Chapter Ten
Forget
Here in the darkness, in the dead of the night, without light and shadow to play around the cobwebbed corners of the ceiling, he started questioning his own existence. It may have been the aftereffects of the day's events, but to him, the darkness was not so much a simple absence of light as a sentient creature lodged in the center of the triangle: neither solid, nor liquid, nor gas. It was the sort of darkness that neutralizes odors and deafens people who lie awake while others sleep: thick, droopy, with the viscosity of blood and the consistency of cold cream, seeping through the gaps between floorboards, spreading out, flattening, taking on the shape of the room and everything in it.
Here in the darkness, he realized that silence could be heard, and numbness felt.
He wondered whether his eyes were closed, or whether they were open without seeing anything. There was nothing but the dark when he waved his hand in front of his face, nothing but the dark when he craned his neck to glance at where the window was set in the wall. Nothing but the dark and silence.
This was the exact moment when he started thinking, Am I real? Deprived of sight, of hearing, with nothing at hand to sniff, his consciousness started ebbing away at the center, gnawing outwards, until he almost fooled himself into believing that he was the darkness, and there was a recumbent figure there on the couch, buried under a thatch of frayed blanket.
He touched a fingertip to his eyelid and pushed it upward. Now there was no question whether his eyes were open; one of them was, and the other was a Schrödinger's cat: open and closed at the same time until the daylight breaks. Still, he saw nothing.
This time, he wondered whether his thoughts safely roamed within the confines of his mind, or whether he was talking to himself. Of course, he couldn't hear anything; that was the problem—he couldn't hear his own thoughts. Experimentally, and a little sheepishly, he mumbled a half-swallowed "Ah." There was no distinction at all: a part of him was cemented on the fact that he had opened his mouth and vibrated his vocal chords, had felt his lips part and his chin dip, yet there was another portion of him that steepled its fingers and argued that the word sounded like a thought, that it rang between his eyes and not in his neck.
He shifted a little and cushioned his head with an arm: there were extra pillows upstairs, but he daren't disturb Chelsea in the middle of the night.
Ah, yes. Chelsea. No matter how much he steered his thoughts to the profound, to the mediocre, even to the pointless pondering of the night's darkness, they still found a path to her unblocked by warning signs, like ships in the night following the glare of a lighthouse.
Again he brought his palm to his face and this time immediately detected the waft of breath from his nostrils. He freed his arm from under his head and grasped one hand in the other, feeling individual fingers, groping along the forearm, tracing familiar contours to convince himself that he was not disembodied—that he was still himself, still intact, still trapped in a casing of meat with its structural support of two hundred and six bones, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes. Reality seemed to dissolve when submerged in the darkness. His fingers brushed against the hair on his forearm. Reality, fantasy—if both felt the same in the dark, both would feel the same under lights, even the ones so bright they blind twice as much as the darkness.
A patch of orange appeared at the top of the stairs and ate away at the black around it. He squinted at it. The light quivered, flickering in circles, throwing out shadows of the handrails onto the living room floor, diagonal bars trembling: black, orange, black, orange, like a decorated pedestrian crossing.
This train of thought petered out and vanished as the light burned brighter and descended a step; it brought first a bare foot, luminous as a lamp, then another, followed by the hem of a pair of pajama bottoms—the light, being tainted orange, made it impossible to tell the color of the fabric. One foot stopped at the third step from the top, the other still resting on the second, heel up, toes down.
He wished she felt the same as he did. Was her heart pounding away in her mouth, like his, was her stomach knotting itself into a fist, twisting itself into a rope, was she falling inside herself, scrabbling for something to hold on to?
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, she was there, standing beside the couch, holding a candle aloft—the very same half-used candle she had tossed the morning before. He had not had the time to feign sleep, and even if he had, he doubted it would fool her. The whites of her eyes glowed yellow.
"Can't sleep, either?" she asked. She placed the candle on the coffee table and sat on his armchair, her knees pulled to her chest.
"Ever tried sleepin' on your lumpy couch?" He stirred and sat up—lying on his back while she sat made him feel helpless for some reason.
In the penumbral light of the candle, he caught her smile. "It's not lumpy. You're sleeping on it wrong." She yawned. "Dark in here."
"Maybe 'cause it's hours after midnight. Maybe."
There stood a wall between them, woven of self-conscious denial and the pathetic imitation of normalcy, the crisscrossing threads dusted over with a mutual attempt to delay the inevitable. They would talk about normal things and keep on talking until one of them slips, unguarded; until one fails to curb the tongue and lets out a word, shooting out to tear a hole through the wall, ripping the fabric—and the pretense will drop like marionettes with their strings cut off.
