We play together on the soft gray carpet. Friendly is twelve and likes swimming and drives trucks for a living, because everybody knows twelve is a very grown-up age to be. Lovely is his neighbor and an astronaut. The way Aisha plays, the way Aisha giggles, she's just the same as any other little girl. I wonder if she remembers her mother at all. I think it's a cruel world where there are children who can't remember their mothers. I think it's even crueler when there are children who can.
"I don't feel so good," Kory groans. He staggers into the room like a wounded veteran.
"I'll drive you to the hospital," Mr. Asad says, standing from his armchair.
"No, it's not that," Kory says. "I've been away from my polymers all night. They tend to grow rather temperamental if we're apart for too long."
"You're nuts," I say, laughing.
"No," Kory laments. "I'm allergic to those, too."
"Well, then," Mr. Asad says, "I'd be happy to drive you home."
"Would you mind driving me, too?" I ask. If we're going in the same direction...
"Of course, of course! So formal," Mr. Asad says.
"Thank you for having us, Mr. Asad."
"Let me go get my jacket."
Mr. Asad heads out into the hall. Kory sits next to Layla. Layla scoots away. Kory whimpers.
"Can I talk to you for a moment?" Azel asks me. He's leaning against the wall.
"Okay." I stand.
"Don't go," Aisha whines. "You're my girlfriend."
I reach for her hair, touch it with my fingertips. I think--in some peculiar way--it does feel like clouds.
"Thank you for letting me play with you," I say. "We'll play again next time, won't we?"
"If you want," she says sullenly.
I follow Azel into the kitchen. The sink is bursting with dishes. I fight the compulsion to turn the water on and start washing them. It's not that I really want to, but I think it would only be fair.
"Are you coming back to school on Monday?" Azel asks.
I don't know that it'll do me any good. If I fail this semester, it's my own fault. I smile. "Yeah."
"Good," Azel says. "I want to see your painting. I'm sure everyone does."
I doubt that's true--but it's nice of him to pretend. "Can I see you dance?"
"Probably."
I start to smile again. The memory of Azel's lips stops me. My face flushes until I can hardly see straight, until I think I might lose balance.
Azel stares at the ceiling. His face has gone red. That's always a good sign.
"Anyway," I start to tell him, nervous.
"I would buy drugs from you," Azel blurts out.
"I should--sorry, what--"
"Not that I'm a drug user," he assures the ceiling rashly, hotly. "But when we went to the library and you said--"
"Oh--the thing about the cute face--"
"Right--that's--"
"Oh."
"If I were a drug user," Azel says evenly, "I would buy drugs from you."
In a really, really weird way, it's the biggest compliment anyone's ever given me.
"Wendy?" And that's Mr. Asad. I can hear him calling me through the kitchen door.
"Don't, uh," Azel says. His shoulders slouch forward. His hands find their way into his pockets. Bad posture for a dancer. "Don't be a stranger."
I stand on my toes. I kiss his cheek. His face is so hot, his skin burns my lips at first touch. I don't think I've ever known a boy like this before.
"See you in school," I say, laughing around my words.
He smiles. He turns his eyes away. It's the kind of gesture that leaves you short of breath; because it's honest. So few people are honest in this world. Not to each other; not to themselves.
* * * * *
Judas arrives home about an hour after I do. He's so tired, he scarcely manages to drag himself into his bedroom before he collapses. I wish he wouldn't work so hard. I don't know what they're making him do at that computer repair joint; but with the money we got from the house closing, it's not as if he can't afford to calm down.
It's late, but I feel energized, fresh in body and mind. If I had to hazard a guess why, I'm sure it would start with A and end in Zel. It's strange. Joss was the one who was boy-crazy. Joss was the one who had a different true love every month. I never understood why boys and girls liked each other so much. Joss used to tease me for that. I understand now, and she's not here to tease me anymore. It's so surreal.
