Page 105 of Alone With You in the Ether

The thought dazed Regan, arresting her in a state of half-awake, half-asleep. If she reclaimed all her things—snuck in like the thief that she was and stole back the life that she’d shared with him—would Aldo wake to feel relief? Would he recognize it as a favor? On the one hand, she wanted to bear his entire sadness for him; to hurt herself doubly, just to keep it from him, and was that illness or love? Was she really so broken that she wanted to suffer to spare him, and if that was true, then had he been right all along? Did she want him to forget (didshewant to forget?) or was his pain something that she had earned, that she deserved, purely by virtue of existing? Was it fairer for him to come home to an emptiness he could trace like the scars along his shoulders? Should the echoes of her still linger for him beyond the pain?

It was something new to curate, Regan thought: the possibility that she could haunt him or free him, and that whatever she did or did not do was entirely up to her. The immensity of it was crippling. Bearing the responsibility for what happened when two people fractured and bled was not something she’d ever attempted before, and she felt weakened by the prospect of it now. She’d given him arrows and he’d shot, and now parts of her were gaping holes, flayed and filleted and left behind as open wounds. Why hadn’t she run after him, why hadn’t she stopped him, why hadn’t she told him the truth? Why had he left, why hadn’t he said to her this time, “I love your brain even when I fear it,” why why why? The effort of asking herself felt like the loneliest thing of all, and the silence that followed was deafening.

Regan imagined cradling the pieces of her broken brain in her palms and staring at them, molding them together and then shaking them like a Magic-8 ball.Try again later, it said, and obediently, she shook again. Have I already destroyed this little fledgling thing I tried to nurture?It is certain.Reply hazy, ask again.Perhaps he would return?It is decidedly so. Outlook not so good.Maybe she should find him?You may rely on it. Very doubtful.

So it turned out divination was useless. The future was uncertain, and the past was a series of cycles that she could only see once she had passed. She thought of Aldo, of time, and how time wasn’t the thing that couldn’t be fixed, it wasthem—it was humanity in general—because time was what gave shapes to things. They could not see themselves unless they could exist outside themselves; ipso fact, without time passing, they could never really know what they had been.

The multiverse is impossible to understand, Aldo had once said, because we can’t know where we are inside it—and if we don’t know where we are, then what is our basis for understanding anything else?

You’re right, Rinaldo, Regan thought, soothed by his mind in retrospect; by a past Aldo who had left her something with which to comfort herself now.

Give it time, she told herself. Let it breathe, take the space to find the outlines.

An ending is only an ending, she thought, when both parties agree they’ve reached the end.

Shortly after their fight, Aldo noticed that Regan had left him something. He couldn’t tell if it had been a recent Regan who’d entered while he was away or if a past Regan had left it for future Aldo to find or not find. Either way, he noticed one of her dresses in his closet as if it had been deliberately placed in his line of sight, slightly withdrawn from the other articles of clothing for the purpose of catching his eye. It was the sort of thing she typically wore to work, and it reminded him of that sacred space in their Venn diagram of existence: The Museum.

Aldo had already considered the possibility that perhaps they had done the right thing; the smart thing; the best thing. In some way, he was quite certain they were safer now, better protected. He was free to be devout about some other thing, to find some new, less fragile theology for survival. There was an ease in that, a simplicity, and was there not some value in such stability? They could easily revert to ancient cultures of themselves, carrying nothing, resuming their mindless worship of the stars.

The Art Institute was much as it always was, quiet on a Monday except for an exhibition which would have normally repulsed Aldo, because it was surrounded by a crowd. He had no intention to observe its contents, noticing the chatter that meant it concerned other people; but then he paused unwillingly when something caught his eye.

It was a view that was both familiar and not. It was new in that he had ever seen it before, but also, it was recognizable in that it seemed to have previously existed inside his brain. The colors, he thought, looked like something he’d seen once or twice among the fabric of his musings, and so he gravitated towards it, slipping through the crowd.

From afar it had been one painting, but upon closer inspection he could see it was actually a triptych of three, individual segments comprising one comprehensive landscape that was smaller upon approach. Up close, Aldo could see the tiny hexagonal lines, fissures of gold so delicate they made the painting look as if it had scales, splintering its content into smaller pieces.

It didn’t appear at first to have a subject. Nothing in it was strictly identifiable, either as a scene or an object, only Aldo felt very strongly as if he’d been transported in time and space. He was no longer inside of a bright white museum looking at a painting, but instead he was on top of his roof, looking at the sky.

“I think it’s incredibly human what you do,” Regan had said, turning her head to look at him. (He’d been smoking and mumbling about Euclidean space.)

“Is it?” he asked, doubtful, “because as far as I know, other humans seem to disagree.”

She made a noise she often made, usually to indicate that he was being ridiculous, hush, stop. “You look for explanations,” she said. “It’s part of our fundamental code to wonder, don’t you think? The Babylonians did it, and so do you.”

“Yes, and yet,” Aldo exhaled, “Zeus’ affairs are more common knowledge than Babylonian math.”

“Well, sex is human, too,” Regan said. “But they’re still both ways of telling stories about existence. You just happen to use a language that only you and—” She paused to estimate it. “Maybe ten other people understand.”

“What about art?” he countered. “Isn’t that storytelling?”

“No, not really.” She leaned over, taking a puff from the spliff between his fingers. “Art isn’t about explaining shit,” she said, coughing once. “It’s about sharing things—experiences, feelings. Art is something we do tofeelhuman, not because we are.”

“Do you feel human?”

“In some interconnected way, like I’m part of a common species? Not often. You?”

“Almost never.”

“Well, it was a good try.”

She’d taken another hit, leaning her cheek against his shoulder, and he’d thought with a sudden, sparkling clarity: Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.

“What is this used for?” someone had asked him later in class. It was a variant of questioning that he was, by then, beyond sick of, but which he deigned to answer that day, about linear partial differential equations. Perhaps because he was tired and his defenses were weak; or, perhaps, because he had lain his head down the previous night next to a woman whose thoughts and matter he wanted desperately to know, and who, if she had been there, would have asked him some variation of the same thing.

Aldo, what’s The Truth?

The easy answer, and the one he would have given had he not been tired or in love, was simply that linear partial differential equations were used for describing changes over time within the scope of quantum mechanics. The answer he gave, however, was something like this:

“We map things,” he said, “and chart things, observing and modeling and predicting, because we have no other choice, and this is the language we have agreed, collectively, to use. Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.”

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