Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

It reminded her of a time when people still committed their violence eye to eye,

Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.

Because for once, in a moment that was either everything or nothing, there would be someone else in Regan’s universe, and from there everything would be as it was, only very slightly different.

He could get arrested for not-smoking or die at any moment, and then he’d have to do his thinking in jail or not at all, and the universe would remain unsolved. His work would never be done, and that alone was tragic, exhilarating, perfect.

“Well, fuck me entirely,” Regan announced to the room.

They see you closer than you are, but you’re further from reach than either you or they can imagine.

Because even when you know everything about how a piece is made, you’re still only seeing the surface.

For the record, Regan wasn’t the only one to speculate on the causality of it all. Aldo was a chronic wonderer, compulsive with his pondering, and therefore crises of meaning and sequence were fairly commonplace. But unlike Regan, whom he had not yet met, Aldo could be patient with the concept of nothing. Emptiness repulsed Regan, filling her with abject terror, but the concept of zero was something that Aldo had come to accept. In his field of expertise, resolution was difficult (if not fully impossible) to come by. Answers, if they were to arrive at all, took time, which was why Aldo’s specialty was constancy. He had a talent for persisting,

That was the risk with time, that knowing things or not knowing them could change from day to day.

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.

Someday, Regan will tell Aldo: It’s very human what you do, and at first, he’ll think, No, not true, because bees.

He didn’t sound insane, but he didn’t not, either.

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.

She half expected him to be inside every room she entered, or to be the footsteps just behind her on every set of stairs. She kept turning him over and over, analyzing the angles she could see and wondering what else she might’ve missed.

“Or I could keep talking about the Babylonians,” he suggested. “Mm. Tempting,” Regan said. “What else did they do?” He wondered what she believed in. Probably most things, or nothing. “Astrology?” “Ooh, yes, okay,” she said quickly, settling in. “Tell me about the Babylonians and the stars.”

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.

Churches were their own kinds of museums—with their devotion to ritual, at least, if not to God—and to exist inside of one was to dwarf oneself with inequity.

He wasn’t just unconventionally handsome, she realized. 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.

The lack of four doors and a steel frame around her altered her perception of her environment, freeing a new-old restlessness the further it and she began to blend.

He was sure now that she was an artist, whether she believed herself to be or not. She was constantly in the midst of an underpainting, imagining things as they could be before steadily making them true.

The speed of her hesitation.

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.

Do you have any opposition to octagons?” “Not my favorite of the geometric shapes, but they’re certainly not invalid.”

Plus it wasn’t really going to go anywhere.” “Why not?” “Oddly,” he said with another sidelong glance, “some people seem to have no interest in bees.”

“I think you can be physically involved with someone before you need them,” he said slowly. “And I think you can need them before you love them.”

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.”

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

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.

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

“Are you asking me to leave,” he said, “or to wait?”

You and me, you-and-me, you and me, my heart will burn a hole through my chest until I know, and I am not done, I can’t be done yet, this cannot be the ending.

Sometimes she hates that she didn’t possess the requisite lunacy to board that train, and the itch to mend it, to do so in some other way, has always stayed with her. It festered into an impulsiveness that will not disappear. She thinks: I hate that I didn’t get on that train, I hate that I watched him go and fade to nothing, and at first she thinks she loves Rinaldo Damiani the same way she loved the boy on the train. As if watching him go will haunt her for the rest of her life.

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 think you carry around a sadness from another life,” she said. “From centuries ago.” She traced his mouth, his cheeks, his eyes, practicing for something he would never understand. “You’ve just been carrying it around for so long that you can’t put it down, can you? It’s yours now. You’ve been tasked with looking after it.

But the body cannot come back, it cannot rebuild itself. It cannot suffer a loss and become what it was before, no, it doesn’t work that way. If she comes back, Aldo told his father, she will be different. Will she be less? Who’s to say (yes, definitely, but this was his nonna, and Masso wouldn’t want to hear it) but either way, she will not be the person you remember. She cannot be, even in resurrection, what she was in life. This was what Regan did to Aldo: irreparable damage to his former self. Regan was Regan, but she was also the loss of a former life to which he could never return. Of course he didn’t wish to, but that wasn’t the point. It could never exist a second time. He considered what she’d said—if it all fails, Aldo, go back and erase us, make it like we never happened—and he understood that while it would be a cruelty, it would be a kindness in equal measure. Because the old him was dead, and what existed of him now could die, too, a painful death, if he were capable of doing what she asked. What he was now, some toddler of a man learning how to breathe again, would be gone. His life before her, his life without her, the Parthenon, they would all be ancient rubble. Only stories would remain to give them value. Charlotte Regan had killed him once and she could kill him again, easily. She could kill him, and that was what Masso had feared, even if he didn’t know it. She could kill him, and now Aldo understood.

So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.

It was knowing what her children would look like, and what she would look like someday, when the youth was gone from her face and replaced by something else; by what? A mystery. It was a fucking mystery and Aldo couldn’t sit idly by while there were mysteries afoot.

She wanted to tell him, to teach him: Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.

Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

“Math is a difficult thing to love,” he said. “It’s precise and unforgiving, it’s evasive and it will never love me back, but I don’t have much of a choice, do I? It’s the thing that I can do that other people can’t, or that other people lack the patience for. Are there worthier things, more rewarding things? Yes, probably. But I don’t know what they are, they never showed themselves to me. Only math did.” “How unromantic,” Regan said, and it was meant to be a joke, but she thought for a moment she meant it. “Not entirely,” he said, and she recalled suddenly that while he believed himself securely fixed, it was really math that saved his life. His answer, which had not seemed like an answer at all at first, was that he had devoted himself to math because it had found him. He couldn’t imagine another life for himself because for him, this was not choice, it was simply destiny. Ah, so fate, Regan thought. So it is romance, after all.

“We map things,” he said, “and chart things, observing and modeling and predicting, because we have no other choice, and this is the language we have agreed, collectively, to use. Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.”

By the end of minute fifteen he was finally gone, turning abruptly and half-sprinting for the doors, and in his absence Regan emptied, watching all their alternate lives begin to wilt. She mourned them like her children, holding their lifeless corpses to her chest, and then she forgot them, slowly, each one vanishing without a trace, until she held nothing at all. Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it. Damn it, I love him.