Swansong (27 page)

“I feel like Prince Camar al-Zaman,” Azel murmurs.  Soft fingertips graze the scars on my scalp.

“Who’s he?” I ask.

“His name means Moon of the Epoch,” Azel says.  “He’s the prince of Khaledan.”

“Where is that?”

“Nowhere.  It’s made up.”

Azel likes his moon.  It’s almost full tonight.  It’s milk-white and radiant.  I feel as if I could reach up and touch it, bring my fingers to my lips and taste ambrosia and snow.

“The Moon Prince didn’t want an arranged marriage, even though his father tried and tried to make a good match.  So the prince threw a tantrum and locked himself in a tall tower with nothing but his favorite books and snacks.”

A tall tower.  I guess we’re pretty high up.  “What were his favorite snacks?”  That’s the important part.

“Luqaimat.”  Azel tucks my hair behind my ears.  It’s long enough now.  It reaches my chin.  “Rose water.  Halwa and kahwa.”

“I don’t blame him for running away.  Imagine marrying someone you don’t love.”

“But the Sultan was wise and judicious.  He knew his son better than his son knew himself.”

That’s always the way with parents, I think.

“One night,” Azel goes on, “the Moon Prince woke up and found a strange woman in bed with him.”

“I hate when that happens.”

“She was beautiful, as is often true of overnight visitors.  She lay sound asleep with her head on the prince’s lap.”

“First date must’ve gone really well.”

“He didn’t want to wake her.  He didn’t dare move her.  Entranced with her, he let her sleep.  He touched her hair—”

Azel touches my hair, his fingers skittering and light.  Oh.

“He felt as if he knew her, from some other realm.  He drifted back to sleep.  But when he woke in the morning, she was gone.”

“She was a dream?” I ask, not entirely trusting my voice.

“The night servants swore they hadn’t let anyone into the tower.  And the bedroom was too high up for anyone to have climbed in through the window.  But the Moon Prince decided she was real.  He left his tower to find her.”

“He did that?  He could have been chasing a dream…”

“It doesn’t matter.  It’s better to chase a dream than never to dream at all.  Even if you’re in for a rude awakening.”

“You’ll get hurt,” I say, uncertain.

“That’s fine.  That’s how you know you’re alive.”

* * * * *

It’s late.  Jude’s going to kill me if I don’t head home soon.  Chilly, numb, I head inside the factory, the kerosene lamps flickering by the paint easel.

“I’ll walk you home,” Azel says, following me.

“Are you sure?” I ask tentatively.  We don’t exactly live close to one another.

“It’s fine,” Azel says.  “It’s dark out.  You shouldn’t walk by your lonesome.”

He tugs on his cotton jacket.  He tosses a glance back at the window.  He smiles his sunrise smile.

“The lighthouse,” he murmurs.  “It’s lit.”

He got to see it.  I’m so glad.

I’m so glad.

* * * * *

We walk south to the Charles Babbage memorial.  A group of high school kids sit around the base of the statue, sharing a bottle of Listerine.

“That is disgusting,” Azel says starkly.

“I guess they’re bored with the regular buzz…”

We walk past the gas stations, past the bottle recycling building.  The bottle machines are all lit up.  Somebody must’ve hit the jackpot tonight.

“I wish I had met you sooner,” Azel remarks.  His shoulders are hunched, his hands in his pockets.

“Huh?”  I follow the streetlights until I’m dizzy.  Azel’s a senior.  I forgot.  “Are you moving back to Oman after school?”

“No.  You can never go home again.”  He trains his eyes carefully on the sidewalk.  For someone who moves so beautifully on a stage, when he walks, he gives off the impression that the ground will fall apart beneath him.  “I’ll enroll in a tertiary school.  Take Graham and Horton classes.  Then go work on a cruise ship or something.”

“Azel.  That’s terrible.  You should be on Broadway.”  Jocelyn wanted to sing on Broadway.

“I believe in chasing dreams,” Azel says.  “I also believe in safety nets.”

When I think about it, painting for a living probably isn’t very realistic.  I’m not sure I’m even all that good.  I could be a deep sea diver, I think.  My heart aches for the ocean.  Home.  We come from the sea.  At our most instinctive, our most primordial, we want to return to it.  I really believe that.

Dad loaded me up in his fishing boat one night.  It was a secret.  We sailed out to the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse.  A sunny yellow glow washed over us from towering white windows.  Clutched safely between the light and the sea, I knew I was home.

Where did you go, God?  Why did you leave?

“Wendy?”

We’re outside the apartment building now.  Nightshadows hide the grunge and the graffiti.  Azel’s eyes are a bright green cosmic dust.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he tells me.

