Swansong (13 page)

“Do you, uh,” Azel says.  “Do you have a lot of homework?”

“Huh?”  But I heard him just fine.  “Yeah.  Uh.  Precalc, Studio…”

“They want you to paint something?”

“Nothing big.  Miss Rappaport just wants us to practice prestezza.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s this technique—you’re painting a human being, and you don’t paint in their face, but it still looks like they have one.  It’s like a trick of the mind.”

Azel nods distractedly.

I hesitate.  “Thank you,” I say.  “For—”

“Do you need—”

I wait to hear what he has to say.  He colors.  He rakes his hand through his hair roughly, like he’s trying to yank it out of its ponytail.

“Do you need help?” Azel asks.  “With Precalc?”

“Yes,” I say at once.

“Okay.  I’ll…”

“Come in.”

“Okay.”

He follows me past the barking dog, into the apartment lobby.  Already I’m a little embarrassed about the building; from the outside it’s shoddy, graffiti-strewn, but on the inside it’s even more derelict, somehow, the carpet sighing when you step on it, the ceiling patched with mysterious brown stains.  Azel’s kind enough not to comment.  We walk up the staircase with its loose banisters and squeaking steps.

Jude’s sitting in the sitting room when we step inside the apartment.  And—get this—he’s reading a
book
.  He whips his reading glasses off when I close the door behind Azel and me.  He stares at us for a good six seconds.

“I’m not gonna ask,” he says.  He puts his reading glasses back on.

Azel follows me into my bedroom, something Mom and Dad never would have allowed.  He tries to hide it, but his gaze is curious when he spots the colored sticky notes on the walls.  We sit on the hardwood together.  I unzip my schoolbag.  He looks at the sealed paint cans, and the wrapped bulk canvases, and the mound of clothes I still need to take down to the laundry room.  At least there aren’t any underpants in that mound.  I think.

My swan bracelet jingles when I tuck my hair behind my ear.  I wonder why I bother when I don’t have much hair to begin with.  My hands are steady; my head is clear.  If I still my thoughts long enough, I can forget that there was ever a car accident, that Dad’s not outside vacuuming the carpet, that Mom’s not in the kitchen baking a lemon pie.

Azel takes my math book when I offer it to him.  “Okay,” he says.  “The function is already graphed.  If the y-value increases with the x-value…”

Oh dear God.  “Uh-huh…”

He leads me through tedious problem after problem.  I wish I could blame my difficulty on my head; but I’ve always sucked at math.  Azel is surprisingly patient with me, even when it takes two and three explanations for any of the numbers to sink in.  If I’m annoying him at all—and I don’t know how I can’t be—he never lets on, his tone gentle, his expression mild.

“They say artists are usually bad with numbers,” Azel tells me.

I wonder if he’s trying to make me feel better.  “That would explain a lot…  Don’t you have homework, too?”

Azel takes on an evasive expression.  “I always leave it for the last minute.”

“Azel,” I say, surprised, trying not to laugh.  “How do you get good grades that way?”

“I don’t.  They don’t want us for our grades.  If they did, they wouldn’t call themselves ‘School of Performing and Visual Arts.’ “

“Still.  If you want to get into a good tertiary arts school…”

“A tertiary school’s going to look at the exact same portfolio Cavalieri did.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to sing or dance.”

He’s right, I realize.  “Well, now I feel taken advantage of.”

“How do you mean?”

“They don’t appreciate me for my brain.”

Maybe it’s the word choice.  It’s got to be the word choice.  It’s the only explanation for the both of us bursting into laughter.  It feels so good to laugh.  It feels so good to laugh with someone.  The laughter wells deep within my belly, so hard it hurts.  It’s the delicious kind of hurt.  I want it never to end.

Here and now, I don’t regret much.  I’m sure that’ll change within the next twelve hours.  Here and now, it doesn’t matter.

I might actually be lucky to be alive.

* * * * *

After homework I see Azel out to the landing.  Secretive remnants of his smile hide themselves in plain sight, the lilting of his mouth, the lightness of his eyes.

“Thank you,” I tell him.

“You don’t have to…  You’re welcome.”

I don’t know whether I should say goodbye.  It feels like there’s…  I don’t know.

“
Qadar
,” Azel says.

I smile unknowingly.  “What’s that??”

“Everything that ever happens—everything that will ever happen—was written down long before we were born.  It’s like the script for a movie.  Life itself is the finished film.”

It’s a scary thought.  “So God already decided our lives for us, huh?”

“No,” Azel says.  “We did.”

I can’t imagine choosing this—my parents dead, my best friend.  But, I suppose, if they chose it for themselves, if it was out of my control…

Why would they choose such a thing?  Why would anyone choose to die?

