Strongest Conjuration (4 page)

“Neither are you,” Phil said with a glance down Ramon's body.

I pulled again, and sludgy time inverted at my feet. I stared into the hole. Maybe its dark was where I belonged. It was where I came from. It was where I had held love in my arms, and I carried the shape of its face in my heartdark.

“Ren?”

On the cave wall in front of me, the symbol was crude, but unmistakable: two eyes and a mouth.

“Ray, can you see Ren?”

I touched my fingers to the ash smudges on the cave wall: two circles and a line—the first shape infant eyes pattern, when all our world is Iandentire comfort, or its terrible lack. Not until that world splits into Me and Not Me, I and Thou, do we learn that we, too, look into the world from behind two circles and a line.

“Ren!”

The cave wall was a glorious welter of umber, rust, and charcoal—long, inverted triangles with heads and feet bleeding into the fluid backs of horses. A red patty-cake blotted out their haunches, half of it scraped white into the cleft circles of female hips and breasts. I wanted to press my palms against the handprints. I wanted to see if torchlight made the horses run.

“Fuck. I should have stopped her! No. Don't give me that look, Ray. If I had told her last night I thought the experiment was dangerous, she wouldn't have—Well, at least she might—I mean …” Phil's voice was muffled by mud and time. “You can't jump a chasm in two leaps. I should have told her.”

I couldn't see him.

I couldn't see us either, but we were there, the many of us in the cavestone. Not the one I loved. She was dead. Herdark hurt me.

“What does it mean for her to shade in her own Garden, Ray?”

Mydark hurt Phil. Fear woke up in me at last.

I had no idea what anything meant:
mother
or
face
or
home
.

I didn't know if horses ran over the stone of our original Garden, or if I'd finally lost my grip on reality. Panic gathered low in my belly. I could barely drag my hands from the cavestone. It was where I came from, and I didn't belong.

I had tampered with
When
, and
Why
crushed me. “Stop!” I said and showed my teeth.

“Is it so much to ask, Ray, to get a year, maybe two, of just me loving her and her loving me back? No drama, no upset?”

“No change, Phil? No growth?”

Why
swallowed me in solid liquid ribbons.

“Yes. Exactly fucking that. Is that too much?”

Why?
Because Celeste had stolen
When
from me and
Who
from Phil.

“Not too much, I think. But too slow, perhaps. A day or a weekend? Sure. But not months. Certainly not years.”

Why?
Because the women in my family lose their memories. Trying to save them, I'd lost my mind.

It caved in.

“Shut up, Ray.”

“It's Ramon.”

11. You Can Never Go

My thoughts were eels through oil, no more solid than the air, and no less opaque than mystery.

I wasn't suffocating. Minds don't breathe and my brain was in Tucson. If I opened my eyes I would be there, sitting on the sofa, and not a bit muddy.

I'd probably want a bath anyway, but Phil was showering. Ramon had made him. “I have pieces of myself pinned to half a dozen memories I will never look at again, Phil. So do you. Get cleaned up.”

I loved him, and I wanted to kiss him with no guilt on his mouth.

But my subtractive Garden filtered noise from signal, and I was made of static. There was no order left to pattern me. I was the mud suffocating me. Mud in my mouth would turn guilty in Phil's, and spitting was part of what I'd come here for.

“Phil, listen. Sometimes the best you can do for someone who loves you is just to be okay yourself.”

I spit, and the cave floor ran under my feet in a soup of data points. Each held as little of me as a face holds, and as much.

“Go play poker. You can't do anything from here.”

“I need to do the dishes first. Ren hates leaving the house with—”

“She's not—”

“Dammit, Ray!”

If my Garden filtered me—stripped out everything extraneous—Phil would be what was left.

“I'll be at Casino Del Sol if you need me.”

I was Phil's
Who
, the axis he knew best, and trusted most.

I turned my Garden
Who
-side down and slid out backward.

I woke up in free fall, terrified and inert. Phil had left—and I was falling too fast to recalibrate his absence into anything less shattering than abandonment. But hurtling through desertion's hole, I recognized it. The Garden—how it is and isn't—exists (or doesn't) symbolically. And I was that sort of shaman. Phil's absence didn't have to be a hole. He loved me, and love comes with strings attached.

So I threw an attached string across the emptiness. It caught like a Tarzan vine, and my tumble turned into a swing. I swooped sideways.

Bleached white bone, smooth and shiny, rounded like ears or sweet peppers, held a hole I recognized, but could not name. I let go of my vine with one hand and reached, swinging past, shaking, and missed. But it was the sole still thing in a world of falls. I stretched out again—almost too far—and put three fingers into the empty space. They caught and closed and held on. It yanked my shoulder joint, but stopped my fall.

I was still.

I still was.

I hung one-handed, suspended and trembling from the D-ring of a mug handle. Behind it, others in a line of Phil's care and presence waited, not tidied up, because Phil doesn't clean as he goes. My fingers ached, but I could almost hear Susi bark.

The caves I came from aren't who I am, but my emergence is. I would ape-swing my way home on the messiness of love.

But it was gone.

Ramon was straightening up, and I was falling apart again. I scrambled from meanings that slipped when I grabbed for them, but whispered when I looked away. The only axis left was
Where
.

Where
comfort returns.

Where
the faces we love come back.

Where
the Me-and-Not-Me split world is knit up into We.

Where there are many of me, and one was speaking. “I'm not checking up on her, Ray. That's not what this is. I just came—”

12. Free

“—home!” I opened my eyes.

Phil closed the door behind him, eyebrows screwed down in concern.

“It isn't where it used to be,” I said.

“No.” Phil's voice was wary. “We moved.”

“Let's stay,” I said and beamed at him.

Phil threw himself onto the sofa next to me like into a summer lake. “Welcome back.” His voice was hearthfire warm, and he folded me against him. “Need tea?”

“Nah.” My empty hands felt warm and full with Phil's shoulders under them. “But I learned something.”

“I'll bet,” he said and kissed me. His mouth tasted of nothing but love.

“I'm still the little Jewish girl who wrote a huge school report on Easter eggs rather than ask to be invited to a backyard hunt.”

He nodded. “It's hard for you to reach out when you feel like an outsider.”

“It's like I parachuted into the Incrementalists, but I got stuck in a tree. I thought maybe I could use my vantage point to help map the terrain.”

“Come down here where you belong,” he said. “You can always climb back up the tree.”

“Phil?” Ramon came into the living room, mascara repaired, hair neatly pinned, carrying his suitcase. “Ren?”

“All better,” I said. “I'm not so sure I'm a symbol shaman, but I've found some cool stuff to explore.”

“Up trees?” he asked. “Are they safer than holes?”

“I'll start small,” I said. “You know, incrementally.”

Ramon nodded, and we walked him to the door. “Phil, Ren, you have a lovely home.” He gave me a quick, silk-hair-and-perfume hug. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”

Phil shook his hand. “No problem, Ray. You're welcome anytime.”

“It's Ramon.”

Phil grinned, and we stood together, watching from the door as Ramon climbed — high heels and panty hose — into his rental car, and drove away.

Phil and I ambled back into the house. We went into the kitchen together, and Phil picked up the egg-scorched pan. I took it out of his hand, and pulled him toward our bedroomdark.

“Stop.” I showed my teeth. “Come play.”

Copyright © 2014 by Skyler White

Art copyright © 2014 by Wesley Allsbrook

eISBN: 978-1-4668-8183-9

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