standing?  What would I be standing on?  Maybe we’re floating.  But then we’re not really here, not in body, anyway; we’re not really anything right now.

“Every known element in the universe was created by the nuclear fission of stars,” Annwn says.  She tilts her head.  She observes one of the newborns in—I think—curiosity.  “Planets and moons.  People.  If there’s a God, I’ll bet he’s a star.”

“What do you want?”  I don’t think I want her here.  I don’t think I can ask her to leave.  This universe doesn’t exist for me alone.

“I don’t really want anything,” Annwn says.  “I’m just waiting for the universe to disappear.”

This universe is disappearing.  Every star that’s born here in this supercluster is a death sentence.  More mass the universe can’t afford.  Less space for the universe to breathe.

“Why do you act like that’s a good thing?” I ask.

“It’s lonely,” Annwn says.  “Millions of people live in The Spit.  We pass each other on the streets everyday.  In the halls between classrooms.  We don’t think to say hi.  We don’t even make eye contact.  We’d rather live as strangers.  We choose a select few to call our friends.  Everybody else doesn’t make the cut.  Isn’t that sad?  Isn’t it a lonely world we live in?”

I can’t even yell at her.  I can’t say that I haven’t had similar thoughts.

“And the few we do grow close to end up dying.  Sometimes I wonder why we bother.”

“Did somebody—?”  She doesn’t have parents.  She studies Rudolf Steiner.  Rudolf Steiner and his
deceased aunt.

“Did you know?” Annwn says.  “If you went to the Louvre Museum in Paris, and you wanted to look at every painting in the museum—just for thirty seconds, nothing longer than that—it would take you six whole months.  That’s if you don’t sleep or eat or use the bathroom.  There are thirty five thousand paintings in the Louvre.  There are seven billion people on earth.  It would take one hundred years of no sleep, no food, no facilities, to meet everyone on earth.  That’s not counting more than one hundred billion people who walked the planet before us.  No one can live that long.  I’m sorry.  It can’t be helped.”

“Do you really want to meet every person on earth?  Is it worth it?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Annwn asks.  “If we knew everyone as intimately as we knew the people we care about, we wouldn’t be at odds with them every day of our lives.  Imagine that.  Imagine a world where we don’t want to kill one another.”

“That’s impossible,” I say.

“It shouldn’t be,” she says.  “If only I could meet everyone in the world.”

“You can’t do that if there’s no world.”

“If there’s no world, then there’s no spacetime.  I’d argue that the only reliable way to meet everyone in the world is, in fact, if this world were to disappear.”

“But we would disappear.”

“You don’t know that.”

Edmund Husserl, Jude said.

I take a moment to watch the stars bursting around me.  They’re so beautiful.  They belong to a dying universe.  This is a universe where my parents can’t be friends with Azel’s.  This universe gave me so much.  This universe took so much away.  I don’t know what to think.  I love it.  I hate it.

I hate it.

“Did you know,” Annwn says, “science can’t prove we have minds?”

That doesn’t sound right.  “Isn’t that what neuroscience is for?”

“Neuroscience proves we have brains,” Annwn says.  “It doesn’t prove we have minds.”

“What’s the difference?”

“We know which parts of the brain help us store memories.  The prefrontal cortex processes short-term memories.  The temporal lobe decides whether short-term memories become long-term memories.”

That’s—that’s the part of my brain that’s damaged.  Isn’t it?  The temporal-parietal-occipital junction.  And I’m always forgetting things.

“What else?”  Annwn goes on.  “We know the frontal lobe is responsible for impulse control, social behavior, decision making.  We know the amygdala is responsible for our emotions.  If you see a dead animal, and you feel repulsed, that’s your amygdala’s fault.  If your amygdala doesn’t work the way everyone else’s does, we call you a psychopath.  What about the subconscious?  Don’t you have a particular habit you can’t attribute to memories or so
cial cues?  Something you do often, but not consciously?  Maybe you like to cut the crust off your sandwich before you eat it.  Maybe you bite your nails when you’re bored.  Those are subconscious idiosyncrasies.  Science says we don’t have a subconscious.  Science even says we don’t have personalities.  No part of the human brain has been proven to play a role in determining our likes and dislikes.  As far as science is concerned, we shouldn’t have them.”

“I don’t…”

“I’d argue, then, that the mind is not solely restricted to what science does and doesn’t know about it.  I’d argue that science can’t even begin to fathom the depths of what the mind is capable of.  But science is right on one account.  Thoughts are bioelectric activity in your brain.  Bioelectricity is energy.  Physics tells us that energy can’t be destroyed.  These bodies of ours will disappear someday.  That doesn’t mean we will.”