Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  He glanced back at the boat. Before his eyes, the snap cover grew old and ripped, then became whole. The boat rusted, then turned pristine. He watched the water freeze, its temperature far below thirty-two degrees, the compacting grip of ocean ice clutching the vessel’s sides like an iron fist. Metal buckled. Wood splintered. Holes appeared, and as the water thawed it flowed in through the holes and the boat began to sink. But then, as the water returned to normal, the boat healed and was new again.

  Ebon focused: The boat is old.

  The cover ripped. Rust grew. Holes appeared in the deck.

  The boat is new.

  It became new.

  Ebon stood on the wood, staring down at the shiny boat in the slip, its dock lines barely used, coiled into spirals on the deck like sleeping snakes. Aimee was right. She’d simply repeated what he realized he’d always known. He could control this.

  He walked to the top of the rise, then looked down at Richard Frey’s old home on the beach. That bastard. That asshole. That bitter old motherfucking cocksucker of a drunk, who hadn’t known Ebon even then, not for real anyway, and wouldn’t know him now, even as good of a man as he’d become, because that’s how Richard was. Richard had acted first and thought second, and Aimee had had to stand by him even at the end, even after what had happened to them that final summer, because blood was cursedly thicker than water. And when he’d died, Aimee’s family had buried him in a rich drunk’s grave, somewhere opulent that they all knew was really God’s gutter, where sons of bitches woke daily amid their puke, even in Heaven.

  Ebon made the house something from a ghost story, its walls denuded of paint, windows sagging inward to holes like an old man’s collapsed gums. He imagined Richard inside, suffering.

  Things could have been different.

  He thought of Aimee. Of Julia. Of Holly. Three women who’d lined up in his life like dominoes, each leaving a legacy to be filled by the second. How could his relationship with Holly not have been what it was? That was Julia’s fault. And how could things with Julia not have turned out as they had? Aimee had left no choice.

  But Ebon didn’t want to think about Richard anymore. So the cottage became something quaint, timeless, nostalgic in the way only artifice could be. It was in its own beam of sunlight, a garden thriving outside, a pink-painted mailbox visible near the road despite the fact that mail on Aaron was delivered to centralized group mailboxes. There was a white fence on the home’s roadside. If Ebon were to head back, he’d probably find Aimee in an apron, her hair done up, wearing heels. A 1950s sitcom portrait of the ideal way things had never been.

  Ebon tried to believe it. He tried to accept it. And for the slightest of moments, he almost could. But the effort was nearly impossible. Something inside knew full well that Aimee had never worn heels. The cottage had never had a mailbox. And he and Aimee had, from those early summers on, never completely fallen out of …

  A beam of sunlight disappeared behind the shifting clouds. The cottage on the dunes was suddenly ordinary — an old place, under slight construction. The cold wind reasserted itself, forcing Ebon to pull his coat tighter around his body. In a few weeks, if he believed the calendar, it would be Christmas. How would he and Aimee celebrate? She had a brother. He had siblings, parents, grandparents. Would they make a meal, get a tree, and sing carols? Would they trade presents like friends? Like lovers? Would their holiday extend to where it rightfully belonged: to those off-island family and friends? Or was his life now here: contained, isolated, wanting for nothing beyond it?

  Ebon walked.

  Controlling what he saw became harder, as if he was exhausting some internal muscle. In order to make anything change, Ebon found he couldn’t just alter that thing. He had to change all he’d already seen, because life wasn’t lived in a bubble that extended only to the horizon of sight. The cottage was out of view, but Ebon knew, as he looked at a ramshackle set of stairs and tried to polish them with his mind, that the cottage existed somewhere behind him. If he wanted to see the steps as new, he had to march progress forward for all of Aaron — to make all he’d seen so far more new, more ideal, more perfect. Yet there were flaws everywhere, and fixing them all created a complicated web. Making the steps shine meant making the cottage gleam along with his boat. The job was getting too big. It wasn’t difficult to see one small thing falsely (something that had been said that should be forgotten, some misstep that he wished he could go back in time to fix but chose to grow blind to instead), but it was so much harder to change the world all at once.

