Page 8 of Gifted & Talented

Occasionally when Arthur Wren had been very small and very sad, he had heard a voice calling to him, speaking as what seemed to Arthur (who was admittedly very imaginative and had not actually read the book) to be a ghost of Christmas future, a message from someone important whom he had yet to meet. He couldn’t have said whether the voice was masculine or feminine, only that it seemed to him very kind and very intimate, gentle in a way but also steadfast and unfailing, and most often what the voice said to him wasI love you,as if he were confusingly reliving the memory of a quiet moment between paramours that had not yet occurred. It had faded into the recesses of his memory as he got older, but not really. He no longer heard the voice anymore, not actively, and he couldn’t have described the tone or timbre, but he retained the memory of hearing it, and the way it made him feel to know he was destined for something that lovely. That kind.

He looked for it in his lovers from time to time in moments of desperation, but life has a way of minimizing the efficacy of imaginary voices that make loneliness gentler to bear. (All conditions are ultimately survivable, which is to say that despite grief, despite loss, Arthur did eventually grow up.) How could Arthur still be so riddled with holes, like a colander of a person? As a man, or whatever he was, Arthur collected all the affection he could hold and was still somehow left with nothing, only the imaginary weight of three overused words.

But then again there were moments, glimmers even, when the voice and its implications seemed not only very real, but powerfully, prescientlyhis, as if he had always had it in him to see the future. It made him a believer in a blueprint, which was in its way a form of relaxation, stress relief. Because it meant that no matter how badly he fucked up, there was a cosmic path he could never actually stray from, and therefore this moment was meant to be his, and so was this, and so was this. He’d felt it long ago with Lou, and again when he’d first run for office, and he felt it with painful severity now.

“I love you,” said Arthur to Yves, one hand on the structured cheekbones for which so many would gladly shed their knickers. “I love you,” Arthur said also to Philippa, imagining himself a handfasting ceremony wherein he bound his life to theirs. He pictured this moment as one of matrimony, almost. As if the voice was somewhere in this room with him now, and maybe if he thought about it hard enough, it had always been his voice. Maybe this was the moment he’d so long remembered as a child—only he hadn’t known it would happen this way, falling into the king-sized bed while reaching for the halos around both his lovers’ heads.

By then the drugs were coursing fully through his system, alive in his veins, the bedroom’s recessed lighting twinkling in and out like the sultriness of candle flame. His magic, or whatever it was (it seemed very silly to call it magic, grown men did not have magic, just as grown men did not imagine bodiless voices professing love to them, sometimes in the anthropomorphized form of the company his father had built, as if Wrenfare were a sexy cartoon fox), was skitteringly potent. Arthur himself was just a series of sparks by then, cascading onto the linen sheets below like stardust. He felt the faintest tug of reality, the buzz of his phone with all the loathing its apps and their denizens had for him, and was surprised to find he still had arms and legs, a pocket. He ignored it, felt Yves digging it out, wonderful Yves, clever Yves, excising the tumor like a surgeon, saving Arthur’s life with his wonderful, clever, lifesaving hands. Arthur could have kissed him. I love you, I love you! It was never meant to be a quiet moment, then. It had always been this moment, this Arthur, reassuring his child-self not with the high of drugs or the lure of sex but with something else, the feeling of existing wholly in therightmoment, the opportune place at the opportune time, which Arthur never seemed to find.

Why had he not chasedthisfeeling, chosenthislife? The monotony of municipal chambers, snippy headlines, angry tags. The lives Arthur wanted devotedly to fix but never could, probably never would. The irony of it! Ofloving this deeply and yet being this powerless; nothing but stars and emptiness after all.

His vision was hazy, filled with the deep purple of Philippa’s robes. Philippa, darling Philippa. He twirled a finger in her curls, imagining a world where he woke up to her each morning, alive as she was now with unfiltered love. Not just the little slivers he was allowed to have, but every morning. Oh god, the luxuries of such a life! The downstairs television ran the gamut of Arthur’s emotions, skimming through every channel of barking dogs and tears of joy.

Imagine it: Philippa fresh out of the shower, Philippa’s perfume on the dresser, brewing a fresh pot of herbal tea for Philippa, because cheesecake gave Philippa the shits. And Yves! Darling Yves, like the silver lining to Philippa’s cloud. Imagine the nights spent with Yves’s long toes in his lap, stroking Yves’s silken mahogany waves, Yves as some sort of symbol of luxury, always reclined like a cat on a velvet chaise lounge even in Arthur’s most domestic fantasies. Arthur kissed him, then kissed Philippa. Oh, he loved them. He loved them, he wanted them, he longed for a life like this!

He leaned over to bury his lips in Yves’s neck. “I want all of it,” he murmured, his mouth muffled by skin slicked with salt and the particular flavor of Arthur’s magic, which was a bit like grape Tylenol, and had technically been used under these conditions as a sort of advanced vibrator, that proverbial electric touch.

