Page 94 of Alone With You in the Ether

Not that her relationships with women were much better. In fact, Regan had told him right away that she didn’t have many friends, and gradually, Aldo discovered that she had been right, or at least honest. That, of course, was the interesting part. Regan didn’t have a lot of time or energy for the sort of love that required openness, and it made Aldo realize that the best thing he could have done to win Regan over was to immediately identify her primary truth: that she was most comfortable when she was at her falsest. Regan did not enjoy honesty. She hated it, was repulsed by it, and by her own truths especially. With other peoples’ truths she merely collected them like shiny things, tucking them away or else carrying them around, wondering where to put them.

With Aldo’s, though, she hoarded them. What did he think about this, why did he love this thing, why was sex best for him like this, why did he choose her? Her compulsion to know was familiar—physically, mentally, procedurally—but it was also a significant break in what he understood about her. Why was she truthful with him and not with others? Why did she wish to know his truths while immediately rejecting them from other people in her life? She wasn’t uncaring in the slightest. She spoke highly of a number of people, but detested possessing any realities of what they were.

Perhaps it was because people were naturally inclined to be honest with her. She had an innocent look; those wide eyes were tricky. She had a deceptive way of making attentiveness look like interest. She was like a magician, down to the quick of it. She measured silences, she used physical cues to guide them to the outcome she wanted; Pick a card, any card, only she was subtly planting with the tilt of her head or with the open motion of her hands: Choose this one. Tell me about your weaknesses, your insecurities, your sex life; yes, tell me, don’t you want me to know? They fell for it every time, not recognizing her for what she was.

It only occurred to Aldo later why he was different.

“Because I love you,” she said.

He had watched her ignore a phone call, silencing the vibration, and asked her why she didn’t care to know what her parents and sister and friends were up to but always wanted to know the most meager details about his day. She hungered for them, the unremarkable crumbs of him. What did you teach today? Who’s your favorite student? What did your advisor say about your dissertation? Did you box today or run or both? For how long, how was it, which muscles hurt? What was your favorite thing that happened today? Why? What do you want to happen tomorrow? He answered all of her questions, amused, but wanted to understand: Why ask me this when you haven’t seen me for ten hours, but you don’t care how your mother filled up the last ten days?

“Because I love you.”

As simple and uncomplicated and wildly unimaginable as that.

It was around that time when, knowing Charlotte Regan was capable of murder, Aldo made a decision. He would have to possess her, all of her, the way he did not currently possess anything and had never possessed anything before. He would have to be able to look at everything she was all at once; to open all the doors she kept locked inside herself and then run through the house, laying claim to the whole of it. How long would that take? Surely ages, eons, several different lifetimes and fuck, he would have to start soon, start immediately. She was right—wasn’t she?—that humans were inherently flawed, crippled by their insubstantial life expectancies, by mortality itself. He would never have enough time, but still, he would have to have all of it, most of it. He couldn’t get back the time that he’d missed, but if not him, then who would have all the rest?

He would have to keep her, somehow, and that would mean solving her. That would mean making her his impossible problem. Time travel no longer held any interest for him, only Regan and whatever it would take to make her a fixture in his life. Knowing her would mean knowing everything, not just her thoughts or her truths or the way she liked to be fucked. Knowing her would mean knowing her future, having it for himself. It was knowing what her children would look like, and whatshewould look like someday, when the youth was gone from her face and replaced by something else; by what? A mystery. It was a fucking mystery and Aldo couldn’t sit idly by while there were mysteries afoot. Uncertainty was something he lived with, yes, but not anymore. Frustration and restraint, she had said, equating his love of math with his love of her.

I am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

“I think we should move in together,” he said.

She smiled.

“Hm,” she said. “And here I thought you’d be sick of me by now.”

In early February, Aldo and Regan walkedhand in hand into her little studio apartment, put things in boxes, summoned a cab outside and then stepped into it, laden down with possessions which smelled of her perfume. They spent two hours shifting pieces of Aldo’s life aside to make room for hers: a toothbrush beside his, her makeup in his medicine cabinet, her dresses hanging beside his suit. He shrank down to make room for her, lent her the corners of his sanity. They had unhurried sex in the bed, which had once been his but was now theirs; she slid her palm across the sheets and thought of changing things. She would implant herself in Aldo over time, whether she intended to or not. She would buy him nicer sheets, give him a taste for her softness that he could never unfulfill. She would occupy his fridge with the foods she liked, the things she loved that she would say: Come here and taste this, and then he would and he would enjoy it, too. He would come to share her joys until he could no longer separate them from his own, and then one day, maybe turning to her at a party or rushing to ask in a text message, he would say: What’s that thing I like? And she would know the answer. She would know everything. Eventually, all the answers to all that he was would be cradled in the palms of her hands.

How dangerous! What a fool he was, how short-sighted, how little-lived he’d been not to feel her fear as she felt it. For her it was an informed terror, re-entering a haunted house, replaying an old and frequent death. She kissed him; Sorry about your stupidity. She wanted to tell him, to teach him: Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.

He smiled at her like: Isn’t it great?

Yes, she thought, pained. Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

She had thought of him as a sort of nomad-adjacent person with meandering habits, but that wasn’t true, not really. He worked hard, worked diligently, worked often. He went to class to learn and to teach, had meetings constantly with professors and colleagues, worked tirelessly on his dissertation. His work, unlike hers (hers was the opposite) was almost entirely inside his head. She came to understand that he could sit relatively still for an hour and only write down one, maybe two things when he was done.

She joined him in his rituals, sitting next to him with her shoulder pressed to his, coaxing him to tell her what he was thinking about as he toyed with a joint between his teeth.

“What’s your dissertation about?”

His response was practiced. “The math behind quantum physics.”

“Which is?”

“Dimensions, functions of reality. Time. Uncertainty; the math behind Heisenberg, Schrödinger—”

“The cat?”

“Not so much that. But sure, also the cat.”

“Is it dead or alive?”

“Both.”

“And that makes sense to you?”

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