“I was everywhere,” he says. “All around you. I was the air you breathed and I was the ocean you swam in. I was the breeze that came through the window and lifted the sheets where you slept.”
And as he says this, my body grows cold. I’m deep in the cold, rippling ocean of Tom’s eyes. “I grew up swimming in your eyes,” I whisper. “I became more beautiful in my way and I grew taller and Mother grew shorter and older and her smile turned into a smirk. And the world never got cold, never turned the color of Mother again. It stayed green and blue like the great Pacific. I floated on its white waves while Mother sank to the silty bottom. Quit her acting career and opened up a dress shop. She gave it my name. I got a job as a princess and even dated a prince. And a fellow princess. But they were nothing like you. There was a space there, too, like the one between me and Mother. Like the one between me and everyone forever after. There has been a space between me and everything ever since you turned to smoke. There has been a wall of glass.”
A smile on Tom’s shining face, rippling like water.
Though I’m still speaking through dead lips, my words garbled like I’m underwater, he hears every word, he knows it’s the heart’s blood. My heart’s blood. The exact true music of our story. To the very last note.
He kisses me on my dead lips.
Behind us, the red jellyfish bursts out of its tank, shattering the glass.
We watch it from our floating table, the story of Tom and me in one red pulsing fish. It drops to the floor. Flails against the wall like a still-beating heart among the glass shards. Right beneath a giant glass tube along the wall that runs from the floor to the ceiling. The tube is like a vacuum, it makes a sucking noise now. My pulsing red jellyfish is rising up toward the sucking mouth of this tube in spite of itself. It’s afraid, I know it. I feel it in my heart beating in time with the pulsing bell. I watch the tube suck it up by its tentacles. I watch the jellyfish float up the clear tube toward the ceiling.
“Where is it going, Tom?” I ask with my broken voice.
But Tom isn’t with me on the table anymore.
I’m alone watching the red jellyfish move up through the glass tube. There’s a hole in the ceiling that connects the tube to the sky. I watch our story join the sky of water. All its red tentacles. Its red bell still beating like a frantic heart. Its pattern of roses. And then it’s floating above me, looking down at me through the glass ceiling with eyes both familiar and strange.
And all goes black.
Part VI
26
A dark, warm room full of fog. White faces frozen on the red wall above me, so many faces. Not faces, masks of faces. Their eyes and mouths wide open like black holes. Are they in the midst of horror or in the midst of bliss? Hard to say. I’m lying on a white chair shaped like an S. Slippery, no armrests. I’m in a robe of white silk that shines in the dark, how pretty. There’s a red flowerlike thing on the breast pocket. It could be a flower, it could be a fish. The petals look like tentacles, very pretty. Where am I? What is this place? Whatever it is, I’m not the only one here, it seems. Others with me, sitting in S chairs of their own. Everyone smiling. Everyone looking so peaceful, like we’re in a spa place. Perhaps we are. And this is the waiting place before. There’s a sound of chimes, a perfume in the fog that’s lulling. All very peaceful, but I’m a little nervous, funny. Maybe I should get up, take a look around in the fog. Orient myself.
“Oh, don’t get up,” says the woman next to me. “Not yet, they said.”
She’s smiling at me in the dark. She’s also in a chair like an S, wearing a white robe with a red flower-fish on the breast.
“Who’s they that said it?” I ask. That can’t be the right way to ask, but it’s how I ask.
She smiles sleepily at me. She’s so extraordinarily beautiful. Her face is like a lake. Lakesmooth. Pale, but something tells me she wasn’t always so. Like she’s been drained a little of her color. Brightened.
“Who’s they?” I ask.
“Can’t remember,” she says. So dreamily. Everything is a dream. The fog is a dream. I’m a dream. She’s smiling in it. “They’re a color.”
“What color?”
“Can’t remember the color,” she says. “Funny, that. It’s so close in my head, you know?”
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s roses. Blood. Fish that float with many legs. You put it on your face with a brush to make yourself pretty. Anyway,” she says, “soon. Soon is when they’re coming for us.”
She knows so much, I think. She’s so wise. And familiar, too. I feel as though I may have sat with her before in this very waiting place. So I ask, “Where are we?”
“The Relaxation Chamber. Where you come post treatment. The After Place.”
I look up at the white faces on the wall frozen in screaming. I breathe in the perfumed fog. The After Place. Yes. It makes sense. So I’ve just had a treatment. “And who are you?”
And she smiles, but then stops. “I’m not sure,” she says. “Funny.”
“Yes, that is. Really funny.”
She looks at me. “Who are you? Maybe if you know, then I’ll know too.”
I try to think, but my mind is a blue pool empty of fish. Light from a sun streaming down. But no words there. No name that’s mine.
“I’m not sure too.”
“Funny,” we both say.
And we smile. You have to smile or you’ll something else. The thing that happens to your eyes when they begin to leak salt water. It’s a little funny how we don’t know. It’s also not funny. It’s the opposite of funny. What’s the opposite of funny? Forgot. Whatever it is, I’m feeling it spread through me and it’s making me cold. It’s spreading through her, too, I see. See it on her… face. She looks the opposite of funny.
“Can you favor me something?” she says.
I look at her. “Course, yes.”
“Do you mind telling me if I look… how I look? If it’s beautiful at all? Because I can’t see a glassthing anywhere.”
“I can’t either,” I say. “Just these white faces on the walls. Do you see them?”
She nods, looking all around. “I see them. I see them and I don’t love them at all.”
She begins to do the opposite of smile again.
“Don’t,” I say. “Please. Look at me. I’ll be your glassthing.”
She looks at me and I look back at her for a while like I’m really looking. Like I’m finding the words in her face though I already know what to say. “You’re beautiful,” I say. “Like a lake of ice. Smooth and Bright.”
This makes her smile again. “It’s true?”
“Very. Can you tell me what I am now? What about me?”
She looks at me.
“There’s a Glow,” she says. “A Glow like a light. Moonbright.”
We smile at each other in the fog. Who needs glassthings when we can give each other our eyes? But oh god. Feet sounds now. We hear them coming our way. A gong thing ringing through the chimes. Rings through me. Making me vibrate like a bell. I watch the fog clear like clouds parting.
“Sounds like soon is coming,” the woman whispers.
“Sounds like soon is now.”
27
We’re in a long line of us. All of us in white silk robes with red flower-fish things on the breast. Lined up, two by two, in a grand, dark hall where I’ve never been. Where are we now? Why are we lined up like this? Where does the line lead? Only They know. There’s a perfumed fog still, all through the hall. There’s the sound of chimes coming from somewhere. “Have you ever been here?” I ask my new friend, beside me. She’s my partner in the line.
“I haven’t,” she says. “It’s a no.” She shakes her head. “Definite.”
I see a woman in red at the very front of the line, at the very end of the long, dark hall. Two people in silver stand on either side of her holding out what looks like bags for each of us to take.