by Penni Russon
“It’s a trick,” Undine said, angry with herself, and the snow collapsed into water, evaporated into a fine mist, disappeared back into the sky to dwell hidden in the clouds.
Grunt sighed, apparently sorry to see it go. He sat beside her.
“When I was a little kid,” he said, reminiscing, immune to the strangeness of the magic he had just witnessed, “it snowed in Hobart. Not just on the mountain, or the foothills, but right down to the beaches. There was snow on the Tasman Bridge….” He waved his hand at the distant illuminated bridge. “I remember seeing people skiing down it on the news. It was amazing. My dad found a big plastic tray, and we sledded down the hill near our house, him behind, me sitting between his legs, steering his knees. It was the best day. And Mum, she lay down in the snow while Dad held the baby—that was my sister Izzy—and made an angel. She got wet, her hair got wet, icicles clinging to it, like she was the snow angel. I’ve never seen snow like that again.” He looked at Undine. “Magic, do you think?”
Undine said nothing. She stared at the bridge, and at the lights winking on the Eastern Shore.
“I like to think it wasn’t. I like to think it was something else, just earth, just nature. Maybe God, even.”
Undine nodded. She wondered, in a world with magic like hers, was there room for God? She had never really believed in God. There didn’t seem any point in it, and he just seemed so, well, unlikely. But now, a world that definitely had no God at all felt kind of…empty. It wasn’t really God she wanted; it was the possibility of God.
“Prospero said you’d stopped doing magic.”
“I have.”
“But tonight…?”
“It happens more easily when I’m upset.” She glanced at Grunt, whose face was impassive, unreadable. “You should know that.”
Grunt nodded. “I remember.”
They sat quietly for a while. Then Grunt said, “So tell me, how does it go? I mean, you leave Prospero and the bay, you come back to Hobart, to your normal life, but man! Everything’s changed. How do you just take up where you left off?”
Undine sighed. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” She thought about school and her exams. What was the point of them? What would she do when they were finished? She thought about her relationship with Dominic. She was trying to be an ordinary girl, to fit in with the world around her, but it was as if the space she had once occupied had changed shape—or she had changed—and they no longer fitted each other.
“Maybe you don’t go back,” Grunt suggested. “Maybe you can’t.”
“Maybe.” She knew Grunt was right. There was no going back to what she had been before. But she wasn’t sure she was ready for the alternative—and what was the alternative? Being an entirely magical girl? Where would that lead her? Away. Away from the people who loved her: Lou, Trout…she looked sideways at Grunt. She didn’t want to be alone.
She tilted her head back toward the party. “Is Trout all right?”
“He will be. You know, Dan…”
“I know,” said Undine. “He was just protecting his brother.”
“I was going to say, Dan’s a dickhead.”
Undine smiled.
“You should do that more often,” Grunt said.
Undine turned to look at him and realized that she rarely met his eyes. She was afraid of what she might see in them, of what he might see in hers, all her feelings revealed.
Grunt said softly, staring into her eyes, “I remember the walk up the hill. With Dad, on that day. It seemed so far, and so hard. We took it in turns to carry the tray, and it was big and awkward and kept slipping in my hands, knocking against my knees. But it was worth it. We slid down that hill, bumping on stones concealed by the snow. It was so fast, I’ve never traveled that fast in my life, not since. No roller coaster, no car, no rocket to the moon can go that fast. It was scary, but I was safe, with my dad’s legs wrapped around me.” He held up his own hand and looked at it, and Undine looked away from his face, relieved to be released from the intensity of Grunt’s locked gaze. “I remember the shape of my hand, how small it seemed on my dad’s leg, how strong he was.” He swiveled his hand to and fro, looking from the back of it to the cracked map of his palm. “It was like magic that day. It was rare and it was precious and it glittered like sunshine.”
Grunt laid his hand down, and it covered Undine’s.
“Show me,” he said softly. “Show me.”
She said nothing. She was silent, still. Then, as a gift for Grunt, she sent the magic out into the sky and filled the night with a flurry of snow. It seemed to light the sky and the land. Grunt’s face was illuminated; it shone with awe at the crystal-filled sky.
Undine gave herself to the magic. She let it fill her. It was breathtaking. But Grunt’s presence, the warm gentle pressure of his hand on hers, kept her grounded, and for once the magic felt peaceful, serene, and safe. She was the magic, but she was herself, too. It had never happened quite like this before; she’d never felt so much control over her power. It was as if she had almost found a way to bridge the magic and the girl.
She did not know how much time passed. What felt like much later, Undine cleared it all away, restored the landscape to what it had been, and sent the snow once again back into the sky.
Grunt seemed to come out of a trance. His hand lifted from where it had been touching hers. “Have fun in Greece,” he said softly, sincerely. By the time Undine looked up, he had gone.
“Good-bye,” she said to the empty air.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Trout and Dan did not speak in the car on the way home. Trout’s head swirled with fragments that he could not piece together: the blank staring eye of a fish, the word never, the smell of peppermints and old car, the metallic taste at the back of his tongue, and a sensation that someone was exerting pressure on his lower back.