He let the pretense drag on for the moment; it would crumble soon enough.
"You're a lot like Denny sometimes. Anyone ever told you that?"
"Just you. And Mark."
There were purplish circles under her eyes, circles like bruises on an overripe fruit. Remnants of a nightmare shed from the night. "He's telling the truth. You and Denny, you guys aren't so different."
"Everyone's not so different from everyone else, when it boils down to it."
"Maybe. But you and Denny, you guys see the world through the same set of eyes."
He turned this thought over in his hands, marring its underside with a tracery of amusement. Two people seeing the world through the same set of eyes: he pictured him and Denny sharing a pair of binoculars, a lens apiece. "Poetic. But that's where the similarities end."
"Both of you are horrible at singing. And dancing."
"Ouch."
"And you both don't like kids."
And so the slip was made, the wall blasted apart, the pretenses scissored away. The air and darkness mingled in drops and vapors and slivers of curling smoke, fingers intertwining, molding together until it became impossible to tell one from the other. He breathed in darkness, exhaled light. He saw air wafting away from the flame, air and darkness, liquefied in the tip of the fire.
"Look," she said. "Vaughn, we… we need to talk."
"We're already talking."
She sat there, curled like a fist, forehead furrowed and eyebrows furled, eyes lustrous from under the shadowed brows. Her mouth was set in a hard diagonal line, lifted where she chewed at the lip, showing a thin strip of gleaming teeth. If she only knew—if she had even an inkling of how chatoyant she seemed to him, she might have taken it in her head to start mewing.
The feet showing below the hem of her pajamas were pale: fish-belly white, heavily veined blue and purple and green, wide, splayed flat, big-boned. Toes bulbous and crooked, pointing up. Certainly far from Sabrina's dainty feet, or Lanna's sandaled soles, or Julia's shapely ankles sheathed deep in her leather boots. They were farmers' feet, strong and calloused, made for endurance and heavy work—ugly, and beautiful in their strength.
"You know what I mean." She closed her eyes and opened them again. "Did you even love her?"
"She was my daughter too."
"So you did."
"Yes."
They say eyes are the windows to the soul. Hers were double doors, four inches thick, leading into the bowels of her mind, into twisting hallways and dead ends and rooms with locked doors, into darkened basements and half-forgotten attics. Doors that were always open, doors that closed only in sleep. His were mere portholes, shuttered and curtained, boarded up with planks of wood nailed together in haste—she had told him so, once, when she was still prying him open with her fingernails. ("You're a well-hidden soul, you know?", "Either that or I don't have one.")
"You weren't there when she was born. You never even saw her."
"Yes."
"Tiny thing." She held her palms apart as if to show him how small it had been. "Bloody, hairy. Wrinkly. Ever seen a newborn? They're ugly. But she was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." She twisted a lock of hair from her shoulder and put it in her mouth; it slashed a dark crescent across her face, a stringy twine creeping from her temple down to the corner of her lips. "Were you upset when she died?"
"Yes."
"But you never wanted her."
"No."
She looked beautiful in the candlelit, with her face so animated and contoured almost lovingly. It was as if the light came from her and the flames borrowed it to burn the wick and blow a dark line of smoke straight up. "Could you do me a favor?" she said. "It's not hard, I swear."
"Shoot."
"Monopolize the conversation."
Beyond the candle, at the fringed edges of the light's golden crown, was darkness deeper than the one behind his eyelids. It was darkness within darkness, black within black, a great stirring beast concealed inside the dearth of the sun. A sack of darkness in a whale's mouth.
Now where did that thought come from?
His elbows dug into the flesh above his knees. A corner of her mouth, the one with the crescent's tail in it, lifted in a half-smile. "Please."
He sighed. "All right." Her eyes were sad. Chatoyant. Double doors four inches thick. "Thing is, when you grow up without parents, you grow up without any idea how to be a parent." He paused. He was never one for melodrama. "Puts fear in you. It follows you. Reminds you of the things you never had, things Mum an' Dad should've done. Things that now are yours to do. All the dramatic questions: the what if's and all that." He unclasped his hands and spread his palms. "What if I die and leave the children behind? What do I do if the little guy cries and doesn't want milk? What if I drop 'em down the stairs 'cause they flail too much?" He laughed. "All those stupid questions."
"You never had much trouble with animals."
"Do animals need me to look up to as they grow up?"
