Axis of Aaron (64 page)

“Of course she can. She only sees one of us.”
 

“Which one?”
 

“Me.”
 

But that wasn’t right, was it? Ebon was speaking from two minds, his perspective flip-flopping between what felt like two equally valid points of view. In a sense, only one of those perspectives could be real. But it was impossible, as he looked between his doppelgänger and Aimee, to tell which one it was.

“Think about it for a minute,” said the nude Ebon. “For months, I’ve been in charge. I’m stronger than you. I feel happier. I feel better about myself. Frankly, I feel more worthy of the affections of a woman like Aimee.”
 

“But you
didn’t
feel worthy of a woman like Holly,” said clothed Ebon.
 

“Maybe that’s true in your version of events,” said nude Ebon, shrugging. “But in mine, I felt
plenty
worthy. That’s the beauty of being me, don’t you see?
You
want to see everything as horrible. And worse, you’ve decided to see yourself as the villain! You want to believe that Holly opened up to you, but that you shot her down. But don’t you see? We don’t need to have that memory at all.” He put a hand on his chest. “As for me, I’ve chosen to forget it.”
 

“You mean you’ve chosen to
repress
it.”
 

Nude Ebon shrugged. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
 

“I’m not just going to push it all down inside myself,” said clothed Ebon, shaking his head. “I won’t just repress everything Holly said and all she was. It would be a betrayal.”
 

“You don’t
have
to push anything down, don’t you see?” said nude Ebon.
“I’ll
do it! The only thing
you
have to do is
leave
. I’ve been working to push you out since the first days after Holly died. Earlier, actually — say, since things began to get heated in our discussions with Aimee and you started to feel guilty.”

“You wanted to push me out because I knew that we were cheating. That we were doing something wrong.”
 

Nude Ebon rolled his eyes. “I don’t remember our dick going near anyone but Holly.” He looked down at Aimee, still sound asleep, and laughed. “Well. Not before last night anyway.”
 

“It was an affair,”
insisted clothed Ebon. “Forget about the physical stuff. What about the emotions of it all? Who did we love? Aimee, or Holly?”
 

“We loved Holly as often as she wanted,” said nude Ebon with a smirk. Then the smirk turned bitter. “The problem was, it wasn’t enough ‘loving’ for her.”
 

“Sex. Not love.”
 

“And yet you want to forgive her for doing worse!” blurted nude Ebon. “Who’s repressing now?”

“I don’t forgive her.”
 

Nude Ebon chuckled.
 

“But I won’t
forget
her either,” clothed Ebon added. He looked down at Aimee. The fact that she wasn’t waking up was bizarre. But then his eye caught the window, and he saw that the snow he’d taken to be falling was actually still, every flake hovering motionless like a snow globe frozen midshake. On the CD boom box, “Wonderwall” continued to play on a loop.
 

“I hate this song,” clothed Ebon said.
 

“Really? “I have no particular feelings about it either way. But for some reason, whenever it comes on the radio, I choose to change the station.”
 

Clothed Ebon shook his head. “You won’t face reality. I will.”
 

“What is reality …
Ebon?”
He said the name with mockery. “You’ve only bobbed back to the surface, like an unflushed turd, recently. For months now, my version of reality has been the only one.”
 

“But it all fell apart,” said clothed Ebon, sensing a checkmate.

“Only because of you.” Nude Ebon shrugged. “If you’d permit yourself to be forgotten, life could go on fine. I don’t think about Holly except to resent her. In time, maybe I’ll come to forgive her. I don’t pine for the past like you do.” He gestured at Aimee. “I have all the ‘past’ I’ll ever need right here. Aimee and I had our time, but we were interrupted. Bad things happened. It messed us up for a while. We had to go through a Julia — and yes, a Holly — before we could finally circle back home where we belonged. We had fun with Holly; of course we did. But she was too much of a party girl for us in the long term. Too hungry. She had no filter, except the one that allowed her to see her actions the way she wanted to see them, rather than how they actually were.”
 

“Sounds familiar,” said clothed Ebon.
 

Nude Ebon made a sarcastic little frown. “I have no idea what you mean.”
 

“You’re erasing the past!” said clothed Ebon, infuriated.
 

“Yes, I’m erasing the past!” nude Ebon spat back. “Just like Holly did! Just like Aimee did! I’m sure
you
remember how Aimee chose her father over us, while we lay half-dead on the floor. But do you know what,
Ebon? I don’t remember that at all!”
 

“You’re lying to yourself. To me. To everyone.”
 

“Aimee is perfect! All is as it should be! I was hurt in the past, but life is finally good. Now I feel worthy of love, not stuck in the self-effacing bullshit you insist on wallowing in. Think about this as you clutch your self-pity: Which one of us is a better partner for Aimee? Which of us is happier?”
 

Ebon shook his head. “It all sounds perfect until you realize it’s not true.”
 

“‘True,’”
said nude Ebon, spitting the word out like a bad seed. “What does ‘true’ mean anyway, beyond our own interpretations and choices? Who is left to contradict whatever ‘truth’ I choose to believe? Who are either of us to pretend there is a truth out there that’s independent of what lives inside our minds? Holly is gone. Mark is gone. Aimee wouldn’t even disagree with my version of events. So who is there to contradict us?”

Still shaking his head, clothed Ebon said, “I know what’s real. I know what’s true.”