If I'm awake, I reason, I might as well try and finish the rest of my semester project. I retreat into my bedroom, change into pajamas. I pick up the palette on the floor and scrape the old paint free with my palette knife. I unwrap the covering from my canvas.
I've said it before, but if you're painting with watercolors, the paint itself does most of the work; it drips and bleeds in whichever direction it likes; your only job is to accommodate it, to try and predict which path it will take the before the brush even touches the canvas. In some ways watercolors are like diffusing a ticking time bomb. That's what makes them exhilarating.
I sit cross-legged on the floor, paint cans open around me. My brushes glide across the unfinished fabric. I alternate between sable for broad strokes, squirrel mop for short curves. A lot of people just use taklon, I guess, but synthetic hairs leave weird streaks. I think the art world isn't very kind to animals. Musicians want their stomachs for string instruments. Painters want their hairs for paintbrushes. If I consider it for too long, I'll depress myself. I'm sure that makes me two-faced. I wish it didn't.
By the time I've filled up the canvas my arm is cramped, my eyes are bagged; I couldn't possibly say how many hours have passed. Paint dries on my fingers and cheeks. My head is full of silence and completion.
The cosmos stare back at me. The dark sky is lit with hanging lights, white-gold, bursting with brightness, tinged with hidden layers of jade green. Stardust scatters behind the universe's nightlights in a glittering, fiery gold trail. I almost forget myself. I almost reach out to touch it. It's still wet. But alive. Beckoning to me from twelve billion light years away.
The room collapses around me. The walls fall away. The ceiling, the floor. I can't say that I didn't expect this. I can't say that I'm afraid. Ethereal space is blue-black around me. Galaxies glimmer like distant stars on the far-away horizon. Giant, universal nightlights hang suspended all around me like quivering spirits. They're so bright, cleansing to my eyes, flickering, hot gold searing into cool white, cool white speckled shimmering green. They're so intense, staining the welkin behind them with faint red-violet-red. They're stars. Newborn stars. Lustrous, like unearthed treasure. Alive.
The air ripples around me. I turn. Saffron stardust converges and bursts in cosmic waves. A new nightlight emerges. It rockets up into the sky. It finds an empty place and takes it and hangs there, white-gold, blue-green, a yawning, feckless newborn.
Again. It happens again. Everywhere around me, new stars rocketing into the sky, eating away the darkness.
"This is the Lynx Arc Supercluster," says a voice behind me.
I turn, startled. Space is supposed to be soundless. Who--why--
"Every five seconds," Annwn says, "a new star is born here. This is the only supercluster in the entire universe that can make that claim."
She looks blurry to me. Everything else is crystal-clear, achingly beautiful, but Annwn is blurry and ephemeral. I can't tell if she's sitting. I can't tell if she's standing. Am I standing? What would I be standing on? Maybe we're floating. But then we're not really here, not in body, anyway; we're not really anything right now.
"Every known element in the universe was created by the nuclear fission of stars," Annwn says. She tilts her head. She observes one of the newborns in--I think--curiosity. "Planets and moons. People. If there's a God, I'll bet he's a star."
"What do you want?" I don't think I want her here. I don't think I can ask her to leave. This universe doesn't exist for me alone.
"I don't really want anything," Annwn
says. "I'm just waiting for the universe to disappear."
This universe is disappearing. Every star that's born here in this supercluster is a death sentence. More mass the universe can't afford. Less space for the universe to breathe.
"Why do you act like that's a good thing?" I ask.
"It's lonely," Annwn says. "Millions of people live in The Spit. We pass each other on the streets everyday. In the halls between classrooms. We don't think to say hi. We don't even make eye contact. We'd rather live as strangers. We choose a select few to call our friends. Everybody else doesn't make the cut. Isn't that sad? Isn't it a lonely world we live in?"
I can't even yell at her. I can't say that I haven't had similar thoughts.
"And the few we do grow close to end up dying. Sometimes I wonder why we bother."
"Did somebody--?" She doesn't have parents. She studies Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner and his deceased aunt.