"Good point."
The sun was shining on the far side of the planet, where people hurriedly jabbed at elevator buttons pointing up, glided buttered knives back and forth across toasted bread, strode on the sidewalks patting their pockets for wallets they left at home, lifted a foot to inspect a grimy pink gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. People unlocking the day with yawns and stretches, people frowning over their salads and poking at their steaks and sipping at their cappuccinos. People who would never know that on the opposite side of the world, where the moon bared its waning face, in some backwater group of islands, there were two people wide-awake in the middle of the night, sitting in the half-light, talking in murmurs, in whispers spat from the corners of their mouths, waiting for dawn to split the sky.
"Animals aren't as fragile," he said.
"How much did you love her?"
He frowned—what an odd question. How is love measured? There is no scale engraved on the surface of the heart, like a beaker's, measuring every drop of affection until it fills up and overflows; nor a ruler extending both ways, down into the earth's belly, up towards the sky's maw, how high will you jump, how deep will you dig; three fingers deep for a fling, four for something serious, all five fingers for commitment; a kilogram or two on the scales, tip the plates to whatever is heavier. He had an answer, though.
"Enough to miss her a bit."
"A bit?"
"Considering that I never even saw her, that's a lot."
"I think you'd have made a great father."
"Sure. 'Cause all great fathers miss their children's births."
"There you go again, acting like Denny."
A time of silence passed. Silence, he now realized, was not the absence of sound; silence teemed with sounds unheard, sounds so loud no one could hear them, sounds that blare and crawl and squeeze, sounds that tingle along the nape with ghostly caresses, sounds that whisper in the tongue, billow in the skin, pirouette in the nose, sounds that impair the ear.
He wondered if darkness was the same.
"What's it going to be, then?" The pink tip of her tongue darted out and moistened her lips. The eyes below the arch of her eyebrows hardened into tempered steel twice folded, sharp enough to slash away at the weavings of time itself.
Three fingers for a fling, four for something serious, all five fingers for commitment. All five fingers of her hand, and he was in the palm, amidst the grooves in the skin, balled up into a wad with his eyes half-open and his limbs lashed back. She was the fire and he was the wick; she burned him and grew brighter, consumed him, feeding off his heart, lighting up the darkened corner of himself where sweeter things had lain forgotten. Dramatic. How poetic. And what utter nonsense.
His eyes longed for sleep—a quick nap, a brief plunge into a state of blissful unthinking, a stretch or two on the floor and a few unconscious snores.
But she was watching him with eyes that glowed yellow in the candlelight. Double doors four inches thick, leading into a room locked from the inside.
In the end, it all tapered down to the middle, to the fork in the road. Left, keep going. Right, start over. Left, right. Stay or go. Else just stand there, waiting for a third option that might resurface somewhere in the hedges if you look hard enough, or wait long enough, or pray too much.
But there's no third option, no middle ground, no gray to buffer the collision between black and white. With us or against us. Stay or go.
That was it: Will they end this circus of a marriage, or will they keep at it until the circus disbands, the animals released into the wild, the ringleader in his waistcoat and studded jacket, hanging up his battered whip?
"I'll pack my bags and leave at the first light," he said.
Her mouth dropped open, and the candle flame flickered. "What?"
"I'll move out if that's what you want."
Now her upper lip curled up in disdain, lifted by the sides of her nose. "How—how could you even think—" She let her head drop into her hands, let out an agitated groan, and pushed herself off the chair. "You idiot. You stupid, selfish bastard."
Without knowing it, he was on his feet, matching her stance. He had no clear memory of standing up, or of his feet hitting the floorboards; it was as if his mind had been torn to glutinous pieces, disintegrated, and scattered all over his limbs, so that his hands and feet were self-aware but he himself was not. His mouth, without his permission, said: "What?"
"How could you assume that I'd want you out?" She bared her teeth as she talked—how savage, he thought. How ferocious. And how beautiful. "Why did you even think I married you? I love you, you bastard. How could I throw you out? It's like you don't even know me. Or maybe it's you who wants to leave."
It took him a while to comprehend the words. "What? No—no, no. That's not it. I just thought—"
"That I'd be too proud to forgive? Is that it? You automatically assume that we can't come out of this intact because Chelsea's so high and mighty and—"
"No, listen. Listen to me. I just—"
"Just what? Just thought you've had enough drama to last you a lifetime? I wanted us to make up and get over this, and you just had to go ahead and assume that—"
"Will you let me finish?" he said. She clamped her mouth shut and crossed her arms. "I don't want to leave. I just thought—I thought you'd be better off without me."
