Chapter Four
Rosetta was uncannily skilled when it came to settling into routine. The annual visit to her mother's grave came, ravaged the sense of stability she had grown accustomed to, and went, just as it always did. She carried on, just as she always did. She went to school the next morning, took the studious notes she was practically known for in the student body—anyone who missed a day of class came to her for notes on the lesson, even though her penmanship was often as untamable as her hair—and did not miss a beat when Rachel called, sniffling and warbling with a tearful voice about how it never seemed to get easier, especially for their father. Like the respectable woman she was, she held her head up and strode onward.
"You should have seen him," Rachel had croaked, just like she did every year. "He was so quiet. He just stared straight ahead. Like he was looking at a ghost or something. Maybe he was..."
"Do you want to take another day off from the shop tomorrow? We can probably afford it..." Rosetta had already been reaching for her little notebook full of jumbled notes regarding finances and affiliated information. Rachel had stopped that idea before Rosetta had even managed to flip open the cover.
"No," she had dismissed. "You're going to school tomorrow. The least I can do is go to work. Besides, between you and me, I think I'll go crazy if I don't do something. Do you know what I mean? Like, pedicure appointments and ordering lip gloss in order of both cuteness and color seems like the pettiest thing in the world right now, but I need to do it." A tangible silence had fallen over the conversation for several seconds. "And it feels like something Mom would do, doesn't it? She was so pretty, Rosetta..."
Rosetta understood, without a doubt. Work, busyness—sometimes they were the only means by which sanity was possible. Personally, she found peace in the beautifully complex mathematical problems with which she was perpetually faced as an engineering major. Most students complained that the variables and formulas and confusion were a numerical translation of what a headache felt like. But for Rosetta, it was a blissful reprieve. Numbers were so much easier to read than people and always made sense in the end. Words and speech and smiles could be deceiving. But numbers—they would never lie.
Still, all personal responsibility and trauma aside, whenever Rosetta curled up under her warm comforter and rested her head on her soft pillow, relishing the feeling of sleep slithering through the shadows and into her mind, she found that her thoughts wandered to the stranger she had seen during her last bout of astral travel. No equation could balance the disproportionate magnitude of her feelings toward the man, who seemed to be more of a daydream than a person. No formula could work out why his voice had left a faint pentimento in all the ambiance of life—the sound of running water, the dull roar of conversation in the corridors at school, even the gentle whisper of the fan that stood at attention atop her dresser. He was nothing to her, was he not? Or, rather, as Rosetta was quickly coming to realize, he would have meant no more to her than a stranger passing through the street, if it had not been a half-dream that had brought her to him. There was some inherent intimacy that came with having seen him as a soul. Not only that, but there was something intoxicating about the fascinating, enigmatic mystery he was surrounded by: how could he appear so tangible, so real, when all the other people who had passed her by in the astral plane were nothing but blurred representations of themselves? And why did he appear that way to her, of all people?
Having more questions than answers was as infuriating to Rosetta as it was perplexing, and that was what drove her to decide to look for him again. It was a decision made both in haste and with careful, meticulous thought, though such a possibility seemed like a strange sort of enigma. She consented, at least to some degree, that the decision was made for her simply because of the fact that she possessed what her mother often called, "a curious soul", but, simultaneously, every time she allowed her mind to immerse itself completely and totally in its wonders and uncertainties at the inexplicable event, even her most precociously wary thought processes brought her to the same conclusion: she wanted answers. No, she needed them, much in the way perfectionists yearned for flawless patterns and bookish people craved endings to their lives as poetic as the conclusions in the fiction they adored.
As she meandered toward the bed, she found herself lingering in the doorway, like a stain of purple lipstick caught on a white shirt, hesitation willing her to worry at her lower lip. Already, the matte, pinkish skin was worn, chapping, and serving as a tangible sign of the long-winded deciding-then-doubting-said-decision process she had been subjected to over the past two nights. Am I sure about this? Nervousness was buzzing inside her. Well, there's one thing I am sure of, she thought determinedly, conjuring images of the half-written paper in her backpack and the nail polish shelves at her shop that were currently bare in her mind. I don't have time to waste.
Repeating that thought in her mind over and over as if it were some sort of sacred chant, Rosetta ventured into the bedroom, taking cautious steps toward her bed. The walls were saturated with shadows, but she did not bother to turn on a lamp. Who needed light when their fondest dreams were realized only in front of an inky nighttime backdrop? Slowly, ever-so-methodically so as not to disturb the utter peace she felt at the moment, she crawled into bed. Such contentment was rare in the midst of her constant drive to do more, to improve, to stretch herself even thinner, but it was as elegant as the last flake of faux snow settling to the bottom of a snow globe. Needless to say, she cherished the luxury of it.
