Swansong (31 page)

“Do you put bacon in your frittatas?” Kory asks me suddenly.  “Is it kosher?” he adds suspiciously.

“What does that even mean?” I cry.

“Pork is haram,” Azel contemplates solemnly.

“Is that so?” Kory asks him.  “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard out of your gullet all afternoon.  Maybe you’re not as
pig-headed
as I thought.  Look at that, I made a funny.”

“Stop,” Azel says.  “You’re no good at it.”

Frittatas take too long, I rationalize—and between Abbott and Costello over here, arguing about which foods will kill their immortal souls, I don’t want to chance it.  I break out the tomatoes for gazpacho.  By the time I turn around again, Abbott and Costello are arm wrestling.

“Guys…”  I wilt.

“Ow!  Ow!  Ow!” Kory chants.

I chop the tomatoes.  I groan.

The gazpacho turns out okay.  Judas makes it way better, but Judas isn’t here right now.  Azel is quiet when he eats; Kory is chatty.  In fact, Kory has a comment for every occasion: the peeling paint on the pantry door, the paint on my face, my aqua-colored stockings, Azel’s powder-green kameez.  The comments tend toward the innocently disparaging.  Especially when he has this to say:

“So do you just dance contemporary because you can’t dance ballet?”

It’s a wonder the spoon doesn’t snap in Azel’s hand.

“What?  It’s a legitimate question, I don’t understand these things.”

“Ballet is about order,” Azel says through his teeth.  “Contemporary is concerned with the expression of the whole body.”

“But can you do that thing where you dance on the tips of your toes?  Doesn’t that hurt?  Isn’t that injurious?  I read that the woman who invented that technique first performed it without any
shoes
.  Why would she do something like that?  Do you think her feet wound up all weird and deformed?”

“Why do you act as if I would know?”

“He has Tourette’s,” I mumble.

“I doubt that, somehow.”

“Just go with it.”

Kory finishes his lunch in record time.  He puts his bowl in the sink.  He fiddles with his eyeglasses and shows me what I’m sure he means to be a friendly smile.

“Did you know,” he says, “that no two eyes on the planet are alike?  Even the eyes sitting in your very head don’t match one another.”

Where does he come up with this stuff?  “They look the same to me…”

“They’re not.  Ever notice the markings scattered about the colored parts of your eyes?  Every iris has a different, totally unique pattern.  Your eyes have a signature all their own.  Considering that one hundred and eight billion people have populated this planet since the birth of
Homo sapiens
, that is a remarkable feat of science.  Don’t you think so?”

One hundred and eight billion…  Unique.  We’re all unique.  Our eyes, our fingerprints.  Snowflakes are the same way.  No two snowflakes share the same pattern.  But it hasn’t snowed in thirteen years.

The whole entire universe inside a glass snowflake.

This universe is crumbling around us.  This universe is dying.

There’s another universe waiting for us.  I’m sure of it.  Maybe the next world will show us mercy.  Maybe the next world will be kinder.

The Me who belongs to the next world—does she have my fingerprints?  Does she have my eyes?

Azel checks the clock on the wall.  He stands, his bowl in his hands.  An irrational part of me considers it a compliment that it’s empty.

“I have to go home to take care of Aisha,” he says.  “Layla wanted to go to the mall.”

“Maybe I can intercept her on the way there,” Kory says thoughtfully.

Azel pulls a face.  “Wendy.  Do you want to come with me?”

I—maybe I should.  Judas said he didn’t want me alone.

“Would you really mind?” I ask warily.

“You should know I wouldn’t.”

“Gross,” Kory says, just before he flounces out the kitchen door.

I can feel the hints of a smile springing to my lips.  I guess the dishes can wait until later.

* * * * *

It’s not even evening, but the sky looks like it’s ready to retire.  Silver creeps into the spinning clouds.  A wintry pink flush climbs over the tops of city spires.  Where flush meets argent, scarlet streaks the welkin like wealing blood.

