Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

One of Aldo’s considerations when it came to time was how long it took, conceptually, before things became ordinary, unspecial. People were so easily desensitized, so helplessly numbed when it came to the repetitive nature of existence.

Her smile was more practiced than either Regan’s or Charlotte’s, he noted. It had a look of frequent rehearsal.

She, Aldo guessed, would be more inclined to appreciate the compliment, but he suspected that if the younger Regan would find such a thing untrustworthy, the elder would tuck it away somewhere and use it to power her electricity.

He made a point to ask her later: Do you imagine things? Is your life a dream or a chart? Have you thought of this or this or this?

Try not to stare at the ceiling when other people talk, Masso usually said, which Aldo found difficult.

Then she was quiet as only she could be quiet, with every motion impossibly loud.

let’s see how the stars shine on your skin.

You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.

whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun,

The glow from the window illuminated pieces of their silhouettes, her right side and his left. With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other’s reflection.

Those eyes in real life were weapons, or possibly anti-weapons. They had kept her out of prison, he was sure of it.

She could pry apart his ribs and leave him there, gutted, doe eyes wide with I didn’t think it’d be so wet.

this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft. “I can’t give you that,” she said, but he only heard it after he felt it, the shutting of the doors and barring of the windows. Somewhere inside her she was triple-checking the locks, swallowing whatever keys remained, tossing them into flames and melting them down to be fashioned as jewelry, as armor, as chains. She was remaking herself as a vault and he felt it, the way she drifted away from him, even before she slid her hand from his.

There was blush in there to mimic innocence, bronzer to imitate sun, gloss to postulate desire. It was a bag full of lies and somewhere at the base of it were orange translucent bottles calling for her attention, summoning the liar to her rightful place. I’ll take them, she thought, I’ll take them now, it’ll be fine, I was going to anyway, and she was.

Art was emotional truth and she had none of that, not one single truth, and this bag was proof of it along with everything else. And anyway, it was one of her failures, and those were meant to belong exclusively to her.

It didn’t feel the way she thought it would. Not like it had in the past. This time it was more like live wire, electricity in her bones, catching fire.

“How are things with Marcus?” “He wants to know why I don’t come to bed.”

The grey of the sky outside was nearly blue. She could see the values in it now, again. She could look closely now, again.

“You sound,” he began, and then stopped. “Good,” he decided. The word he’d meant was bright, perhaps even blinding, but it didn’t make sense, and she laughed again.

She used to dream like that, in nothing but lines and patterns and textures. Art was a language of both limitless vocabulary and limited syntax; endless concepts to express with boundless opportunities to express them, but only a finite number of ways to do it. Color, line, shape, space, texture, and value, six elements in total, which was newly revelatory to her until she realized why, running her finger along the edge of the key. Bees.

she pulled her sketchbook closer, surreptitiously blocking his view of her drawings with her arm. Would he recognize the hand, the shape of the palm, the angle of the fingers? Had he seen them reflected in her eyes the way she’d seen them in her mind? Probably not, but she wasn’t ready for him to know the outlines of her thoughts, to see the geography of them.

That was all art was, wasn’t it? The blatant exposition of the inside of her head.

Art, a voice buzzed in her ear, was creation. It was dissecting a piece of herself and leaving it out for consumption, for speculation. For the possibility of misinterpretation and the inevitability of judgment. For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice. That, her mind whispered, was art,

“I don’t want to do fabrics right now,” she said, stepping conclusively away from his closet. “They’re an illusion, and besides, I don’t like any of yours. I want to show how the shadows really fall.”

That he was naked felt somehow much less relevant than the fact that she would be analyzing him, theorizing him in her own way, clothes or no clothes. He felt suddenly very conscious of what it was to be an equation.

Time. Once upon a time. Time to begin. Time and time again. Time after time. Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.

“You don’t actually want things to be easy, do you?” he said. “No, not really. But I wish I did.”

It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye. Though, he reminded himself, maybe if he committed it to memory then he could return to it in another shape, with better understanding.