  Rounding the curving beach, Ebon saw Aaron’s Party. Abandoned, dead, decaying in place. He tried, but making it live again felt like lifting a boulder. In a world where Aaron’s Party continued to thrill children and make magical nights, Aimee’s cottage would be whole and new. Richard Frey would still be alive. Redrafting it all took the work of a master articulator — someone who could imagine not only how things could have been different, but what even those myriad differences would have affected.

  Ebon wasn’t that master articulator. He’d made his living, rising to the top of his agency, because for him the details had always been easy. He’d always been quiet, able to form connections with others and get them to start talking. To do it, he needed only to remember all that they’d spilled: the scope of their kids’ soccer victories, where they vacationed, the color of their mother’s hair when she’d been younger. That all came from allowing things to happen — from being quiet and passive enough to allow others to paint the world in bright colors that were easy to see. Ebon wasn’t a builder. He didn’t create or manage details. He was a collector, taking what came and holding it close. Remembering every detail. Forever.

  As Ebon passed the pier, he thought back to his job, to what Aimee had said.

  Get on your knees. Grovel.

  But Ebon was sure that he still had his job in the city, and his apartment. He was on sabbatical from both. He hadn’t been let go, or in the middle of an eviction. He was a carefree island dweller, not a deadbeat. He was recovering from his wife’s infidelity and death, not running away from …

  From …

  Ebon wasn’t sure. His usually drum-tight memory was slipping. Around him, reality continued to shift — under his control when he pushed, out of control as he strolled. None of it seemed strange anymore. He’d flitted backward and forward in time with no memory of the intervening weeks; he’d struck up a relationship with a beautiful woman he didn’t know at all. His mind had come to accept it. Change was difficult, and this was merely a time of change. Sometimes the past wasn’t as immutable as people pretended. Sometimes the past was an intruder to the future. Sometimes the brush that colored the world was subjective. Sometimes a man saw what he wanted — or needed — to see.

  Ebon saw his destination ahead. Redding Dock was long and winding, its form unchanged, its planks still fresh and red. He felt fatigued, because accepting the shifting reality was exhausting. Part of Ebon wanted to surrender. To stop trying to make his surroundings something palatable and just accept what they were. Part of him longed to let go.

  Redding would make everything okay. The dock (not Vicky, not Aimee’s funhouse cottage) was his port in the storm and always had been. When he’d been twelve and had met the pretty, bossy girl on the beach and her strangely overbearing father, he’d dipped his toes into Redding’s cool water and thought about the new stir of feelings within him. Contemplation had sifted his world into place. When he’d seen the Pleasantville veneer peel away at age fifteen, when Aimee had fled her father and their day had ended in a kiss, stolen thoughts at the dock had eased his mind. And that final summer, when he’d been fifteen, Redding had wrapped its arms around him and promised that everything would be okay.

  Ebon stepped onto the dock, not looking back until he was halfway down. When he finally did, he found that the changes had stopped. The shoreline looked denuded and gray, as it should in the days nipping winter. Water licked the shore, as if it had all the time in the
world. Aaron’s Party, visible to the south, was whole but abandoned, just as it should be.

  Tempting fate, Ebon looked at the dock’s freshly painted boards, then closed his eyes and focused.

  The boards are weathered.

  He opened his eyes. The boards were fresh and new and red. Timeless. Immutable. Immune to whatever was going on, whatever Ebon was able to do.

  He sighed, then walked to the dock’s end. Knowing it was foolish and perhaps even slightly insane, Ebon removed his shoes and socks and dangled his feet in the frigid water. The feeling was like a slap; he focused on the sense of chilling discomfort as if it were all he’d ever wanted. Something to center him. Sensation as a reminder of who he was, where he was, and what was real.

  He looked back at the low fishing bench beside him. All the initials were still there, including his own redacted contribution. One day’s infatuation, a subsequent day’s embarrassment and regret. But both emotions — infatuation and regret — had been equally real.

