Swansong (35 page)

Unless I haven’t imagined Annwn.

I threw a pillow at her.  She caught it.

I…

My head hurts.  Dark, dipping, swimming pain.

Universes.  Headaches.  They’re the same.

“Wendy,” Kory says.  The apology’s on his face, in his voice, bleeding into me.  It makes me feel sorry for him.  “You’re sick.”

I’m sick.  I know I’m sick.

I want to get away.

“Maybe you
shouldn’t
have come back to school this term,” Kory murmurs.

“No,” I beg.  No.  I don’t want him to say that.  I don’t want him to make it real.

He—

Kory spies something under my bed.  He pulls it out, snatches it into his hands.  That’s always the way with him; he knows no boundaries, nothing except for his own impulses.

It’s a paper.  He scans it thoroughly with his eyes.  He scoffs.

“Thank God we’re still on winter break,” he says.  “The Battle of Alesia was in 52 BC, not 82 BC.  Vercingetorix wasn’t even alive in 82 BC!”

My take-home test.

The tears I can’t shed—they freeze on my eyes.  They don’t fall.  “Did I really write that?”  What a stupid mistake…

“See for yourself.”

Kory hands me the test.  I take it in shaking hands.  I read the paper.

I smile.  It hurts.  Oh, I could cry.

“It’s not
that
bad,” Kory amends quickly.  I think he misjudges the look on my face.  “I can help you fix it before the break ends.”

“Are you real, Kory?”  Is this real?

“I’m as real as you are,” Kory assures me.

That’s not reassuring at all.

* * * * *

Kory convinces me to take a shower, on the grounds that I stink.  If he knew subtlety, he wouldn’t be Kory.

When I make my way back to my room, in wet hair and pajamas, I find him sitting on my bed and playing with Maurice.  The kitten mewls in annoyance as Kory captures her tail between his fingers.

Azel.  If Azel’s not real, how could I have…

Azel.  He has to be real.  He’s the most real I’ve experienced since I lost the three people I loved.

He has to be real.  He has to be.

I won’t let him not be.

“Why are you wearing pajamas?” Kory asks with disdain.  “It’s almost eleven o’clock.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”  I don’t want to.

“Oh,” Kory says, sounding dubious.  “I thought we could go to the game arcade or something.”

I want to die.  I don’t want to die.

What does this world want?

“Do you want to go to a movie?” Kory asks.  “Do you want something to eat?”

He’s such a good friend.  From the beginning, he’s been such a good friend.  It’s almost as if he’s actively trying to make sure I don’t kill myself.

He—

I look at Kory while he’s scratching Maurice behind her ears.  His glasses rest low on the bridge of his nose.  He looks unassuming.  He looks like any other boy you might attend high school with.

He—

“Kory.”

Maurice curls up on the mattress for a nap.  Kory lifts his head.

Id.  I want to live.  Superego.  I want to die.

“Kory.”

Kory falters.  He runs his hand through his hair.  He stands from the bed.

I don’t know how I don’t burst into tears.

“Don’t think of it like that,” Kory says.

“You’re not—you’re—oh, God—”

“I’m right here, Wendy.  I’ve been your friend all along.”

—real, he’s not real, he’s not—

“What’s changed?  Is it that you can’t prove I exist outside of your imagination?  But that’s true of everyone else you share the planet with.  Every interaction you have with them takes place solely inside your head.”

Everything happens inside our heads.  When you stand amid a scented garden, and you smell the gardenias, heavy, heady, like honey, that’s just your olfactory receptors sending a combination of axons into your cranial nerve.  When the boy you like kisses you on the cheek, and you feel his warm lips lingering on your skin, that’s just your epithelia sending signals up your spinal cord and into your parietal lobe.  Everything happens because your brain says it happens.  If your brain doesn’t say so, then it doesn’t happen.  Nothing exists outside of your head.

Consciousness.  Bioelectric pulses in your brain.  I can validate my own consciousness.  I can hear my thoughts as they flit in and out of my head.  I can choose to verbalize them or not to verbalize them.  I can’t validate anyone else’s consciousness.  I can’t see their thoughts before they turn into words.  I can’t prove those people exist when I’m not looking at them.  The Scientific Method warns you not to believe in something you can’t prove on your own.  Isn’t that the Anthropic Principle, too?  That the universe exists in its Fine-Tuned state because we’re looking at it?  And what are we if not living components of the universe around us?  Don’t our atoms come from the stars?  Don’t the stars come from the Higgs boson?

What are you if I am not looking at you?

What am I if you are not looking at me?

Kory’s shoulders droop.  He rubs his elbow, the way I sometimes do when I’m embarrassed.

I feel as if I’ve lost a friend.

“You haven’t,” Kory says, his head rocketing up on his shoulders.

He’s—he’s really inside my head.

“Everything is inside your head, Wendy.  That doesn’t change anything.”

“Yes, it does.”

“How?  Haven’t I been looking after you all along?  Haven’t I given you some semblance of a normal life?”

I squeeze my eyes shut so the tears won’t fall.  “I wish you hadn’t…”

“That’s not true, or I wouldn’t have.”

I want to die.  I can’t stand this anymore.  I want to die.

“Here I am,” Annwn says behind me.

I turn around.  She looks like Christmas came early.  I guess that’s appropriate, because Christmas is today.  Her smile brightens her sleepy eyes.  Her curls bounce around her shoulders, a blue ribbon tucked away within their folds.

Kory stiffens.  “Don’t you dare.”

“That’s not really your choice, is it?” Annwn says calmly.  “Wendy, let’s leave this world.  There’s nothing left here.  Let’s leave it to die.”