Nude Ebon threw his hands in the air, exasperated. “What’s so goddamn great about the truth? What has the ‘objective truth’ caused other than pain?” He began to tick off items on his fingers. “Truth gives us conflicted impressions of Holly, making us feel bad. Truth makes us unsure where we stand with Aimee. Truth forces us to watch the torment unfold in Holly’s journal — something I don’t think you’ve even fully seen. So let me take my hand off the head of a particularly dicey drowning memory and give you another truth you’ll love to wallow in:
Holly felt worthless to us.
Have you let yourself see
that
yet? Have you permitted yourself to recall the passages where, between bouts of ecstasy with Mark, she goes on for pages about how much she hates herself? Have you seen that,
Ebon?
Have you seen the two times she considered killing herself?”
 

Clothed Ebon felt the wind leave his stomach. His legs buckled. He’d read the whole journal, but somehow, he’d failed to connect the dots from end to end.

A sly, cruel smile creased nude Ebon’s lips. “Repressed that one yourself, didn’t you? Not so high and goddamn mighty all the time, are you? But if you want the truth, you have to take all of it, don’t you?”
 

Why did I read her journal at all?
clothed Ebon thought.
I knew what I needed to know already. Why didn’t I let sleeping dogs lie?
 

“The truth isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, is it?” said nude Ebon, pacing. “Haven’t we turned from other grim truths in the past because we didn’t want to know them? Haven’t we encountered macabre videos on the Internet and refused to watch them? Haven’t we seen homeless people with their hands out and passed without a glance? Haven’t we flinched from the news, deciding it was better not to know all the world’s evil than to be besieged by it? And yet you
had
to look at the journal, didn’t you? Because you had to
know the truth?
Well,
you
can face that horrible truth if you want, but I think it’s just unnecessary pain.”

Clothed Ebon was finding it hard to think. “We should have given Holly her privacy. We never should have read her journal.”

Nude Ebon smirked. “Speaking for myself,
I never did.
”
 

“We can’t just ignore everything that happened.”
 

“Why not? Life goes on.” For a disarming moment, the nude man softened, looking down at Aimee, wrapped in her blanket by the dying fire. “With her, as it should have from the start.”
 

“But it didn’t. And we can’t change that.”
 

“YES. WE. CAN!”
said the other, his words coming out challenging, through half-gritted teeth. He tapped his head hard, as if angry with himself. “Our personal past isn’t a matter of historical record! It’s not immutable or able to be contradicted! What’s in here is
all there is!”
Again he rapped his skull with a finger. “Have you found a time machine? Or are you like everyone else — living here and now, in
this
moment, with no ability or plans to ever visit those old times again? So what good are they to you? How does it benefit you to remember things in any way other than
how you want to remember them?
What’s so goddamn great and noble about the
truth?”

Clothed Ebon felt like he was stuck in a loop. He could only repeat what was already obvious, feeling weak, knowing his argument had no teeth but compelled to fight for it anyway.
 

“It’s true,” he said. “It’s what actually happened.”

“It’s arbitrary! Even people who stood by our side would remember things differently as our truth clashes with theirs. Holly would see a different version. So would Aimee. Think back to the day Richard found us with her.
Our
truth is that when forced to choose between comforting us and comforting her father, Aimee chose him. But do you doubt for a second that if we ask her about it when she wakes up, she’ll say anything other than ‘I had to calm him down in order to save you?’ Or Holly: do you think Holly would cop to being a cheating whore if she were here now, or do you think she’d say she felt lonely because we’d been ignoring her? That she’d needed to feel
special
and
pretty
and
loved
and
adored
, and that we’d stopped giving her those things years ago because our affection was on someone else? Someone who we’d always considered the end-all, be-all, effectively eliminating any chance Holly might have had?”
 

Clothed Ebon sat on the couch, clamping hands to his ears. Everything his opposite was saying made sense, but somehow his own argument had been twisted into a blunt weapon against him. It was true that there were many sides to every story, but where he’d been so sure that he should face his own side, the naked man said there wasn’t a point. There
was
no objective truth. So why not choose a reality that didn’t hurt his heart? Who would fault him for it? Who would even
know?
 

I’d
know. I’d have to look in the mirror every day. I’d know I was washing the face of a liar. That I was shaving the chin of someone without enough of a spine to …
 

He looked down at Aimee.
 

… to Own His Shit.
 

He stood, feeling a sudden surge of confidence.
 

“We cheated first,” he said. “We never stopped, not since we found Aimee online. When Holly reached out, we pushed her away. When Holly felt low and tried to open up, we made jokes.”
 

“That’s not the way I choose to remember it,” said nude Ebon.
 

But clothed Ebon was feeling stronger by the second. Aimee was still as motionless as the snow outside the window, but he now felt as if she were standing beside him. The deceitful version of himself could manufacture any past or present he wanted, but even
he
couldn’t pretend his way into Aimee’s allegiance. It was one thing to change memories inside your own mind, to create a version of events in which you were the hero. But it was quite another to win over someone as strong and bossy as Aimee. Someone who insisted on taking responsibility and never making excuses.

The blanket stirred. There was a strange doubling as a copy of Aimee emerged from the original’s skin. The new woman crouched beside her sleeping sister, then stood. She picked up a discarded robe from the couch and shrugged it on, then moved to stand beside clothed Ebon. Both of them watched the naked man, waiting. The original Aimee stayed sleeping on her side by the fire, eyes closed, oblivious.

“She’s not part of this,” said nude Ebon, disarmed.
 

“I choose to believe she is.”
 

“She’s just a projection,” he said, looking at the standing Aimee. He pointed to the Aimee sleeping by the fire. “That’s how she really is right now.”
 

“What is ‘right now’?” asked clothed Ebon.
 

“Now. Here.”
 

“While time is frozen. While I am standing in a kind of mindscape, arguing with a different version of my own memories. Is
that
the rational universe in which I should refuse to believe the impossible?”