Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

He didn’t sound insane, but he didn’t not, either. “You think bees know the secret to time travel?”

“Something has to kill us,” he agreed. “We already live far longer than our peak reproductive years. After a certain point we’re just overusing resources.”

“You’re making me feel like a zoo animal.” “I like zoos,” Aldo said. “Everybody likes zoos. That’s not the point.”

“What did you learn?” he asked neutrally. That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.

“There she is. Queen of chaos.” Chaos for chaos’ sake. Regan’s staple, and what made her such a fucking laugh.

Sometimes she was a marvel, brilliant, creative, witty; sometimes merely predictable, spoiled, manic, vain. It was never particularly cruel, but it was always honest.

And how are your moods?” the doctor had asked. The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking. Every time a pill sat in Regan’s palm she suffered some new strangulation; a faint memory of some distant need to force her heart to race. She’d crave a senseless rage, a dried-up sob, a psychotic joy, but find only pulse after pulse of nothing. Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she? “Managed,” she’d said.)

“You know he’ll see through you eventually,” he murmured to her. “You’ll put on an act for him, won’t you, the way you do for everyone—but it just exhausts you in the end, doesn’t it?”

Complimentary pieces in a perfect, shitty puzzle, where she was the broken one and he was normal. She would always be sick and he would always be fine.

Men loved that. They were so fucking easy. The whole thing was so tragically primal.

That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don’t go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun. Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.

Time, and sometimes floods. Every ancient culture had a flood story. There must have been one, something to sweep them all away. The earth had been vengeful then.

They don’t tell you how close smoking is to setting yourself on fire. Some days, he enjoyed the act of it more than the outcome. The sense that he could burn something, trap the smoldering of ash inside his chest, and then breathe it out like some sort of omnipotent god. Fires, floods. Plagues and locusts.

Sometimes Aldo thought a fall was precisely what he was waiting for.

Her discomfort was, for him, an insurmountable distraction.

Above him were stars. Beneath him was grass. There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. He would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it.

He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.

You’re making a mess, you’re flailing around like usual, did you take your pills? Did you hold them in your hands, cradle them between the lines of your palms and let them remind you how ill you are, how sick, how desperate?

You’re going to make a mistake with him, Charlotte. I don’t know what that mistake will be and neither do you, but it doesn’t matter, you and I both know you will. Will it be worth it, just for his hands on your skin? Will it be worth him slipping through your fingers, bleeding through the cracks in your constitution, just to be reminded you’re the kind of person people leave? Maybe it will, because look at his mouth, look at the shape it makes when his eyes are on you. You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy.

Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It’s him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he’ll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you’ve always understood that. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.

He could slide away the strap of her shirt and discover what, until now, remained only hers. (Hers, and whoever else had been given permission to see it. Hers, and whoever else possessed some version of this moment with her, touching and not-touching within the shelter of a darkened room.)

Regan, he thought, Regan, this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.

Something is wrong, she thought, something is right. Something is definitely wrong but the something right is bigger, somehow, closer to truth. Wrong the way truth is when it’s right.

You and me, you and me, you and me, Aldo, Aldo, Rinaldo, I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice. The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.

It’s a fire. I used to burn out, now I just burn.

She couldn’t look away from his face, which did not say: What’s wrong with you?, but instead, said: Hi. Hello. Nice to meet you.

“You can’t fix me,” she whispered to him, her mouth tracing his neck. Do you understand, do you know what you hold in your hands, do you know how readily it breaks? “I don’t see anything to fix,” he said.

Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her. What a waste, and then he says aloud, JesusfuckingChrist what have you done to me?

Am I the girl who stays while others leave?

I love him, and for a moment it doesn’t matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

Oh, you love my brain? Well, do you love it when it does this thing, or this thing? Do you love it when it means I’m lifeless on the floor, curling my tongue around a pill or a stranger’s dick? Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent? Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?

She should know right now that the secrets of the universe aren’t in his dick.

“I want you to expect—no, I want you to demand,” she amended. “I want you to demand things from me, to tell me to make this work, to force me if you have to. I want you to bet on me, Aldo. I want you to make investments, I want your future.” The last part slipped out. “I want your future, Aldo. I want it for me.”

“Jesus, we’re fucked, aren’t we?” Yes, yeah, probably.

“I only know that I loved a woman once like her, who saw the world as she does: like a flame she can’t hold between her fingers. I only know that a woman like that isn’t afraid to burn, that she will drag you in with her, and I know she will come out laughing and you will not.

If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.

She wanted to cry, needed compulsively to suffer. Jesus, she thought, you really have a fucking problem,

When she talked to him, she tried to make all her words beautiful, sensual, like she was painting for him with her voice. She didn’t tell him the depravity of her imaginings, or the repulsion she felt with them, or with herself.

Marc babysat rich pricks for a living, Aldo solved the mysteries of the universe. Where the fuck was the comparison?

“Oh, sure,” Marc laughed, “he loves you the way you are, of course. Because he doesn’t fucking know what you are.” “And what am I?” “I don’t know, nobody knows, but he certainly doesn’t fucking know.” She felt a rage she didn’t understand; an anger she didn’t know how to direct. “Just wait, Regan, until he figures you out. You’re complicated at first, unpredictable, exciting, but eventually you’re just a pattern. You feel something, you lash out. You get soft again, you don’t want to be alone, then you’re Dream Girl all over again. You think you want sex? You don’t want it, Regan, you need it. You need it to remind you that somebody loves you, and you won’t believe that unless there’s sex involved. That’s it, that’s everything there is to you, isn’t there? You need to be loved, you need someone to believe you’re perfect, you hate being reminded you have flaws. I already figured it out, so you needed someone else. Someone new. And when he figures you out, you’ll just find someone else. You fucking love the con, Regan. You love the con, but the con doesn’t love you, you’re not good enough at it. Your game is a lot less fun when it’s the same shit over and over.”

She’d diffused the situation. Good job, Regan. Another day for him to believe you’re something close to sane.

Aldo, I cry when it rains, I pick fights sometimes, I don’t know why. I look at the sky and feel this inexplicable sense of dread. I’m afraid that everything will end; are you ever afraid like that?

You don’t need me, I need you, and it will always be like that, unequal like that. I will always cling to you in gratitude and you will always be kind, you’re just made that way. You’ll let me do it but eventually I will make you unhappy, and then it will be on me to leave, because you are much too good to give me the ending we both know I deserve.

The idea that even he didn’t recognize happiness when he felt it was comforting, in some way. She was comforted by knowing he was equally as stupid and hopeless as she was.

“I was thinking about the way the water felt hitting my ankles, the way it could pull me away. I thought about how easy it would be to disappear, to get dragged under the waves and be lost forever, but you were standing right there, and I thought … all I’d have to do is reach out.”

“I don’t think you can ever really know a person without fucking them,”

If any sexual organ is omnipotent it’s the fucking cunt but no, penises are the ones who get to decide whether a woman has value.

You see, Charlotte? Nobody wants you, nobody has ever wanted you, you’re irresponsible with the love of others and so they lose interest in you, they always will.

Why had he left, why hadn’t he said to her this time, “I love your brain even when I fear it,” why why why? The effort of asking herself felt like the loneliest thing of all, and the silence that followed was deafening.

To you, my fellow mortals with your gorgeous little fractures: your crazy is your magic. Your wildness is what makes you. Resilience is your talent. Burn, but don’t burn out.