Page 92 of Alone With You in the Ether

Stay, stay, stay.

Regan stepped into the street, watching the streetlights glisten against the dampness of the asphalt. That day they’d suffered the sort of slushy, precipitous snowfall that left behind slickness and salt. Every bar had muddied floors, caution signs, a slosh of weather and spilled drinks beneath the din of clamoring voices. The hazy sheen of red, yellow, green at her feet winked and glittered, reflections of headlights temporarily blinding her where she stood.

“Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?”

“It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,” he said. “They believed light needed to pass through something, only Einstein proved light can be particles, which don’t need a medium to travel through. And before that,” he added, “ether was what they called the air in the realm of the gods. A shining, fluid substance.”

“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?”

“Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”

“But,” she said, and stopped. “But the bees.”

She felt certain she could feel him smile.

“Yeah,” he said, “the bees,” and she felt the weight in her chest ease a little, the sea that had risen to her ankles fading away with the tide.

That night, as the year was changing, Regan picked up a brush, tied her hair back and looked down at an untouched canvas, observing the blankness as if that were an object itself. She paced the floor, pushed the bed to the side; she rearranged things around the canvas, which sat in the center of everything.

Okay, she said to herself, what now?

(Just wait, Regan, until he figures you out.)

She closed her eyes.

I am not a game, she thought, breathing out and imploring time to slow.

Graciously, the night obliged.

Habits, Aldo had always thought, were the antithesis of linear time. As in, a habitual existence was to live time in circles, like chasing your tail, this time the same as this time the same as that one. Before Regan, each of Aldo’s days had been precisely the same, as close to a carbon copy of the others as he could conceivably create. Monday layered over Tuesday layered over Wednesday; Thursday was a tracing of the others and so on, with only faint warps around the edges—where he ate something slightly different for breakfast or missed a traffic light on the way home from work—to acknowledge the passing of time. He could travel forward and backward merely by existing within the halo of habit. He lived each day over and over, with only his memory of rising each morning to prove that his existence followed the same rules of motion as everything else. He didn’t know it was vacancy until his new life was overfull, bursting, his sense of stability lost to the effort of pacing himself to her. When she moved, he moved, and it was unsteadying; debilitating, at times.

Charlotte Regan, Aldo suspected, had never lived a day twice in her entire life.

He understood now why she’d agreed to six conversations with a stranger. It wasn’t because she’d been curious about him the same way he’d been curious about her. It wasn’t because of him at all, actually. It was because for her, life was careening into something for the reward of—of what? He wasn’t entirely sure—something. He could look back on himself, time-traveling through retrospect, and see that he was in love with her right away, though he’d given it other names at the time: curiosity, interest, attraction. For her, though, he had been another break in habit, a disruption, and those were the things she craved like sustenance. She proved herself alive by proving this day had never been lived before, that this thing had never been felt or never tasted or never wanted, and now, because it existed, things were different; changed.

Charlotte Regan, Aldo realized, loved change, unhealthily. She loved it like an obsession, like infatuation. With change she had an ongoing affair, and perhaps it had been neutralized for a time with pills and psychotherapy but underneath it all, the little monster that was her soul was clawing for it, and it had been Aldo who’d hauled it out again. He’d unleashed a titan, he’d freed her, fallen in love with her, and as much as he’d hoped it would relent to something manageable, it did not.

“You know what I think?” Regan whispered to him one night. She didn’t sleep regular hours. Neither did he, but he pretended to. He followed a schedule, even if his mind refused to rest within the parameters he prescribed. “I think you carry around a sadness from another life,” she said. “From centuries ago.” She traced his mouth, his cheeks, his eyes, practicing for something he would never understand. “You’ve just been carrying it around for so long that you can’t put it down, can you? It’s yours now. You’ve been tasked with looking after it. You’re like Atlas,” she said with a laugh. “Aldo, you poor thing, what a curse. I wonder which god you angered.”

His mouth was dry, and not purely because she’d slid her fingers into it, hooking one behind the backs of his front teeth. She did that, loved him invasively, exploring him like the depths of the sea.

“I don’t really believe in reincarnation,” he said.

“Well, neither do I, but it’s a hypothesis,” she replied. “Sometimes,” she added, with a mournful little twist of confession, “sometimes I think it’s so pointless that we’ll never know anything. We’ll nevertestanything because we can’t, it’s impossible to be around long enough.” She hummed to herself, something unrecognizable, probably the melodic nature of her thoughts; he wished he could commit the full score to paper, to see what the violins were up to when she was busy channeling the upright bass. “I guess we just have to believe what feels right, don’t we?”

“So, I’m… cursed?” he asked her, and she laughed again, then sobered quickly.

“You have to take back your life, Aldo,” she said, suddenly admonishing. “You can’t just live in your past lives.”

“I wasn’t aware that I was.”

“Of course you are. Don’t you see, if you make the trajectory even a little bit longer, everything’s a little different? Happiness,” she told him, “maybe it’s something you’ve been earning slowly, over several lifetimes, and now it’s something you get to have. Maybe all this math you know, maybe it was a little seed of something before and now it’s finally bearing fruit. Maybe you weren’t made this way, youbecamethis way,” she finished triumphantly, and then he understood.

I’m made like this,he had told her before, and so now she was setting him free, casting off the restrictions of a dull reality. She made his life magic as a favor to him, without his asking, and he understood now, too, what she’d meant: I don’t believe it, but maybe I do. It isn’t real, but maybe it is. Because maybe she needed to relinquish him from something and maybe she didn’t, but wasn’t his burden lighter now, either way?

He loved her fiercely for that.

He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship with time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.

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