“Do you think that’s true?” Azel asks, without any lead-in.

We walk past the sandstone clinic.  I grimace at the thought of Dr. Grace inside.

“Think what’s true?” I ask Azel.  The sidewalk is smeared with ancient blue gum.

“That no two eyes are the same.  The markings in the irises.”

I stop on the street corner, the Don’t Walk sign flashing garish red.  Azel stops at my side.  Even hunched over, he’s taller than me.

I turn toward him.  “Let me see.”

Wavering, he tucks stray curls behind his ears.  He rolls his shoulders back in an attempt to fix his terrible posture.  I wish he wouldn’t.  It means I have to stand on my toes.

I stand up tall and reach for his face.

His eyes are striking, startling.  Interstellar green borders on kind poison.  I never thought of poison as particularly kind before; but Azel’s visage makes me question everything I thought I knew.  In his right iris are five dark markings, a glittering green almost black, three to the right of his pupil, two to the left.  They make me think of spokes on a wagon wheel.  One Mind.  Collective Unconscious. 
Rushdiyya
.

His left eye is another story.  Crazy green scratches flare around the inside of his limbal ring.  The only way I can think to describe them is to compare them to a very thick forest: when you tilt your head back and try to look up at the sky, but the sky’s too busy hiding behind a rolling, endless canopy of evergreen trees, sleepy and warm with filtered, fuzzy sunlight.

“They
are
different,” Azel says.

I don’t know how he could possibly see as much without a mirror to peek into.  But then I realize:  He doesn’t mean his own eyes.  He’s looking at mine.

What does he see when he looks at me?  I can’t begin to imagine.  Whatever it is, I think he must like it.  I find that absolutely insane.  I hate myself.  I mean it with my whole heart.  Why shouldn’t I hate myself?  I killed three of the people I love.  I killed an innocent stranger.  If it had been a stranger who had killed them, I would have hated that stranger just as much.  I’m a stranger to myself these days.  I don’t know where I’ve gone.

Wherever I’ve gone, I hope I come back.

It takes me a while to realize my hands are still on Azel’s face.  Snapping back to my senses, oddly, doesn’t compel me to let go.  His eyes are so close, I can’t see anything else.  His eyes are like nobody else’s on the planet.  Nobody before him.  Nobody after him.  Now I know.  I couldn’t see it before.  I see it now.

“There’s never going to be another you.”

I see it now.

I see nothing but green.  It occludes my vision.  It envelopes me whole.  Suddenly I can’t see it anymore.  I don’t understand.  Oh.  Azel.  His eyes are closed.  I should probably close mine.

I see nothing but the cosmos on the backs of my eyelids, spotty red-violet and hyperviolet lights.  I feel nothing but soft lips touching my lips.  I am rooted to the ground.  I am anchored in place.  I’ve been so afraid of leaving.  I thought it was inevitable.  The Pied Piper came for me.  She tried to make me a Crusader.

I don’t have to leave, Azel tells me.  He tells me with his hands on my arms and his mouth on my mouth, my hands on his shoulders, his curls in my face.  He tells me in the way the world lurches underneath me, but doesn’t quite cast me aside.

I don’t have to leave.  I get to stay.

I was scared.  I was so scared.

* * * * *

Aisha’s in a sour mood when we step through the door of the maisonette.  No sooner than Azel steps out of his loafers she barrels at him, whimpering over a toothache.  Layla breezes past us and out the door with nothing but a “See ya.”

“What happened?” Azel asks, dazed.  He puts his arms around Aisha.

“It hurts,” Aisha whines.  “I wasn’t supposed to eat the cookies but then I did and now it hurts.”

“
Ya ummah
,” Azel clucks.  He parts her lips and peeks at her teeth.  “Ow!” he exclaims.  “Don’t bite me!”

“Then don’t put your fingers in my mouth!”