She collapsed against the mattress, letting her head fall back with a soft thud against the pillow. The weariness in her body dragged her down into the embrace of slumber, as heavy as rocks chained to the ankles of a swimmer in deep water. As her eyes closed and she let her mind slowly detach itself from her body, she wondered how she could find the singing stranger who had planted a seed of infatuation in her mind. Journeying to different places was easy in the astral plane—a thought or mental image would suffice as transport to just about anywhere. (Even the moon, she had discovered, was not off-limits.) It mimicked the abilities of a book; so long as Rosetta could conjure herself a believable perception, she could lose herself in a world that seemed to be ethereal, timeless, and just out of reach in the most addictive way. A person, however, was nothing like a place. To imagine reaching out to another living soul in the most literal sense seemed complex and improbable. Books, Rosetta had concluded long ago, often did not do their characters the same justice that they did their settings. Sometimes the people born of paper and ink seemed to be just that—paper, flat and shapeless, muddling through a story almost unwillingly, interacting with their circumstances in monotoous predictability. In reality people were wild like hurricanes, intricate like the patterns of waves and sea foam on the ocean, and unpredictable like stallions with their backs to the wind. What could Rosetta depend on to remain unchanged with the mysterious, captivating stranger? And how could she recall every detail of his face when she had only gazed upon it for a few meager seconds? She could not fabricate for herself a paper-flat version of a man she had met in an astral dimension.
As her soul clipped the final threads joining physical and mental states of being, she stood, leaving her body behind, and determinedly set her jaw. The thing that had led her to him before would have to be her best chance of finding him once more. She would think of his song. She would follow his voice.
Rosetta found that recalling the exact words he had sung was all but useless. The syllables meant next to nothing to her, and she could not latch onto them when they were so slick with confusion. It was when she focused on the sound of the voice that she felt herself fading, falling, floating to somewhere new. It felt almost as though the voice was calling for her again, just as she was reaching for it. Fueled by a zing of excitement, she focused, letting the dips, curves, and peaks of the man’s serenade permeate her mind. She could almost see the patterns of the musical notes on the backs of her eyelids, her hands reached out to stead
y herself on the stable and yet ever-changing melody that was not even truly there, and her ears were so full of the beauty and the wonder that had poured from his mouth that she pondered, in a dull, muddled thought, whether her own voice was singing, too. If it were, she could not have hoped to hear it over the deafening roar of memory. One can never truly hear his or her own thoughts if the past overpowers and drowns them out; Rosetta figured that was why silence was the most poignant symptom of irreversible damage.
All at once, the familiar walls around her vanished, and she was surrounded by a plethora of things that she had never seen. In her copper eyes was the reflection of a sky with the first raw, scarlet traces of dawn bleeding onto it, evening-stained clouds painted with veins that were brimming with the promise of a new day, intoning vows of light and life and love. Stretching up to greet the morning light were vast, towering hills climbing up to embrace the waking sky and to hold back the raging brightness of the sun for just a moment longer. Where Rosetta stood, nestled in the heart of the hills that seemed to rise up in the distance on all sides, happened to be a paved bridge that overshadowed a peaceful, steady river that snaked through its hushed path over the ground with little more than a sigh to announce its presence, perhaps so as not to disturb the silent little town slowly coming to its senses in the east. The river was not even so selfish as to claim a sandy shore; trees and brush erupted from the soil mere inches from its banks and stretched on in countless numbers toward the horizon to form a vast forest colored green with a deep blue reflection in the water under the dimness of a night's final fleeting moments. The connectedness and equanimity of the place was astounding, and it left Rosetta wondering how conflict could exist when loveliness still reigned so supreme in places like this.
"You came." The unexpected murmur from her right caused her to jump. She turned and was, once again, looking directly into the face of the man she had been searching for, still clad in ratty jeans, but now also wrapped in a brown leather jacket. There he was, standing mere feet from her, and still nothing but a wandering soul; that much was given away by his slightly-translucent appearance. Her eyes locked onto his cognac-colored ones, which were framed by the russet tone of his skin. "I was beginning to think that I would never see you again." His voice was heavily accented, but he was most certainly speaking in an English dialect. His words were appallingly easygoing, though Rosetta was not sure what other tone she expected from him. The dramatic, grandeur-filled words of a fairy-tale prince? The dark, grumbling tone of a mysterious figure residing in the shadows? She had admittedly forgotten that, though astral projection seemed like a dream, he could easily be a very normal, perhaps even uninteresting, person. The idea was certainly probable. Still, Rosetta found herself scoffing at the thought. He was an enigma, a question with no answer. He was like the nameless melodies that play in a person’s head sometimes—the tunes that come from nowhere, never make it onto paper or into song, but remain a quiet hum in daydreams for a while.
"You speak English?" It was arguably the dullest question she could have asked, but she did not come to grips with that fact until after the inquiry had tumbled past her lips.
"Sì," he answered, "but my native tongue is Italian. My mother was an English woman." His speaking voice was incredibly different from his musical tone, but no less pleasing to the ears. It was gentle, yet not lacking in assurance and stability. "Where have you been these past few days? I went searching, but you were nowhere, bella viaggiatore."