Her eyes widened. Double doors, double doors, double doors. "What in the world gave you that idea?"
"I don't deserve you. There you go. Plain and simple." In her angry outburst, she'd gotten one thing right, though: he'd had enough drama to last him a lifetime. All these touchy confessions and emotion-charged exchanges went straight to his neck.
"You do," she said. "Otherwise we wouldn't still be here, arguing about something that shouldn't have been this big anyway."
Not knowing what she meant, he offered his silence.
"I mean I shouldn't have been pregnant." The candle flame flickered again, dancing to the melody of unfelt drafts from the window. The room darkened momentarily. She wrapped her arms around herself. "It's… it's all my fault. I stopped taking pills. That's how it happened in the first place. I stopped taking pills and I never told you."
Inside his head, between his ears, a wave of vertigo passed: something inside himself was falling. Something alive and panting was falling, arms flailing about, shouting in a voice no once could hear. Ten, twenty, thirty feet down and still at it—an endless fall, an earthbound dive, to the bottom that did not exist, hurtling deeper and deeper.
"I know."
"You know?"
He shrugged. "Yeah. Figured it out pretty early."
The expression on her face was puzzled, her eyes guarded. "You knew? All this time?"
"Yep."
"And you let me put the blame on you?"
He shrugged again, and this time smiled. "I'm a great guy." It was a risk, making a joke in a conversation where every word could go both ways. A single nod could turn left into a road paved with ivory and silk, or veer to the right, where the essence of words are wrung out and collected in a pail and fashioned into something altogether deadly: poison, maybe, or a guillotine made into a word.
"I—I don't' know what to say." She put a hand over her mouth and talked through it, through the fingers. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
The crickets outside chirped their mating calls. Her shoulders started shaking, but there were no tears—not yet. The way she was dressed infused a vulnerable veneer to the air around her, what with her oversized shirt all rumpled and creased, and those motley pajama bottoms frayed at the hem. She looked like a child somebody had lost, come looking for help.
"Hey," he said, walking towards her. "Come here. Don't cry."
His arms found their way around her, around the pointedly familiar body alienated by a brief stretch of forgetfulness. She was warm in his arms, neither soft nor delicate, her face pressed to his neck. He felt her lashes brush against his skin whenever she blinked.
"Are you crying?" he asked.
"No."
They stood in silence, holding each other, swaying slightly. The fingers of his hands plunged into her hair, enmeshed, fingers and hair, in the dark held at bay by the candlelight. A woman might say it was romantic. A man might frown and puff on his cigarette and say, Well, what are you waiting for?
"If I gave you permission," she said, "will you leave?"
"Do you want me to?"
A brush of her eyelashes. "No."
"Then no."
"Do you want to?"
"No."
They had always gotten things wrong. The bullet never hit the mark, the arrow never found its target, the ball always danced around the rim of the basket before dropping away. It was always the small things: forgotten allergies, minor preferences, cats or dogs, boxers or briefs. The things they'd gotten right were all but a cracked brick set into the wall of the things they'd gotten wrong, surrounded by hardened mortar that crumbled at a breath.
In the face of all the faults, though, they had plowed ahead, because the point of marriage is to keep trying and trying until they get it right. One day they were bound to hit the vein of gold, pickaxes ringing, Jackpot, Here it is, We found it, Finally.
"We're going to be fine, aren't we?" she said. She blinked, slowly. "We can pull through, can't we?"
"We've gone this far. I say we take our chances."
The person inside him was still falling, the wind still whistling past, the world a blur, the hollow ground spreading out to catch him from below. But when she blinked once more and smiled and said, "I love you," the falling stopped: He finally found something to hold on to.
a/n:
Sorry for taking too long to update. My wisdom tooth was polite enough to say hi this week. Ever tried writing with a toothache? It's harder than it sounds. lol.
Anyway, this is the last chapter. Or rather, the second to the last—there's just the epilogue to go. The story somewhat ends here, because I honestly have no idea what to write for the epilogue, but I'll make it up as I go along, as usual. Or they might not be an epilogue. I haven't made up my mind yet. Haha.
Thank you so much for all your wonderful reviews. I want to reply to individual comments, but I'm painfully shy both in real life and on the internet, and I could spend a quarter of an hour or more staring at a message I'm too nervous to send. But I would still like to thank you all: all who reviewed, who read, who stuck with this story 'til the end. Thanks so much, guys.