Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

was it because she had been vacant where he was vacant, and therefore both would inevitably seek to be filled?

believed that a continuous trajectory of “light cones” toward the future meant that one could always return to the same point in space-time.

“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”

If he were a “right now” sort of person, he’d probably get on his bike and drive it directly into Lake Michigan, which was why it was probably best that he wasn’

She wondered what she was doing out there in all those mirror-shards of lives unlived.

Fortunately or unfortunately, she believed in everything and nothing.

REGAN reaches for the bottle of pills and says nothing. She wonders how long it will be until she feels something again.

Everything was so cyclical. So predictable. At one point, Regan’s court-appointed psychiatrist had asked her how she felt about being alive,

she’d given the doctor a more tolerable answer and they’d both gone home satisfied, or something.

But it is my professional belief that her bouts of depression and mania make her easily led astray by others.”

When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but it isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

It isn’t constancy that keeps us alive, it’s the progression we use to move us. Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.

If I’d known I would meet Charlotte Regan in the morning, maybe I would have gotten some fucking sleep.

Their brains aren’t designed to wonder. A useless evolution,” he muttered to himself, “but here we are.”

If she were to paint him, she thought, nobody would even believe her.

It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.

Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this.

Regan always felt most secure in the hands of a man with no misconceptions of her flaws, because for better or worse, he would not be swayed by the possibility of their resurgence.

Regan suspected that Marc liked her a little broken; he liked expressing concern for her health, because caring for her made her grateful to him and therefore secured her as one of his treasures.

“Only if you’re looking for the truth in an object,” she said. “But if you want to identify an emotion, or a sensation, then there is nothing more precise than art.”

She typically liked to be a mirror of whoever she was with.

Part of Regan irrationally resented the girl for not knowing that Aldo Damiani was closest to handsome when he was talking about bees.

she agreed with Aldo’s position that not every hypothetical situation was worth pursuing.

“I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.”

though the thought of Regan influencing a child’s development was charming in a way. A slightly troubling, very amusing way.

“Because if you don’t have something to figure out, then you have no reason to keep going?”

The thing about women and clothes was, in Regan’s mind, that nothing was ever a permanent expression; it wasn’t any sort of commitment to being this type of girl or that one, but purely today, I am. It was just whichever version of herself she wanted to project for the time being.

She understood the compulsion to seek out more space. To lessen to a speck of nothingness.

He wasn’t just unconventionally handsome, she realized. He was uncommonly beautiful.

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.

“I—” Don’t hold hands with anyone ever again.

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

“We both know you’re happiest when you’re causing a scene,” he said,

Sometimes she was a marvel, brilliant, creative, witty; sometimes merely predictable, spoiled, manic, vain.

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?

She had a distinct ability to take up space, he thought.

Fascinating, really, to see what she saw. Bewildering that she could turn something in her mind into something real. Practical magic.

He wandered to the hall closet, noting the places she’d been. Here. Here. There.

His mind retraced the shape of her touch, replicating its patterns and shapes; linking observations together. The speed of her hesitation. The force of her breath. He turned her over in his head, facts and details and observation...

“Just tell me if this is some sort of … episode.” She blinked with surprise, turning to look at him. “Excuse me?”

Regan bristled; he hadn’t asked Have you taken your pills? but she could hear it, the implication that she had not.

“Fine, Regan. Here it is, no bullshit: Fuck him if you want to.” She tried not to flinch, though she was certain she’d recoiled to some degree. “You know why it doesn’t matter? Because you’ll come back to me,” he said, and again, it was a disconcerting mismatch; soft words, hard intentions. “Because I know you. Because I get you. You think you want excitement, you think you want new and interesting, but babe—” He stepped toward her, coolly brushing her hair away from her face. “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?”

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.

“We’re the same, Regan,” Marc reminded her. “It’s not pretty underneath, is it? But you don’t have to be anything else for me. You can be your fucked-up self,” he said with a laugh in her ear, lips brushing her cheek, “and I’ll still be there, even when everyone else turns away.” His sweetness was always moderately bitter. His candor was never without some bite.

(Haven’t you been paying enough attention to run?)

She had a need, several needs, that she could never manage to extinguish. But people didn’t like needy, so she’d learned to transform it. To bury it, cleverly disguised, in someone whose compulsions matched hers. Complementary shapes into fitting pieces. Flaws, she thought, were just vacancies to be filled.

He’d once asked his father what it had felt like to meet his mother. “Like jumping off a cliff,” Masso had said, and not in a way that invited further questioning.

He should tell her she looked pretty, he thought, though that was probably an underwhelming word.