Page 102 of Alone With You in the Ether

“No, Aldo,” she sighed, “I was just—”

“You’re not okay, Regan,” he said, suddenly agitated, and she blinked. “This isn’t normal.”

“What isn’t?”

“Any of it.” He rubbed at his temple like she was a headache, a formula that wouldn’t obey, and it stung her. She, like his thoughts, had drained him, and the pain of knowing it festered in her chest.

It felt unfair, unjust, that the things that had so easily been shared between them—I’m strange, no I’m strange, okay we’re both strange, nobody understands us except for us—were now hers to bear alone.

“I’mnot okay?”

He looked at her blankly.

“You’veneverbeen okay,” she flung at him, and Aldo turned his head away, neither surprised nor unsurprised by her tone, which made things infinitely worse. “You think you fixed yourself, Aldo?” she snapped, desperately seeking higher ground and only managing to shrink inside it. “You didn’t. When I met you, you were empty, not fixed. You were trying to find meaning in nothing!”

“You think I don’t know that there’s something wrong with me?” He looked strangely disenchanted, like he’d woken from something. (He can always undream me, unbelieve me.) “It’s all my father ever tells me, Regan. My brain is broken,” Aldo said robotically, “and your brain is broken, but we can’t both be broken. One of us has to be fixable—no, one of us has to befixed, or else—”

“Or else what?” It came out sharply escalated. “What happens, Aldo, if you can’t fix me?”

He looked at her for a long time without answering.

“I’m not an overdose you can undo with a Ph.D.,” she said, hurt where she’d wanted to be angry. “I’m not a problem you can solve. I thought you understood that.”

“I did. I do.”

“Well, it seems like you don’t. It seems like you have conditions for being with me.”

“It’s not… it’s not that. It’s not conditions.”

Her pulse faltered. “But it’s something.”

“I just don’t know,” he said, sounding as if he might say more, but then he spread his hands helplessly. “I just don’t know.”

She stared at him in silence. She felt the floorboards giving way beneath her like sand, some tide in the distance turning.

“I used to have this theory that I could save myself with time,” Aldo said. “That I’d solve it, and then I’d turn a corner one day, and then everything would be different. One hundred and twenty degrees from what it had been.” He paused. “Now, of course,” he mumbled, more to himself than to her, “I realize I can’t actually save anything.”

Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. “Why? Just because I forged a painting?”

He seemed sorry, but he didn’t say it.

“Because,” he exhaled wearily. “Because I think you need me more than you want me, Regan, and I think maybe—”

There was a dull drone in her ear, temporarily deafening.

“—I think maybe that means that I should go.”

Reaction flooded her in waves, in surges.

First, like an electrical socket she’d shoved herself into, she sparked with panic, angry and lost without knowing which to suffer most. She felt stricken and empty and vacant with rage. Then it was doused, drenched, plunged. In a wash of desperation, chilling her to a shiver, she felt like falling to her knees, like grabbing him around the ankles. She felt like kissing his feet, like slapping his face.

Next, it was violence. She wanted to take the words and force them back into his mouth—the shape of which she knew like the God she’d never believed in—and shove them back down to his liver. She wanted to stab him and stab herself and stab her mother and especially to stab Marc; she couldn’t stop the images of herself, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing until her hands were soaked with tears and blood.

She would do all of it, she thought, and then use the carnage to paint something new, something brilliant, and with Aldo’s blood especially—from the vessels of his lovely wounds—she would paint a sky mixed with gold, dotted with constellations. Then she would say: See what I did, what I made? She would make a promise to him, kissing each of his lifeless eyes with reverence, and the promise would be this: Now, you and I will live forever.

But after the violence had been the numbness, the unfeeling calm.

“Maybe you should go, then,” she said dully, and Aldo froze, hesitating for a moment.

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