Swansong (37 page)

After Azel has gone I tighten his scarf around my neck.  I turn off all the intricate kerosene lamps.  Last thing I need is for this place to burn down while I’m away.

I watch the wind from the window blowing against Jocelyn’s striped pink curtain.  My heart wrenches and twists.  It’s been half a year now.  You’d think grief becomes easier over time.

The past half year didn’t even happen, I realize, floored.  I never went back to school.  It didn’t happen.  Even as I think these thoughts, they don’t make sense.  Of course it happened.  It happened to me.  Doesn’t that count for something?  Isn’t that real enough?

All of reality takes place inside our heads.  I still haven’t figured out a way to get away from mine.

Yes I have.  But that option scares me.

Sharks scare me.

The icy wind is merciless.  It ruffles Jocelyn’s curtain as if it intends to rip it free and yank it out the window.  For a moment I worry that it will do just that.  Winter isn’t normally this cold in The Spit; this hideout has never had to worry about snow or gale in the past.  How can I keep the wind out?  The factory windows were never fully constructed.  People are in such a rush to get somewhere, they leave debris behind.  Where are they going?  Why do they always leave me behind?

The curtain billows.  For a moment I entertain the fantasy that Joss is hiding back there.  That’s why the fabric is rippling.  She’ll grab the curtain, wrench it sideways, and step out into the open.

Jocelyn grabs the curtain.  She wrenches it sideways.  She steps out into the open.

In the wintry sunlight, Jocelyn looks terrible.  Her long, black hair, once lustrous and glossy, is stringy and unwashed.  Her face is bruised with smudges of dirt, her clothes rumpled and stained.  The gloves on her hands are mismatched, too big; they look stolen.  Behind her I can see dirty shopping bags filled with vegetables, juice cans with the price tags still on them.  Those look stolen, too.

The worst part about all this is the scar on the side of her neck.  It’s an enormous, patched puncture, sticky and discolored.  It looks like a bullet wound.  It looks like it was never stitched.

“Thank God,” she whispers.  “You’re alone.”

Her voice isn’t the same.  It’s a rattling rasp.  Her voice—she used to sing.  Her face is the same, smooth and milk-white, porcelain underneath all the wear-and-tear.  What—what happened to her?  Her eyes.  Beautiful black slants, but dim, like dusty glass.  The light’s been snuffed out of them.

“You’re dead,” I stammer.  She’s dead.  She can’t be—

Oh.

This, this very moment, this is when I learn just how cruel my mind can really be.

“Wendy!”  Joss takes a step forward.

“No.”  I take a step back.  My ankle brushes against an extinguished kerosene lamp.

Her face crumples.  “Your hair.  Your face.  Oh, look at you…”

“You’re not here.”  God, why—why do you keep doing this to me—

“What?”  Joss comes to a stand-still, attentive, her shoulders thrown back.  “Wait.  Did they tell you—”

I reach behind me.  My hand brushes against the bloated door.

“Wendy, wait!”  Jocelyn’s head snaps up on her shoulders.  She darts over to me.

I thrust the door open.  I slide through it.  I slam it shut.  I lean against it with my weight.

Somewhere, in some other universe, maybe I’m crying right now.  But not in this one.

I’ve finally learned how to stop.

15

The Arithmetical Paradox

I sit on the bed in my bedroom, Azel’s scarf wrapped around my hands.  Annwn sits next to me, her beret on her lap, her stockings tan-colored and her head bowed with—something.  Is it exhaustion?  Is it pain?  Whenever I glance her way she lifts her head.  She smiles at me.  It’s fleeting and sweet; whereupon she goes back to staring at her knees.

Jocelyn’s charm bracelet rests around her left wrist.

“You’re really lonely,” I say to the air.  “Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Annwn says, without any compunction.  “I think we all are.  I think this universe was a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because it separates us by its very nature.  The illusion of spacetime is what keeps us at opposite ends of the world, living as strangers.”

Seven billion strangers.

That’s…  It’s really lonely.

“Should we destroy this universe?” I ask her.

Maybe she’s right.  Maybe it’s no coincidence that this universe wants to die at the same time that I do.

If left to its own devices, the universe will destroy itself.  I don’t know what that is if it isn’t the textbook definition of humanity.

“I think so,” Annwn says.  She swings her legs lightly.  A child.  A Lost Boy.

“Consciousness needs something to be conscious of,” I say.  And I’m sure we won’t die when the universe does, because thoughts are energy and energy can’t die.  “So even if this world disappears…”

“I’m sure there will be more worlds for you to be conscious of,” Annwn reasons.  “But if they’re anything like this one, they’ll all die, too.  I’m not very worried.  I can wait.  You wouldn’t believe just how long I’ve already been waiting.”

