All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Lately I’ve discovered certainty can be a kind of curse,” said Laurence.

  They were in Laurence’s bedroom, where Patricia had never been before. It was a sort of in-law apartment downstairs from Isobel’s apartment, with a view of a back garden out the window, behind the twin bed with a Mighty Mouse quilt. On the opposite wall, he had a workstation, with docks for a laptop computer and a 19-inch monitor, plus shelves and racks of cannibalized electronics. Including five Caddies, two of them jailbroken and two others shackled together with a mesh of crossover cables.

  The remaining wall space, over by the door, was taken up with a small bookcase containing graphic novels, engineering texts, and a few science memoirs, like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Random action figures and toys in silly poses sat on the dresser, and one of Serafina’s robots, Jimmy, peered over Laurence’s bed frame.

  Laurence was feeling pretty freaking nervous. He had been with a nontrivial number of girls—but at least half of those had been tipsy hookups where you had a certain amount of plausible deniability about sexual performance. He’d dated Ginnifer, an electrical engineer with a wicked smile, during sophomore and junior years in college, and she would devise contraptions that could stimulate Laurence’s prostate with varying levels of vibration while also enabling her to straddle his penis, and apply a similar variable-speed oscillation/vibrator function to her clitoris. Plus Ginnifer’s Sexoskeleton, which would take way too long to describe.

  But this was someone he’d known half his life, with whom he had this whole labyrinthine history. He could not screw this up. Plus Patricia might be used to crazy magic sex. She and the other witches probably turned themselves into bats and had bat sex one hundred feet up, or had sex on the spirit plane, or with fire elementals or whatever. Even if none of that was true, she was way more experienced than him.

  And then there was the fact that Patricia looked absolutely stunning naked—like, radiant. She wore these fluffy outfits a lot of the time, but her breasts were perfect and bigger than Laurence had expected, and her arms and legs were long and slender. Her skin was pale, but it had a rosy warmth to it. As she shifted around on his bed, her long black hair spilled everywhere and her toes flexed, and he caught glimpses of her downy pubic hair and the indentations behind her knees, and the whole thing felt like a miracle. He was just beginning to appreciate a fraction of how beautiful she was. Not for the first time in the past couple months, Laurence found himself thinking, I wish I still had my grandmother’s ring so I could give it to her the right way. Except now, he was also thinking, Please god let me not blow this, let this not be a huge mistake.

  For her part, Patricia was looking at Laurence and feeling a kind of ache deeper than mere sexual desire, although there was that, too. All of her life, she felt like she had been telling people, “It doesn’t have to be like this,” which is the close cousin to “It can be better than this.” Or even, “We can be better than this.” As a little girl, getting pressed into the dirt by her schoolmates or padlocked in a foul old spice crate by Roberta, she’d tried to say that with tears in her eyes, but she didn’t have the words back then and nobody would have understood anyway. As the outcast freak in junior high, with everybody wanting to burn her alive, she’d given up on even trying to find a way to say, “It can be more than this.” But she’d never let go of that feeling, and it came back now, in the form of hope. She gazed at Laurence’s face (which looked squarer and more handsome without a big shirt collar framing it), his surprisingly puffy and suckable-looking nipples, his shaved pubes, and the way the leg and stomach hair erupted in a heart-shaped ring around the depilated zone. And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.

  * * *

  MAYBE TWO MONTHS after Priya’s near disaster, Laurence had gone for drinks with Patricia, because only she could even begin to understand why he had just told Serafina they ought to spend some time apart. His other friends all thought he was crazy.

  Laurence had sat in the darkest corner of PoisonRx, drinking a Snakebite, and poured out the whole story to Patricia, how he’d never felt worthy of Serafina in the first place and how their love had always felt like a shared delusion propped up by pure bloody-mindedness. Patricia had not scoffed: She’d had relationships like that too, and refusing to accept reality had made her the person she was today.