“Your tooth hurts?” I ask, stepping out of my Mary Janes.

“That’s what I
said
,” Aisha huffs at me.

“You know what you have to do?  Get an ice cube and put it between your fingers.”

Aisha looks at me like I’m plotting to steal her teddy bear.  She doesn’t realize that’s my brother’s area of expertise.

“I swear,” I tell her.  “It works.”

She scuttles off to the kitchen.  Azel stares after her, nursing his finger.

“Brat,” he says.

“I still think she’s sweet.”

“You’re blinded by your lack of relation to her.  Trust me.”

Aisha trundles back out of the kitchen, a wrapped ice cube between her knuckles.  She lies on the wine-colored sofa, whimpering.  Azel, for all his complaints, sits with her and strokes her wild hair.

“You shouldn’t have gone in the sweets,” Azel says.  “No sweets before dinner, you know that.”

“I don’t care.”

“Aisha.”

“Layla said I could.”

“That’s why you do the opposite of what Layla says.”

Aisha watches a dancing cartoon on the television, her cheek on the sofa’s arm rest.  All that crying must have worn her out, because her eyes droop closed until she’s sleeping soundly, her every breath a soft, tinny whistle.  I slide the ice out from between her knuckles.  I carry it back to the kitchen and put it away.  By the time I return, the TV’s turned off; Azel’s draping a blanket over Aisha’s bony shoulders.

“Does that really work?” he asks me, his voice very quiet.  “The ice.”

“Yeah.”  I smile.  I sit beside him.  “No idea why, but it does.”

Mom’s favorite food was peanut brittle.  You grow up on peanut brittle, you get used to toothaches.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have dragged you here,” Azel says, casting his eyes away.  “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.  I hate being alone.”  I hate it more than anything.  More than God.  More than my own skin.

Azel looks at me.  I can’t explain it; I feel as if he sees me in my entirety, all at once.  I wonder how that doesn’t serve as some kind of sensory overload.

“You don’t have to be alone,” Azel says.  “People love you.  Just let them.”

My face tinges with warmth.  I smile quickly.  I smile at my hands, because that’s easier.  They’re resting on my lap, a folded distraction, a charm bracelet wrapped around the right wrist.

He gave me…

He wraps his hand around mine.  It feels like nothing I can describe.  It feels like belonging; but something else.  It feels like friendship; but something more.  It feels like a world all its own, a world that exists between the two of us, a world I can escape to without leaving the larger, greater world behind.  But then maybe our world is the greater world after all.  I can’t imagine anything greater than this.  Here.  Now.

I laugh while he coils his fingers around mine.  His skin is soft, tickling me.

“
Can
you dance
en pointe
?” I wonder.  Kory’s questions have a way of worming into you.

“Yes.”  He doesn’t hesitate, so I know he’s not lying.  Azel never lies.  “I just don’t like the way it looks.”

“How does it look?”  I’ve never been to a ballet.  The closest I ever got was that animated Nutcracker short they used to air on TV around Christmastime.

“Girly,” Azel says, pensive.  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he adds, about as subtle as a roadblock.

“You have to be girly,” I rationalize.  “You’re the Anima, I’m the Animus.”

“Who said this?  Who is this Jung?  Why haven’t I met him?”

“Well, first you board a plane to Switzerland…”

“I hate those.”

“Then you buy a time machine and calibrate it for the nineteenth century.”

“No, thank you.  If I can’t handle an airplane, I doubt I can handle a time machine.”

“The DeLorean looks comfy enough.”

“The what?”

“You’ve really never seen—?”

Azel stands.  He scoops the sleeping Aisha in his arms.  I hasten to lower my voice.

“Be right back,” he whispers.

He carries her up the stairs.

He’s back within minutes.  He has his music player with him.  I thought he left it at the factory, for some reason.

“Here,” he says.  “Listen to this.”

“What is it?” I ask, reaching for the headphones.