"Did you know?" Annwn says. "If you went to the Louvre Museum in Paris, and you wanted to look at every painting in the museum--just for thirty seconds, nothing longer than that--it would take you six whole months. That's if you don't sleep or eat or use the bathroom. There are thirty five thousand paintings in the Louvre. There are seven billion people on earth. It would take one hundred years of no sleep, no food, no facilities, to meet everyone on earth. That's not counting more than one hundred billion people who walked the planet before us. No one can live that long. I'm sorry. It can't be helped."
"Do you really want to meet every person on earth? Is it worth it?"
"Why wouldn't it be?" Annwn asks. "If we knew everyone as intimately as we knew the people we care about, we wouldn't be at odds with them every day of our lives. Imagine that. Imagine a world where we don't want to kill one another."
"That's impossible," I say.
"It shouldn't be," she says. "If only I could meet everyone in the world."
"You can't do that if there's no world."
"If there's no world, then there's no spacetime. I'd argue that the only reliable way to meet everyone in the world is, in fact, if this world were to disappear."
"But we would disappear."
"You don't know that."
Edmund Husserl, Jude said.
I take a moment to watch the stars bursting around me. They're so beautiful. They belong to a dying universe. This is a universe where my parents can't be friends with Azel's. This universe gave me so much. This universe took so much away. I don't know what to think. I love it. I hate it.
I hate it.
"Did you know," Annwn says, "science can't prove we have minds?"
That doesn't sound right. "Isn't that what neuroscience is for?"
"Neuroscience proves we have brains," Annwn says. "It doesn't prove we have minds."
"What's the difference?"
"We know which parts of the brain help us store memories. The prefrontal cortex processes short-term memories. The temporal lobe decides whether short-term memories become long-term memories."
That's--that's the part of my brain that's damaged. Isn't it? The temporal-parietal-occipital junction. And I'm always forgetting things.
"What else?" Annwn goes on. "We know the frontal lobe is responsible for impulse control, social behavior, decision making. We know the amygdala is responsible for our emotions. If you see a dead animal, and you feel repulsed, that's your amygdala's fault. If your amygdala doesn't work the way everyone else's does, we call you a psychopath. What about the subconscious? Don't you have a particular habit you can't attribute to memories or social cues? Something you do often, but not consciously? Maybe you like to cut the crust off your sandwich before you eat it. Maybe you bite your nails when you're bored. Those are subconscious idiosyncrasies. Science says we don't have a subconscious. Science even says we don't have personalities. No part of the human brain has been proven to play a role in determining our likes and dislikes. As far as science is concerned, we shouldn't have them."
"I don't..."
"I'd argue, then, that the mind is not solely restricted to what science does and doesn't know about it. I'd argue that science can't even begin to fathom the depths of what the mind is capable of. But science is right on one account. Thoughts are bioelectric activity in your brain. Bioelectricity is energy. Physics tells us that energy can't be destroyed. These bodies of ours will disappear someday. That doesn't mean we will."
This universe is going to disappear.
"Could there be more than one universe?" I ask, unbidden.
I remember the universe, galaxies drifting farther apart in a snowy, childlike macrocosm. I remember seeing double, my eyes blurry with pain. Two universes. I didn't think much of it back then. But now I...
Schrodinger's Cat. Superposition. Particles are like waves. Azel said so. That makes it real. Azel said there's another place out there. There has to be.
"Why not?" Annwn muses. She reaches for one of the errant stars. She can't quite reach it. It's too big, too far away. "We know our universe came out of a tiny particle we call the Higgs boson. Nobody ever said there was only one Higgs boson. All it takes is one trillion protons of energy to make another."
Kory said there are more protons in the human body than there are stars in the universe.
"This universe," I start. I stop.
"It's not worth it, is it?" Annwn says.
But there could be more. More universes. Maybe a universe where my parents are still alive.
A universe where Azel has a mother.
