Axis of Aaron (58 page)

“I screwed up, Aimee. I don’t know why it matters, but I keep thinking about Holly. About this one night, after we started dating, after we’d been together a few weeks. We were in bed. After sex. Just talking. Do you remember?”
 

Ebon shook his head. Why the hell would Aimee remember that? She hadn’t been there. If she
did
somehow remember, it would mean she was the wrong Aimee. And she might well
be
the wrong Aimee, come to think of it, no matter what she told him. Holding the memories apart — holding one stream of events away from the other — felt incredibly difficult. In one of those streams, Ebon remembered being able to manipulate the world around him and tried to do it now, but nothing happened. He couldn’t keep the winter from coming. How could anyone halt the inevitable?
 

“I wasn’t there, Ebon.”
 

“Of course. Of course.” He nodded to himself, trying to make his feet move quickly in the sand. He couldn’t run. If he ran, he’d lose control, and whatever was trying to press into his skull would succeed. He felt one body of reality on one side and another reality on the other. One of those realities had to be true, and the other had to be false. But what if
neither
was true?
 

Ebon shook his head. He’d cross that bridge if he came to it. He had to reach Redding Dock. That truth had become increasingly clear, leaving Vicky’s with an itching sort of discomfort and feeling pressure mount by the step. Vicky had been one kind of anchor and Aimee another. But Redding? Between the two sets of realities — or three, or four, or fifty, depending on how he counted — Redding was the only thing that had stayed the same throughout all of them, right down to the initials carved into the bench at its end.
 

“You weren’t there,” he continued, “but it’s bright in my mind. Shiny like a beacon. The colors are vivid. The sounds are sharp, like the song. You know the song?”
 

“Which song?”

Ebon shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. The
song
. The feelings, the sights, the sounds. But most of all, this one memory. I can see it all now, even if I try not to. The way her hair was spread on the pillow. A mosquito bite near her wrist. The way her lipstick had smudged, just a tiny bit, into this shape that was like half a heart just below the very middle. We’d made fajitas the night before, like a full twelve hours earlier, and I could still smell cumin in the air. And cayenne. You know?”
 

Aimee, out of breath:
“I don’t know,
Ebon!”
 

“I want to see it — and I don’t want to see it at the same time. It’s like a balloon inflating. I can squeeze it to try and keep the size down, to keep it from growing, but it’s getting air whether I like it or not, and it’s going to pop. When it does, I’ll … well, I guess we’ll see what happens.”
 

Aimee sounded like she was sobbing, but half of that had to be exertion as she chased him from the south. Ebon chanced a look back as he neared the pier, but he’d already rounded the bend, and the beach by the cottage was out of sight. Would she even be running toward him in the same reality? Until they both reached Redding, they could be anywhere. Anywhen. Anywhat.
 

“Keep talking, Ebon.” She sniffed heavily. “Do you feel dizzy? Do you smell anything funny? Are you seeing spots, or stars, or anything else?”
 

Ebon almost laughed. He was seeing
everything
. He was smelling
everything
. The world was a jumble. A stew of his life, in all its many forms.
 

“Where are you now?” she said when Ebon didn’t answer.
 

“Just past the pier.”
 

“I’m catching up.” He could hear the wind in the phone’s pickups as Aimee ran, the thudding of her feet, the swish of her clothes. “Do you see me?”
 

“I’m around the bend. But I don’t think I’d see you anyway.”

“Because the trees would be in the way?”
 

“Because
everything
would be in the way. How can I know you’re even you?”
 

“What are you talking about?” A heavy sniff. “Oh God, oh shit, oh damn. Just hang on. I’m coming.”
 

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Aimee faked a laugh, assuming he’d made a joke.

“Seriously.” Ebon could see Redding ahead. Its top surface was white rather than red, but that wasn’t a change in Redding’s reliable, rock-solid persistence. It looked white because it was wearing a quarter-inch blanket of snow, January blooming from an October afternoon. “I mean it, Aimee:
Tell me something I don’t know.”
 

“I don’t know what you mean,” she panted, her breaths short and rushed.
 

“Tell me about flowers.”
 

“What?”
 

“Tell me about flowers, Aimee. Something I don’t already know. Something you’re sure you haven’t told me before.”

“Why?”
 

“Make it complicated. Full of jargon. Something I’d never be able to pull out of my ass in a thousand years, even if I were trying my best to fake it, or to impersonate you.”
 

“Impersonate
me?”
 

“Tell me, Aimee!” he snapped. His feet slipped on the snow. Recovered. Holding things upright — holding
himself
upright, both inside and out — felt nearly impossible. The going was getting harder. The short, pulsing time cycles were deepening the snow around him, chilling his ankles. Ebon wondered if his solution was a fix after all. Even if he
did
make it to Redding Dock, he might just freeze to death atop its boards. And wouldn’t that be bitter irony?

“Okay,” she said. A deep sniff. Then she began speaking, her words punctuated every few words by a pause for breath. The jittering rub of the phone on her end increased in frequency, as if she were running faster.
 

“Ecuadorian roses use an automated hot-water heating system that allows the climate in each of the greenhouses to be individually monitored and controlled with the ideal temperature and relative humidity to prevent diseases, without the use of pesticides. This gives them a high petal count and clean foliage. If you want to maximize the vase life of your flowers, you have to be aware of their changing and transport them to vases that will support their new size as you get rid of the oldest flowers. And only idiots use scissors to cut the stems. Everyone else knows you should always use a sharp, non-serrated knife to cut an inch from the bottom at a 45-degree angle in a small bowl of water, because that’s the only way to prevent air from permeating the stems and aging the flowers.”

