Swansong (36 page)

I smile so hard it hurts.  I don’t want to believe the worst of him.  I don’t believe the worst of him.  He’s been solace and refuge and kindness for half a year.  That has been my reality for half a year.  Only yesterday did reality decide to change.

Azel’s hand is around mine.  I realize he never let go.

“I told you before,” Azel says.  “I never lie.”

Maybe that was a lie.  Maybe this is a lie.

I don’t know what’s real anymore.  I don’t know if anything was ever real.

I don’t know if I ever woke up from the accident.

“Wendy,” Azel says.  “Do you feel my hand?”

I do.  It’s so warm.  It’s so real.

“Isn’t that real?  Isn’t this reality?”

This is our world-within-a-world.  This is what we made together, he and I.  If Azel were anyone else—Kory—Judas—this world wouldn’t be the way it is.  It wouldn’t be solace and refuge and kindness.  It wouldn’t be escape.

That is real.

I just don’t know how real.

* * * * *

My head rests on Azel’s lap.  His fingers sift comfortingly through my hair.  Cold breath leaves my mouth and rises toward the ceiling, the ceiling rafters exposed.

I used to come to this place all the time with Jocelyn.

I wonder whether that’s true.

I wonder whether I’m even here right now.

“Let me tell you a story,” Azel says.

His legs are comfortable.  His hands.  I don’t want anything else.

“The first time Sinbad sailed the ocean,” Azel says, “he didn’t really know what he was doing.  He had a small, borrowed ship and a small but dedicated team.  His only real goal was to get away from Sohar, to see what else might be out there.  He was restless, and wanted an escape.”

Escape.  That’s why I…

“His crew ran into a storm,” Azel says.  “And the storm wrecked the ship.  But they were lucky enough to wash up on a nearby island.”

“Convenient,” I murmur.

“They waited out the storm.  They dug a pit in the soil and crouched in it to avoid the lightning strikes.  This island had a lot of trees, so lightning strikes were at the forefront of everybody’s mind.  But eventually the hurricane came to pass.  So they got up; and they began to explore.”

“Was the island populated?”  People.  We need each other.  Seven billion strangers.  It’s so lonely.

“It wasn’t,” Azel says.  “Sinbad had his crew collect provisions.  He decided they would construct a new craft and sail back to Sohar.”

“Did they?”

“The story isn’t about whether they went home again.  The story is about what they found on the island.”

Azel has a low and calming voice.  By nature, it wants to be quiet.  I can’t listen to his voice without feeling myself drift away.  I can’t have imagined that voice.  I don’t know why Judas wants me to think I did.  Judas is wrong.  Judas has to be wrong.

“One night,” Azel said, “while Sinbad was building a fire, the island began to sing.”

This universe is singing.  Karl Jansky proved it in 1931.  Those soundwaves were what pushed the galaxies apart, gave them their structure, their shape.

Rosa das rosas, e fror das frores.

The universe sits inside a black hole.  The universe is singing as it dies.

“It was a whale,” Azel says.  “The whole entire island sat on the back of an ancient whale.  Until that point, until that night, Sinbad never entertained the thought that the very earth beneath him could be a living creature.  Suddenly he began to wonder whether the same was true of his own home.”

A living earth.  A living planet.  A sentient world.

What does this world want?

We live in a Fine-Tuned Universe.  If cosmic background radiation were even a single degree hotter than it is right now, this entire universe wouldn’t be here.  We live on a planet traveling 66,000 miles an hour around a sun traveling 500,000 miles an hour in a galaxy traveling 1,300,000 miles an hour around the universe.  The galaxy flies through the heavens in the same direction as a swan.

And maybe the Anthropic Principle is right.  Maybe it’s true that the universe only exists in its present observable state precisely because we’re observing it.  Maybe Edmund Husserl was right when he proposed the exact same school of thought centuries earlier and called it phenomenology.  To be conscious, there needs to be something you’re conscious of.

But that swan.

The snow.  It hasn’t snowed in thirteen years.  It’s snowing now.  I can feel it in the cement floor around us, ice-cold, and the ice-cold air blowing freely through the frameless window.

I can’t bring myself to believe that this universe is ready to die just because I am.  I am only one of seven billion people observing this universe.  And I know I can’t validate that.  I know I can’t prove that there’s anything outside of my mind.  That there’s any mind but my own.

But the truth is, I can’t prove the existence of my own mind, either.

Science says I don’t have one.

What am I?  I don’t know.  I could try and tell myself that I’m the only real person there is.  I am the only sentient person in the universe.  If I made that kind of an assertion, no one would be able to disprove it.  But that’s the loneliest kind of existence I can possibly imagine.  Why would I even want to?

I think we’re all Adam.  I can understand why Adam split himself one hundred and eight billion ways.  It’s terrible, isn’t it?  It’s terrible being alone.  It’s the most horrific feeling I have ever felt.  Because we, as human beings, are not meant to be islands.  We are defined over the years by the countless interactions we have with the people who cross our paths.  We grow up under the care and tutelage of the people we call our family.  We form new ideas, new loves, new memories, only by meeting people outside of our family.  And that is what we are.  We are ideas and loves and memories.

Being alone doesn’t just mean having no one to keep you company.  It means you have no room to grow.  It means you are the Lost Boy who fell out of his pram in Kensington Gardens and stopped growing, stopped being.

You might as well not exist.