  “One thing we’ve both seen,” Patricia had said, “is things come back around. People come back around. You and Serafina could have another chance, sometime.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Laurence’s drink had gone from sour fruit to dark bread, all in one swig. “Sometimes you just have to accept defeat, though.”

  Patricia had kept saying she was sorry about the ring until Laurence was like, “No. I have to man up and take responsibility. For the Priya thing, for the consequences, and for my own decision afterward. Right?” Saying that stuff made Laurence feel better, both because it was true and because it made him feel like an active participant in his life.

  Laurence and Patricia hadn’t started dating after that or anything—they’d just hung out. All the time. Way more time than Laurence had ever spent with Serafina, because every date with Serafina had to be perfect, and he’d always worried about being clingy. He and Patricia were just always grabbing dinner and coffee and late-night drinks, whenever Laurence could slip Milton’s leash. They were always cheating at foozeball, dancing at The EndUp with insomniac queers until five in the morning, bowling for cake, inventing elaborate drinking games for Terrence Malick movies, quoting Rutherford B. Hayes from memory, and building the weirdest kites they could coax into the sky over Kite Hill. They were always hand in hand.

  They knew almost all of each other’s secrets, and that gave them license to talk in crappy puns and quotes from old hip-hop songs and fake Prohibition bootlegger slang, to the point where nobody else could even stand to be around them.

  Patricia couldn’t remember a time when she’d taken herself less seriously. Like maybe Laurence was inadvertently keeping his semipromise to Kawashima and Ernesto, to keep her from getting too full of herself, but she did not even remotely mind. For the first time in living memory, she was just a girl who laughed too loud in movie theaters.

  At some point, when you’re spending every free waking moment with a person, and you’ve developed your own private language, and you’re always chilling until way past your bedtime, you inevitably start to wonder if maybe it wouldn’t be easier just to share a bed as well. Not to mention, you know, fun.

  * * *

  PATRICIA REACHED WITH her left hand and stroked the incline of Laurence’s face, from his jaw to right under his eye. His eyes were bluer than she’d realized, along with the gray she was used to noticing. His pupils dilated a little. Her right hand reached out and touched from his thigh to his stomach, and he trembled a little. His penis rose out of the smooth zone, past the firebreak of hair, to graze the light fur of his stomach.

  Patricia thought it was kind of funny that he shaved his junk and she didn’t shave hers, but she knew better than to laugh at this moment.

  If either of them had turned their heads and looked at the racks of electronic detritus along the other wall, they might have noticed the Caddies were acting weird. That is, in a way that nobody had ever seen a Caddy behave before. The Caddies lit an LED on the peak of their guitar-pick-shaped cases as a pinhole camera activated. Even the two that were theoretically wiped and reformatted with Artichoke BSD. The Caddy in Patricia’s purse also came to life and flooded its screen with data. This wasn’t the way a Caddy flashes its screen to remind you of an appointment, or the little bubble that appears in the corner of the screen to let you know one of your friends is having drinks nearby. This wasn’t a user-interface thing at all. The Caddies were just interested in this one event. Caddies had been physically present for a billion human sex acts by now, but this was the first time they’d ever bothered to watch.

  Patricia’s phone
shut itself off, even though its battery was full. So did Laurence’s phone. Across town, Laurence’s housemate Isobel missed her bus by seconds and then the next bus broke down, so she wouldn’t be getting home any time soon. Laurence had left his instant messenger client active on his laptop, but the program crashed. Not even Superstorm Allegra making landfall in Delaware, erasing half the Eastern Seaboard with its twelve hundred miles of Category 3 fury, could disturb these two right now.

  Patricia hadn’t seen Laurence naked since they were both thirteen or fourteen, and she had been trying not to look too much back then. This time, she made a point of taking in every detail. Meticulous. Greedy.

