Kory's shoulders droop. He rubs his elbow, the way I sometimes do when I'm embarrassed.
I feel as if I've lost a friend.
"You haven't," Kory says, his head rocketing up on his shoulders.
He's--he's really inside my head.
"Everything is inside your head, Wendy. That doesn't change anything."
"Yes, it does."
"How? Haven't I been looking after you all along? Haven't I given you some semblance of a normal life?"
I squeeze my eyes shut so the tears won't fall. "I wish you hadn't..."
"That's not true, or I wouldn't have."
I want to die. I can't stand this anymore. I want to die.
"Here I am," Annwn says behind me.
I turn around. She looks like Christmas came early. I guess that's appropriate, because Christmas is today. Her smile brightens her sleepy eyes. Her curls bounce around her shoulders, a blue ribbon tucked away within their folds.
Kory stiffens. "Don't you dare."
"That's not really your choice, is it?" Annwn says calmly. "Wendy, let's leave this world. There's nothing left here. Let's leave it to die."
"Don't!" Kory says. He draws closer to me.
I step back. "Leave me alone." Which one--I don't know which one--
"You're just going to let this entire universe die?" Kory asks. "After all that it's given you? You're just going to let it die?"
"It did give you something," Annwn says solemnly. "It gave you a family. But then it took that family away."
"Everybody dies," Kory counters, his eyes pinched behind his glasses. "We are born and we die and nothing, absolutely nothing, can change that. But it's only through the grace of this universe that you get to experience something in between. This universe is made up of spacetime. Your life is made up of spacetime. If you were ever pleased with your life, even for a solitary second, you have this universe to thank."
"What good is happiness if it doesn't last forever?" Annwn asks. Her head tips inquisitively to one side.
"Who says it doesn't last forever?" Kory returns. "Isn't that what memories are for?"
"With time, memories lose their luster."
"That's why you make more."
I am two people. One of them wants to destroy this universe. One of them wants to save it.
I am two people. One of them wants to kill herself. One of them wants to live.
My mind is fractured. I don't know that I can put it together again.
I don't know that I want to.
I lift my right hand, inspect my palmlines. Azel's charm bracelet is gone. I lift my left hand. Jocelyn's charm bracelet is wrapped around my left wrist. The silver-gilt swan's wings are spread out in dainty flight.
I don't want Jocelyn's bracelet anymore. I want Azel's.
I want Azel.
* * * * *
It's snowing outside. I can see it through the gaping factory window. A few flakes drift in from the balcony. I huddle for warmth beneath my wool jacket, my wool cardigan. I light the kerosene lamps by my easel.
The easel. Sinbad's still splashed across the paint canvas. I wonder if that painting is real. I can't remember the brushstrokes it took to get the water to lap against the bottom of his ship. I can't remember smudging the sun so it would leak through the translucent clouds. I don't remember painting it, but that doesn't mean I didn't paint it. I forget things all the time. Meeting with Jocelyn's parents to say goodbye. The accident in which I took Jocelyn's life. The accident that shattered my skull and my mind.
The bloated, half-finished door shunts open. I hear Azel's loafers on the cement, his soles soft. I hear the door budge shut and I see him walk over to me, his curls tied back in a ponytail.
"I got your message," he says. He unwraps a coffee-colored scarf from his neck. "You seemed upset about..."
He trails off at the sight of me. I don't know what he's seeing. I never do. I never can. You can only see the world through your own eyes.
"Wendy, what happened?"
I must look pretty bad, if that's where his mind immediately jumps. He leaves his scarf on the floor. He takes my hands in his.
His hands are cold with winter, brown and soft and scarred across the knuckles. His eyes are bright with concern. I've never seen a green that bright. Yes I have. In the cosmos. The sea of stardust from which the Swan Nebula emerges. His eyebrows are thick and black like the hairs of a paintbrush. His nose is curved. It's a little like a hawk's. A little like a swan's.
He looks real. He feels real. I can even see his breath, the fine, chilly mist that leaves his lips while he awaits my response.
"I haven't been going to school." There's my response.
Azel starts. "I think winter break doesn't end until the second..."
"I'm not talking about winter break."
His eyebrows knit together. He hasn't let go of my hands. Warmth passes from my hands into his. I can feel the exchange, the flow of energy.
Forty trillion atoms passing between us.
I met him in school. I haven't been to school.
I never met him.
"Let's sit," Azel says.
We sit together on his red silk prayer rug. Towers of books stand precariously around us. I spot the Rubaiyat atop one of them. A Plath collection atop another.
The Rubaiyat was so beautiful. Azel read its verses to me as we sat on the concrete terrace, the air much warmer back then, the sky alive and sentient. He read me the verses. I can still hear them inside my head. I can't have made them up. Something so beautiful couldn't have come from my head.
Universes pour out of my head. My head throbs with pain.
My head is throbbing with pain.
"Tell me what's going on," Azel says. His voice is nothing but concern.
I swallow, my throat like sandpaper. "Judas says I haven't been back to school since June."
I wait for it: the unpleasant reveal. Any moment now Azel will leap off the prayer rug and plash his forehead and say, "You got me. It's all been one big conspiracy."