"Did your parents die?" I ask Annwn. Maybe it's too forward of me--but hasn't she been forward herself?
Annwn looks at me. For a moment I think I can make out her sleepy brown eyes. She's blurry. Is she even here?
Am I?
"It's so sad," Annwn says. "We share atoms. We share a biosphere. We are all one person. In which case, I have never seen anybody more intent to kill himself than we are."
11
Act Three
Monday morning. Skittish, I dress for school. I take my meds and pack my books and wrap my canvas in a sheet of bubble paper. I'll stretch the canvas later. I cook eggs for Jude and wrap them and put them on the stove warmer. I'm not very hungry myself. I drink a glass of orange soda; and then I leave for the lobby.
"This sucks," Kory complains. He's standing under the mailboxes, a giant cardboard box at his side. "Can't I just airlift it to the school?"
"Why didn't you sculpt it at school to begin with?"
"Sabotage, Wendy. We don't want the grubby underclassmen putting their little hands on it."
"I thought you were dating an underclassman?"
"Yeah, but she hates me."
It'll be winter before long. The Spit has yet to take notice. Warm gray winds barrage us the moment we step outside the apartment building. I hold on tight to my paint canvas. Kory grumbles about not having a car of his own. I don't think I'll ever want one.
We walk underneath the filthy overpass. We walk past the crumbling apartments. I want to see Azel dance. If I hold onto that sentiment, maybe I won't feel like I'm falling. When I hold still, I feel like I'm falling.
It feels like flying, Azel said.
"How do you feel?" I ask Kory. "Are your allergies alright?"
"Oh, sure," Kory says. "Just as long as I don't eat any nuts, shellfish, red vegetables, cinnamon..."
We step inside Cavalieri's pristine glass lobby. Heads turn our way. Eyes linger. I pretend I don't notice.
"I have a quiz second period," I tell Kory.
"Then I should hope you've studied for it. I have to run to the fifth floor. See you in Comp?"
"See you."
We take separate elevators. I board the lift to the thirteenth floor. Talk about falling. As the city drops around me, I feel compelled to drop with it. I feel compelled to close my eyes.
Another universe. A place where my parents and Jocelyn didn't die.
I'd give up this universe in a heartbeat. I think I would.
* * * * *
r /> I jot down halfhearted notes in Comp class, seated on the back bench beside a very indifferent Kory. Mr. Reiner goes off on a tangent about toward vs. towards. That's about when I lose all ability to focus.
"Kory?" I whisper.
"Hm?" He eases his elbow off the archaic wood table.
"Do you know how to find people by their social security number?"
Kory stares at me while Mr. Reiner rattles off example sentences.
"Whatever you're thinking of doing," Kory says, "I'm fairly certain it's illegal."
"What? No," I whisper. I really don't have to. In a room full of one hundred... "Another man died in the car accident. I want to apologize to his family."
"And you need his social security number for that?"
"It's the only information I could find."
"Just send a card in to the police station," Kory suggests. "They'll know where to find him."
I'm sure he's right. Still, a card seems cold, impersonal. I guess I could write a letter instead. But I'm hardly any good at putting words on paper. If I say the wrong thing, if I make it worse...
"Are you sure you should be doing this?" Kory asks. "What if you make things worse?"
Exactly.
"It's been almost half a year since that accident," Kory says. "His family may have just begun to heal. You don't want to rip open old wounds."
Half a year. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I can't believe it's been that long. How can it have been that long? It--it can't have. It feels like it was yesterday.
I touch the charm bracelet around my right wrist. The swan with her wings folded. Her head bowed.
I was behind the wheel.
* * * * *
In Precalc I keep an eye out for Annwn. I don't see her. I pass the quiz--by the skim of my teeth.
After Precalc is Studio. I unwrap my paint canvas, stretch it, and set it up on a spare easel. Miss Rappaport walks around putting stickers on the backs of the canvases and writing our names down in her log book. She gives me a watery, sympathetic smile. It makes me want to hide.