  Laurence’s body was a lot more solid than Patricia had realized, because he was so tall that you expected him to be a beanpole. Sitting on the bed, all of him collected in one place, he turned out to have a pleasing swell to his biceps and his pecs and some impressive thigh action. He still looked like he could do track and field but mostly field. She’d always found his thick, inquisitive hands kind of thrilling, but they were sexier in the context of the rest of his skin: The sandy hair ran from his knuckles all the way up his arms, and slowly got darker and thicker as it traveled down his chest to the heart-shaped zone of smoothness. Patricia had never seen anything so beautiful. She wanted to be all over him forever.

  That seemed like a good impulse, so she acted on it, pouncing. He made a little surprised grunt and then a much happier little gasp. Her breasts nuzzled his chest and her face was right up in front of his, and she was straddling his stomach, her feet on either side of him and her ass just nudging his cock. He started laughing, and so did she, and she leaned over and kissed him and chewed on his lip too gently to break the skin.

  She was tingling all over, even her scalp and her elbows, and she felt a kind of madness taking her over that was better than any spell or concoction ever.

  She almost put him inside her without a condom—she wouldn’t get pregnant, unless she chose to. And she was sure neither of them had an STD. But doing it bareback this first time felt like too much, like they would be making some kind of declaration that they were fluid bonded, practically married, instead of just trying this shit out. Which is what they were doing. So she groped for a foil package.

  “I keep expecting you to do like a spell or something.” Laurence thrust into her with an even tempo, occasionally syncopating and twisting, in ways that startled her with pleasure.

  “Do you want me to do a spell?” She smiled up at him, her hazel eyes going sideways for a moment as she tried to think what spell she could even get away with, and then rolling upwards as he thrust harder and faster for a second.

  “I don’t know.” Laurence leaned forward and kissed her between her own ankles. “Nothing fancy, or, you know, tricky.” She winced a little at the mention of tricks, but he was still smiling, it was all good. “You don’t have to, I was just kind of half-expecting it in a way.”

  “Okay,” Patricia said. “But remember, you asked for it.”

  “I didn’t,” Laurence said. “I merely speculated about—ooh.” And then he lost all train of thought because his already-quite-sensitive left nipple had developed a few million new nerve endings, and she was blowing on it. He damn near passed out from the sensation, and his brain shut down, and then he was pouring out of himself into the condom inside the woman he loved.

  He hadn’t quite let himself think that before, but now he realized it was true. He found himself saying it aloud, sort of by accident, before his brain’s normal functioning could quite be restored: “I love you.”

  “Oh.” Patricia was staring down at him, from where he’d fallen into a puddle on the bed. “Wow.”

  She was obviously processing this. Like, a non sequitur.

  “I can take it back,” Laurence babbled. “I’m taking it back. I never said that.”

  He looked up at her green eyes (wide with surprise), her glistening eyelashes, her half-open mouth.

  “No, don’t take it back.” She shivered, but not in a bad way. “It’s just. Wow.” And then she looked at him straight on and said, “I love you, too.”

  Even as Patricia said it back to him, she felt like her whole history was taking on a whole new focus, the landscape of her past rearranging so that the stuff with Laurence became major geographical features and some other, lonelier, events shrank proportionately. Historical revisionism was like a sugar rush, flooding her head. Her mind flashed on Laurence saying she had saved him, Laurence promising he would never run away from her again. It felt like something she had known a long time.

  “Oh my god, I love you. I love you so much,” she started chattering, and soon they were pressed together and kissing the tears out of each other’s eyes and laughing. She touched his cock and even she couldn’t tell if she used magic to lift it up again or if it was just her mere touch, but soon he was inside her again. This time, they were fucking and talking at the same time, and caressing each other’s faces. They kept rolling over and over so neither of them was on top.

  “I don’t even know how I lucked out so damn much, you’re the most beautiful ever,” Laurence was saying.

  “Let’s just never stop holding each other.” Patricia was laughing and crying. “Let’s just hold on like this forever and people can come and ask us questions through the door or bug us on the phone or—”

  Patricia’s phone rang, having switched itself back on.