My head is spinning, the pain dull, weak.  It all sounds like some kind of nauseating ouroboros.  Consciousness exists; so it needs something to be conscious of; so the universe exists.  But the universe, by its very nature, is dying.  But consciousness doesn’t die.  The universe dies and leaves consciousness behind.  Consciousness exists; so it needs something to be conscious of; so the universe…

The pain spikes.  It dulls again.

“Do you like Greek mythology, Wendy?” Annwn asks.

“Huh?”

“The ouroboros.  I prefer Welsh myself.  Cwn Annwn—the Dogs of Hell.”

“You think this universe was a mistake.”

“Mm, I do.”

“If there had never been a universe, there wouldn’t be any Welsh mythology for you to enjoy.”

Annwn is silent.  She has no rebuttal.  She has no retort.  I can’t believe it.

“You think this universe is a mistake,” I say.  “You think it separates us.”

“It does.”

“But without this universe, we wouldn’t be…”  We wouldn’t
be
.  “I like wrestling and orange soda and swans.  My first crush was Hunter Hearst Helmsley.  I paint.  My favorite painter’s Monet.  My favorite food is spinach.  I am in love with the sea.”  I want to go back.  “Those are the things that make me who I am.  And they only exist because this universe exists.  Somebody looked at the spinach in the ground and thought it would be a good idea to eat it.  Somebody looked at the ocean and thought it would be a good idea to sail across it.  Somebody looked at Triple H and thought he should make a living body-slamming people in his underwear.  None of those conventions could have arisen if there wasn’t a universe to give them form, and shape, and mass.  If you take away this universe, you take away what made me ‘me.’  You take away
me
.”

And there is never going to be another me.

Oh, God, what am I going to do?

To be human is to be Id, Ego, and Superego.  Each of us is science and spirit—survival and escapism—and something in-between.  The structure of my mind was shattered in that debilitating car wreck.  If I could piece together the three components of my mind, maybe they would stop opposing one another.  Maybe I wouldn’t wake up every morning with a voice whispering in my ear, telling me to take my life.  If I could piece my mind together…

Azel.

Azel likes poetry.  He likes opera.  He can’t swim.  He hates the rain and barely tolerates the cold.  He loves the moon.  His favorite color’s russet.  His favorite story’s
The Magic Flute.
  His favorite food is banana cookies.  He bakes better than I do.  He knows three languages and he’s neat and orderly and he dances.  He dances like smoke, like water, like God is infused in his bones.  He is not like me.  He is nothing like me.

He is not me.

I don’t want him to go away.

I run my fingers across his coffee-colored scarf.  I can feel the soft stitches against my skin.  It feels like fleece.

It feels real.

* * * * *

Jude’s passed out on the sofa, Maurice snoozing in his arms.  It sucks that they made him work Christmas Day, but gave him Boxing Day off.  What the heck is a Boxing Day?

I leave Jude a note in the form of a colored post-it.  I stick it on his elbow.  I wrap Azel’s scarf around my neck—but it isn’t really necessary: I’m only going downstairs.

I head out the door, the door locking behind me.  I take the feeble staircase two flights down to Kory’s apartment.

I’ve been envisioning this scenario since last night.  Probably I’ll knock on the door and some old man will answer it, confused, and send me away.  Or maybe I’ll find that the apartment is vacant.  If I’ve only been interacting with Kory inside my head, then who’s really inside this apartment?  Or is this apartment even here?

But when I knock on the door, it’s Kory who answers it.  It’s Kory standing on the threshold, looking halfway between dazed and stunned.

So am I really here right now?  Is he?

“Come in,” he says quickly, and steps aside.

I step in.  He closes the door.  The apartment is still Yuppie Central, framed squiggles on the walls, glass waterfalls, plastic covering the furniture and floor.  It’s as if nothing—as opposed to everything—has changed.

He’s a figment of my imagination.  Or maybe I’m a figment of his.

Or maybe both statements are equally valid.

I can’t bring myself to see this universe as a mistake—but I’m sure I want to leave it.  I can’t deal with this anymore.  This.  It’s insane.  I’m insane.

Everything makes sense if I’m insane.

“You’re not insane, Wendy.”

That’s exactly what an insane person tells herself.

Kory smiles, fluttering and weak.  “You asked me once if we were all the same person.  Do you remember that?”

I nod.

“I didn’t know what to tell you back then.  You were in a precarious state.  I think I’m no better than Annwn, only I played you a different way.”

“You were never really my friend.”  I’m talking to myself.

“That’s not true.  I wanted to make things easier for you.  I really did.”

Because he has a vested interest in the universe at large.  He loves this universe.  He’d do anything for this universe.  He told me so, once.

“I’m sorry, Wendy.  I don’t pretend to serve anyone’s interests but my own.”

He told me that, too.

But he’s me.

But he’s not me.  He’s a sculptor.  I’m a painter.

Kory sits on the plastic-covered floor.  I sit with him.  I can smell the wet modeling clay.  I can smell sugarglass.