I hug him.  Maybe it’s silly.  Maybe it’s selfish.  I have to hug him, because I’m scared right now.  I’m scared of endings.  I’m scared of goodbyes.

He puts his arms around me.  He tucks his hands into the small of my back.  I press my cheek against his curls.  I steal his warmth.

I let go.

I watch Azel when he crosses the street.  I watch him walk down the sidewalk until his brown ponytail’s a blur.

He saw the lighthouse.  I’m glad.

I’m done.

My head bursts with pain.

My head bursts open.  I can feel my skull snapping away, matter rushing out of it.  I can’t see.  The agony scalds my eyes, blinding, white-hot.  I double over, shoulders hunched, muscles locking with pain.  My head is lighter and lighter on my shoulders.  Something is loud and I don’t know what and
Help me, I’m afraid.

I hear a voice.  It’s not my own.  Can’t make out the words.  Can’t see.  My eyes are swollen shut with tears.

I wrench them open.

Stars and quasars pour out of my head.  They swell and flare and die in explosions of light.  Hot stardust disperses in their wake, bright scarlet and orange and sea-blue and sea-green.  The stardust cools and spins and thickens and hardens into planets and moons and new stars, tiny stars, white-green-white-gold stars flickering with youth, shimmering comets in watery ice, watery planets with bronze poles, sandy satellites orbiting in envy, in deference.  The comets rocket off into vacuums of nothing, of everything.  The stars and clouds and planets spin away from one another.  They spiral into chains.  They spiral into the ethers of a pulsating, blue-black sky.  New galaxies wink innumerably from the endless sky, the sky streaked in energy trails of powdery saffron and splashes of teal-green.

A cloudy swan in white watercolors ascends the cosmos, wings outstretched.

My head crackles with static pain.

I can almost hear my mother singing.

Rosa das rosas, e fror das frores.

Doña das doñas, señor das señores.

She sits on the sand with her backstrap loom stretched in front of her.  Red textiles pool on her knees.  The back saddle rests around her tiny waist, the stick shuttle in her tiny hand.  Gray hairs weave through her thick gold mane.  Each one is a separate secret.  She’s good at keeping those.

Mom.  I can reach out.  I can touch you.  You’re almost here.

“Here I am.”

I turn around.

Warm puddles of light pool in Annwn’s red-blonde hair.  She’s standing under the streetlight.  She clamps her beret close to her head when a car rushes past us, wind from the tires tousling her curls.

Frantic, I feel my head with both hands.  I feel the scars beneath my palms, the sparse hair.

The city tilts and twirls around me, dull pain whispering in my ears.

“Didn’t you call for me?” Annwn asks, calm, placid, a little bemused.

“What?  I—”  My head—

“Are you ready to go?” Annwn asks.  “You wanted to escape, didn’t you?”

“How the hell—”  Of all people—

Annwn smiles.  She folds her hands.  There’s a new light in her sleepy brown eyes.

Wrapped around her left wrist is a charm bracelet.  A silver-gilt swan spreads her wings in flight.

13

Adam

“You’re not here,” I stammer.  “You
can’t
be.”

The Pied Piper smiles her innocuous smile.  I think of Great Whites with their beautiful fins.  They hide their ugly teeth below the water’s surface.

“You’re not real,” I go on, head spinning, head aching.

1950s time-traveler in a dark beret—

—Beret, no, it’s supposed to be a ribbon—

She’s not here.  She’s not here.  I’m seeing things.

I keep seeing things.

“You wanted to escape,” Annwn says.  “So, here I am.”

She’s not here.  I’m seeing her.  I’m seeing things.

“Let’s leave this world behind.”

“That’s all you want,” I answer.  “You want to watch the world die—”

“Don’t you?”

I want to leave.  I want to escape.

I want my mom and dad.

Annwn sits calmly on the curb.  I don’t sit with her.

“I don’t understand why you’re afraid of me,” Annwn speaks to the air.  “I told you before, I care about what happens to you.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.  You’re me.”

“I’m
me
.”

“I’m you.”

She’s lying, she’s lying—  “You go to school with us.  You’re real.  You’re not—”  It’s crazy—  “You’re Annwn Allender.”

“I am me and I am you.  You and I are sharing forty trillion atoms right now.  This universe doesn’t know the difference between any of us.  That’s because there isn’t one.”

The pain in my head won’t go away.

“Your Superego wants to take you away from this world,” Annwn says.  “That’s natural.  Every human mind has one.  So why don’t you let yours take you away?”

Take me away.

She’s come to take me away.

Headaches.  Universes emerging from my head.  One trillion protons colliding.  Higgs boson.  Swan Nebula.  Macrocosmic snowflakes.

Rosa das rosas, e fror das frores.

Annwn smells sweet.  Citrus.  Lemon pies.

