“What
do you see?”
Rona’s
face. A swirl of patterns, playing
across the ceiling, the purple cloth, Rona’s cheeks and nose and lips, bumping
along in time to the music. That same
song from before, but he understood it better now—beating patterns, uneven in
places, broken, then reuniting into perfectly matched symmetry.
“What
day is it?” he asked.
The
patterns spilled on to her teeth, the tip of her tongue. She was laughing.
“Still Saturday. You’ve only been away for like.” She turned to the open laptop on the far side
of the mattress, pressed a button to wake it up. “Fifteen minutes maybe?” Her voice was
hushed, impressed, like he was a very important painting in a museum. “What was
going on?”
“You
were there.”
She
shook her head, disturbing the patterns across her face. He watched them scatter and regroup, forming
their own hands and faces and eyes, watching him as he watched them. They
weren’t hallucinations, he could tell, just systems of energy and light that
his eyes were newly sensitive to.
“No,
I wish I was.” Her eyes big, eager. Then she frowned. “Well, maybe not. You looked pretty stressed out. I was trying to wake you up but it took a
while. What was happening?”
What
was happening. How would he even
describe it? What happened. What happened
was.
He
felt the vibrations of the music through his body, bump ba-bump bump, stirring
his blood, pulsing the shapes above him.
They were fainter now, fading. The whole thing was fading. All he could hold on to was a feeling,
something between his ribs. A lightness
above his heart.
“I
feel relieved,” he said.
“Oh,
no. That it’s over?”
“No,
not that it’s over.” He put his hand on
his chest. Yes, that was definitely the
feeling. “Relieved in general.”
She
smiled, a tired, worried smile like she had just been through something. He
loved when she looked like that, post-ordeal Rona, complex and deepened by
experience. He wanted to kiss her, not in a sex kind of way, just because she
was amazing.
“What
did you see?” he asked.
“Oh
me?” She yawned, rubbed her
eyes. “I had some pretty crazy visuals,
but I didn’t, like, go anywhere. You were the only one who really broke
through.”
That’s
right. The only one. Where did everyone else go?
“They’re
in the living room I think,” she said. “Can you get up yet?”
He
was pretty sure he could, but he didn’t want to. This room had Rona, patterns, ivy. It was one of those ecosystems, perfectly
balanced to sustain the life within it. Even the didgeridoo was perfect. Dark,
polished wood, a deep reflective chocolate brown, carved and painted by hand
somewhere in the Outback where they didn’t have machines. How could anyone hate
a didgeridoo?
“Come
on.” Rona was pulling on his elbow. She was right. This room was really nice, but they couldn’t
stay here forever. Time to move, grow,
continue.
Walking
felt like floating, like he might step wrong and hit the ceiling. He dragged his fingers along the wall for
balance as he followed the back of Rona’s head into the living room.
Sinder
and Dean were lying on the couch, their legs crossed over each other like girls
at a slumber party, smoking a purple bong.
“Want
some?” Dean held the bong out towards Rona. She climbed next to them on the couch, wrapped
her right hand around the shaft, just above the rounded bottom, took the
lighter in her left hand, pressed her lips to the opening. She handed the bong back to Dean, held smoke
in her puffed-out cheeks. She leaned the side of her face into the bulge of his uncovered biceps, opened her mouth, released a cloud of twirling smoke that curled into tiny
fingers and breasts and penises.
“Bong
hit?” Dean asked Gavin.
Gavin
shook his head.
“Yeah,
you don’t need any,” Dean said. “You
were pretty far gone.”
Pretty far gone. Gavin wondered what he’d
looked like, if he should be embarrassed. Probably. Of course he would be the
only one who couldn’t handle his DMT.
“Gavin’s
just more magic than us,” Rona murmured. She was falling asleep now, cuddled
against Dean’s arm, eyes closed, and Gavin didn’t even care. His chest was
filled up like a thousand smiles.
More magic.
Of
course it wasn’t true. There was no way he was more magic than Rona Gomez.
“I’m
gonna crash in a sec.” Dean put the bong down on the floor, pointed towards his
bedroom. “I have to get up early and
study. Big accounting exam. You guys are welcome to stay.”
“Nah,”
said Sinder. “We’re only a few blocks
away.”
They
left Rona there, falling asleep next to Dean on the couch. Gavin was pretty sure he should feel upset
about the thought of Rona and him, snuggled like kittens together, doing
whatever else they were going to do or had already done. But he couldn’t. Relief was all he felt. He
felt like a ten thousand pound weight had been pried from between his ribs. It
was so much relief it was almost scary, like he might float up into the black,
pulsating sky and dissolve.
“So
I guess maybe she’s with Dean now,” Sinder said. The streets around them were
dark, darker than usual it seemed like.
The patterns were gone now, but Gavin could still see shadows of them shifting
and moving behind the darkness.
“Yeah,
maybe.” If she was, it seemed okay.
Actually it kind of seemed like a good thing if anybody was having sex with Rona.
Like the universe and its inhabitants could only benefit from something
like that.
“But
she didn’t ask Dean to move to New York,” Sinder said. “She asked us.”
Something
rustled and jumped in the bushes next to the sidewalk. Gavin gasped, almost
tripped, caught himself. Sinder had
grabbed his hand and was holding it.
Loosely, casual. Gavin couldn’t
remember holding a guy’s hand before, not since he was a little kid, maybe, but
it felt okay. Felt kind of nice,
actually, like he had a partner in the darkness, an anchor to keep him from
getting lost in the thoughts and energy and relief.
“What
do you think?” Sinder asked. “About moving to New York with me and Rona.”
That
was it. That’s what he was relieved
about. Something had just happened, and
now he knew, felt pretty sure at least, that everything would be okay. That Liam Stump would survive without him.
That if he left this whole academia thing and never became a professor, that he
wouldn’t be letting anybody down. Not
his advisors, not Liam Stump, not himself.
That he could do anything he wanted to do, anything his imagination
could conceive of. That he was free.
“I
think,” he said, squeezing Sinder’s skinny hand. “It might be okay.”
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