“You are in your head. You need to break up with imaginary Harriet and fall in love with someone who will love you back. Not that real Harriet doesn’t love you. She just doesn’t love you like that.”
“Where the fuck is the real Harriet?” he fumed. “I think she walked all the way to Hershey, Pennsylvania, to get this candy bar.” She was always going off on these quests with June’s brothers, determined to find June the weird chocolate or weird soda or weird T-shirt that would make another day with cancer less depressing.
June sighed in a very heavy sort of way and turned her head to look out the window. “Why are there so many romantic songs about the spring? I hate the spring. The snow melts, and everything smells like thawing dog shit. Don’t you dare write any romantic songs about springtime, Aubrey. It would kill me, and dying once is bad enough.”
16
FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARD, he lay panting, happily exhausted, and slicked with cool sweat. His head was spinny from the combination of hunger and exertion, but the sensation was not entirely disagreeable, came with the endorphin rush that might accompany a whirl on a fairground ride.
She had slipped away—melted in his hands when his orgasm was complete—flowed across the floor in a shuddering blanket of fog. He liked to think it had been good for her, too. When he looked about for her, he saw her waiting through a high archway, at a ghost-colored table.
He wriggled back into his jumpsuit and walked into a grand dining room. He looked upon the immensity of the table, set with spectral goblets, a cottony-looking white turkey, and a bowl of cloudfruit.
Aubrey was famished—more than famished, almost shaky with hunger—but the sight of the smokefood wasn’t promising. He couldn’t smell it. It was sculpture, not dinner.
She carved him a slice of nothing, put it on a platter of sky, next to a prickly-looking cloudfruit. She regarded him with an almost childlike desire to please.
“Thanks,” he said. “Looks delicious.”
He used a pale knife to cut a long, canoe-shaped slice of the cloud fruit. Aubrey speared it with his fork, considered it in the muted light, then decided what the fuck and took a bite.
It crunched and splintered, not unlike rock candy. It tasted of rain, coppery and cold. He had been in error. Close up, it did have a scent. It smelled faintly like thundershowers.
He tucked in.
17
IT STARTED TO HURT ON his second slice of phantom turkey breast—a sharp, lancing strike of pain through his abdomen. He grunted, clenching his teeth together, and bent over in his smoky chair.
His mouth had a silky residue in it, a bad flavor like he’d been sucking on a handful of grimy pocket change. Another sewing needle pushed itself through his intestines. He cried out.
Sky Harriet, sitting catty-corner to him, reached for Aubrey in alarm, taking his hand in hers. With her free hand, she passed him a goblet of white smoke. He drank the froth in desperation, two big swallows before he realized it was just more of God knew what toxic foam. He flung the goblet away.
Bumblebees crawled frantically through his insides, stinging haphazardly.
He lurched to his feet, accidentally tearing Sky Harriet’s hand off. She didn’t seem to mind. He hurried through the archway as he was stricken with another shooting burst of pain. His bowels cramped. Oh, God.
Aubrey went down the stairs in a kind of controlled fall, a fast, reckless stumble, not at all sure where he was going. It felt as if his intestines were wrapped in a throttling coil of steel wire, drawing ever tighter with each passing moment. He had never before felt so desperately close to filling his pants. It was like losing an arm-wrestling match, only with his sphincter.
He flung himself through the gates and raced across the bridge span ning the moat. A toilet abided beside his Cadillac-size bed. He ran the last five steps with his jumpsuit around his knees, shackling his legs. He sat.
There was an eruption. He groaned. It felt like he was passing a lump of glass splinters. His guts squeezed again, and he felt the shock of pain down into his knees. His feet tingled, the circulation draining out of them. The third time his bowels convulsed, he felt a stab of pain behind his breastbone. An intense wavering shock radiated through his chest.
His high-altitude Harriet watched from a few yards away, her Greek-goddess features set in an expression of transcendent mourning.
“Excuse me, please!” he cried, straining at a fresh mass of stainless-steel slivers. What he really wanted to scream was Get the fuck away from me! Or maybe, You just killed me, bitch. But he didn’t have the courage for cruelty, it wasn’t in his nature. “I need to be alone. I’m sick.”
She dissolved into gossamer streamers, a silken waterfall that was absorbed into the cloud at her feet.
18
WHAT A THING TO ASK of her, I need to be alone. There was no alone. For that matter, there was no her. There was only the cloud. He knew, from the first moment he looked into her face, she wasn’t looking back at him. Not with her eyes anyway.
Maybe, in a sense, all of the cloud was looking back at him. If “looking” was really the right term. “Monitoring” was perhaps more accurate. Monitoring what he did, but also what he thought in some fashion. How else did it know what his idea of an end table looked like? Or a lover? His ideal lover?
And when he spoke to himself in the language of conscious thought—did it understand that?
The idea made him woozy with anxiety. But he wasn’t sure it did—that it could read him with such precision. He had a notion it was turning through his thoughts the way an illiterate child would flip through a magazine with a lot of pictures in it. He wondered if it was possible to keep anything to himself, if he could push the psychic eye of the cloudmind out of his head if need be. Much might hinge on the answer to that question.
The pain was letting up, although his insides felt torn and raw. He didn’t think that what he’d eaten was going to kill him directly. If it was any kind of concentrated poison, he never would’ve even made it out of the palace. But it wasn’t food either, and he couldn’t afford what it had done to him. He couldn’t afford to be carved up from the inside, not when he was already enervated, exhausted by a walk of ten steps. Anything that required physical effort cost him calories he didn’t have to waste.
Which turned his thoughts back to Sky Harriet’s visit in the night, and then their second, more strenuous exertions before the banquet of broken glass. Was she— But there was no she, he reminded himself. He forced himself to begin again. Was the cloud trying to exhaust him? Was it trying to use him up, deplete whatever reservoirs of fuel he was running on? But if it wanted to wipe him out, it seemed to Aubrey it would be so much easier to simply turn to insubstantial smoke and let him fall.