Swansong

What does he see when he looks at me? I can't begin to imagine. Whatever it is, I think he must like it. I find that absolutely insane. I hate myself. I mean it with my whole heart. Why shouldn't I hate myself? I killed three of the people I love. I killed an innocent stranger. If it had been a stranger who had killed them, I would have hated that stranger just as much. I'm a stranger to myself these days. I don't know where I've gone.

  Wherever I've gone, I hope I come back.

  It takes me a while to realize my hands are still on Azel's face. Snapping back to my senses, oddly, doesn't compel me to let go. His eyes are so close, I can't see anything else. His eyes are like nobody else's on the planet. Nobody before him. Nobody after him. Now I know. I couldn't see it before. I see it now.

  "There's never going to be another you."

  I see it now.

  I see nothing but green. It occludes my vision. It envelopes me whole. Suddenly I can't see it anymore. I don't understand. Oh. Azel. His eyes are closed. I should probably close mine.

  I see nothing but the cosmos on the backs of my eyelids, spotty red-violet and hyperviolet lights. I feel nothing but soft lips touching my lips. I am rooted to the ground. I am anchored in place. I've been so afraid of leaving. I thought it was inevitable. The Pied Piper came for me. She tried to make me a Crusader.

  I don't have to leave, Azel tells me. He tells me with his hands on my arms and his mouth on my mouth, my hands on his shoulders, his curls in my face. He tells me in the way the world lurches underneath me, but doesn't quite cast me aside.

  I don't have to leave. I get to stay.

  I was scared. I was so scared.

  * * * * *

  Aisha's in a sour mood when we step through the door of the maisonette. No sooner than Azel steps out of his loafers she barrels at him, whimpering over a toothache. Layla breezes past us and out the door with nothing but a "See ya."

  "What happened?" Azel asks, dazed. He puts his arms around Aisha.

  "It hurts," Aisha whines. "I wasn't supposed to eat the cookies but then I did and now it hurts."

  "Ya ummah," Azel clucks. He parts her lips and peeks at her teeth. "Ow!" he exclaims. "Don't bite me!"

  "Then don't put your fingers in my mouth!"

  "Your tooth hurts?" I ask, stepping out of my Mary Janes.

  "That's what I said," Aisha huffs at me.

  "You know what you have to do? Get an ice cube and put it between your fingers."

  Aisha looks at me like I'm plotting to steal her teddy bear. She doesn't realize that's my brother's area of expertise.

  "I swear," I tell her. "It works."

  She scuttles off to the kitchen. Azel stares after her, nursing his finger.

  "Brat," he says.

  "I still think she's sweet."

  "You're blinded by your lack of relation to her. Trust me."

  Aisha trundles back out of the kitchen, a wrapped ice cube between her knuckles. She lies on the wine-colored sofa, whimpering. Azel, for all his complaints, sits with her and strokes her wild hair.

  "You shouldn't have gone in the sweets," Azel says. "No sweets before dinner, you know that."

  "I don't care."

  "Aisha."

  "Layla said I could."

  "That's why you do the opposite of what Layla says."

  Aisha watches a dancing cartoon on the television, her cheek on the sofa's arm rest. All that crying must have worn her out, because her eyes droop closed until she's sleeping soundly, her every breath a soft, tinny whistle. I slide the ice out from between her knuckles. I carry it back to the kitchen and put it away. By the time I return, the TV's turned off; Azel's draping a blanket over Aisha's bony shoulders.

  "Does that really work?" he asks me, his voice very quiet. "The ice."

  "Yeah." I smile. I sit beside him. "No idea why, but it does."

  Mom's favorite food was peanut brittle. You grow up on peanut brittle, you get used to toothaches.

  "Maybe I shouldn't have dragged you here," Azel says, casting his eyes away. "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be sorry. I hate being alone." I hate it more than anything. More than God. More than my own skin.

  Azel looks at me. I can't explain it; I feel as if he sees me in my entirety, all at once. I wonder how that doesn't serve as some kind of sensory overload.

  "You don't have to be alone," Azel says. "People love you. Just let them."

