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For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.
He was uncommonly beautiful. “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.
“It’s short for Rinaldo,” Regan leapt to explain. “Oh, interesting,” Marc said, and briefly, Aldo thought about bees. Specifically, drone bees.
She took him in sense by sense: he felt certain, smelled permanent, sounded firm.
Aldo’s gaze on hers intensified, a chatter somewhere in his mind rising visibly to the surface. Then, abruptly, it went quiet. In his eyes, acquiescence was soft.
Focus looked right on her, vibrant and bright. She had her lip caught between her teeth, pink tongue slipping out every now and then in concentration, and Aldo was so fixated on her that he didn’t notice what she’d done to his hair until after she’d stepped back and looked up, meeting his eye in the mirror. She’d cut it short enough that it was more tousled now than curly, trimmed safely away from his eyes and forehead. He hadn’t necessarily cared about the outcome, but he found the results satisfactory; he’d been right to trust her eye, running his fingers over the subtle fade. “There,” she
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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 observations, wrapping his mind around her the way his fingers had done. Then he turned the vacuum on, permitting the sound to drown him out.
Sometimes Aldo thought a fall was precisely what he was waiting for.
“How do you feel about dancing?” she asked him. “My grandmother taught me when I was in high school,” Aldo said. “I know how.” “That’s not what I asked.” She caught the motion of him smiling. “Ask me later,” he suggested. “Okay,” she agreed. Six conversations, she thought with another rush of palpable disbelief, and still, she couldn’t wait to know.
“So within those parameters, some people are exponential functions, but still largely predictable. Regan”—Charlotte, he reminded himself too late, but dismissed it as a foregone error—“isn’t just difficult, she’s convoluted. She’s contradictory—honest even when she lies,” he offered as an example, “and rarely the same version twice. She’s confounding, really intricate. Infinite.” That was the word, he thought, clinging to it once he found it. “She’d have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do.”
“Not bees?” “Not bees,” he said, and handed her the blunt. “Bees are for you.”
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. She seemed to appreciate things she could see. He thought of her gaze traveling over the scars on his shoulders, taking him in. Yes, he would draw it for her, and then she would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he’d said it in a way she could understand, and then she would know that even this,
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He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.
He took another drag from the blunt as her fingers skated down, running lightly over his cheek and down to his mouth. The dark tips of her nails traveled the shape of his upper lip, curving with it, and in another version of this precise moment, he said, Regan, come closer, let’s see what happens, let’s see how the stars shine on your skin.
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.
Regan, he thought, Regan, this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.
“I seem like I’m looking for something?” “I think,” Aldo said slowly, “that if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here.” She looked up again, pausing the motion of her pencil this time. It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye.
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.
He let a moment stretch between them. “Are you ready to show me?” Are you ready? his green eyes had asked, Because if I let you in, I will not let you go.
She opens her mouth to apologize and he, unthinking—thinking only that he doesn’t want her to be sorry, that in fact “sorry” from her tongue should be reserved for only the most capital of offenses, such as disappearing from his life forever—he takes her hand and holds it, urgently.
He steps behind her as she pretends to scrutinize the dials. He rests his hand on her hips and she shivers. This time, it will all be for her.
“Oh, good,” she said when she woke to the sight of him, and that’s what he thinks while he kisses her. Oh, good. It’s you.
She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.
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? And she says, Kiss me. He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please. She kisses him back and she does.
The first time they fight, she knows she loves him because she has never been worth the fight before.
Before Aldo, love was concession.
Am I the girl who stays while others leave?
Of course he signed up for it. What? Of course he signed up for it, it’s what he wants. Why should someone else get her highs and lows? He wants them all, selfishly, possessively.
Yes it does, he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.
He had never kept much from his father, and Regan was no secret. What is she, your girlfriend? Yes, he supposed so, though it seemed a silly word for her. Well, what was she, then? She’s, I don’t know. What do you mean you don’t know, how can you not know? No, I know, I just don’t think the word exists. Mm well then tell me, where are we in time, Rinaldo? Lost, Dad, lost, I no longer understand what time is, how it works, what it does, I give up. Ah, Masso said, okay, I see what she is. What does that mean, Dad, what is she? She’s your … you know, your provocateur, she’s your disturbance. Big
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He liked her best when she was saying, with the twist of her fingers, You are already mine.
“We don’t even understand time, so how are we possibly supposed to understand health, which is a concept we made up? I don’t just feel differently about you—I feel more, a lot more. It’s like you woke up something inside me and it won’t be quiet. It refuses to calm down, and why should it? It’s not like ‘Oh, you make me happy,’ it’s not something as clichéd as that. You make me feel like I’m alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I’m not just a goddamn waste of time.” She paused, slightly winded, with a glance up at him. “If this is unhealthy or obsessive or whatever, who gives a fuck,” she
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My eyes are too big, everyone will know I’ve seen everything, they’ll know I saw the universe itself. They will look at me and they’ll think: This poor girl, she knows too much, she can’t go back. “I can’t go back,” she whispered to herself, refreshing a curl with a twist around her finger. Okay, her wide eyes said, okay, fine. Then get ready to move forward.
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.
“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.”
“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.” “But,” she said, and stopped. “But the bees.” She felt certain she could feel him smile. “Yeah,” he said, “the bees,” and she felt the weight in her chest ease a little, the sea that had risen to her ankles fading away with the tide.
I am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.
“Why six conversations?” the doctor asked. Regan cleared her throat, recognizing that this would be a very long, highly revelatory answer. Surely the cracks would show. But it had worked once, hadn’t it? “It has to do with,” Regan began, and paused. “Bees.” The doctor leaned back in her chair, nodding. “Alright, then,” she said. “Tell me about the bees.”
People thought addiction was a craving, but the difference was this: Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.
An ending is only an ending, she thought, when both parties agree they’ve reached the end.
All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float.
Of course it is! Everything is uncertain, he and she both know that by now, but there is a smaller certainty within all of the uncertainty, which is: The Truth. And what, he asks, is The Truth? That she will keep turning corners until she finds him.