  Again Ebon closed his eyes and focused.

  The initials read ES + AF.

  But when he opened his eyes, they remained BS + AP.

  Ebon looked at the carnival. He’d seen that shift, even from here. But Redding Dock itself didn’t change. It was some sort of an axis. Even when a wheel spun, the wheel’s center stayed where it was. You could survive the fastest rotation if you found its center.

  Ebon smelled the air, noticing the way salt mingled with the scent of fresh wood and fresher paint. Redding had always seemed new to Ebon, save the initials. When he’d carved them, the bench had seemed to bleed. Today they stayed in the wood like a fresh scar, still sharp and angular where his clumsy knife had cut rather than rounded by time, wind, and changing seasons.

  He sat on the dock, feet to the ankles in the swell of gentle waves. His feet were going numb; his ass and hands, both on the planks, were dying a slow but similar death. During his walk, he’d kept his blood pumping. Now it was pooling. Redding was unchanging, its colors and scents forever bright. But he couldn’t just sit through eternity, staring as the world revolved without mercy around him.

  I have to go back.

  But Ebon didn’t want to go back. It didn’t matter that his mind was finding a perverse sort of sense in reality’s shifting. Things had been getting worse and worse, increasingly unstable. He’d thought Vicky was a kind of anchor (a safe place in a storm, like Redding Dock), but even she’d begun to shift on him — to become someone or something else. Aimee became what Ebon seemed to want, seemed to fear, seemed to expect. Even if he returned to her cottage, which Aimee would he find? He wanted her to be how she was, whatever that meant. He needed someone to talk to. Someone to level with him, to center him while the world spiraled out of control. But he couldn’t even trust her anymore. He had only his memories. He could trust them, because memories didn’t change, or twist in front of the mind’s eye to become something different. Except when they did, which was all the time, as their host demanded.

  Ebon looked at Aaron’s Party.

  Maybe that had been Aimee’s anchor point, all those years ago. Her bullying father, her loving father, her father who cared so much about his only daughter that he protected her enough to make her hate him. It had been where they’d gone that time Ebon had seen her cry, where they’d shared that first aggressive, nonromantic kiss. And Aaron’s Party was where, years later, in a letter, Aimee had told him she’d gone at the end of their last summer. Aaron’s pier wasn’t like a city pier; there weren’t homeless people and delinquents huddling under its skeleton. Aimee said she’d gone there that day, wrapped in a ball with her knees hugged up to her face, sobbing. She’d stayed long enough to force her father to call the police, but emerged before they’d sussed her out, keeping her secret spot hidden for later. The place where she’d later taken boys who weren’t Ebon. Boys who, Ebon sometimes wondered, she might have been using as stand-ins, to help her forget him. Because sometimes, a person must force themselves to forget in order to keep on living.

  Ebon didn’t like to think about that final summer. How it had ended. He’d draped a blanket over the memory in his mind’s attic, always knowing what lurked there. He was unwilling to discard it, but always afraid to peek. But it was there like a cavity. And like an untreated cavity, it had spread. So much of what had followed — Julia, Holly, Aimee again — had begun on that day, beginning with that old and malignant cancer.

  Ebon looked across the water, then stood and returned to the shore, back away from the axis and into the spinning portion of the world’s wheel.

  He waited.

  The shore began to morph into something more washed by the sun. Buildings shifted until Redding Dock was no longer behind him. Instead, Ebon found himself facing the cottage. Aimee’s cottage. Her father’s cottage.

  Ebon didn’t want to remember.

  But with a feeling like coming sleep, he did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A Cobbled Picture

  AIMEE SAID, “YOU PROBABLY THINK YOU love me, don’t you?”

  Ebon looked up from his Game Boy. He finally had Mortal Kombat, but compared to the arcade version, it kind of sucked. Neither of them had spoken for at least an hour. Aimee was sketching something on her lap, and he’d been hearing the charcoal pencil scratching the pad. From the corner of his eye, he kept seeing Aimee set down the pencil, then wipe at the paper with a careful finger to turn a line into an artful smudge.