“Sorry,” Azel says.  “Don’t give it any thought.”

“No.  I…”  He didn’t bother me, I want him to know that.  “So life’s kind of like a play, huh?  And we’re so caught up in playing our roles, we forgot who we are underneath the masks?”

Azel pauses.  I don’t know that I can adequately describe the look on his face.  Contemplative.  But beautiful.

“I’ve always thought of it as a scrapbook,” he says.  “Filled with old photographs and memories.  And as we look through it, we’re so overwhelmed by the memories, we forget that they’ve already happened.  We forget that they’re just memories.”

My head pounds faintly.

“Your prestezza,” Azel says.  “Do you know what you’re going to paint?  Or not-paint?”

“I’m not sure,” I say.  I think I am.

“Freckles,” Azel says.  “You should those.”

My breath catches somewhere in my throat.

Azel looks at me.  He looks away.  “You have thirteen of them,” he says.

I never knew.  I never counted.

Say something.  I should say something.

“I’ll see you,” Azel says.

“See you in school,” I say.

He climbs down the staircase.  I mentally kick myself.  I watch him until I can’t see his curls anymore, until I can’t feel the belly-aching laughter that united us only moments earlier.

8

The Poincaré Conjecture

Saturday morning I spend watching cartoons with Kory in his apartment.  The Adventures of Cereal Man and Toasty Boy runs for two hours straight.  Kory sure gets a kick out of it, which I suppose is the important thing.

“Imagine living in a world where you’re edible,” Kory says dreamily.

“Uh,” I respond, concerned for his mental state.

“Actually,” Kory says, “I suppose we are edible, aren’t we?”

“Please don’t let’s find out?”

Kory’s apartment is Yuppie Central, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Meaningless squiggles hang framed on the otherwise bare walls.  A glass waterfall stands proudly where a hearth might be in a normal home.  The furniture is covered in protective plastic.  So are the floors, come to think of it, the plastic flecked with dried molding clay.

“Are you working on anything new?” I ask.

Kory stares at me skeptically, as if I’ve asked him whether the earth might not be round.  He unfolds his legs and stands from the floor.

“You can see it, if you like,” he says loftily.  And by the tone of his voice, I realize he means it as a great honor.

I follow Kory to the back of his apartment.  He rolls open an opaque glass door; we step into the room on the other side.  He turns the light on.  This is his bedroom, I realize, his clothes thrown absolutely everywhere—the floor, the computer desk, the oddly round and squashy bed.  On the walls hang arcane posters.  “WHAT IS QUARK?” one posits.  Another depicts a steeple suspended over what looks like a messy ball of bright string.  “Without Me,” reads the caption, “How Can There Be Mass?”

“I thought you were Jewish,” I tell Kory, confused.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” says Kory, affronted.

He throws open his closet door.  He turns that light on, too.

Now I know why Kory’s clothes are everywhere but their hangers:  He’s converted the walk-in to a workshop.  And when I say walk-in, I mean walk-in.  It surprises me that a closet of this size exists in an apartment building as ramshackle as ours is.  I follow Kory in.  It’s chilly in here; I’m not sure why.  The floor is wooden and smooth, the walls high.  Odd little plaster and clay sculptures sit on the shelves: a faceless yogi with four arms, an octopus in a baby carriage, a raven with its eye in its mouth.  My friend is insane, I realize grimly.  That’s okay.  He’s in good company.

“Here,” Kory says.

At the far back of the room stands a spindly little table covered in a rough cloth.  It’s what’s sitting on the table that stuns me the moment I see it.  I’m not even sure I can describe it and still make sense.  It’s a sparkling glass orb.  I don’t understand how it doesn’t roll off the table.  It refracts the ceiling lights in wintry, spectral auras, shades of snow-blue and twilight leaking puddles on the floor.  And I know I said it was an orb; and it is; but it’s not completely round.  Dozens and dozens of fractal glass snowflakes intersect through its center.  Their wings comprise the boundaries of the circle.  Their points touch the circumference and compromise its roundness.  The whole thing is like a snowflake made of snowflakes.  I never would have expected something so elegant from Kory.

“How did you
do
this?” I ask.  I don’t see a blowtorch anywhere.  I don’t know of any other way to make a glass sculpture.

“It’s sugarglass,” Kory admits.  He adjusts his glasses.  He grins bashfully.  The orb’s refracted light bounces off his earrings.  “So as sturdy as it looks, it’s very frail.  I suppose that’s fitting.”

“Why?  What is it supposed to be?”

“The universe, of course,” Kory scoffs.

I hesitate.  I entertain him with a smile.  “Nobody knows what shape the universe is.”  I don’t know much; but I know that much.