“I want all of it,” Arthur said again when Philippa’s breathy moan sounded in his ear, like the call of a siren from afar. Her hands were elsewhere, on Yves. “I want all of it, everything, the baby—”

“Is that your phone?” said Philippa, and Arthur didn’t know, his trousers were gone, everything was euphoria, would only be euphoria from now until forever, it was euphoria eternal, euphoria evermore. He turned to kiss Yves, who was no longer within reach, and Arthur felt confusingly marooned. Everything seemed to shrink a little. The bed, which had seemed so large and uncontainable just breaths ago now seemed too small, his fingertips and toes already bursting from its edges.

He didn’t quite realize what was happening until Gillian’s voice was already in his ear, tinny and far away, like an astronaut in deep and distant space.

“Arthur,” said his wife’s voice. Yes, you heard me correctly. “Art, are you there?”

“Yes.” He struggled to sit up, holding the phone to his ear and squinting at Philippa, who was tracing delicate filigrees of nothing on his thigh.

“I’m very sorry to have to spoil your trip, but your father is dead.” Arthur heard the faint sound of static in his head, like the connection was bad, the blueprint was failing. “I’ve emailed you your flight itinerary; it leaves in three hours. I’ll take care of everything at the office and send a car to SFO if I can’t be there myself. Do give Yves and Philippa my love.”

I love you,said the voice in Arthur’s head, which in reality could have been any voice but was always supposed to be his father’s.I love you.Like the tumble of the flag pin to the floor, the neatness of an ending, gone as it had never been before.

And with it, the phone fell from Arthur’s hand.

6

The transaction between Eilidh and her demonic parasite completed, the plane righted itself. Not gradually, as if the pilot had somehow regained control through his own volition. Instead, the lights simply stopped flickering, the turbulence fell instantly away, and the world—the portion of it that had nearly ended on a commercial flight from Vermont to San Francisco—suddenly stabilized, the woman with the rosary looking heavenward, awestruck, as if a wordless god had seen fit to answer her prayers. The baby’s cries began to fade away, slowing to a whine, then a series of hiccups. There was a collective intake of breath, a gripping of hands between passengers. The man who’d been weeping looked as if he had righted the plane himself, as a product of masculine resilience.

Eilidh Wren exhaled her own relief in private, quietly glancing at the image on the lock screen of her phone, still uselessly in airplane mode. Her father’s smiling face—no teeth, but that was his way—was a momentary balm, temporarily reassuring. He would not have to wait alone for her in a restaurant now. And she would tell all of this to her company-provided therapist—not the details, obviously, but the important bit, in which she had chosen life, which was not always a guarantee in the way you’d sort of hope it would be—and everything would be fine, and she would oversee some kind of social media campaign and do nothing really of consequence, but maybe the baby in 22A would grow up to cure cancer.

And wasn’t it kind of a gift, in its way, that Eilidh would never know?

Passengers had begun opening their window shades, emboldened now, hoping to see the universal gift of blue sky, searching for the evidence of their communal miracle. Thirstily, light slaked in from both sides of the plane, intoxicating, garish, bright.

Eilidh, meanwhile, braced herself. Alongside the benedictions of life lived its unavoidable horrors. Not a metaphor, or at least not solely one. Survivalwas only half the bargain, and she understood the way the others couldn’t that nothing came for free.

So Eilidh sat white-knuckled in her aisle seat, waiting for the jump scare. For the unavoidable drop. She closed her eyes. Her heart thudded in her chest, uncontrollable.

There. She could feel it—feel it before she could place it. Thud-thud in her chest, a wild ricochet.

And then, like clockwork, there it was.

At first it was a light—the kind you’re cautioned not to follow. The kind that leads to the end of a tunnel, to the ultimate swallowing up. The light pouring in from outside the plane grew gradually overwhelming, a heady jolt to their collective senses. Passenger by passenger, seat by seat, aisle by aisle, every occupant of the plane began to squint.

The light—was it sun?—was offensive, infernal, like staring into the grainy screen afterThe Exorciston VHS. It was…bright,but not sunlight bright—the brightness of realizing the dark room had never been empty. The brightness of revelation that despite what you believed, you were never in there alone.

Eilidh looked into the window, blinking back corneal damage. The saturation of the brightness was white and somehow viscous—the shade of pus draining from an open wound. From the windows, the ensorceling blindness expanded, becoming increasingly offensive, insidious. Some people hastily slammed their window shades shut; her seatmate didn’t. To her right, Eilidh could sense the suggestion of movement, a ubiquity of thickness that now seemed to breathe. Each pane of light that remained open was crammed with the blurring, indecipherable presence of something solid. Something festering, fidgeting.

Alive.

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