Swansong (18 page)

“The technician come today?” Jude asks.

“Yeah.”  I’m back in pajamas.  I don’t need to look pretty for my brother.

“Good.  He fix the thing with the thing?”

“Jude.”

“What?”

I lean back against the kitchen counter.  I choose my words carefully.  I don’t want him to think I’m mad.

“I was driving the car,” I say.

Jude pauses with a mouthful of muffin.  I’d probably find it funny on any other day.

He swallows.  “Who told you that?”

“I read the news articles.”  I scuff my socks against the ceramic floor.

“Hell.”

“Can I ask…?  Why didn’t you tell me?  Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

Jude shrugs.  “Didn’t want you to find out,” he says.  “Best case scenario, you’d never ask questions.  I’d never answer ‘em.”

I nod, but my heart’s not in it.  I was driving the car.  Everything’s different now.  Yet paradoxically, nothing’s changed.

“Wendy.  You ever tell a lie to someone just to make them feel better?”

“No,” I start to say.  But when I think about it—sure I have.  How many times have I told Joss I liked that skirt on her, that shade of lipstick?  You don’t want to hurt your best friend’s feelings.

“Sometimes lies are better than the truth,” Jude says.  “Sometimes the truth only brings unnecessary complications.”

“Unnecessary?” I ask.

“You knowing you were behind the wheel doesn’t change what happened to you.  It doesn’t change that your parents and your friend died.”

“And a stranger,” I say distantly.  What was his name?  Galloway?  His family…

“The thing is, suppose you were adopted, but you never knew.  Suppose you died never knowing you weren’t biologically related to your family.  Does that change anything at all about the way you lived your life?  From your perspective, you only ever had one pair of parents.  That’s the reality you knew.  There’s no such thing as a reality free from perception.”

“Is this kind of like the tree falling in the forest when there’s no one there to hear it?”

“You ever hear of a guy named Edmund Husserl?”

I shake my head.  I take a seat at the note-laden table.

“He was a mathematician,” Judas says.  “Jewish guy from the Czech Republic.  If you’ve ever been pissed off in algebra class by terms like ‘real numbers’ and ‘integers,’ you have him to blame.”

“Nice guy.”

“He also coined a philosophy called Phenomenology.  Ever heard of that?”

“No.”

“Yeah, you have.  You just don’t know it.  How about the ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ dilemma?”

“As in, ‘Which came first’?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

Jude takes another muffin.  He really shouldn’t.  The pilaf…

“To be conscious,” Judas says, “you need something to be conscious of.  Right?”

“I—I guess so…”

“So how do you know the rest of reality wasn’t just added for that purpose?”

“What are you saying?”  I know what he’s saying.  My skin’s gone cold.

“There’s no such thing as a reality free from perception.  The sun is bright because it hurts our eyes.  If the sun doesn’t hurt our eyes, is it still bright?  If we’re not here to perceive reality, then reality might as well not be here, either.”

My head hurts.  The room tilts in oscillating shadows.

Jude puts his muffin down.  Suddenly he looks pensive.  Suddenly he looks remorseful.  That must be a really bad muffin to evoke such strong feeling.

“Wish I could promise I’ll never lie to you again,” Judas says.

“But you can’t?” I ask.

“No.”

He’s my brother.  Brothers are supposed to lie to you.  Brothers are supposed to decapitate your teddy bears and hang you from coat racks.

A chilly weight rests in my stomach.

* * * * *

Later that evening I sit up in bed, my cell phone open on my lap.  I need to charge it soon.  I need to buy milk.

I take in a deep breath.  I dial Mr. and Mrs. Jordan’s phone number.

I haven’t spoken to Jocelyn’s parents since August.  Even then, I don’t remember it.  Even so, I couldn’t possibly have known back then what I know now.  I couldn’t possibly have apologized to them for it.

I killed their daughter.

I have to say I’m sorry.

The phone rings a few seconds before a high-pitched beep reverberates in my ears.  “The number you have dialed has been disconnected,” an automated voice informs me.

I snap my phone closed.  I stare at the tangerine lid in consternation.

If I had to guess how likely it is that Joss’ parents moved away—I’d say, “Pretty likely.”  It’s the same as my not wanting to live on Tillamook Bay anymore.  The absence would have haunted me.  I might have killed myself.

Maybe I should have.

Mr. and Mrs. Jordan probably changed residence.  I bite down on my tongue.  I hope they didn’t divorce.  You hear about that a lot—couples growing apart when they lose their child.  I hope…

There’s another possibility, of course.  And that is: that I’ve dialed the wrong number.  That I can’t remember my best friend’s telephone number because my head’s so broken, so porous, I can’t trust my own memories anymore.

I lay the cell phone on the nighttable.  I resist the urge to throw it across the room.

* * * * *

Thursday morning.  I almost went to school today, except I woke up with teeth fresh on my mind, my dreams riddled with Great Whites.

I won’t be surprised if I flunk this year.  I think I deserve to.

Jude leaves for work and I put the television on for noise.  I sit on the sofa, massaging my temples.  I try and talk myself into tackling my semester project.

There’s somebody knocking at the door.

My main problem, I think, is that I’m rash.  When I’m acting on impulse, I tend to miss the obvious.  Only in hindsight do I realize how stupid I was.

The front door has a peephole.  That doesn’t mean I think to use it.  I swing the door open as soon as I reach the knob.

Annwn’s rosy red hair is pinned up at the back of her head.  A beret sits sideways on her crown.  She looks like she’s visiting
from the 1950s.

I check and make sure she’s not carrying a violin.

For a moment, neither of us speaks.  She looks at me, and her eyes are pale brown; sleepy, but unsmiling.  Her mouth is fixed with what I want to call determination.