  My face tinges with warmth. I smile quickly. I smile at my hands, because that's easier. They're resting on my lap, a folded distraction, a charm bracelet wrapped around the right wrist.

  He gave me...

  He wraps his hand around mine. It feels like nothing I can describe. It feels like belonging; but something else. It feels like friendship; but something more. It feels like a world all its own, a world that exists between the two of us, a world I can escape to without leaving the larger, greater world behind. But then maybe our world is the greater world after all. I can't imagine anything greater than this. Here. Now.

  I laugh while he coils his fingers around mine. His skin is soft, tickling me.

  "Can you dance en pointe?" I wonder. Kory's questions have a way of worming into you.

  "Yes." He doesn't hesitate, so I know he's not lying. Azel never lies. "I just don't like the way it looks."

  "How does it look?" I've never been to a ballet. The closest I ever got was that animated Nutcracker short they used to air on TV around Christmastime.

  "Girly," Azel says, pensive. "Not that there's anything wrong with that," he adds, about as subtle as a roadblock.

  "You have to be girly," I rationalize. "You're the Anima, I'm the Animus."

  "Who said this? Who is this Jung? Why haven't I met him?"

  "Well, first you board a plane to Switzerland..."

  "I hate those."

  "Then you buy a time machine and calibrate it for the nineteenth century."

  "No, thank you. If I can't handle an airplane, I doubt I can handle a time machine."

  "The DeLorean looks comfy enough."

  "The what?"

  "You've really never seen--?"

  Azel stands. He scoops the sleeping Aisha in his arms. I hasten to lower my voice.

  "Be right back," he whispers.

  He carries her up the stairs.

  He's back within minutes. He has his music player with him. I thought he left it at the factory, for some reason.

  "Here," he says. "Listen to this."

  "What is it?" I ask, reaching for the headphones.

  "Fauré's Pavane. It's my favorite song. Just listen."

  I listen to the string quartet, slow and ambling, mysterious. The violin makes me think of Annwn. I focus on the cello instead, the viola. Then come the oboes, the clarinets. It's a peaceful melody. At the same time, it's tense, self-aware. That shouldn't make sense, I know. When I close my eyes I can see some invisible entity strolling through a willowed park, glancing carefully over his shoulder, certain he's being followed, but intent not to miss out on the beauty of a rare, cerulean spring day.

  The invisible entity becomes Azel. Because when I think about it, that's the kind of person he is. He walks with his shoulders hunched, his eyes on the ground. He walks like he's never quite certain where his feet will end up from one moment to the next. But he doesn't let that stop him from walking. He doesn't let that stop him from dancing.

  And then the full orchestra kicks in, sweeping and rushing and elegant and grand. And suddenly there's magic; the real kind; the kind that infuses your bones with God. This is more than a song. This is somebody's vision of the world at large. This is somebody's pain and anger and wonder and gratitude and awe, sheer awe. This is one hundred, two hundred, three hundred magicians calling out together for something they've never seen with their own eyes, manufacturing that something erstwhile. Suddenly I understand why we're seven billion instead of one. Suddenly I can see how we might all be one anyway.

  My eyes feel hot. I don't dare open them. Let somebody else do the crying for a chan
ge.

  * * * * *

  Layla comes home around early evening, when Aisha's up and playing with her Lovely doll. I decide I'd better get home myself.

  "Let me walk you," Azel says.

  I step into my shoes. I follow him out the door.

  The sky looks like a wet paint canvas. It aches with shades of garnet. It seeps with lush persimmon. A watery white sun touches the opal clouds. Their lights are dim and flickering, flitting in and out of realms.

  "It's beautiful," Azel comments quietly.

  It is beautiful. The imprint of a phantom moon shines faintly between the city's iron smokestacks. The thick gray smog, ugly, usurping, is a crude contender for the sky's natural satellites.

  The moon rises and the night connects us.

  It's cold tonight. I zip my woolen jacket closed. Azel reaches for my hand and I let him capture it, warmth in my cheeks, my fingers curling around his. We walk past the maisonettes, past Charles Babbage, suspiciously devoid of Listerine.