I want my mom.  It’s been half a year, and I want my mom.

“I can take you away from this dying universe,” the Pied Piper promises.  “I can bring you to a brand new one.  You know exactly what you need to do.”

She turns her head over her shoulder to show me her Great White smile.  I shouldn’t trust it.  Why shouldn’t I?  That’s the thing about Great Whites.  They don’t hunt you because they’re cruel.  They don’t know the difference.  To her, I’m just a hapless seal.

I go to school with an Annwn Allender.  An Annwn Allender with a blue ribbon in her hair.

Annwn adjusts her beret.  She laces her fingers atop her knees.

I look back at the apartment building behind me.

A few windows are boarded.  A few windows are lit.  A dog leash hangs uselessly from the broken parking meter out front.  Yards away is the underground parking lot.  Jude’s car is down there somewhere.  He built it himself.

Jude.

“I can’t.”

If I leave this universe—if I die—there’s nothing keeping Judas alive.  He said so himself.  He’s broken.  Probably more than I am.  If I die, I kill him.  I can’t kill my own brother.

“You can be with your brother in the next world,” Annwn tells me.

“But the Judas who’s right here…”

“Isn’t it true that all objects, all individuals are multitasking by virtue of wave-particle duality?”

Superposition.  Schrodinger’s Cat.

“You have to be objective, Wendy,” Annwn says lightly.  “You can’t save your brother in every reality.  I’m sure there’s a reality in which he’s already died.  I’m sorry.  It can’t be helped.”

I’m sorry.  It can’t be helped.

“That’s not what I want to hear.”

Annwn doesn’t answer me.  Her face is sleepy and soft.

“Kill one brother to spare a different brother?” I ask.  “Isn’t that cold?”

“Are they different?  I thought you said they weren’t.  I thought that’s what you told your doctor.”

I fall silent.

Annwn stands.  She brushes the imaginary grit from her skirt.  She stretches her arms in a soundless yawn.  I don’t know how she manages to be so graceful and so tactless all at once.

I know how.  She’s not real.  I’m imagining this.  This is all inside my head.

“You’re right,” Annwn says without looking at me.  “This is all inside your head.  But so is everything else you’ll ever experience in life.  The lime plaster frescoes from the Renaissance.  The concert pianist with agile hands.  There is no such thing as a reality free from perception.

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

* * * * *

I thunder up the staircase and into my apartment.  I slap the door shut behind me and lean against it.

Judas starts.  He mutes the television.  He looks at me from the sofa, slow, confused.

“There’s something wrong with me, Judas.”

He stands.  I hurry over to him.  Suddenly I feel small.  Suddenly I feel five years old.  All I want is for him to decapitate my teddy bear and hang me from the coat rack.

He reaches for me.  I bowl into his arms.

“What happened?” Judas asks.  He sounds the way people sound when they don’t want you to know they’re panicking.  “Did that boy—?”

“No.  No, Azel would never—”  Whatever it is he thinks Azel would do.  “I’m sick.  I’m really sick.”

“You took all your meds today.  I counted.”

“Not that.”

He sits me down on the sofa.  I spill my heart out.  I tell him about the hallucinations, the headaches.  I tell him about the swan and its elegiac song.  I don’t tell him I want to die.  He already knows that.  There wouldn’t be any point.

“Hallucinating is normal with a TBI like yours,” Jude says.  He lifts his hand.  He drops it.  Poor guy; I think he was going to pat me on the head.  He doesn’t know what to do.  Neither do I.  “Want I should call the doctor?  No way he’s in right now, but I’ll leave him a message.”

“I hate that guy,” I swear.  At once, I feel guilty.  “Hate” is unfair; I barely even know Dr. Moritz.  “They’ve given me all the medicine they can.  Right?  If there were a way to fix me…”

“You talk to your shrink about this?  Never mind,” Jude says at once.  “She’s weird.”

“They’re all weird.  They’re all creepy.”

“Don’t put a lot of stock in shrinks myself.  I still say I’d yank you out of there if I wasn’t afraid social services would move in like vultures.”

I shudder at the imagery.

“Kiddo.”  He tousles my hair.  It’s long enough now.  Imagine that.  “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.  But you should’ve told me earlier.”

“I didn’t want you to think I was a freak.”

He gives me a weird look.

“What?” I ask, taken aback.

“I’m covered in scars and I can’t smile straight.  You think you’re the freak?”

I almost want to laugh.  Almost.  “You’re not a freak, you just made bad choices.”

“I killed somebody.”

“So did I.”

Judas looks like he wants to say something more.  I don’t know what.

“I don’t want you leaving home without me or a friend,” Judas decides.

“What about groceries?” I ask.

“I’ll handle those.  I want your phone on you 24/7.”

