Page 106 of Alone With You in the Ether

She, the student doing the asking, was later the only one to give his class a five-star rating, saying, “I really don’t understand what Damiani’s talking about most of the time, but I feel like he actually cares and that’s pretty cool. Nobody cares anymore. Anyway I probably failed this class but I liked it, sort of. As much as you can like differential equations.”

In the present, Aldo felt a tap on his shoulder; someone wanted to get by to look at another painting. He snapped to attention, nodding quickly and stepping closer to read the plaque below the triptych.

Alone with You in the Ether, it said, followed byOils and acrylics.

Below, in smaller letters:C. Regan.

“Oh, this is pretty,” remarked someone beside him, pointing to Regan’s work, and Aldo turned his head, suddenly irritated.

It isn’t pretty, he wanted to say, it’s lonely, it’s desolate, it’s a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It’s the human condition! It’s the entire universe itself! It’s the depths of spacetime you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fuckingdareyou stand there and fail to weep? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time? Pretty, that’s what you think this is? You think that’s all she’s capable of? You fool, she’s done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn’t, it’s Truth. She told the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitilessly. So carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of,

Oh, this is pretty.

But Aldo didn’t say that, or say anything. Instead, he nodded and turned, pulling his phone out of his pocket and racing outside, faster and faster the closer he got to the doors.

“Dad,” he said, the moment Masso answered the phone. He wanted to scream, primally, or to tear at his hair, hysterical with understanding. “She’s nothing like Mom.”

“Rinaldo, I haven’t heard from you in two days, where have you b-”

“You’re wrong and you’re right,” Aldo said again, pacing the stairs outside the museum. “She does burn me, she ignites me, you’re right. But it’s different, they’re different things.” He was thinking more than he was saying, unsure what was even coming out of his mouth. Science without faith is crippled, Masso, and life without it is soulless. She is my hope and for that she is dangerous, unequivocally, but she is also alive, unreservedly. It took this long for me to finally understand.

Masso was silent for a long moment.

“So then what will you do, Rinaldo?”

Aldo laughed, startling the stranger sitting peacefully on the steps who was witnessing, unknowingly, a bit of existential decay. It’s you and me right now, Stranger!, Aldo wanted to tell him. It’s you and me alone in the ether and you don’t even know it, you don’t even care, but still you are tied to this, and to me, and so be it, really.

So be it. This is what it means to live.

“I’ll do whatever she wants me to do,” Aldo said to his father, who contemplated this in three beats of silence on the other side of the phone.

“Okay, Rinaldo,” said Masso. “Sounds like a plan.”

Aldo had staredat her paintings, alone, for over fifteen minutes.

Throughout that time, Regan had been crafting imaginary scenarios of what came next. At first it was very simple, perhaps even boring, a little scripted. For the first minute or so she imagined herself walking up to him and tapping his shoulder, casually saying: How did you know?

Between minutes three and five, her projections went a bit further. She imagined herself apologizing to him, saying: I should have stopped you, I shouldn’t have let you go, this is my love letter to you and I hope that you like it, goodbye now if that’s what you want. It would be sweet, and also masochistically generous. She could probably live with herself if she said that.

But Regan had never martyred herself with grace before, so somewhere around minute six—which felt borderline ungodly—she grew angry. You see that it’s my work!, she wanted to shout at him. Why are you still looking, come find me! By minute ten she was infuriated, considering kicking him in the shins and then storming away, saying nothing at all. Wouldn’t that serve him right? He couldn’t just stand there and stare like that, judging her work. When had he ever made himself that vulnerable? Never, probably, and now look at him, just standing there, staring. He hadn’t even noticed how many people had jostled him; nor had he noticed the girl in Regan’s anatomical figure drawing class who had the spot right below hers, which the girl and her grandfather were presently struggling to see because Aldo was standing in the way and hadn’t moved.

By minute twelve Regan had abandoned her sanctimonious posturing and begun thinking Aldo, oh, Rinaldo, I miss you; only you would look for so long and so closely; only you would bother trying to see what others don’t. She wanted to creep up behind him, press her chest to the blades of his shoulders and her lips to the back of his neck: Thank you. Because of you, she would whisper in his ear, I made the very first real thing I have ever made, can you believe it? I’m an artist for the first time—yes, an artist, I said it, you heard me!—and it is only because I painted the world as you saw it, so it was theft, sort of, but no, it wasn’t, because we made it together. This is our love, do you see it? This is what it looks like to love you; it looks like an abyss, but it isn’t, do you understand? All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float.

By minute fourteen she wanted to drag him somewhere private. She was alight with a desperate need to feel close to him, to feel connected, beatifically vulgar and harmoniously obscene. Alonewith you, she would gasp when she came, do you understand why I called it that, what it means? Because you and I, we are so different, aren’t we, and yet we are more like each other than the rest of the world is like us, and for that I bless you, I condemn you, I sanctify you, I sustain you. This painting, Aldo, it’s about God. They cannot hang it in the Louvre, they will have to put it in the Vatican, because what we are is holy, and this, you and me as one together, is transubstantiation of the highest degree. This is you and me becoming the consecration of us; amen, above everything, I believe.

By minute fifteen she began seeing flashes of their lives in snippets, apart and together, playing side by side like a film. A wedding, maybe, probably. Aldo wouldn’t want one but Masso probably would, and Regan would invite Madeline happily and her parents less happily. But they could be there, because she had taken away their ability to hold any power over her happiness (okay it was an ongoing effort, but she had started it and that counted for something), and they could watch as she said to Aldo: I do. In another frame, they break up and she moves to Italy or something. She fucks a series of younger and younger twenty-year-olds until they exhaust her, and then she comes back with her life in pieces to find that Professor Damiani is busy, can I take a message? and she says, No, no, never mind, this was a mistake. In another frame she turns to Aldo and says, You know, one of the little quirks of this mortal prison of mine is it can make other humans if you want it to, and he smiles in a way that means: Yes. In another frame she watches him leave her on a loop, on repeat, and her feet are trapped in place like it’s a nightmare—and it is, isn’t it?—so she thinks no, not this one, next. The next frame has her sleeping beside him; that’s it, just sleeping. He leans over and kisses her forehead while she sleeps on, ignorant and stupidly peaceful. It is free of time entirely, belonging to no special hour. This, she thinks, this is the one.

Somewhere in the universe a star exploded or someone was born or they died or time passed while Regan stood there and missed him, while she mourned him, and then she thought with an equally quiet violence: Maybe I do not have to do it alone.

By minute fifteen he was finally gone, turning abruptly and half-sprinting for the doors, and in his absence Regan emptied, watching all their alternate lives begin to wilt. She mourned them like her children, holding their lifeless corpses to her chest, and then she forgot them, slowly, each one vanishing without a trace, until she held nothing at all.

Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it.

Damn it, I love him.

Then, after the smoke cleared, she could see nothing else.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENs NEXT.

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