Page 99 of Alone With You in the Ether

His problem was this: Beginning in late March, Regan had stopped sleeping. Her sleep patterns had always been erratic, often easily disrupted, but that had been the difference: the predictability of her unpredictability. During the winter, she had occasionally been loath to leave their bed, still nestled in the sheets until Aldo returned from class in the afternoon, or else she would be inclined to stay up all night, postulating wildly about the universe. Regan didn’t often cook, but when she did it was a production, a spectacle; she used every pot and pan in the cupboards and produced multiple courses of varying quality. On those days, Aldo would spy the glasses of wine upon entry and observe, drawing from his shallow but reliable well of experience, that it would be another night of sex and conversation.

His days were a process of recognizing subtle cues: Had Regan gotten out of bed willingly or sluggishly? Had she leapt or dragged? Had she purchased something, many things, and had she been gone for several hours, or had she never left the house? Was Regan smiling, was she crying, was she shouting? Regan’s tears were almost never of sadness and, instead, usually of rage or frustration, little of which was directed at him. More often she was at war with something entirely different; someone she’d seen that day, or a thought of injustice she’d recently had. She could spark to passion about almost anything, and Aldo learned to recognize the signs, the patterns: What films had she been watching? She had happy films, sad films, cathartic ones, and same with books. She read voraciously, several books at once, or not at all. She consumed music like it was a conversation with her soul; Did you hear that, Aldo, were you listening? How can you stand there as if nothing has changed when either you are not alive at all or all of what you are is now inconceivably different?

He grew accustomed to the turbulence until, abruptly, it stopped. March rolled around, the first day of spring came and went, and by April, Regan had begun to assimilate herself to regularity. Whose regularity that was, Aldo couldn’t say. He knew that when he came home in the evenings, she was gone; she would creep in late at night and kiss his neck, or climb into his lap and say things—Regan things—like, Aldo, I’ve been thinking about you all day, Rinaldo I’d like to put my fingers in the slats of your ribs, I want to shape my teeth to the ridges of your stomach, I’d like to kiss the tip of your cock and hold you inside me until we both see stars.

He didn’t ask what she’d been doing, because he had already learned that she didn’t like to be asked much of anything. Don’t pry, she would say, I’ll tell you when I’m ready, and he would listen to her because he trusted her, because he was afraid of her, because he loved her.

“I love her,” he told Masso, who sighed.

“I know, I know you do, Rinaldo, but everything is too fast. First you like her, then you love her, then you live with her, then what?”

Flames licked at Aldo’s thoughts, dancing in the shape of Regan’s hips.

“So? Sometimes things move fast, Dad. It happens.”

He didn’t tell Masso that he had been right; that by May, Aldo was sure Regan was too fast for him. Much too fast, and he struggled to take in air, because even one breath to clear his head would mean faltering and falling behind. Aldo did not tell Masso that he was gripped with terror, understanding now what it really meant to love something. That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.

Secretly, Aldo believed that if he slowed down at all, Regan would run out of sight. He would never see anything of her but the back of her head. Perhaps there might be a glimpse over her shoulder, perhaps a regretful smile of, Aldo, oh Aldo, thank you for your time, it was fun while it lasted—but then she would slip out, fall away, through his fingers and into the cracks of the sidewalk into some upside-down world where she belonged and where he could never, ever follow.

His thoughts of time persisted, though he no longer wished to transport himself through it and instead felt desperate to stop it, to drag it to a halt. He would suspend the hexagon of time at one edge and say, See, Regan? See, you’re still alive even if things don’t move in a blur, and then maybe she’d stroke his hair and touch his cheek with the pads of her fingers and say, Rinaldo, you’re a genius.

People thought addiction was a craving. People were always saying they were addicted to things like chocolate or reality television, and as a result Aldo felt lexically homeless. That isn’t it, he wanted to insist to them. He wanted to say you don’t understand, because nowheunderstood. There was a difference between craving and compulsion. He knew this because of the pills,hispills, which had once been prescribed and dutifully followed. But the problem with pain existing in the mind is that it is easy to trick the mind into almost anything—placebos, opinion polls, skewed data; the list of what the brain could be taught to believe was endless—and likewise, the body will do almost anything to feel nothing. The extent to which Aldo aspired to be numb had once been vast, and his desperation for silence hardly much smaller. What omnipotence his medication had possessed until it hadn’t; how obediently his mind would quiet until it had fallen out of love with the quiet and fought back.

People thought addiction was a craving, but the difference was this: Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.

He had once told Madeline that Regan was infinite, and she was. There was no way to tell where she began and where she ended. Aldo could think: Where has she been? What has she been doing? And she could answer him and he would still not understand, because where she was at any given time wasn’t necessarily where shewas, and what she’d been doing was another matter entirely. For example: Was she cooking, or filling a void? Was she painting, or summoning demons? Was she sleeping or was she dreaming, was she transporting through realms, what was it?

What was any of it, and would he ever understand?

He twirled the joint between his fingers, shaking his head. Why had he chosen the theoretical side of math? Because math had no stake in the consequences. Math was about explanation, not application. He had never cared to see whether anything really worked, only whether he could solve it, fix it, make it into something possible to understand. Let someone elsecreatethe particles; let others be the ones to discover what the universe was made of and then rebuild it, molding life out of proverbial clay. He only wanted to take something that no one had ever solved and transform it into something that could be viewed on a page, just so that someday, someone would say, Oh. Oh okay, I see it now—and then they would do with that knowledge whatever they wished, which was not a matter of concern for Aldo. He had never taken responsibility for anything before Regan, and now it seemed that taking responsibility was all he could do.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, bringing it to his ear.

“Ready for this?”

He glanced down at the joint, contemplating it. “Almost.”

“You’re in the park, aren’t you?”

“Well, the museum’s your space.”

“It’s yours, too.” She liked to think of things as being shared. It was one of her virtues.

“Yeah, but it’s nice out.”

“It is, isn’t it? But you’ll have to come home, we need to get going.”

“Okay. Now?”

“Yes, now.” Patience, on the other hand, was not. “I’ve been assured it won’t be terrible.”

“By Madeline?”

“Yes, by Madeline.”

“She’s lying, isn’t she?”

“Yes, almost certainly. But I think it’s probably for the best.”

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