"But we met in school." Instead, he says this.
"I know we did. I..."
How can I tell him that I didn't go to school? That I didn't meet him? I can't tell him he's a figment of my imagination. How can he be a figment of my imagination? He told me about his childhood in Nizwa. He told me about the dance troupe from Iraq, about his mom's profession, about his fear of airplanes. I met his father. I cooked with his father. How can that be fake? How can I tell him it's fake if I don't believe it's fake?
"Your brother thinks you haven't gone to school?" This is what Azel says.
"He told me I haven't. He told me--he said we agreed to it, back in September. That I'd take the year off."
Azel doesn't look convinced. "But you've definitely been to school..."
I remember. I remember going to school.
Kory--Annwn--they're inside my head. But Azel has met both of them.
Azel is inside my head.
But everything is inside my head. Everyone is inside my head.
Everything that happens happens inside your head.
"Could Judas be confused?" Azel asks. "Maybe that was the plan--you staying home from school this year--but it's not as if he's been going to school with you everyday. I have. Kory has."
Kory. Kory's inside my head.
Everything's inside my head.
"Are you lying to me, Azel?"
I smile so hard it hurts. I don't want to believe the worst of him. I don't believe the worst of him. He's been solace and refuge and kindness for half a year. That has been my reality for half a year. Only yesterday did reality decide to change.
Azel's hand is around mine. I realize he never let go.
"I told you before," Azel says. "I never lie."
Maybe that was a lie. Maybe this is a lie.
I don't know what's real anymore. I don't know if anything was ever real.
I don't know if I ever woke up from the accident.
"Wen
dy," Azel says. "Do you feel my hand?"
I do. It's so warm. It's so real.
"Isn't that real? Isn't this reality?"
This is our world-within-a-world. This is what we made together, he and I. If Azel were anyone else--Kory--Judas--this world wouldn't be the way it is. It wouldn't be solace and refuge and kindness. It wouldn't be escape.
That is real.
I just don't know how real.
* * * * *
My head rests on Azel's lap. His fingers sift comfortingly through my hair. Cold breath leaves my mouth and rises toward the ceiling, the ceiling rafters exposed.
I used to come to this place all the time with Jocelyn.
I wonder whether that's true.
I wonder whether I'm even here right now.
"Let me tell you a story," Azel says.
His legs are comfortable. His hands. I don't want anything else.
"The first time Sinbad sailed the ocean," Azel says, "he didn't really know what he was doing. He had a small, borrowed ship and a small but dedicated team. His only real goal was to get away from Sohar, to see what else might be out there. He was restless, and wanted an escape."
Escape. That's why I...
"His crew ran into a storm," Azel says. "And the storm wrecked the ship. But they were lucky enough to wash up on a nearby island."
"Convenient," I murmur.
"They waited out the storm. They dug a pit in the soil and crouched in it to avoid the lightning strikes. This island had a lot of trees, so lightning strikes were at the forefront of everybody's mind. But eventually the hurricane came to pass. So they got up; and they began to explore."
"Was the island populated?" People. We need each other. Seven billion strangers. It's so lonely.
"It wasn't," Azel says. "Sinbad had his crew collect provisions. He decided they would construct a new craft and sail back to Sohar."
"Did they?"
"The story isn't about whether they went home again. The story is about what they found on the island."
Azel has a low and calming voice. By nature, it wants to be quiet. I can't listen to his voice without feeling myself drift away. I can't have imagined that voice. I don't know why Judas wants me to think I did. Judas is wrong. Judas has to be wrong.
"One night," Azel said, "while Sinbad was building a fire, the island began to sing."
This universe is singing. Karl Jansky proved it in 1931. Those soundwaves were what pushed the galaxies apart, gave them their structure, their shape.
Rosa das rosas, e fror das frores.
The universe sits inside a black hole. The universe is singing as it dies.
"It was a whale," Azel says. "The whole entire island sat on the back of an ancient whale. Until that point, until that night, Sinbad never entertained the thought that the very earth beneath him could be a living creature. Suddenly he began to wonder whether the same was true of his own home."
A living earth. A living planet. A sentient world.
What does this world want?
We live in a Fine-Tuned Universe. If cosmic background radiation were even a single degree hotter than it is right now, this entire universe wouldn't be here. We live on a planet traveling 66,000 miles an hour around a sun traveling 500,000 miles an hour in a galaxy traveling 1,300,000 miles an hour around the universe. The galaxy flies through the heavens in the same direction as a swan.
And maybe the Anthropic Principle is right. Maybe it's true that the universe only exists in its present observable state precisely because we're observing it. Maybe Edmund Husserl was right when he proposed the exact same school of thought centuries earlier and called it phenomenology. To be conscious, there needs to be something you're conscious of.
But that swan.
The snow. It hasn't snowed in thirteen years. It's snowing now. I can feel it in the cement floor around us, ice-cold, and the ice-cold air blowing freely through the frameless window.
I can't bring myself to believe that this universe is ready to die just because I am. I am only one of seven billion people observing this universe. And I know I can't validate that. I know I can't prove that there's anything outside of my mind. That there's any mind but my own.