  Aimee had been into painting two summers ago, and Ebon knew from her letters that last summer — the summer a family vacation had kept him away from Aaron — she’d been into sculpting clay. Now she was into charcoal sketching. Everything she was into was, at the time, terribly serious and important because she was a consummate artiste. But he knew she’d only picked up charcoal a few weeks ago (he’d been there when she’d discovered her mother’s old charcoal sketches and had decided instantly to try it herself), and found her posturing annoying. Kind of. But still, part of him found it cute, like everything about Aimee. She was two full years older than he was, and although he knew he was falling into her trap by doing so, Ebon couldn’t help but see her superior experience as compelling. She was seventeen and had blossomed into something magnificent over the past two years. He could only be annoyed until his hormones took over.

  “What?”

  She looked him in the eyes. “Admit it. You think about me all the time.”

  “No,” he lied. The truth was that he’d thought about Aimee almost nonstop for two years of absence and then even more fervently throughout their third shared summer. The terrible thing was that he knew exactly how she’d been manipulating him with her letters, yet was helpless to resist. As usual, Aimee was in charge. As usual, she was going to call all the shots, push him around, and make him do what she wanted. She held all the cards. Her unabashedly heated off-season letters — which, throughout the summer, she’d been playing off as “just for fun” rather than seductive — had left Ebon, yet again, at her total mercy.

  She set the sketch pad to one side, then used a napkin to wipe at her hand. The wiping was perfunctory; she didn’t so much as touch the huge black smudge that had blossomed on her hand’s meaty heel where it had been brushing the page. When she laced her fingers together atop the afghan like a teacher about to commence lecturing, black marred the white fabric.

  “Yes, you do.”

  Ebon felt himself blushing. “No.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve thought about you too.”

  “Really?” The word was too eager. Aimee was reeling off affections with all the passion of an accountant lining columns, but he’d too eagerly leapt at what she’d said.

  “Well, sure. A girl has needs.”

  “Um … ”

  “Look,” she said. “Here’s the thing. I’m not ready for you to love me. You can’t understand yet anyway. You’re only fifteen.”

  “Fifteen and a half.” Ebon regretted saying it immediately. Only little kids measure
d their age in half years.

  “When we’re older, maybe. But I can’t exactly be tied down. You’re gone too often. This time, you were gone for two full years.” Aimee paused, and in the gap Ebon realized how deftly she was avoiding any true part in their friendship … or whatever it was they had. She could have said, “I had to wait two years.” But no. Instead, he’d been “gone for two years.” She was neutral, uncaring. Ebon was the one who came and went, and hence was always at fault.

  “Okay,” said Ebon.

  “Can I see a future, some day in the way — like, way — distant future where we’re married and stuff? Sure. I guess. But you need to hold off until then.”

  “Hold off?”

  “You know, get yourself a girlfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  “But when you do, you need to tell me what you do with her.”

  Ebon knew exactly what Aimee meant, but she’d said it like Ebon’s theoretical girlfriend would be as passive as his Game Boy. Like a life-size action figure that he could pose and buy expansion sets for.

  “Um … ”

  “You need to catch up,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “But maybe you should wait a year. You’re still so young.”

  That was too much. Ebon wasn’t actually two years younger than Aimee; he was more like one and three-quarters. And although Ebon was a virgin and didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, he knew for a fact that Aimee had rounded the bases at his age, and done plenty of other stuff years earlier. She’d told him all about it last summer. She’d told him the way she’d tell her girlfriends, as if he’d have no more than a passing interest. He’d had to sit with a pillow in his lap for an hour afterward and think about nothing but baseball.

  “Hey,” he said. “I so am not.”

  “Okay, okay, fine. But I know you, Ebon. I know you’re all hung up on me.”

  “Bullshit.” He didn’t swear often, but Ebon had been a card-carrying teen for two and a half years. Time to turn up the dial.