“
Don’t!
” Kory says.  He draws closer to me.

I step back.  “Leave me alone.”  Which one—I don’t know which one—

“You’re just going to let this entire universe die?” Kory asks.  “After all that it’s given you?  You’re just going to let it die?”

“It did give you something,” Annwn says solemnly.  “It gave you a family.  But then it took that family away.”

“Everybody dies,” Kory counters, his eyes pinched behind his glasses.  “We are born and we die and nothing, absolutely nothing, can change that.  But it’s only through the grace of this universe that you get to experience something in between.  This universe is made up of spacetime.  Your life is made up of spacetime.  If you were ever pleased with your life, even for a solitary second, you have this universe to thank.”

“What good is happiness if it doesn’t last forever?” Annwn asks.  Her head tips inquisitively to one side.

“Who says it doesn’t last forever?” Kory returns.  “Isn’t that what memories are for?”

“With time, memories lose their luster.”

“That’s why you make more.”

I am two people.  One of them wants to destroy this universe.  One of them wants to save it.

I am two people.  One of them wants to kill herself.  One of them wants to live.

My mind is fractured.  I don’t know that I can put it together again.

I don’t know that I want to.

I lift my right hand, inspect my palmlines.  Azel’s charm bracelet is gone.  I lift my left hand.  Jocelyn’s charm bracelet is wrapped around my left wrist.  The silver-gilt swan’s wings are spread out in dainty flight.

I don’t want Jocelyn’s bracelet anymore.  I want Azel’s.

I want Azel.

* * * * *

It’s snowing outside.  I can see it through the gaping factory window.  A few flakes drift in from the balcony.  I huddle for warmth beneath my wool jacket, my wool cardigan.  I light the kerosene lamps by my easel.

The easel.  Sinbad’s still splashed across the paint canvas.  I wonder if that painting is real.  I can’t remember the brushstrokes it took to get the water to lap against the bottom of his ship.  I can’t remember smudging the sun so it would leak through the translucent clouds.  I don’t remember painting it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t paint it.  I forget things all the time.  Meeting with Jocelyn’s parents to say goodbye.  The accident in which I took Jocelyn’s life.  The accident that shattered my skull and my mind.

The bloated, half-finished door shunts open.  I hear Azel’s loafers on the cement, his soles soft.  I hear the door budge shut and I see him walk over to me, his curls tied back in a ponytail.

“I got your message,” he says.  He unwraps a coffee-colored scarf from his neck.  “You seemed upset about…”

He trails off at the sight of me.  I don’t know what he’s seeing.  I never do.  I never can.  You can only see the world through your own eyes.

“Wendy, what happened?”

I must look pretty bad, if that’s where his mind immediately jumps.  He leaves his scarf on the floor.  He takes my hands in his.

His hands are cold with winter, brown and soft and scarred across the knuckles.  His eyes are bright with concern.  I’ve never seen a green that bright.  Yes I have.  In the cosmos.  The sea of stardust from which the Swan Nebula emerges.  His eyebrows are thick and black like the hairs of a paintbrush.  His nose is curved.  It’s a little like a hawk’s.  A little like a swan’s.

He looks real.  He feels real.  I can even see his breath, the fine, chilly mist that leaves his lips while he awaits my response.

“I haven’t been going to school.”  There’s my response.

Azel starts.  “I think winter break doesn’t end until the second…”

“I’m not talking about winter break.”

His eyebrows knit together.  He hasn’t let go of my hands.  Warmth passes from my hands into his.  I can feel the exchange, the flow of energy.

Forty trillion atoms passing between us.

I met him in school.  I haven’t been to school.

I never met him.

“Let’s sit,” Azel says.

We sit together on his red silk prayer rug.  Towers of books stand precariously around us.  I spot the
Rubaiyat
atop one of them.  A Plath collection atop another.

The
Rubaiyat
was so beautiful.  Azel read its verses to me as we sat on the concrete terrace, the air much warmer back then, the sky alive and sentient.  He read me the verses.  I can still hear them inside my head.  I can’t have made them up.  Something so beautiful couldn’t have come from my head.

Universes pour out of my head.  My head throbs with pain.

My head is throbbing with pain.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Azel says.  His voice is nothing but concern.

I swallow, my throat like sandpaper.  “Judas says I haven’t been back to school since June.”

I wait for it: the unpleasant reveal.  Any moment now Azel will leap off the prayer rug and plash his forehead and say, “You got me.  It’s all been one big conspiracy.”

“But we met in school.”  Instead, he says this.

“I know we did.  I…”

How can I tell him that I didn’t go to school?  That I didn’t meet him?  I can’t tell him he’s a figment of my imagination.  How can he be a figment of my imagination?  He told me about his childhood in Nizwa.  He told me about the dance troupe from Iraq, about his mom’s profession, about his fear of airplanes.  I met his father.  I cooked with his father.  How can that be fake?  How can I tell him it’s fake if I don’t believe it’s fake?

“Your brother thinks you haven’t gone to school?”  This is what Azel says.

“He told me I haven’t.  He told me—he said we agreed to it, back in September.  That I’d take the year off.”

Azel doesn’t look convinced.  “But you’ve definitely been to school…”

I remember.  I remember going to school.

Kory—Annwn—they’re inside my head.  But Azel has met both of them.

Azel is inside my head.

But everything is inside my head.  Everyone is inside my head.

Everything that happens happens inside your head.

“Could Judas be confused?” Azel asks.  “Maybe that was the plan—you staying home from school this year—but it’s not as if he’s been going to school with you everyday.  I have.  Kory has.”

Kory.  Kory’s inside my head.

Everything’s inside my head.

“Are you lying to me, Azel?”