The most distinctive space was the one unseen between his eyes and thoughts, separated by what seemed to Regan to be a distance of miles, eons, light-years.

“What’s it like,” she murmured, “thinking so much that your whole body changes?” “Fairly normal by now.” He paused. “When I’m not in motion, I feel sort of … stagnant.”

It is thinking, What time is this? and it doesn’t mean six o’clock, it doesn’t mean evening, it doesn’t even mean dinnertime, it just means, Where are we in the cosmos, because I have lived this so many times in fantasy that it has become six different forms of reality and now, tell me, which reality are we?

He is a mathematician, a scientist, and he is precise in his waiting,

She wakes around four and seems disoriented—How did we get here, down here in this ocean?—and then finds him and comforts herself aloud with “Oh, good.”

Because people want to be romantic about everything, they want to give names to the stars, they want to tell stories. Love is a story, that’s all, until she fights with him for the first time.

Later she will forget what the argument was even about, only that it happened, and most importantly that when she said???, he said!!!, and did not dismiss it.

He doesn’t do any of that, instead he!!s when she??s and when she!!s he??s, and she should be annoyed, she knows. She should be irritated or tired, the way people always are with her, but she isn’t. Instead she thinks: 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.

only instead he surprises her, says: I love your brain. She doesn’t know what to deal with first, the use of “love” or the fact that it isn’t what she was expecting, or the idea that anyone can possibly think fondly of her brain when she has put almost no effort into molding it. Her body, that’s easy to love, and her personality, whichever version it is, is specially crafted for every occasion. She has always been studious of other people, despite what her mother thinks. Her mother believes she rebels just to rebel, just to provoke, but that, Regan thinks, is just another form of study. She understands what people want from her, knows when to give it or not. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that the success of a rebellion, knowing what people want, so to vehemently deny what others so desperately desire? Regan has always been good at that, at making people hate her or love her depending on her mood, but she has never given any thought to her thoughts.

No no, he wants to be very clear: that’s not how math works. God, he’s doing this now? He’s very interested in accuracy, he sits up to graph it for her: x is how long you know a person, y is how well. Maybe he has only known her for x, but look at all this exponential growth in y. Look how steep this curve is, does she see what he means? Yes, grudgingly she sees it. What’s his point? He doesn’t have a point, he just wanted to tell her. She thinks he’s incredibly weird. He knows. Is she okay with it? Okay with it? Fuck, he has no idea.

He’d like her to be honest if she wants to be but if she’s going to lie then he’d like to be in on it.

She needs something, first. An idea. An impossible problem? (He’s teasing, but she’s serious.) Yes, that. Something worth devoting all her thoughts to.

he thinks he can feel them (he-and-she them) changing their shapes a little. And he’s been this-shaped for so long that he could do with some expansion.

how time only exists within their understanding of what time is, even though time is probably something else entirely. But they still call it time, because that’s what everyone agreed to call it.

He wants to hold her but he can’t. He’s holding her right now, see? (He is, loosely.) Not like that, not physically. He wants to … mentally hold her? Kind of. Sure. If she can make sense of that. (She can’t.)

He could feel new paths of thought, those previously untraveled for self-preservation (things dismissed for reasons of: not a practical question, impossible, would never work this way) becoming worn beneath his feet.

Everything was as it was before, as it had been each semester prior, except for little, subtle differences. The extra helmet he kept strapped to his backpack, just in case. The checking of his phone more often, waiting for her name to appear on his screen. The extra key on the ring, freshly cut and polished, for when she was awake at three in the morning, her voice a hoarse whisper of “Aldo, you have to see this shade of blue right now, I want you to see it with me; I want to watch you see it for the first time.”

Her voice was bitter, tasting like anise now.

“Regan, do you like mushrooms? Truffles?” “Yes, I love it all, I’ll eat anything—” “She won’t, Dad, she’s lying, go easy on her—” “Be quiet, Rinaldo, the adults are talking.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”

She stared at herself in the mirror and thought: 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 thought you wanted things to end amicably. Didn’t you say you wanted to be friends?” “That’s just what people say, Marc. I’ve never been amicable in my entire life.”