“Oh, but
I
do,” Kory insists.  “WMAP beams sent out into the universe travel a 180-degree path.  This would imply that our universe is flat.”

I frown at the glass model.  It’s beautiful, but it sure isn’t flat.

“So?” Kory prompts.  What?  I didn’t say anything.  “Grigori Perelman satisfied the Poincaré Conjecture when he proved in 2003 that all flat surfaces are actually spherical to some degree. 
All
flat surfaces, you understand.  We just can’t detect the curvature because it’s either too big or too small.  The same logic applies to those supposedly flat WMAP beams.  Our supposedly flat universe must be curved.  But the curve is so small, we can’t see it.”

Kory sits on the floor, legs folded.  He stares at his own creation like he’s trying to understand it.  I try to think of something articulate to say; but I can’t.

“Three-degree kelvin radiation is still being thrown off by the Big Bang,” Kory says.  “Did you know that?”

I shake my head.  “I didn’t.”

“And every time the pulses reach a distance of sixteen billion light years, they suddenly change direction.  They make a sharp sixty-degree turn and keep going.”  Kory’s chin falls on his hands.  “It’s the same with my model.  Each angle is exactly sixty degrees.  I measured them myself.”

“Kory, that had to have taken forever…”

“Obviously not, or I’d still be doing it.”

I sit with him.  “You really care about the universe, don’t you?”

Kory scratches his cheek.  “Sometimes,” he says, “I think it’s the only thing I can rely on.”

“What?  Why?”  Can’t he rely on me?

“Humans, by and large, are too unstable.  Most of them are busy killing one another, fighting over resources when there are more than enough to go around, shoving their interpretations of God down one another’s throats.  No, I can’t depend on them.  But then how can I depend on the universe, either?  I’ve never seen the cosmos with my own eyes.  NASA gives us graphs and articles.  NASA gives us pictures of Mars.  I can do that, too.  It’s called Photoshop.  How do we know there’s really a Mars?  Because a stranger says so?  We’re all indoctrinated to believe in something we haven’t seen for ourselves.  That’s the very pitfall the Scientific Method warns us to avoid.”

Seeing is believing, Kory tells me.

I saw.  Does that mean I should believe? 
The Neurological Dictionary
says I shouldn’t believe.  Science tells me seeing is believing—but science says it was all an accident in my brain.

No.  It can’t have been an accident.  Because that nebula—because I saw something I had never seen before—

But then maybe I did see it before, in a schoolbook, in a museum, and I forgot about it; and then my eyes pulled the memory out of my brain when I was at my most vulnerable—

I grip my knees.

“What?”  Kory peers at me.

“Nothing.”  I smile.  “You’re really talented, Kory.”

“I know that,” he says.  He frowns.  “But you look a little…consternate.”

I blanch.

“
Consternate
, Wendy, it’s not what you’re thinking.”

“Oh.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“I…”

I haven’t told Jude.  About the hallucination, mean.  I don’t want him to look at me like I’m insane.  I care about his opinion too much.  Maybe I care about Kory’s just as much.  He’s the only consistent friend I’ve had since waking up from the accident.  If I lose him…then what?  It’s selfish.  I know it is.  I’m comfortable around him.  I don’t want him to go away.

I change the subject.  “Did you say the Big Bang’s still emitting radiation?”

“Oh.  Yes,” Kory says.  “The universe is still expanding.  People talk about the Big Bang like it’s something that happened billions of years ago.  In reality, it’s happening right now.”

“So the universe keeps getting bigger?”  My head feels woozy.

“Think of it like a plastic straw penetrating a bubble.  You blow into the straw and the bubble gets bigger.  Of course, I’m sure you can see the problem with such a scenario—”

“The bubble eventually pops.”

“Right, yes.”

My stomach feels cold.  “There’s no way to stop it?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But it’s so beautiful,” I say.  I can’t stop myself.  “This universe.”  That nebula.  “It’s so beautiful, it can’t just…”

Kory averts his eyes from mine.  He suddenly looks tired, and bitter, and like somebody I wouldn’t want to be friends with.  But I know that’s not true.  I want to be friends with him.

“Artists are the most selfish people on the planet,” he says.  “Aren’t we?  What we create sustains nobody.  It doesn’t solve any of the universe’s countless problems.  It doesn’t do anything except evoke emotion.  It makes us feel good.  It makes our audience feel better.”

“Better about what?” I ask.  I can’t say he’s wrong.

“About themselves,” he says.  “It’s like medication without the prescription.”

Heavy thoughts.  Too heavy for me.  “You’re a very conflicted person, Kory.”

“I know.  That’s why I need art.”