  "Are you doing anything for New Year's?" Azel asks.

  "Church, probably." I smile. I don't know whether I should be worried, that Judas' only hobbies are church and that one cell phone game where you pop balloons with a dart gun.

  "We follow the lunar calendar," Azel tells me. "Our New Year was a couple months back."

  "Does that mean you're contacting me from the future? And you said you didn't have a time machine."

  His mouth flicks into a warm smile.

  "What's the future like?" I ask him. "Any good?"

  "A lot of the same," he says. "Only we have jetpacks now."

  "Finally."

  "You can borrow mine."

  "Can I borrow your robot housekeeper, too?"

  "He has Sundays off."

  "Robots. Give 'em an inch and they want a yard."

  We walk past the gas station. Cop cars crowd the lot with their loud sirens and flashing lights. Another holdup, I guess. I try not to let my gaze wander. Azel doesn't spare the mess a single glance.

  "Don't leave your winter homework for too long," I tell him. "Okay?"

  "Have you already started yours?" he asks.

  "Yeah. We had this take-home test on Vercingetorix. I don't know why they bother giving us take-home tests when it's so easy to cheat. Everything's on the internet these days..."

  "Don't remind me." I forgot he hates the internet.

  We stop for the street light outside the boarded up cinema. Traffic breezes past us in the streets. I huddle under my jacket, surprised at the frigid air.

  "This world," Azel murmurs. "It's really going to die?"

  His eyes are on the smokestacks, the breath of death polluting the sky.

  I smile shakily. "That's the word on the street."

  "It seems like such a waste." His hand slips free from mine. I don't think he realizes. "It's a waste of a perfectly good world."

  "Yeah..."

  What's so good about this world? Mom and Dad aren't in it. We've killed the planet we're living on. This time next year, maybe we'll get to kill Europa, too.

  This world. This world was the one that gave me Mom and Dad to begin with.

  I never even said thank you.

  Thank you. Thank you for giving me a family. Thank you for letting me grow up a happy little girl. Thank you for brothers. Thank you for friends. Thank you for showing me that I was loved.

  This world is a world of water. 65% of the human body is water. 71% of the planet is ocean. 95% of the ocean remains uncharted. Five hundred million years ago, we stepped out of the sea. We were young, and timid, and didn't know what waited at the surface. We didn't know we could go home anytime we wanted. We still don't.

  I am the ocean. The ocean is in my veins. It's the blood that runs from my heart to my fingertips. It's the water that fills the space between my cells, my synapses, my thoughts. It's the tears that fill my eyes when I forget where I came from; when I delude myself into thinking that I can never go back.

  There's never going to be another you.

  I wait for the traffic light to change. The planet around me holds its breath. The first gray stars take to the darkening horizon, shadows spreading across the bloated sun. A gust of wintry air caresses my face, a father's gentle, weather-beaten hands.

  Snow falls slowly from the sky.

  14

  The Battle of Alesia

  I lie in a glass casket, fluorescent lights pouring through the lid above my head. My back and my shoulders have gone stiff. Warm air rushes at the scar on my face, my chapped lips.

  How much money does the hospital make when I come in for oxygen therapy? That's what I want to know. It's not like the therapy's helping at all. If anything, I feel disjointed, disillusioned, at the end of each session. A paranoid, wriggling presence in the back of my head wonders whether that's not the point.

  My eyes are glassy. Affixed to the glass lid, they water and burn.

  A face looms above me, distorted through the hazy casket. Sleepy eyes. Rosy curls. Hint of a smile.

  Lady Lazarus arises from her own ash, red-haired, tired. Sick to death.

  Sick of her.

  Sick of me.

  * * * * *

  In my bedroom I hang clean clothes in my closet. I take the medicines lined up on my nighttable. I scribble notes to myself and stick them to the stucco walls.

  Annwn watches me from the bed, beret sitting sideways on her hair. Jocelyn's swan bracelet hangs from her left wrist.

