Page 5 of Alone With You in the Ether

“Are we breaking up?” Marc called after her.

“Not today,” she told him, snatching the orange bottles from their usual place beside the fridge before making her way to the bathroom. She set the pills aside and pulled herself onto the sink, hiking one leg upright to rest her heel atop the marble counter, and slid her hand under her seamless thong, unlocking her phone with her free hand. She’d never enjoyed porn, finding it kind of… upsettingly unsubtle. She preferred mystery—craved it like a drug—so she pulled up a password protected note on her screen.

the first photois a grainy shot of a nondescript male hand under a short skirt, positioned lasciviously between the slim curves of female thighs. The second is a black-and-white image of two female torsos pressed together.

This, Regan determined, was worth it. This was the better decision. She could have ended her relationship, true, but instead she had these four minutes. No, three and a half. But she knew her physicalities well, and therefore knew she’d need only three, tops. That left at least thirty seconds.

With the remainder of her time, she could do something very Regan, like tucking her underwear into Marc’s jacket pocket before she kissed him goodbye. He’d find it later that evening, probably while he was schmoozing with some bespoke-suited exec, at which point he’d sneak into a bathroom stall and take a picture of his dick for her. He’d expect something in return, probably, but in all likelihood she’d be sleeping. Or maybe she wouldn’t have come home at all. What a mystery, her future self! The possibilities were fascinatingly mundane and yet, somehow, perfectly endless, which was close enough to elation itself.

She came, biting down on the sensation, and exhaled.

Forty-five seconds.

reganreaches for the bottle of pills and says nothing. She wonders how long it will be until she feels something again.

Aldo was getting his Ph.D.in theoretical mathematics, which meant a broad variety of things depending on who he was saying it to. Strangers were typically impressed with him, albeit in a disbelieving sort of way. Most people thought he was joking, as people who looked like him did not typically say the words “I’m getting my doctorate in theoretical mathematics” unironically. His father was proud of him but blindly, having been bewildered by most things Aldo had done or said for the majority of his life. Others were unsurprised. “You’re one of those brainy fucks, right?” Aldo’s dealer used to say, always asking about the chances of winning this or that, and though Aldo would remind him that statistics was a practical application, i.e.appliedmath, his dealer would simply shrug, ask something about life in outer space (Aldo didn’t know anything about life in outer space) and hand him the items he’d requested.

Aldo’s students detested him. The truly gifted ones tolerated him, but the others—the undergraduates who were taking calculus to satisfy requirements for study—positively loathed him. He lent very little thought to why, which was likely part of the problem.

Aldo was not an especially good communicator, either. That was what the drugs had been for to begin with; he was an anxious kid, then a depressed teen, and then, for a brief period, a full-blown addict. He had learned over time to keep his thoughts to himself, which was most easily accomplished if his brain activity was split into categories. His mind was like a computer with multiple applications open, some of them buzzing with contemplation in the background. Most of the time Aldo did not give others the impression he was listening, a suspicion that was generally correct.

“Exponential and logarithmic functions,” Aldo said without preamble, walking into the poorly lit classroom

scene: A university classroom.

and suffering the usual itch to dive out its institutional windows. He was exactly one minute late, and, as a rule, was never early. Had he been any earlier to arrive, he might have had to interact with his students, which neither he nor they wished him to do.

“Did anyone struggle with the reading?”

“Yes,” said one of the students in the second row.

Unsurprising.

“What exactly is this used for?” asked a student in the back.

Aldo, who preferred not to dirty his hands with application, loathed that particular question. “Charting bacterial growth,” he said on a whim. He found linear functions banal. They were mostly used to simplify things to a base level of understanding, though few things on earth were ever so straightforward. The world, after all, was naturally entropic.

Aldo strode over to the whiteboard, which he hated, though it was at least less messy than chalk. “Growth and decay,” he said, scrawling out a graph before scribblingg(x)beside it. Historically speaking, this lecture would be extremely frustrating for all of them. Aldo found it difficult to focus on something that required so little of his attention; conversely, his students found it difficult to follow his line of thought. If the department were not so hard-pressed for qualified teachers, he doubted he would have been promoted to lecturer. His performance as an apprentice had been less than stellar, but unfortunately for everyone (himself included), Aldo was brilliant at what he did.

The university needed him. He needed a job. His students, then, would simply have to adapt, as he had.

For Aldo, time in the classroom regularly slid to a crawl. He was interrupted several times by questions that he was required by university policy not to remark were stupid. He enjoyed solving problems, true, but found teaching to be more tedious than challenging. His brain didn’t approach things in an easily observable way; he unintentionally skipped steps and was then forced to move backwards, usually by the sound of some throat-clearing distress at his back.

He knew, on some level, that repetition was required for some base level of learning—extensive boxing training had been part of his self-inflicted rehab, so he knew the importance of running the same drill over and over until his head pounded and his limbs were sore—but that didn’t stop him from lamenting it. It didn’t keep him from wishing he could walk out of the room, turn a corner, and head in an entirely different direction.

Theoretically speaking, anyway.

The first of the day’s toursincluded an elderly couple, two twenty-something women, a handful of German tourists, and what Regan furtively ascertained (having made it a custom to check for rings whether she was interested in the outcome or not) to be a married couple in their mid-thirties. The husband was staring at her, poor thing. She knew that particular stare and was no longer especially flattered by it. She’d started using it to her advantage as a teenager, and now simply stored it among her other tools. Philip’s head, paintbrush, saturation scale, the attraction of unavailable men; it was all the same category of functionality.

This particular husband was good-looking, sort of. His wife had a pretty but unremarkable face. Likely the husband, a “catch” by virtue of what Regan guessed to be a practical job selling insurance, saw the Chinese mixing with Irish in Regan’s features and considered it some sort of exotic thrill. In reality, she could have been the genetic combination of half the Art Institute’s current occupants.

“I’m sure many of you will recognize Jackson Pollock’s work,” Regan said, gesturing to theGreyed Rainbowcanvas behind her.

the narrator, a teenage girl who is barely paying attention:The pieceGreyed Rainbowby Jackson Pollock is basically just a black surface covered with splotches of grey and white oil paints with, I don’t know, some other colors at the bottom. It’s like, abstract or whatever.

“One of the most remarkable features of Pollock’s art is how tactile it is,” Regan continued. “I encourage you to step forward to witness the painting’s depths up close; the layers of paint have a distinct solidity you will not find elsewhere.”

The Wife stepped closer, eagerly eyeing it upon Regan’s suggestion, and the others followed suit. The Husband hung back, hovering in Regan’s eyeline.

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