“Michael.”
“Of course.”
Reynald’s silvered eyes narrowed as he sipped the last of his monkey-picked oolong. “Son, I know there are places you don’t want to go, and people you never thought you’d be asked to bring in. I wouldn’t ask you this if I didn’t know that we need them. That’s the cold truth of this: we need them.”
Flick, scratch, click. Paul inhaled, talked through the smoke’s exit. “I know.”
“Why?”
“Hmm?”
“This place—Why’d you bring me here?”
The wait—The weight of being whole draped the winter plains with a tougher skin than dustings of snow could provide. He’d dreamt worlds into realities, and this was how he now regarded the ghost space: more Minnesota January than Michigan February. He’d been to neither place, now never would.
The work-shined leather gloves were warmer than they’d ever really been. The realizations of ghosts were in the details of perception. There were trees on those edges, timothy spines interrupting the cadence of the frozen ground’s rises and falls. Grabbing and tearing one of the winter hay stalks without gloves would have been painful; the way timothy snaps, inserts itself into the palm when grabbed, when dry. Under gloves’ pressure, there was no danger, a buffer between red-stitched palms and infection. Ground those now-weeds into chaff. Alfalfa barely broke the snow’s surface; it was pliant, without will, bending to the white pressure and hiding until rising again, desiccated, in the thaws.
“If we’re going to make this work, there are things about me you have to accept.”
Alina walked to his side, faced the small snowed stone, one of dozens (hundreds, thousands?) across the ghost space. Glove reached for glove, but his hand was slack, not returning her attempt at reassurance through pressure. That place contextualized a particular, peculiar fear: he’s gone already, no hand in that glove; this is how distance feels, tastes of wind.
“Say something.”
“What do you—”
“Anything. Something.” But in that expanse, silence seemed the most appropriate discourse.
“I—”
“Not that, not here. There’s no way you could, not here.”
“Get out of my head.”
It hung there.
The glove under her grasp grew a framework of bones and action as it pulled away. He knelt before the stone, swept away the sugared surface. She thought of childhoods she’d not known spent building forts in the snow, a sunny day lying warmth, hardpack bleeding into snowpants, numbing knees and afternoon hot chocolate before suppertime. Snotty noses frozen solid. What semblance of a childhood she’d survived had had alternate definitions of forts, bleeding, and freezing.
“Know this: this man beneath me, this boy, he died because I chose typing over listening. Stayed home to finish writing a book and never looked at his warnings. Spent years trying to convince myself it wasn’t my fault, but I know…If I’d listened—”
“Paul, you—”
“And this one?” His bad knee locked upon attempts to rise, limped with a dragging right diagonally one row, one column. “She wasn’t nearly as passive a departure. Forced her away, murdered her in time. There’s a murder that allows the victim to persist. And persist,” he wiped the rock face, “she did, never knowing that she’d died. From the inside of a life based on lies, it’s easy to confuse continuation with happiness.”
“You’re—”
“A
Stumbled over two, up one.
“Paul, it’s—”
“She,” wiped the face, his own, “died in my arms. Do you still want this?”
“—not your fault.”
Pulled the gloves off, clenched hands to fists, smashed both against the ground. Compound fractures, each finger. Echoed across skeleton trees. The wind had stopped. She’d felt the impact across twenty silent feet.
He stood, dribbling blood and flecking fragments to the ground. Steam. One simple flash and his claws had repaired. Grabbed both gloves in one hand.
“I refuse to be the end of you,” stood in place, yet she walked toward his speech, “but if we do this, there’s no other way.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can’t,” another line burned across his temple, “but I do. I’m asking you to leave. Right now. Don’t be a part of this. I can almost see your face—You’re becoming integral.”
Proximity. Saw silver crawling behind his muddied eyes. Alina thumbed the new burn, allowed her palm to rest against the unshaven cheek. “I’m not leaving.”
He grabbed her wrist, considered removing her touch, but held her hand closer. Mouth played over appropriate sentiments, found none to voice. Some communications are solely internal approximations of external poetries.
Love is, after all, sacrifice, whether borne out in bitten tongues, arms wrapped around and stifling fears, nighttime combat over sheets and vying for higher percentages of a bed’s square footage. No one will admit to the fraction of hate rippling under love’s frozen surface, because to acknowledge that dichotomy would undermine the hesitant interplay that defines desire. Love is, after all, defined by loss.
Staff meeting.
West noted the unfamiliar, growing steadily more-familiar, silence whispering out of the stillness of the birth chambers. The ratcheting and slams of a million billion artificial canals had been replaced by the echoing nothing in which you could park the moon, if you were in fact driving it, ever since Judith had—
fused with Alina, the new woman walked in and took her place at the table. She still answered to Alina, Al, Cap’n Crunch, sweetness, but she was more. The god Judith had found home, and that home was somehow less mousy-haired, less banana-titted. She’d grown freckles for every transgression that she wore mostly on her shoulders and the back of her neck, a scatter across gently-angled cheekbones under upturned eyes. As she slid into her chair, utilitarian (the chair, completely, the woman, mostly), Reynald cleared his throat, and she raised her hand to preempt.
“Boys.”
And they were. Veritable sausage-fest. West, Reynald, Hank, Sam. The twins were elsewhere. The bear lacked balls.
“Where is he?” Reynald accented over the three words, the tension materializing in the acute angles of his fingers.
“Detox.” Her term for the silver chamber. Quickening, they all knew. More and more time in the mercury sea, leaching out, leaching in, a Chinaman’s attempt at karaoke. “Let’s hear it.”
“The Lettuce Brothers report A/O lock at eight under, hovering on Delta.” West let the glass tink the tabletop. Things were falling in the space outside of time.
“New sights, new sounds?”
“Fairly certain Tunguska, 1908, fourteen-seven.”
“Good. File under ‘sneaking suspicion.’ Next?”
“Bleedthrough tertiaries on 1994, 1998 lines, fourteen-seven.”
“Interesting, but no surprises. Next?”
“Lunar meteor impact, 2047.”
“Fourteen—?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Extrapolations?”
“Didn’t touch our target. Fucked thirty-three over, though. Moon collision. Sixth extinction.”