It’s funny.  When Judas says the word “home,” I still think about Tillamook Bay.

“There’s no way to fix me, huh?” I ask.  I smile.

“You don’t need to be fixed,” Judas says.  So that’s a no.  “You’re fine the way you are.”

“I’m not normal.”

“Normalcy is a spectrum.”

He’s said that before.

“Jude,” I say suddenly.  “Don’t die.”

If I were in a better mood, I’d find it comical the way his face morphs: scarred mouth sagging, gray eyes rounding, like he’s just starting to realize
Yeah, my sister is crazy after all.

“I won’t if you won’t,” Jude compromises.

I expected as much.

* * * * *

It’s dark in my bedroom, the lamp on low.  The mess on the floor—clothes I need to wash—makes me think of Azel.  A paint canvas from school leans against the closet door, a watercolor swan emerging from a nebular sea.

I sit in front of the paint canvas in my Neon City pajamas.  A silver-gilt swan hangs from my right wrist.

Energy can’t be destroyed.  All we are is energy.  Our atoms come from the energy produced by the deaths of stars.  Our thoughts are bioelectric pulses.  Where do thoughts go when we’ve finished thinking them?  If they can’t be destroyed, they have to go somewhere, don’t they?  This universe will lose its mass one day and fall apart.  Our thoughts won’t.  They can’t.  They don’t have any mass to lose.  They don’t have any shape.

You can’t destroy consciousness.  Consciousness will always be here.

You can’t be conscious unless there’s something to be conscious of.

I stare at the watercolor swan.  The shadows from the lamp make her look hazy, indistinct.

Mom.  I want my mom.  I want my dad.  I want my best friend.  I want a world where Jocelyn and Kory can sit together in the same room.  I want a world where Dad goes fishing with Mr. Asad and Azel makes breakfast for his mother and he doesn’t have a scar on the back of his hand.

I want many worlds like that.

I want a world where Judas never went to prison.

If Judas never went to prison, would we be as close as we are today?  If Azel never lost his mother, would he have empathized with me the way he did?

They scare me.  These questions.  They scare me.

This world is already going to die.  Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe tonight.  Nobody knows exactly when.  That’s the Accelerating Universe model.  The more it expands, the faster it expands.  The faster it expands, the faster it dies.

If the universe dies in three days, and Judas dies with it, what’s the difference?  If he dies in ten years, what’s the difference?  Either way you look at it, he’s going to die.  We all are.  We are born and we die and nothing, absolutely nothing, can change that.

Now I sound like Kory.  We barely even knew each other before he started telling me how meaningless the human experience is.  There have been humans before us; there’ll be humans after us.  We don’t matter nearly as much as the universe around us does.

But he was also the one who told me we are the center of the universe.

If we are the center of the universe, I can’t see how we don’t matter.

What should I do?

Why do I have to fight so hard to want to live?  Why does my every instinct want me to die?

No.  Nobody ever wants to die.  All anybody ever wants is a way out.

I could leave.  I want to leave.

I can’t leave Judas.  If I die now, and the world dies three days later, that’s still three days in which Judas is alone.

I don’t want Judas to be alone anymore.  Not in this universe.  Not in any universe.

I’m trapped.

* * * * *

The next morning I toss our laundry in the lime green bin.  I drag it to the stale brown elevator and down to the basement.

The basement is dingy and cold, the walls scratchy and concrete.  One of the light fixtures on the ceiling is broken.  So are two of the five washing machines.  A sign on the wall lists the Laundry Room Do’s and Don’t’s.  Somebody scribbled a sharpie phallus all over Rule #4.

Hypnotized, Kory stares at the dryer on the wall, clothes spinning noisily behind the glass door.  I sincerely hope they’re his clothes.  Otherwise this is pretty creepy.

“Torque is fascinating, isn’t it?” Kory breathes.

“S-Sure.”

I sort my clothing piles.  I look for the detergent.  I find it standing in an empty litterbox.  Why is there a litterbox in the basement?  Cats aren’t allowed in this building.  If they were, Judas would have one.

A cat.  How much do those cost?

“Can we hang out later?” Kory asks.  “More importantly, is your pantry stocked?”

“Sure,” I respond.  I don’t know which question I’m answering.  Maybe both.

“Great!”  Kory beams.  “I’ve been reading up on the Chandrasekhar limit, I’ll tell you all about it.”

The washing machine whirs and sloshes noisily.  I dump in the clothes, the detergent.  Mom always said to let the washer fill with water first.  I don’t know why.  I close the lid.  Kory hops up and sits on it, his legs swinging leisurely.

He peers at me closely.  “You are in a sober mood.”

“Huh?  Sorry.”

“Penny for your thoughts?  Not that a penny can buy you anything these days.  Wow, that idiom has got to go…”