Page 71 of Alone With You in the Ether

“I think,” Aldo said slowly, “that if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here.”

She looked up again, pausing the motion of her pencil this time.

It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye. Though, he reminded himself, maybe if he committed it to memory then he could return to it in another shape, with better understanding.

Eventually Regan cleared her throat. “I’m going to draw your mouth,” she said, “so we probably shouldn’t talk for a bit.”

“Okay,” he said, and as she dropped her attention back to her parchment, Aldo contemplated going back to live in that single second of time, when he and she had existed in perfect synchronicity.

His second toe was longerthan his first, his feet were narrow, the arches were high and largely free of calluses. Had he been born to wear high heels he would have blistered unrelentingly, and Regan was relieved that he’d probably never know that pain. His calves were narrow and thin and so were his quadriceps. They were well-proportioned, though something had happened to his knee. There was a scar there, maybe surgery, maybe he’d fallen at some point. There had been no mother to kiss away the pain, and now the mark of inattention would remain.

His remarkable lines were, by chronology of looking: the one along the side of his thigh, the curve from his shoulder around his bicep, the ridge along his clavicle, the edge of his jaw. His color gradient was more saturated in his legs and then faded near his hips, then warmed again in his arms, his neck, his face. The most distinctive space was the one unseen between his eyes and thoughts, separated by what seemed to Regan to be a distance of miles, eons, lightyears.

His fingers, which she already knew better than anything aside from his mouth and his eyes, started to move after only a few minutes of silence. His brain had gone somewhere else and his fingers danced along with his thoughts, almost swaying. He was drawing tiny shapes in the air, little letters, feverishly recounting his theories to empty space. The room felt full and perhaps even crowded with everything he’d injected into it, though his chin remained level in allegiance to where she’d placed it. There was no noticeable cleft there; the whole of him was smooth and uninterrupted, aside from the stubble of facial hair he was never fully rid of, and the natural shadow beneath the bones of his cheeks. He was breathing steadily, rhythmically, his pulse visible along his neck. Regan counted his heartbeats, tapping lightly and telling herself that was important for an accurate representation. Man at Rest, she’d thought to call the drawing, only he wasn’t nearly at rest at all.

His fingers were moving; he’d caught onto something again. Something caught flame in his head and it showed in his limbs, disrupting them. His brow had furrowed; he’d pulled his knee in closer. She could see the lines on his stomach where his abdomen had been compressed. The slope of his torso to his hips was more obvious now, and everything was all wrong. He was himself again, precisely the way that she’d always known she would never be able to capture.

“Stop,” she said, and his thoughts jolted back from wherever they’d gone, his attention snapping back to hers. “You’re moving too much.”

“Oh.” He shifted, trying to adjust himself. “Like this?”

“No, Aldo, not—” She sighed, setting her sketchpad down and coming over to him, readjusting him. “Leg here, hands here. Relax your fingers,” she said, shaking out his knuckles, and he gave her a look of amusement. “No,relaxthem, just—here, let me—”

She slid her fingers between his, curling and uncurling his hand with hers, and then let her fingers drape smoothly over his knee, silently beckoning for his to do the same. She waited, palm resting warmly over his knuckles, and then gradually, finger by finger, he relaxed.

She could feel the stillness in his torso; he wasn’t breathing. She’d told him to breathe, and of course he hadn’t listened. “Breathe,” she instructed, and his fingers tensed again. “Aldo,” she said, exasperated, and then, nudging him over, she sat beside him, fixing things as she went.

Knee like this, yes, thank you. Arm like this.Curvethe hand, yes, like that, let it fall.

She turned, his eyes rising from where they’d been on her neck.

She couldn’t prevent the urge to know his thoughts. She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he’d secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.

“Time,” she asked him, “or bees?”

“Just regular old quantum groups this time,” he said, gently. She felt the words as if he’d placed them in her hands. “I don’t actually think about bees as much as you think I do.”

“What’s it like,” she murmured, “thinking so much that your whole body changes?”

“Fairly normal by now.” He paused. “When I’m not in motion, I feel sort of… stagnant.”

“Racing thoughts make the rest of you want to run, too?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

She ran her fingers over his knuckles, flexing and unflexing them.

You and me, she thought rhythmically, you-and-me.

“Can I tell you the truth?” she asked, not looking at him.

He leaned forward, his cheek brushing her shoulder, and nodded.

“I’m not taking my pills,” she said. “I’m not sleeping.” She exhaled raggedly, “I’m… I have problems. Like, diagnosed ones. Ones I should be treating somehow.”

Then, regretfully, she added, “I suppose I should have told you that before.”

He turned his head. She could feel his eyes on her, even if she refused to meet them.

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