Lately his feelings for Undine had swung from love to loathing like a crazy pendulum. He understood what people meant when they said things about love and hate being opposite sides of the same coin. But fueling the momentum of the pendulum had always been hope. He hadn’t realized how much he had still been hoping, until now that hope was gone. Dan had reached out and strangled hope. Inside Trout anger spat and hissed; he could not look Dan in the face.
Richard would have apologized. Richard would have made the peace; the peace was always more important to Richard than the principle. But Dan would not. He stopped at the house, and as soon as Trout had closed the passenger door he drove off, back to the party, spinning the tires and leaving a burn mark on the road.
The bitch of being in love with the girl next door is that even at home she can’t be escaped; there was her house, a constant reminder, crouching over him in the darkness. He wondered if Jasper was there, watching him. The kid gave him the creeps. All little kids did a bit. His own childhood, as he looked back on it, now seemed full of lies and bullies and a general pervasive threat. Quicksand, the bogeyman, Bigfoot, nuclear war. Even the Easter Bunny was alarming: a rabbit of immense proportions who knows where you live. Grown-ups that control you. Bad dreams that won’t leave you alone.
Trout let himself in. Mrs. M. called down the stairs, “Trout? Dan? Is that you?”
“It’s okay, Mum, we’re home,” Trout lied. “Go to sleep.”
He heard her feet scuffle across the hall and their bedroom door close. She wouldn’t have closed the door until she heard them come in.
Trout’s head was still not clear. He tried to push away the fluctuating anxiety that kept threatening to come upon him; he was sure that if he gave in to the fear that he could not breathe, it would come true and lead to a genuine asthma attack.
He stood at the closed front door. An overwhelming weariness came over him and he rested back, allowing the door to support his weight. His legs buckled under him and he slid down to the floor, sitting on the cold slate in the hallway. The night played itself back to him. He shook his head, trying to clear the images from hi
s mind, but whenever he closed his eyes he could see the fish he believed he was becoming.
He pulled himself up from the ground and walked into the study, stumbling slightly against the wall. He flicked on the computer and connected to the Internet. He typed the Chaosphere’s address into the browser.
A quote came up on the screen: Chaos is process rather than state, becoming rather than being.
Trout looked at the time. It was 3 a.m. What were the chances that Max would be online? It was months since he’d entered the Chaosphere.
He typed his user name and password. His name appeared in the list of members currently online. Trout’s heart skipped a beat. Max’s name was there.
He opened a private box.
TROUT: Max, I need to talk to you.
The cursor blinked. Trout waited, but there was no response.
TROUT: Max, are you there? I need to ask you something.
Trout waited. Max didn’t respond, but Trout kept typing, desperately filling the blank void of the box.
TROUT: Please. Please. The magic. I need to know. Does it belong here? Do you think it belongs here? In this world? In this universe? Is it natural? Is it real? Should it be here? I need to know.
He knew he shouldn’t be here. He knew he was breaking his own rule and putting Undine at risk of discovery by talking about the magic. What would happen to her if people knew what she could do? But his frantic need for answers made him reckless.
TROUT: What I mean is, does magic belong in the universe like sparrows and rice and collapsible garden furniture? Should it be able to act, to save people, to change the future or the past? I need to understand it. Should it be allowed to change things? Should it be here? SHOULD I BE HERE?
In the “members online” list, Max’s name suddenly disappeared. Trout put his head down on the desk. He wanted sorrow and rage to tear through him, to erupt out of him in huge raking sobs. But crying wouldn’t come.
Why couldn’t he cry? He suspected that if he was alive, it was only half a life. Like Prospero, was he destined to spend his remaining years remote from the people around him? Is this what happened when you came in contact with the magic? Did it consume you from the inside, did it empty you out, did it leave you broken and barren? Was he less human, now that he had traded a fish’s life for his own?
Before he logged off, he grabbed the pack of sticky notes from the desk drawer. “Chaos is process,” he wrote. “Becoming…being…” He went back to his room. He held the quote up against the wall on the Chaos side, then tried it on the True Chaos side—as if it was a painting and he was trying to find the best light for it. Eventually, in the margin between the two sides, he fastened the scrawled note to the wall.
He peeled off the treacherous green shirt and lay down on his bed. But of course, even there he found no peace. It was a long time before his racing mind quietened enough for him to sleep, and when he did it was fitful: he relived the moment of his own death over and over.
Baby. Here comes the dark.
Though Undine took great care to slide the key silently into the lock and enter the house on tiptoe, it was for nothing. Lou was awake, waiting up for her.
“Was it a fun party?” Lou asked.
“Um. Yeah.” Thinking about Trout and the events of the party, and then of course her own broken promise, Undine failed to be entirely convincing. “I’m tired, though. I think I’ll go straight to bed.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at Lou; she felt she wore the magic about her like a gaudy costume, all colors and sparkles and loud noise. She could still feel the aftereffects tingling in her fingers and toes like pins and needles, racing through her blood like pure caffeine.
But Lou seemed distracted, and Undine realized she hadn’t been waiting up for her after all.
“Anything wrong?”