But the truth is, I can't prove the existence of my own mind, either.
Science says I don't have one.
What am I? I don't know. I could try and tell myself that I'm the only real person there is. I am the only sentient person in the universe. If I made that kind of an assertion, no one would be able to disprove it. But that's the loneliest kind of existence I can possibly imagine. Why would I even want to?
I think we're all Adam. I can understand why Adam split himself one hundred and eight billion ways. It's terrible, isn't it? It's terrible being alone. It's the most horrific feeling I have ever felt. Because we, as human beings, are not meant to be islands. We are defined over the years by the countless interactions we have with the people who cross our paths. We grow up under the care and tutelage of the people we call our family. We form new ideas, new loves, new memories, only by meeting people outside of our family. And that is what we are. We are ideas and loves and memories.
Being alone doesn't just mean having no one to keep you company. It means you have no room to grow. It means you are the Lost Boy who fell out of his pram in Kensington Gardens and stopped growing, stopped being.
You might as well not exist.
I don't know all the people who live alongside me on this planet. I've always found that strange, and lonely. We share something so tremendous, you would think it binds us together as brethren. Children in grade school often become lifelong friends after sharing lunch or pencils. We share the universe and we can't bring ourselves to be friends. What's wrong with us? Are we really so arrogant to think of the universe as our due? Are we really so stupid to think it's a coincidence that we're all here at the same time? If cosmic background radiation were even a single degree hotter or colder than it is right now, we'd all have died before we even drew our first breath. Our entire existence is contingent on one degree. It's a miracle we're alive. We're sharing a miracle. And we still can't bring ourselves to be friends.
I'm so lonely, I don't know how I haven't killed myself already.
I do know how.
It's the boy whose hands are in my hair. It's his soft, rich voice, his glittering green eyes. It's the kindness he has shown me, the world he has given me, the ability he has taught me--how to escape without running away.
I am two people. One of them wants to destroy this universe. One of them wants to save it.
I am two people. One of them wants to kill herself. One of them wants to live.
When I'm with Azel, I can be both of those people simultaneously. I don't have to choose.
No one really wants to die. They just want to escape.
* * * * *
It's so cold in here. It feels like Heaven. I've always thought that Heaven must be cold if it's up in the clouds.
That's actually kind of dumb of me. Warm air holds water vapor better than cold air does. So it stands to reason that the clouds are hot, too. Burning hot. Heaven is really more like a Hell.
I tell Azel as much and he smiles. He wraps his scarf around my neck, tucks it into the collar of my jacket. It's soft and plush. It feels so warm. It feels so real.
I lie back on his prayer rug. He lies with me.
"I'll tell you another story," Azel says. "This one is about Sinbad's last voyage."
Why is there a last voyage? There shouldn't be. They should go on forever.
"One day," Azel says, "Sinbad was sailing on his own, on a raft. He came to an unusual series of sea cliffs and discovered there was a cavern beneath them. Inside that cavern was a river."
The River Styx? No, that's Greek. I need a penny for the ferryman, just in case I die. I think I might. I don't know for sure. Kory said a penny can't buy you anything these days. Kory was wrong. Kory's not real. Kory's inside my head. But everything is inside my head. That's what
makes everything real.
"Sinbad followed the river," Azel goes on, "and emerged in a jeweled kingdom called Serendip. The people there had wings, like those of great birds."
"Angels?" I ask. Heaven. But Heaven is a Hell...
"Sinbad certainly thought so. He even fell in love with one of them and married her."
"Oh," I say. I like love stories. Every story should be a love story.
"Once a month, the people of Serendip took to the skies in search of God. When that day came, Sinbad's wife took him with her. What they saw can't be put into human words, so I won't even try. But up in the heavens, so close to God, even a man like Sinbad was overcome. He cried out, 'Alhamdulillah!' 'Praise God!' "
"Then what happened?"
"The people of Serendip turned on him."
"They--why...?"
"They weren't angels. They were devils. Every month they took to the skies to try and kill God, not praise it."
Kill God. Can we kill God? I think if I could kill God, all my problems would solve themselves.
"So Heaven really was Hell," I murmur.
"That's what I think," Azel says. "This might sound crazy. You've been through so much this past year... But just listen for a moment. I think if we were happy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months a year, it wouldn't be happiness anymore.
"How do you mean?"
"It would be the status quo. We wouldn't have anything to compare it to. We wouldn't have anything to look forward to." He hesitates, unsure of himself. "Am I making any sense?"
I think he is. It's crazy, but... If Christmas were everyday, it wouldn't be Christmas anymore. Right?
Today is Christmas Day. That's bizarre.
"Religion promises Heaven for your devotion," Azel says. "It's because the religions know how miserable we are on earth. They use our misery as a bargaining chip. But I think we'd be just as miserable in Heaven, if not more. After some period of time, we'd have to come back to earth just to get away from it."
"Reincarnation...?"
"I don't know. But I've told you before that I think we go on forever. Brand new atoms don't spring from the ethers every time a baby is born. This universe likes to conserve resources. Every part of us is recycled from somebody before us."