  She pulled away from Laurence long enough to see that it was her parents calling. She hadn’t spoken to them in ages. She knew at once what this was about—Roberta had finally gone off the deep end, in spite of all her straight-edge resolutions.

  “What’s wrong with Roberta?” Patricia blurted.

  “Your sister is fine.” It was Patricia’s dad, sounding weary. “We just spoke to her. She’s safe, she was outside the impact zone. Unfortunately, we had just gone to Delaware for one of your mother’s seminars and we weren’t able to get out in time.”

  “Wait. What happened? What’s going on?”

  “It’s all over the news, we thought you’d seen. Allegra, it came ashore,” said Patricia’s father. “We’re in the basement of the convention center. They herded us all down here when the tidal waves hit. We can’t get the door open, and we think the building collapsed on top of us, plus the whole area is underwater. It’s a miracle we’ve got cell phone signal.”

  “Hang in there, Dad.” Patricia felt her face soaking. Between the tears and the white flashes, she was blind. “I’ll find a way. I’ll get you out of there.” There had to be. There had to be a spell to get her to Delaware in a hurry, like a way to bend space. She just couldn’t think what it was, or just whom she could trick enough to pull off such a thing. Maybe just telling her father that she could save him was paradoxically a big enough lie that it would give her the power to save him. Maybe there was a magician in Delaware who could help—except anybody on the ground there was probably dead, or had their hands full. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t breathe, she choked.

  “It’s okay, PP. I just wanted you to know that even though we were hard on you, and we disowned you after you ran away from home, we always loved you, and I’m … I’m … I’m proud that you became your own person.” Patricia’s heart shattered. She heard Isobel in the living room upstairs, shouting for Laurence to come and see on the news the scope of the destruction, streets become canals, air choked with debris. Like the heel of God’s hand.

  “Do you want to talk to your mother?” Patricia’s father asked. “She’s right here. She broke her arm, but I can hold the phone up to her. Hang on.” There was a scuffling noise. The line went dead.

  Patricia hit the callback function a dozen times, and nothing. Part of her thought maybe she should just stay hung up in case they were calling her back too and they got her voicemail, but she couldn’t stop hitting redial-redial-redial, she was bawling and shaking and her naked body was freezing and Laurence put his arm around her and she slapped him and then cl
ung to him and the sound that came from inside her was like all the wounded animals she had ever fixed in her life.

  Then she pulled herself together. Her parents weren’t dead yet. The destruction was still happening. She could get help. Someone was doing this, someone was making this happen, and she could make them pay. There was some evil witch or most likely witches, and they had found a way to supercharge a storm system, and they were fucking going down.

  She was pulling her cargo pants on, her shirt, fuck her bra and panties.

  “Where are you going?” Laurence was still naked.

  “I have to go.” She put her shoes on. “Find Ernesto. Find the others. We can fix this. We can make them pay. We can save them.”

  “I’ll go with you.” Laurence leapt for his pants.

  “You can’t,” Patricia said. “I’m sorry, you can’t.”

  And then she was gone, without saying goodbye or anything.

  Laurence heard the front door slamming and Isobel trying to say something to Patricia as she ran past. And now he could hear the terrible chatter of the cable news people trying to make sense of the greatest natural disaster in America’s history. The storm’s supermassive fetch, hurling the already-swollen ocean onto land. High winds and twenty inches of rain shredding Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom. The President in a secure location. Manhattan dead in the storm’s path, with all the bridges clogged with people who’d waited too long to evacuate after so many false alarms in the past.

  Someone knocked on Laurence’s bedroom door. He leapt off the bed, hoping it was Patricia coming back for him. Instead, he opened the door to see Isobel. She didn’t seem to care that he was naked.

  “Pack a bag,” Isobel said. “Just one.”

  “What? Why?”

  “This is it,” she said. “We’ve put this off as long as we could. I’ve moved Heaven and Earth to give you a normal life here. But this, what happened just now, means it’s over. We can’t wait any longer. We can’t afford to. Milton will say we waited too long as it is. We need the project up and running.”