I don’t know all the people who live alongside me on this planet.  I’ve always found that strange, and lonely.  We share something so tremendous, you would think it binds us together as brethren.  Children in grade school often become lifelong friends after sharing lunch or pencils.  We share the
universe
and we can’t bring ourselves to be friends.  What’s wrong with us?  Are we really so arrogant to think of the universe as our due?  Are we really so stupid to think it’s a coincidence that we’re all here at the same time?  If cosmic background radiation were even a single degree hotter or colder than it is right now, we’d all have died before we even drew our first breath.  Our entire existence is contingent on one degree.  It’s a miracle we’re alive.  We’re sharing a miracle.  And we still can’t bring ourselves to be friends.

I’m so lonely, I don’t know how I haven’t killed myself already.

I do know how.

It’s the boy whose hands are in my hair.  It’s his soft, rich voice, his glittering green eyes.  It’s the kindness he has shown me, the world he has given me, the ability he has taught me—how to escape without running away.

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.

When I’m with Azel, I can be both of those people simultaneously.  I don’t have to choose.

No one really wants to die.  They just want to escape.

* * * * *

It’s so cold in here.  It feels like Heaven.  I’ve always thought that Heaven must be cold if it’s up in the clouds.

That’s actually kind of dumb of me.  Warm air holds water vapor better than cold air does.  So it stands to reason that the clouds are hot, too.  Burning hot.  Heaven is really more like a Hell.

I tell Azel as much and he smiles.  He wraps his scarf around my neck, tucks it into the collar of my jacket.  It’s soft and plush.  It feels so warm.  It feels so real.

I lie back on his prayer rug.  He lies with me.

“I’ll tell you another story,” Azel says.  “This one is about Sinbad’s last voyage.”

Why is there a last voyage?  There shouldn’t be.  They should go on forever.

“One day,” Azel says, “Sinbad was sailing on his own, on a raft.  He came to an unusual series of sea cliffs and discovered there was a cavern beneath them.  Inside that cavern was a river.”

The River Styx?  No, that’s Greek.  I need a penny for the ferryman, just in case I die.  I think I might.  I don’t know for sure.  Kory said a penny can’t buy you anything these days.  Kory was wrong.  Kory’s not real.  Kory’s inside my head.  But everything is inside my head.  That’s what makes everything real.

“Sinbad followed the river,” Azel goes on, “and emerged in a jeweled kingdom called Serendip.  The people there had wings, like those of great birds.”

“Angels?” I ask.  Heaven.  But Heaven is a Hell…

“Sinbad certainly thought so.  He even fell in love with one of them and married her.”

“Oh,” I say.  I like love stories.  Every story should be a love story.

“Once a month, the people of Serendip took to the skies in search of God.  When that day came, Sinbad’s wife took him with her.  What they saw can’t be put into human words, so I won’t even try.  But up in the heavens, so close to God, even a man like Sinbad was overcome.  He cried out, ‘
Alhamdulillah!
‘  ‘Praise God!’ “

“Then what happened?”

“The people of Serendip turned on him.”

“They—why…?”

“They weren’t angels.  They were devils.  Every month they took to the skies to try and kill God, not praise it.”

Kill God.  Can we kill God?  I think if I could kill God, all my problems would solve themselves.

“So Heaven really was Hell,” I murmur.

“That’s what I think,” Azel says.  “This might sound crazy.  You’ve been through so much this past year…  But just listen for a moment.  I think if we were happy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months a year, it wouldn’t be happiness anymore.

“How do you mean?”

“It would be the status quo.  We wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.  We wouldn’t have anything to look forward to.”  He hesitates, unsure of himself.  “Am I making any sense?”

I think he is.  It’s crazy, but…  If Christmas were everyday, it wouldn’t be Christmas anymore.  Right?

Today is Christmas Day.  That’s bizarre.

“Religion promises Heaven for your devotion,” Azel says.  “It’s because the religions know how miserable we are on earth.  They use our misery as a bargaining chip.  But I think we’d be just as miserable in Heaven, if not more.  After some period of time, we’d have to come back to earth just to get away from it.”

“Reincarnation…?”

“I don’t know.  But I’ve told you before that I think we go on forever.  Brand new atoms don’t spring from the ethers every time a baby is born.  This universe likes to conserve resources.  Every part of us is recycled from somebody before us.”

Whose words are these?  They aren’t mine.  I’ve been so miserable the past year, sometimes I think I’d give anything to erase my own emotions.

But Azel…

I don’t want to be happy all the time, or the taste will become stale, unenjoyable.  But that doesn’t mean I wanted to lose my family, either.

That doesn’t mean Azel wanted to lose his mother.

Azel isn’t real.

I’m not real.  If we are all products of the people we interact with, and I haven’t interacted with any of the people I thought I did, that means I am absolutely not real.

“God’s a dick,” I say.

Azel’s face suffuses with red.  “
Ameen
.”

* * * * *

Azel has to go home to take care of his sister.  He asks me to go with him.

If he’s not real, where is he going to?  What home?  What sister?  These are the questions I’d like to ask somebody, but there’s nobody to repeat them to.  I don’t know that anybody’s real.  I don’t know what real is.  I think real might be subjective.  Like good and evil.

How many months ago was it that Judas and I sat on the rooftop, talking about good and evil?  And
paradidomi
.  Did that ever really happen?  Did I make that up, too?

Did I make up all of reality?

Or was that somebody else?

Who are you?  Am I a part of your seamless dream?

“I’m fine,” I finally respond.  “Judas gets off work soon.  I’ll call him.”

“I don’t want you alone, Wendy,” Azel says.

Neither did I.  That’s why I met him.

I never met him.

* * * * *