Westlake Soul (6 page)

“The music room,” she said brightly.

How could I resist? I stepped to the piano and tinkled a few of the high keys, matched the notes with a warbling false. Nadia looked at me, one eyebrow raised.

“What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“A-flat minor.”
Tinkle-tinkle!

“Funny,” she said. “You get that joke from a Christmas cracker?”

“The great Fozzie Bear,” I said. “Wocka Wocka.”

Half a smile. “You’re playing B-flat, though. Now C . . . now B-flat again.”

I stopped tinkling. “You play?”

“A little.”

“Show me what you got.”

She considered for a moment, biting her lower lip, looking from my expectant face to the piano’s immaculate keyboard, then back to me. I thought a little shyness was creeping in, but this wasn’t the case; she was actually afraid I would think her uncool. All I had really seen of Nadia was a hottie who could kick the decks and kiss like a soul-breaker, but now I was going to see the flip side. The rich man’s daughter, who sat with her knees together and her chin high. Montessori schooling and tennis trophies. Piano lessons from the age of four . . . continuing until she was old enough to rebel, get a tramp stamp, and play music of a different kind.

“I don’t know what to play,” she said, hesitating.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Play anything.”

She sighed and looked at me, her eyes deep and warm.
This is who I am,
that look said.
Take it or leave it.
I replied by touching her cheek, curling a wisp of hair behind her ear, making her smile. She sat at the piano, her back straight, her small feet poised above the pedals.

“Okay,” she said.

I didn’t know what to expect. As I’ve said, the Nadia I knew was punkier . . . wilder. This was a different version, but—as I was about to discover—no less alluring. She placed her fingers on the keys and they suddenly looked more elegant. Those fingers had tousled my hair and set turntables on fire, but now they were as light as motes of dust. This wasn’t the only change. A calm had fallen across her face. Her whole demeanour settled. She went from a river, tumultuous and white, to a lake, serene and blue.

And then she started to play.

Within moments, everything inside me lifted, teased into flight by notes as delicate as the fingers that played them. My skin flushed with sensation. My mouth dropped open. Heart floating in my chest as I breathed shallow sips of air. I’d never known anything so beautiful. Not just the melody, but to see Nadia so transformed, and to feel her oneness with the music . . . it was astounding. And as those notes tiptoed in the air, coalescing with the lavender to kiss my senses, I
felt
it—beauty and euphony activating gravitational collapse, the build-up of heat, a chain reaction. It was happening, beyond my control. Nuclear fusion. My sun forming.

Nadia played the final note and it faded from the air, leaving something behind. An intangible. A kind of . . . sweetened silence. She stood up and stepped toward me. Punky again, but different. Chewing her lower lip. Dark eyes shimmering. I took her hands, touched her fingers, as if they couldn’t be real.

“Beethoven,” she said.

I nodded hopelessly.

“
Sonata pathétique,
” she added. “Second movement. Adagio cantabile.”

“Yeah,” I said, as if I knew that. I stroked her fingers, expecting them to fade perfectly, like the music.

“It’s pretty,” Nadia said.

“Breathtaking,” I said.

Another sweet silence while we stood beside the grand piano, hands clasped, looking at each other. The heat was suffocating. We kissed, eventually, and then consummated the moment. Not the fumbling, over-excited coitus of youth, but a considerate union. Two mirrors facing one another, reflecting to the point where light ran out.

Thirteen months later, with a cardiac monitor ticking away my broken life—a clock with no hands—Nadia placed her headphones over my ears and played
Sonata pathétique
’s
second movement . . . her final, desperate attempt to reach me, and to rescue a future with Marvel and Calypso—our garden made of sand.

“Come back,” she said again.

I gunned the Soulmobile through the rain-slick streets of my coma. Lightning in the sky and Dr. Quietus in my rearview mirror. I screeched onto the Ego Ideal, where blank towers loomed above me and the traffic signals were caught between stop and go. Dr. Quietus put his foot to the floor and closed the distance between us. His voracious engine howled.

I’ve got you this time, Westlake Soul
,
he said, and cackled.

I tried to go faster . . . to get everything I could out of my failing machine. I took a hard left turn onto Preconscious Boulevard and Dr. Quietus was right behind me. His headlights filled the Soulmobile with dreadful light.

