I don’t want to go, but he has my hand, so I follow him deeper. It goes on for a long time, this tiny, suffocating space, spiraling down until I feel sure we’re just twisting ourselves into the earth like screws.
Then we are in the basement. No glamour. No tricks. No hidden locks or passwords.
The basement is just there in front of us. Huge and black and empty. And the windows, completely covered over with soil. Gowan doesn’t say anything. I don’t know if he sees. But him being here and me not being alone is enough of a reason to not bring it up. I want to protect this moment.
We don’t find any food.
But we do find a stupid supply of wine. I grin and look at Gowan and he grins right back.
“Let’s forget this whole damn thing,” he says, offering his hand.
I take it, and we each grab two bottles of wine and run upstairs, cackling.
“Let’s drink to the irony.” Gowan raises his bottle in a toast. “No real food, plenty of alcohol. We could make passable college students yet.”
The cork crumbles into the wine, and it doesn’t taste particularly nice, but soon we are sprawled on the library floor in front of the fire, laughing and singing.
“… and her toe was sticking out of the slipper like this tiny little sausage!”
I can’t contain my roar of laughter. One bottle of wine is gone. The embers burn low. The house cools and sighs.
“I’ve never had a boy over before. Overnight, I mean.”
Gowan looks at me.
“It’s kise to have numpany.”
His eyes widen and we howl with laughter again until I’ve got tears streaming down my face and I can’t talk. He’s not doing much better.
“Numpany!”
I nudge him. “Shove off! You’re nice company, okay?”
We laugh for a long time, until I’ve almost wet myself, and then Gowan’s laughter dies suddenly and he sighs.
He takes a drink. “Unless I get through those trees in the garden… you may be stuck with me for a while.”
“I… don’t mind.”
We talk for a while, back and forth, until the talking becomes a question game.
“Would you rather live alone or in a commune?”
“Alone. Easy.” I think for a moment. “Would you rather have four hands or four feet?”
“Oh, come on,” he says, laughing. “Four hands would totally win. Think of everything you could get done.”
“Yeah, but you’d fracture your wrist bones if you tried to walk on them for very long.”
He snorts. “I still vote hands. Okay…” He takes a drink from the bottle. “What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done?”
My turn to drink. I can feel the wine swimming in my head like floppy fizzy fish. “Once, when I first came here, I woke up on the roof. I used to sleepwalk really badly, so I guess I sleepwalked up there. Anyway, I woke up around midnight or so, and decided it was so beautiful, I just stayed there. Only in the morning, I was back in my bed. Craziest thing ever.”
Gowan grins. “I remember.”
“What?”
“Nori told me that one already.”
I frown. “How?”
“She’s a very good writer. Terrible speller. R-U-F-E I took to mean roof.”
I laugh. “She’s a nut, that one. Okay, well, then have this one: When I was four, my mother told me about La Baume. I was so obsessed with it that I spent six years trying to get her to draw me a picture of it. When she finally gave it to me, it became a sort of talisman of hope, and now I keep it hidden in my pocket at all times. To remind me what a goddamn idiot I was and still am.”
Silence.
I fill it by drinking.
“You’re not an idiot for wanting a better life.”
I snort. “What the hell would you know about my life? It’s stupid. I’m stupid.”
“You should stop doing that.”
“What?”
“Calling yourself stupid. You’re not.”
I shrug. “I guess I just got used to hearing it.”
He’s quiet for a while, and it begins to feel heavy. Then he asks, “Would you rather punch a toad or a slug?”
I feel a surge of affection. “Toad.”
Back and forth, we play, until the room is spinning and I start laughing again, and then Gowan is laughing and we are rolling on the floor, howling, the night nothing but a backdrop to our forgetting. Forgetting the curse, forgetting this messed-up situation, forgetting that none of this can possibly be real.
I lean forward and the floor leans, too. “Did you know,” I say, dangling the bottle between two long fingers, “that most artists and most scientists are technically insane?”
Gowan takes the bottle and I topple forward, landing on my forehead with a dull bonk!
“Is that a statistic of convenience?” he asks.
I manage to untangle myself from the floor and my own limbs and sit swaying. “Fact is fact. Insanity is common. And I am starting to think I might be insane.”
“Define insane.”
“It’s a state of mind. Contrary to normal people. Unstable. Unusual. Seeing things that can’t be real.”
“Then, by definition, I could be insane, too.”