Page 56 of Alone With You in the Ether

Charlotte Regan, you fool, you’ve been stuck inside a trance, wake up.

Wake up, Regan.

Regan, look at me. Wake up.

Tell the voice in your head to be quiet, would you? I know you’re not here right now, I know you’re lost somewhere that I can’t go or touch or see, but look me in my green eyes and tell me what else matters. Bees, Regan, think of the bees, think about the implausibility of time and space, think of impossible things. Think about the stars in Babylon and tell me, Regan, all this time we’ve been talking and you’ve been syncopating your breath to mine and your pulse to mine and your thoughts to my thoughts, you’ve been learning how to love me, haven’t you? If I am a lover of impossible problems then you will have loved me for my impossibilities, so tell me, Regan, what else matters but this, me, us?

Nothing.

Nothing.

Welcome back, Regan.

I missed you while you were away.

“Aldo?”

His eyes snapped open. He hadn’t been sleeping, obviously—the weed had helped, but even so, he was in John and Helen Regan’s guest room, which was too foreign a thought to lull him to even the vaguest approximation of sleep—but still, her voice in the dark was startling. She was half a dream as she carefully pushed open the door.

He sat up slightly, catching the motion of moonlight from the window falling on bare legs. She crept across the wooden floors with an air of practice, avoiding a spot near the door, and bounded lightly over to where he lay in the bed before perching on the edge of the mattress.

“Did I wake you?” she asked him. Her hair fell loose and half-dried around her face, parted like a curtain in the center.

“No,” he said, “not really.”

“Good.” She nudged him over, sliding in next to him. “Did you have fun? Or, you know. Something like it.”

“Something like it,” he confirmed, turning on his side to face her. “Definitely something like it.”

“Good.” She was buzzing a little, almost vibrating with something indefinable. Excitement, maybe. She had, after all, snuck into his room, and perhaps not all elements of youthful rebellion faded with age. “You’re a good dancer.”

So was she. The rest of her family had mostly left them alone for the remainder of the evening and her mother, Helen, had looked deliberately at the wall behind his head. He could tell (he wasn’t stupid) that it was a distasteful sort of apathy, something he should resent or, more helpfully, repair, but he wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of them communicating as little as possible.

Regan slid closer to him, propping her head up to look at him.

“I haven’t done it in a while,” he said. Dancing, he meant.

“Well, you’re good. Very good.”

Her fingers stretched out tentatively, finding the marks that State Street had left across his shoulders. The glow from the window illuminated pieces of their silhouettes, her right side and his left. With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other’s reflection. He felt the echoes of her touch unfurling in gooseflesh down his arms, his legs, spreading to the soles of his feet.

“I’m sorry,” Regan said. “About my parents.”

“Why?”

He saw only half of her tiny half-smile, a splintered crescent of amusement in the dark. “You didn’t notice? No, of course you didn’t,” she sighed. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Too late,” he noted, and her smile tightened to a grimace.

“Well, it’s no surprise they don’t like you,” she said. “They don’t get you, and besides, they don’t like anybody.” She slid her thumb over his clavicle. “They hate Marc, too. Just for different reasons.”

He had the distinct impression that she was drawing him, somewhere in her mind.

“Reasons like what?”

“Like, I don’t know.” She pulled away, her hand falling to the sheets, and he immediately regretted asking. “Marc’s, you know, the normal kind of intolerable. Loud, flashy, all that.”

“And I’m… abnormal?”

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