There’s no getting away.

In the rearview mirror, I watched missile launchers unfold from his fenders, hood, and roof—each one loaded with a 15-Megaton WS Heart Stopper. He cackled again. More lightning in the sky, illuminating empty sidewalks, the falling rain. I crushed the accelerator, knowing there was no way out . . . and suddenly the Auditory Cortex light was flashing in the HUD. I hit the button and several thousand decibels of
Sonata pathétique
shook my comatose world.

Nadia,
I thought.

The music gave the Soulmobile a boost. Rainwater fanned from the rear tires and Dr. Quietus’s headlights shrank to pinpricks. My heart cannoned as the windows of dead skyscrapers blew out. Deep cracks raced through their structures, weakening them. I saw one building—I think it was the Arbor Vitae Exchange—sag like a tired muscle, and then partially collapse as I raced by. I looked for Nadia. Her face on a billboard. Her name on a street sign. Nothing. Only the music, inciting emotion. Notes leading me like small men running on a track. I took an exit to the Pleasure Principle and caned it at unspeakable miles per hour.

Where are you?

I imagined delicate fingers touching piano keys. Those same fingers touching me.

NADIA!

No sign of her. I smeared tears from my eyes, and then Dr. Quietus was behind me again. His machine purred, smooth and efficient. Missiles locked on. He fired—cackling wildly—and arrows of light bloomed in the rearview mirror, shooting toward me, trailing smoke.

This is the end of the road, Westlake Soul!

Three seconds to impact. The supervillain boomed laughter.

The music—our song—embraced me, as it always had. I recalled how my sun had formed, and burned still.

Two seconds . . .

The sun,
I thought.
Up.

Through the black rags thrown over the city, I saw a crescent of red light.

One second to impact.

Up
,
I thought again, and punched a button on the console labelled,
PSYCHEJECTOR.
The Soulmobile’s roof snapped open and my seat thrust upward. I soared into the night, surrounded by music. Below me, Dr. Quietus’s missiles hit the Soulmobile and it exploded in a ball of white flame—
KA-BLAAM!—
spraying stellate cells and afferent neurons.

Lightning jagged and the music started to fade.

NADIA!
I screamed with everything I had, my lungs full of glass.

Dr. Quietus’s black machine rumbled into the distance. I heard him cry out in rage—vowing to return—as I arced over the Pleasure Principle. I searched the sky, looking for that glimpse of the sun, but saw only cloud.

NADIA!

No sign of her. No way out of this dark city. I turned my face to the sky. Rain fell into my eyes as the music faded.

In my hospital room, Nadia clicked the stop button on her iPod and took the headphones from my ears. She sat a moment longer, looking at me, dreams slipping from her heart like snow off a roof. Still no tears. Only those big eyes and sharp lines. More the girl at the piano than the cool chick beatmatching tracks.

“I don’t know what—” she started, but stopped. Pressed a knuckle to her lips. She never finished that sentence. If only she knew how desperately I was trying to reach her.

Those two words again:
if only.

She put her iPod and headphones back into her beach bag and stood up. The soles of her sneakers squeaked on the floor as she walked toward the door. One final look over her shoulder, the last wedge of snow sliding from her roof. I lay among my tubes and lines like a torn parachute. My cardiac monitor chirped. The door closed softly behind her.

So Nadia returned to her home in Rosedale with a trail of broken pieces, and I remained in my empty city—until I discovered a thread of light between two buildings, once robust, that had crumbled and collapsed against one another. I powered through the narrow gap. Opened my eyes.

I was transferred, almost immediately, to Toronto Western Hospital, which meant that I got more visitors. Niki came two or three times a week. She showed me pictures of Hub and her various new boyfriends, and bitched to me about the shittiness of life, and how Mom and Dad had her doing twice as many chores for the same allowance. Her visits were always such a highlight. Nonetheless, I longed to reach out, pull her into my arms, and kiss her bratty little face. Darryl would drop by. Usually once a week. He never had much to say, though. Inane comments that I might once have found interesting:
Got some dope new ink, bitch. Right shoulder. Tribal fire with boards bustin’ out of it. Fuckin’ dope, bitch.
Mostly he would just stare at me, as if I were a new breed of creature. Something no man had ever seen before. On one occasion, he showed me some porn on his iPhone. On another—clearly bored—he ate a flower.