“What? Oh, no, I’m fine. I…” Lou looked at the cordless phone, lying on the table in front of her. “I had a call from Prospero tonight.”
“Everything all right? We’re still going, aren’t we?”
“Yes, yes. I’m just…I’m still not used to him being in our lives, that’s all.”
Undine sensed there was something more, but she was anxious to retreat upstairs to the solitude of her room. She murmured good night and walked away, her face still cast downward, avoiding her mother’s eyes. She lay awake a long time, thinking of Trout’s haunted face, the gentle pressure of Grunt’s hand on her own, and remembering what it had been like to fill the world with snow.
It was early afternoon by the time Trout woke. His mouth was dry and woolly from the beer he had drunk. His arm was pressed against his face and his skin smelled faintly chemical.
He pulled himself out of bed. The curtain was open, and he went to shut it. Undine was on her balcony, and it seemed she had been watching for him because as he approached his bedroom window she waved. He waved back. She signaled to him to meet her at the bottom of the steps. He hesitated, then nodded weakly. He rummaged on his floor for clothes, passing over the crumpled green shirt where it lay—duplicitous and conniving on the bedroom floor—for his regular uniform of black.
Undine was sitting on the bottom step waiting for him. He sat a few steps up and put his head down between his knees.
“How are you?” she asked tentatively.
“Fine,” Trout said to the ground. Then he looked up and managed a sheepish combination of a grimace and a grin. “Did anyone ever tell you that drugs are bad?”
“So why…?”
Trout shrugged. “Why did I take it? I don’t know. I guess, just because. Maybe I’m sick of being Trout. Good old predictable Trout.”
“Do you remember everything about it? Do you remember what you said to me?”
“I remember what you said to me.”
“But Trout,” Undine said, scuffing her foot on the step. “You knew that. Didn’t you? I mean, isn’t that why you’ve never asked?”
Trout looked at a far-off distant point, a trick he had taught himself as a kid when he knew he was going to cry. “Yeah. I knew.”
“So what about the other thing? About the fish? Do you remember?”
Trout shook his head no, but would not meet Undine’s eye. He didn’t want to talk about it with her. He couldn’t tell her about the dreams. He couldn’t tell her that every night she came for him, that every night she pulled the very life out of him.
Undine said, “You must know that it wasn’t meant to be you.” Trout was silent. Undine went on desperately, “It wasn’t. It was just a fish.”
“It feels like…”
“What?”
Trout found he needed to say it out loud. “Sometimes I think…it’s like the fish died in my place, you know? Like I should be dead, and he should be—” “It.”
“What?”
“It. It should be. Not he. It’s just a fish.”
“Whatever. It should be still there, alive, in the sea. Like I’ve taken something I shouldn’t have.”
“No,” said Undine. “No, Trout. You’re meant to be here. You have to be.”
“How do you know? Why?”
“Because…because it would break my heart…. You’re my best friend.”
“Yeah, I know. And you’re mine. Sort of.”
Undine flinched.
“Well,” said Trout matter-of-factly. “I am in love with you.” It was the first time he’d said it out loud. “I am. That complicates things. It means there’s a part of me that will never be your friend. That will never be happy with friendship alone.”
“Dan said the same thing last night,” Undine said.
Trout nodded. “Besides,” he added. “I’m not sure it’s a good enough reason.”
“What?”
“That I’m here because you want me to be. I’m not sure that’s reason enough to cheat death.”
“You didn’t cheat death. If it hadn’t been for me, you would never have been there. I put you in the situation in the first place.”
Trout shook his
head. “No. God, you’re so arrogant. You didn’t force me. I have agency, I have a mind of my own. I chose to be there. And, just sometimes, I think it should have been me. That I should be dead. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Undine was close to tears.
“That’s all.”
Trout got up to go.
“It was just a fish,” said Undine, really crying now. “Just a stupid fish.”
Trout stopped, but he didn’t look back. “It was a fish,” he said. “It was life. Now it’s nothing.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sun. Old fire burning. Caster of shadows, illuminating difference, speaking an ancient language of presence and absence, light and dark, having and lacking.
Trout hated it. Even in winter the sunlight in Hobart was bright and blinding, blazing through the thin, icy atmosphere. When the sun shone, he felt he could never belong. The world of the day was less and less his, as if by some rule of the universe he had forfeited light and color and warmth when he had dodged death.
In the daytime, Trout seemed to be holding his breath, his lungs tight and tense. When night came, shadows blanketing the world, Trout began to breathe again. Blackness spread through him, but if you didn’t fight the blackness, he found, if you let it take you, then you became something else. Something part night, not completely alive. The sharp edges of the harshly sunlit world were blunted, numbed by darkness.
In the night, Trout walked.
Sunday nights were always the quietest. The air seemed reverent. The cold drifted around him and the river docks smelled like fish and old seawater. He walked down Hunter Street, lined with restaurants and warehouses, the art school on one side and the gloomy water on the other.
He stood under a streetlight, looking at the flat surface of the river, slick and black as oil. He wondered what was below the water, what murky life thrived here. He shivered as the wind bit through him.