  She's not here. I know that. I have a head injury, a bad one. My brain doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

  How is the brain supposed to work? Did somebody come up with a written set of rules?

  "That's a very good point," Annwn says. "You know, there are eighty-six billion neurons inside the human brain. Sixty-nine billion of those are inside the cerebellum alone. The cerebellum has a processing capacity of 0.1 quadrillion tasks per second. That's faster than the modern computer. But at a mere 10% of our total neurological output, the cerebellum is the part of the brain we use the least. Seems like we're busy squandering our potential, doesn't it?"

  How can somebody who isn't here know all these numbers? Unless she's lying. She could be lying.

  "I'm not lying, Wendy. You can look it up, if you like."

  I pick up a pillow lying on the floor. I throw it at her. She catches it.

  She smiles.

  "Leave," I tell her. I'm tired of hallucinations. This world is dying. I want to enjoy what's left of it.

  "But you admit there isn't much left."

  I have Judas and Kory. I have Azel. I have my artwork, my school. It's not what I want, but...

  "But beggars can't be choosers?"

  In other words: They can.

  I want Azel. I really do. I don't want him more than I want my parents and my best friend. But while I'm here--while he's here--

  "We can take him with us," Annwn says softly. "We can take everyone with us."

  We. There is no we.

  "Of course there is. We are all one."

  There's never going to be another you.

  "There doesn't have to be," Annwn says.

  My head hurts. I cradle it in my hands, begging the pain to stop. I wish I could take painkillers. The doctor won't let me. Something about blood thinners. Something about statins.

  "Let's leave this world," Annwn says. "Let's abandon it to die its natural death. Or did you think it was a coincidence that you and this universe are ready to die at the same time?"

  She's crazy. I'm crazy.

  You are at the center of the universe.

  "Come away with me," she says. She's the Pied Piper of Hamelin. She's the Lost Boy in Kensington Gardens. She doesn't want to grow up.

  Wendy, come away with me. Come away to Neverland.

  "I won't go." I won't die.

  "Dying is just like everything else," Annwn tells me. "That is: an artform. You'd probably be very good at it. You are an artist."

  "You are not real."
br />   "You don't know that anything's real. Everything, absolutely everything, happens inside your head. There is no way to observe phenomena outside of your head. That is the universal truth."

  What I know is that my head is fractured. My skull perforated my brain through the temporal-parietal-occipital junction. The temporal lobe runs the gamut between short-term memories and long-term memories. I'm always forgetting things. The parietal lobe codifies pain receptors. I'm always having headaches.

  What does the occipital lobe do? I think it might have something to do with vision. I'm always seeing things that aren't there.

  Should I call for Judas? Should I tell him I'm seeing things again?

  "You can, if you like," Annwn says. "That doesn't mean I'll disappear."

  Who's to say they aren't there? The things I see. Somebody else might not see them, but does that mean they aren't there? A colorblind man can't see green. Does that mean green doesn't exist?

  Green, green like Azel's eyes, green like stellar dust--

  "Your mind is quite fragmented," Annwn says. "I won't deny that that's true. It's true of every human mind. Id. 'I want to live.' Superego. 'I want to die.' Those two opposing forces ought to have nothing to do with one another, and yet every human being is made up of both. Being human is a horrific struggle, don't you think? The Ego is nothing more than a ceasefire between warring parties. You are your own battlefield."

  Azel called it jihad. I remember. Everybody goes through the same internal struggle. That's how we know we're human. That's how we know we're real.

  "I don't want to die," I tell Annwn.

  Nobody really wants to die.

  Annwn lets out a gentle sound--like a breath, only--only she's not here, so she shouldn't be able to breathe. This is insane.

  I'm insane.

  "Is it possible," Annwn says, "that you've forgotten something important?"

  I stop in my tracks. "What do you mean?"

  Of course I've forgotten something important. Lately that's all I know how to do. I can't remember the accident that ruined five lives. I can't remember putting my arms around Mr. and Mrs. Jordan, telling them how sorry I am, telling them how much I loved their daughter.

  "Not that," Annwn says. "Something else. Something right in front of your eyes, only you can't see it."