Nadia came, too.

One last time.

I would have preferred that she didn’t come at all, with her new short haircut and the cold rock that used to be her sun. The last time she saw me—that glance over the shoulder in my Vancouver hospital room—I was (sort of) sleeping. Granted, my face was bruised and scraped, and I was plugged in to various life-monitoring/sustaining apparatus, but I was still sleeping, thus relatively normal. Awake, though, with my head cricked sideways and frothy sputum on my chin, I was shocking. Not only that, but a nurse had cut my lovely blond hair to keep it from falling into my eyes. A brutal cut, too—sheared me to the scalp in places. Frickin’ Vidal Sassoon, she was not.

It was the worst possible time for Nadia to visit. I was ashamed. Horrified.

Don’t look at me,
I implored her.

“Westlake,” she said. Two steps toward my bed, then she stopped, covered her eyes with one hand. Her lower lip pooched out. She broke, tears sparkling through the cracks of her fingers, shoulders trembling. Her hand had slipped from that saddle horn of strength. I ached to fly away. I ached to hold her.

The vein in my temple throbbed. All the emotion I could offer.

I don’t want you to see me like this,
I said.
Go away, baby. Please, just go—

My sun flared painfully.

“Sorry,” Nadia said, wiping her eyes, stroking mascara across her cheekbones. She was sorry for crying. For not being strong. I wanted her to be sorry for coming. She looked at the plain white ceiling, as if she’d find composure there. Impulsively, I leapt into her mind. It sounded like a subway train—like the wave that had killed me. Her thoughts were not images. More like shaped feelings. I deciphered them and saw our former togetherness . . . pink sunshine . . . how I looked in her eyes: a pale, partial thing.

Just leave. Please.
I threw these thoughts at her. Vehemently. They thudded off her wall like stones.
I don’t WANT you here. I can’t take it.

She took a seat, not beside my bed, but in the corner, where I couldn’t see her. This wasn’t ideal, but it was better. I could still hear her, of course. Shaky breaths, uncomfortable movements. Long minutes passed. I prayed—of all my superhero powers—to be invisible, and wondered if I could mentally refract enough light to at least fade into the white hospital sheets. I tried, of course, but nothing happened. I was too emotional to concentrate and had to settle for the room dimming when a cloud moved over the sun.

Literally. Figuratively.

“I can’t do this,” Nadia said. I couldn’t see her, but knew she was crying again. “It’s just too much. I can’t bear to see you like this, and I’m not strong enough to handle it.”

You are,
I said bitterly.
You just don’t want to.

“Can you even hear me, Westlake?”

Of course I can hear you.

“Do you even understand?”

More than you realize.

And I did, but not because of my super intelligence. I didn’t need to pluck thoughts from her mind to know that the love was gone. She emitted no heat, no energy. This hurt so deeply that I felt it in my spine. A bleak fluid. Coupled with the shame, I could have died—thrown myself at Dr. Quietus’s feet. And yet my sun still flared, trying to provide light for us both.

Could I blame her, though? I have pondered this so often since, and asked myself what I would do in her situation. Nadia was young and beautiful. She had everything to look forward to, and I could offer nothing. Furthermore, I didn’t know what
I
wanted (other than my body, of course—my
life
). I loved her too much to lose her . . . too much for her to stay.

If only
she had been stronger. It would have made it easier for us both.
If only
she had held my hand, and told me that we would still have our garden made of sand. I needed her faith, but it was as cold as the rock that had once been her sun. She didn’t want to be my Soul anymore. My pale, partial image had eclipsed everything. I was already dead to her.

Just get out of here.
I wished she could see how angry I was. How desperately hurt.
Please, Nadia . . . you’re not helping.

“I didn’t know if I should come,” she said, her voice a little firmer. “But I need to end this. I need to move on.”

I groaned involuntarily and my head rolled to the other side so that—dammit—I could see her again. Sitting on the edge of the chair. Knees together. Purse in her lap because she didn’t plan on staying long. Her short, painfully cute haircut much cooler than mine.