Chapter 36

Liam Stump was gone. The lesbians had all twisted themselves taller, reached their arms up towards the diamond sky, grown leaves and branches sticky with sap. 

“Come on,” Randy said. 

He was leading Gavin down a dark forest path. The trees swayed and moaned in pleasure.  The wind spoke in voices, calling him by name.

Gav-in.

Gav-in.

What do you see?

Randy floated ahead of him, like all the thorns and branches and thick ropey roots sticking up out of the ground weren’t bothering him at all.  Gavin was stumbling, falling, brushing leaves and sap and spider webs off his face.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Ga-vin.

What do you see?

Tell me what you see.

Randy turned, still gliding, frowned a frown that wasn’t his.  “I think that’s Rona,” he said.

Gavin’s foot caught on something, his knees hit soft mud, his face fell into a pool of sticky fluid that felt like it went downward forever.  He swam down into it, flipped over—hard to do, with the liquid so thick—kicked his way up to the surface.

Rona. What was she doing here?

“You must really be scared to talk to her,” Randy said, as Gavin’s head emerged.  “All these branches.”

Gavin braced his hands on the side of the puddle, pulled his body free from the goo, thwack. Up ahead, there was a lot of fuzzy noise and something glowing. Brighter, brighter, louder, roaring in Gavin’s ears and blowing the branches back.  He walked towards it, right into the center of it.  Randy wasn’t there anymore. Just Gavin and the roaring brightness and the branches slapping his face as he struggled to move forward, into it, with heavy, lunging steps.  

The brightness was so sharp that he closed his eyes against it, covered his face.  Step. Step. Don’t look, don’t think, just walk and listen for the voice past the rushing loudness.

There it was.

Ga—

vin.

His eyes opened, and he was in a room.  It was bright, still, but the brightness had distributed itself across the painted walls, the high domed ceiling, every electric inch glowing and humming.  The trees were still there, crowding against each other, twisting around and in on themselves like pole dancers through a kaleidoscope.

Rona was up in the branches, a wise owl watching him.  He wanted to tell her something, something interesting to make her want to stay and talk to him.

“I saw Liam Stump.”

She nodded, that makes sense.  She was high above him, but he felt like he was falling right into her eyes. 

“He said. Um.” Her eyes. deep, violet, dark and still. All of her was purple, her pale skin, her dark hair falling over her shoulders, the shadowy hollows of her neck. What was it Liam Stump said?

“He said.”  He really wanted to tell her.  She was so beautiful up on her perch, feathers rustling from the movements of the tree, the gyrations of branches around her.  He needed to give her something, a gift. This was the only thing he had to offer.

Think. His mind had turned all external, stuck in the dancing of trees.  He couldn’t control it.  But it has to be in here, somewhere. He checked the trees, the dirt, the tall arched roof.  Ah, there it was!  Written in squiggles and symbols across the ceiling, but he could read this language.  It must have been one of those codes he learned at summer camp.

“I cannot fall apart.  That’s what he said.”

Rona nodded. Of course.

“No. I don’t get it.”

“You cannot fall apart,” Rona said.

“But he made me fall apart.  Look.”

He pointed at his chest. On the left side, there was a murky patch, a body-fog where you could see his anatomy had been disrupted.

“He scratched holes in my heart.  He licked pieces of it off his fingernails.”

Rona’s eyes spread wide, big, purple eyes that could see right into his mind.  Since his mind was outside of him, written across the dome behind and overhead, it wasn’t hard to see.

“Yeah, you totally didn’t get it,” Rona said.

“I know,” Gavin said.  “What does it mean?”

She stretched her arms over her head, making rainbows with her fingertips, yawned a beautiful, sleepy yawn.

“You can’t fall apart because you’re not one thing. You don’t have a border.”

Don’t have a border?  Then what was his skin? He looked down at his hand, wiggled it, snaked it around in an S.  Color bled out from his flesh into the air around his fingers, traced a rippling path wherever his hand had been.

“But I think I usually do,” he said.

“No,” Rona said.  “You’re porous.  When you breathe, you change molecules with the air.  When you move, you shed your skin and hair into the dirt.”

She stretched, grew, blurred into the tree that held her. It wrapped its arms around her and they became her arms, her leaves.

“Then I am falling apart,” Gavin said.

“It’s like water.” Her voice was getting softer around the edges, blending into the roar of noise circling into the dome above them. “Water can’t fall apart into water.  There is no you to fall apart.”

Of course there’s a me.

He could feel it, the border where he hit the air around him. Soft skin, scratched heart, fingertips, leaves, branches.  He looked down at his body: bark, breasts, feathers, blood, oxygen.  Rona’s body, a towering maple, a moving, breathing tree, an alien being, Randy Ledbetter on his throne.

Don’t hold on so tight. Rona’s voice, echoing from the ceiling, the sky, his own body.  You can’t lose yourself it said. There’s no yourself to lose.  

We are all part of the same big thing.

He could feel their molecules mingling, entwining, water droplets in space, carbon, air.  Atoms, electrons.  His electrons, hers, sparks of electricity, the unknown thing that made them alive.  The soup of their bodies, the ecosystems and universes that lived inside of them, that traveled in and out.

Gavin. 

The voice echoed in every molecule across the giant room, the ones in him and the ones out of him and the ones in between. Ga-vin.

The ceiling was spreading, receding at a thousand miles an hour, becoming the sky.  Becoming a grid of darkness and stars, snowflakes and flowers, moving backwards, becoming new and different stars, becoming complicated flowers with stars for centers.

The flowers spread like antique wallpaper across the ceiling of Dean’s room. Flowers on the purple batik, the walls, bookshelves, ivy.  Across Gavin’s body. It lay on the mattress, but he couldn’t figure out how to get into it.

Wiggle your fingers. That always seemed to help, whenever he had lost his body. Wiggle. Wig-gle.  There they were, his fingers, his arms and feet and stomach.  He held his hand up over his face, watched the flower patterns spreading over it, watched them appear and disappear and regroup.  Tried to pin them still with his gaze, but it didn’t work.

Rona was leaning over him, touching his shoulder.  Her hair was tangled, cheeks flushed, eyes drowsy but wide, a little worried. She was touching his shoulder, shaking him the tiniest bit.  Sending sparks of electricity down below his belly button.  

“Gavin,” she said.  “Tell me what you see.”

<Chapter 35

Chapter 37>