“Do you want the answer to your question?” Kory asks.

I’m not sure I do.  I tell him yes.

“Quantum physics has known for a while now that if there is, in fact, a consciousness, then there is only one consciousness.”

I suck my stomach in.  I don’t know why, but hearing it like that…

“It all relates back to the Higgs boson,” Kory says.  “The entire universe came out of that subatomic particle.  The entire universe, and everything in it.”

Even him.  Even me…

“When you take a pitcher of water,” Kory says, “and you pour its contents into however many glasses you like—let’s say three glasses, in this instance—the contents don’t magically stop being water just because they’ve taken on a new shape in a new container.  Water is still water.”

“Annwn said the same thing.”  My mouth’s gone dry.  Water.  There’s water inside us.  We come from the sea.  “About the water.  A while back.”  I don’t even remember how long ago.

“Yes, well, Annwn’s frequently right about these things.  That doesn’t mean I like her for it, but…”

“One consciousness?  One mind?”

“Let’s look at it in reverse.  If you could take a recording of the universe’s expansion—and then rewind that recording, watch the whole thing in reverse—what you would see is one hundred and eight billion people merging together into one being.  The Higgs boson.  As doofy as its name may be.”

Adam.  That’s its name.  Adam sounds better.

“It was Erwin Schrodinger who first said, ‘The total number of minds in this universe amounts to one.’ “

“Schrodinger?”  My head shoots up.  “Like Schrodinger’s Cat?”

“The very same.”  Kory’s smile is lopsided.  His eyeglasses are askew.  “Have you been studying superposition?”

Shouldn’t he already know that?

He adjusts his eyeglasses.  He doesn’t meet my gaze.  “That ‘oneness of mind,’ so to speak, has a mathematical basis behind it.  It’s called the Arithmetical Paradox.  I won’t go into numerical values, I know you’re not very good at those.  Put it this way.  Your ongoing consciousness and your picture of the whole world around you are one and the same.  You can’t separate the one from the other; it’s impossible.  So your mind becomes synonymous with the whole.  But then when you look at the whole world, it appears to contain a huge multitude of conscious minds in the forms of the other people you share the planet with.  Those minds exist as a part of the whole and, of course, the whole is your mind.  Plurality then becomes nothing short of an illusion.”

Here comes the headache.  “But if there’s only one mind…”

Whose is it?  Mine?

I don’t want it to be mine.

“What do you think?” Kory prompts.

I don’t think.  I don’t want to think.

“Well,” Kory says at length, “it doesn’t matter.  The point is, your mind and the whole world are one and the same.”

“But—”

“Wendy, if we all came from the same source—the Higgs boson—then it stands to reason that our consciousness also derived from the Higgs boson.  Our consciousness, then, is actually the Higgs boson’s consciousness.  The Higgs boson gives mass to the entire universe.  The Higgs boson is the universe.”

The headache dashes across my scalp, into my forehead and the back of my skull.

“If you’ll allow me a moment of idealism…  The universe is dreaming, and we are that dream.”

I sit plucking at a frayed thread on the end of Azel’s scarf.  Azel read to me from the
Rubaiyat
at the start of winter break. 
Who is the Potter, and who, pray tell, the Pot?

If you can’t tell the difference, is there a difference?

I’ve never felt as small as I feel now.

I look at Kory with his owlish eyeglasses, his zipper-shaped earrings.  I didn’t consciously sit down one day and design a boy who looks and acts just like he does.  But he only exists because his existence is coded inside my head.  But that’s true of all of reality.  The only reality we can ever know is the one that takes place inside our heads; behind our eyes; in the various lobes of our brains.

Change what’s inside your head, and you change reality.

Am I a dream?  Is he?  The universe is sleeping, and as it sleeps, it dreams.  I’ve never, ever thought of this predicament in terms like those before.  Often I’ve felt as if I were walking around in a dream-like state—a nightmare—but I never considered the option of waking up.

What happens if the universe wakes up?

“Now you see the problem, don’t you?” Kory says.  “If this universe ‘wakes up,’ what becomes of us, the fleeting dream?”

The universe is dying.

The universe is waking up.

“Do you know what a migraine is?” Kory asks.  “A cluster headache?  Bioenergetics tells us that a headache is nothing more than an efflux of protons inside your skull.”

Protons.  One trillion protons make a universe.  There are more protons in the human body than there are stars in the universe.

Oh.  Oh, God, this is really—

“You see why you’re in such a unique position, don’t you?  That car wreck gave you a brain injury.  That brain injury gives you constant headaches.  You are experiencing a constant efflux of protons.  Do you know what that means?  You’re spitting out mass faster than the Big Bang thirteen billion years ago.  You can do
anything
with that!  Your injury is a godsend.  I don’t deny it came about at a great cost to you—”

“I lost my family, Kory.”

Jocelyn.  She—

“Wendy, do you want this universe to wake up?”