“Go away,” I mutter.  There’s no strength behind it.  It’s childish.

“Kory gave me your address,” Annwn explains.

That never occurred to me.  I assumed she followed me by scent, like Great Whites are inclined to do.

And maybe I’m too tired to fight back; or maybe I’m smart enough to know there’s no fighting a creature with three thousand teeth in its mouth.  I step aside.  I let the shark right into my home.

She closes the door with a quiet click.

“I’ll call my brother,” I warn her.

Her eyes pass between my hands.  No, I’m not carrying my cell phone.  Stupid.  I’m so stupid.

Her eyes land on my charm bracelet.  Jocelyn’s present hangs from my right wrist.

“Did you know,” Annwn says, “that our galaxy flies in the same direction as a migratory swan?”

I stare at her.

“It’s true,” Annwn says.  I can’t interpret the tone of her voice.  “The Milky Way is traveling 1,300,000 miles an hour across the cosmos.  Its orbit takes the exact same shape as a swan’s migration route.  Cree Indians were the first to notice it.  They call it the Summer Bird’s Path.”

Annwn pauses.  Her head tilts just slightly, almost imperceptibly.  “Since we started talking, you and I have already traveled two thousand miles across the universe.”

“What do you want from me?” I ask.

“I don’t want anything from you, Wendy.”

“That’s a lie.”

“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“You did that on purpose.”  I’m babbling.  It’s—I can’t stop.  “That’s my mom’s song.  You knew my mom’s song.  You knew about the universe, you knew…”

“Please, don’t exert yourself.  You’re still unwell.”

“Who are you?” I ask.  And it’s infantile.  And I already know who she is.  Her name is Annwn.  She likes Black-Eyed Susans.

“What does it matter who I am?” Annwn asks.

“You’re in my apartment.”  That’s supposed to mean something.

“We are all one,” Annwn says.  “It doesn’t matter who I am, because I’m everybody, and they’re me.”

“You’re crazy.”  From one crazy girl to another.

“All the matter in this universe came out of one tiny subatomic particle.  That includes you and me.  How can you argue that we’re not the same?  If you pour a pitcher of water into a tiny glass, it’s still water.  You and I are sharing atoms right now, just by talking.  How can that be helped?”  She hasn’t moved at all, but I feel as if she’s standing too close.  “Every sixteen days, all the water content in your body gets replaced.  Every month, your skin.  Every three months, your entire skeleton.  By the end of this year, you will have traded 98% of your atoms for somebody else’s.  You’re never the same person from one year to the next.  I’m sorry.  It can’t be helped.”

“You are crazy.”

“Maybe.”

A crazy person usually doesn’t admit she’s crazy, does she?

“What are you?”  I try again.  Foolish as it sounds.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then you can show yourself out, right?”

“I don’t matter much.  But…have you ever considered that you do?”

My head pounds slowly.  “If I do, then you do.”  Because I have to believe that.  Because I have to believe no one’s any better or any worse than his counterpart.  I have to believe it was just an accident that I lived and my family died.

“You are in a unique position,” Annwn says.  “You can observe this universe in a way very few people can.  Good for you.”

“Good for me?”  My ears ring.  “You can have the migraines.”

“I don’t need the migraines,” Annwn says.

The pain almost subsides.  Almost.  “Have you seen—?”  I trail off.  It’s stupid.  I shouldn’t get my hopes up.  But the prospect that I’m not alone in this—this insanity—

“Rudolf Steiner,” Annwn says.

I want to curl up in a ball and hide.

“Autoscopy occurs when the brain’s upper processes slow down while its lower processes speed up.  That is what Dr. Steiner discovered in his tenure.”  Annwn invites herself to sit down on the sofa.  “Anybody can induce autoscopy so long as he understands how his own brain works.  How better to understand the world around you than to view it as an outsider?”

“You…”  I draw tentatively closer.  Not too close.  I still remember the Great White’s fin, how beautiful it looked, how menacing of a creature it really belonged to.  “You do this stuff?  Willingly?”

Annwn smiles at her knuckles, her hands folded on her knees.  “It gets lonely, you know,” she tells them.  “Belonging to this planet.  Seven billion is the loneliest number.  Sometimes you have to get away.”

Get away.  Get away from me, get—

“I’m making you uncomfortable, Wendy?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m not here to hurt you, Wendy.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Most physicists believe the universe is at 80% its inflationary capacity,” Annwn says.  “20% more and it will collapse.”

“That could take millions of years,” I argue.  I can’t bring myself to sit down.

“Not quite.  The more the universe expands, the faster it expands.  This is called the Accelerating Universe model.”  Annwn smiles at me.  “
There’s no fixed rate for that expansion, except that it’s growing faster every day.  Everything around us could be gone by next year.”

“Please get out.”  I don’t want to hear this anymore.

“From your unique vantage point, you can literally watch the universe die.  That is a luxury many physicists only dream of.”

“Luxury?” I demand, voice cracking.  “What is wrong with you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You want this universe to just—just die?  Don’t you like Black-Eyed Susans?  Don’t you like violins?  How are you going to enjoy them if everything stops existing?”

“Does it?”

Dialogue with a maniac.  I don’t want this.

“This universe will be gone,” Annwn says.  “Will you?  Will I?”

“How do you expect us to live if there’s no air, no mass, no gravity?”

“Ah,” Annwn says.  “But we weren’t talking about living.  We were talking about existing.”

My head hurts.  It hurts so much.

Annwn stands up.  “I can see that I’ve taken enough of your time, and I’m very sorry for that.  You should think a little about the position you’re in, and how you might want to use it.  I hope you feel better, Wendy.”