When she finished speaking, Ebon was maybe a hundred yards from Redding Dock. He was so close. But the effort to soldier on, under the weight of the growing and brightening memory of Holly, had become almost unbearable. He wasn’t going to make it. He was too tired. He wanted to lie down, to disappear, to let whatever was supposed to happen, happen.
 

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you were supposed to leave them in the same vase until they all died.”
 

On the other end of the phone, Ebon heard Aimee vent a surprised laugh, the sound choked with shedding tears.
 

“I’m tired, Aimee,” he said, falling to his knees.
 

“Keep walking!”
 

“I need to sit. I need to lie down.”
 

“Goddammit, Ebon! Don’t you fucking dare!”
 

“I tried. It’s too much. It wants me. It’s here. I’ve been trying, but I can’t stop it.”
 

Aimee shouted between gasped breath and hitching sobs from a sprint.
 

Ebon’s vision was clouding, the time cycles around him now shrinking toward equilibrium. It was winter, the time of dying. Autumn had gone. He was cold, too cold. The memory, on the other hand was warm: two bodies under sheets and a comforter, his tired bones eager to lie down and join them. To
become
them.

He looked back along the white beach, trying to see her approach. But “her” who? But
who
was he trying to see? He couldn’t remember. Was it Holly? Vicky? Aimee? Yes,
Aimee
. But he could see nothing other than sand and snow and a skim of ice. The winter must still be new. It took a lot for salt water to freeze over, but in a long enough, cold enough, deep enough winter, he’d always felt like he’d be able to skate to the mainland. The idea was childlike, stirring memories of being nine years old, before he’d known any of them, any of those stirred and combined and shaken women, when life had been simple and bold, tying ice skates to glide across a frozen inland lake only to find uneven ice under his weak ankles.
 

“Ebon!”

“It was you first, Aimee,” he said into the small, cold brick of metal and plastic in his hand. “But now I see the problem. I never gave Holly a chance to be second.”
 

The phone slipped from Ebon’s ear. He watched it disappear into the snow as his face crashed into white powder, chilling his skin, wrapping him like a corpse’s blanket.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Who I Am

“CUTE.”
 

“NO, REALLY. WHO AM I?”
 

Ebon reached past the pillow, aiming to move aside the mop of blonde hair covering Holly’s face. She must have been able to see past it, despite appearances, because she slapped his hand deftly away before he reached the first strand.
 

“I don’t know. A very satisfied woman?”

“Who else?”
 

“I don’t know.”
 

She whipped her hair back with one hand to show her piercing green eyes. “I was Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.”

Ebon laughed, returning her witticism and following her lead into idle banter. He felt content, but odd at the same time. He had the most curious sense of watching the conversation unfold through known-ahead twists and turns. It felt like they were following a script. He could pre-guess everything Holly said (and then, in turn, his required reply), but mostly he didn’t care. The comforter was warm, and Holly’s nude body, beside him, was warmer. Life was good. Better than it had any right to be, in fact. Or, for that matter, any right to remain.

Holly spoke her parts of the script. Ebon spoke his. Ebon saw her lips move and felt his do the same. The whole scene was numb and predictable, guided from the outside as if they were puppets. As if Ebon were an observer watching a play from inside the lead actor’s skin. He could do nothing wrong, nothing right, only what was real. Cognition wasn’t required or worth the effort. Only the moment, here and in this second, mattered.
 

“I will always be down to fuck you, Ebon Shale,” said Holly, faux-serious. Then she laughed.
 

But Ebon, with a fondness like nostalgia, could only smile. Who wouldn’t want to fuck Holly Moone? She was twentysomething, ripe, vibrant, and perfect. The kind of girl Ebon had always dreamed of. They constantly laughed, and made love just as much. They were the perfect couple — in many ways like he and Aimee had been, but in other ways the exact opposite. Aimee had always been a tease. With Aimee, he’d had a playground version of love. Then with Julia, he’d found comfort blended with inexorable pleasure. Holly, on the other hand, was a blend of both women —
sans
Julia’s emasculation and control, of course.
 

Ebon felt himself slipping, as if dropping along a greased sliding board. Both body and mind seemed to sigh. The moment was perfect. Ideal. He spoke, but barely noticed. Moments passed. He felt like floating, flying, dipping into and out of his own mind.

“How did we end up together?” he found himself asking.

Holly said, “I saw what I wanted and went after it.”
 

“But really. I didn’t exactly see myself with someone like you.”
 

Holly made a frown. “That hurts.”
 

Again Ebon felt the sensation of slipping down a greased board. More time passed. He saw it, felt the exchange, slid along the moment’s warmth. When he dipped back down into himself, Holly was again speaking as she always had: Blunt. Direct. No filter at all.

“Why don’t you fuck the terror right out of my body?” she purred.

It was an arousing suggestion, but Ebon felt drained. They’d just had sex moments ago. And still, he felt as fresh as he did spent. He felt an afterglow, but it lived beside a distant pining, like something from long ago.

“I can’t just keep going like that, over and over,” he said.

Slip.
It was like God had pressed fast-forward. Ebon found he didn’t mind.
 

“That’s a big difference between us, you know,” he told Holly.

“What?”
 

“Sex.”
 

“We both like it,” said Holly. “Problem solved.”
 

“Yes, but your …
appetites
… are beyond mine.”
 

Ebon felt the moment sharpening around him. The script suddenly seemed foggy, less rehearsed with each spoken line. He still felt like a voyeur to his own experience as if watching a favorite film, but now the twists were harder to recall. Why couldn’t he remember the ending? He should know how a favorite film ended, shouldn’t he? But he didn’t remember at all. Or had perhaps once remembered, but somehow made himself forget so he could be surprised the next time he saw it. Memory was like that. If you wanted badly enough to forget something, you could.