by Rachel Gold
“What does a serious ocean look like?” she asked. Her voice was quieter than I was used to and slow, as if she was pushing the words out one at a time.
“Choppy white waves and a thousand shades of gray and blue in the water, kind of like your eyes.”
“My eyes have waves?” she asked.
“Wings,” I said. “Not waves. Gray-blue wings. Your eyes make me think of a kingfisher, flashing blue and gray. That way they have where they can be still but they look like at any minute they’re going to take off into the sky.”
“Lauren,” her voice was low, on the edge of sad or maybe so deep into it as to be on the far side. “Why aren’t you here? Why don’t I own a teleporter? Why isn’t it set to your coordinates?”
“Why didn’t you text or call? I would have helped. I would have done something.” The words tumbled out after each other. “What did the scene mean where Cypher tells Zeno to run? Were you trying to protect me? You didn’t have to. What does the book mean that you sent me? You sent me that book of sayings and I didn’t know if I was supposed to be reading the one about the saddle or the other one?”
“There’s one about a saddle?” she asked. “And you thought I meant that one?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think. It’s not like it sounds.”
“Which one is ‘the other one?’” she asked.
I crossed the room to the book and flipped to the page that was pretty well worn by now. “The one that starts ‘it was a night like no other.’”
She quoted the end of the poem back to me: “… you said the words, primeval and holy, that I have never forgotten, and the evil night disappeared like smoke.’”
Hearing the words in her voice I saw us again on the golf course looking up at the sky. The evil of the poem wasn’t the night itself, it wasn’t any specific night, it was my fear of the night. It was like a promise she’d made me that she’d show me how to be less afraid.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s about the infinities. Did you know you were going to explain them to me?”
“It’s poetry,” she said. “It’s about a lot of nights. Some of them are even metaphorical.”
I wanted her hand in mine again. I wanted to kiss her and feel her head tucked against my shoulder.
“How are you for real?” I asked. “You said dusty and plastic wrap and fog. That sounds not good.”
She sighed. “I’m okay. With everything, they upped my meds again. It feels like plastic wrap around my brain. Layers. Like if you made clothes out of plastic wrap. Which is not a bad idea, now that I think about it. But too much work. And I’m still minus-one.”
“Is that a math thing?” I asked.
“No, it’s the stupid mood chart I’m supposed to keep. It’s a misuse of numbers. Columns and neat little rows and I’m supposed to fit into it and I hate it.”
“Is minus-one bad?”
“Kind of bad,” she said.
“How minus does it go?”
“To three. So I guess minus-one is about thirty-three percent bad.”
“What’s minus three?”
She was quiet. I could hear her breathing, a little ragged, getting further from the phone. I worried that I’d made her cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to answer that. You don’t ever have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
She came back closer to the phone, or held it near her mouth again, took a breath in and said, “When I was minus-three, I was so deep in hating myself that I thought if I killed myself it would solve everyone’s problems. Everything was wrong, and death, and useless, and I was the worst of it. I tried, you know, twice. I almost…”
There was a long pause and I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I couldn’t imagine her hating herself like that. Not that I’d never had moments when I felt like I wanted to die, when I felt hopeless, but Blake was so bright and funny and lovable. How could she feel that way about herself?
How could she feel that way so much that she’d tried to kill herself?
“I got how selfish that was,” she said in a small voice. “I got that it hurts other people. If I killed myself, it would cause so much pain. And with the medication, I don’t feel that way. Lauren…if you don’t want to…”
“What?” I said, trying to get over the bolt of panic I felt picturing a world without Blake.
She was definitely crying. The skin of my palms itched and burned from wanting to reach through the phone and touch her. I went back over what we’d said, trying to get my brain and my mouth to sync again.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“It’s silly,” she said. “It’s not like it could work with you there and me here and everything.”
Words spilled out of my lips like they were kicking through the brain-mouth barrier: “Okay first, I’m extremely glad you didn’t kill yourself because I’d be seriously fucked up now without you. Is that okay to say?”
“Yeah,” she said the word fast and breathy.
“And second, are you not asking me out? Are you saying that we could—except that we couldn’t, because you’re not asking—but you would if you thought that we could?”
“Yeah,” she repeated, even faster this time, more breath than sound.
“God, Blake, yes. Yes! I can’t not go out with you.”
She laughed and I could picture her with her mouth open and her laugh ringing in the room.
“But I didn’t ask,” she said.
“When you do, it’s yes. And, um, is it also okay to say I think it’s adorable that you’re supposed to describe yourself with numbers?”
She said, “yeah,” one more time.
“What’s the best number?” I asked. “I mean, the one that means you’re doing really well?”
She sniffled and told me, “Zero.”
“Seriously?”
“No kidding. It means my mood is ‘within normal limits.’”
“Zero,” I said. “It’s my new favorite number.”
“It’s been mine for a long time. It’s why Cypher is named that, because it comes from the Arabic, Sifr, and people used to say ‘cypher’ when they meant zero. Do you know it messed up the Greeks that their math didn’t have a zero in it?”
“You were saying that the day I met you,” I told her. “I mean, before I walked into the room. I was in the kitchen and I heard you say that but you didn’t say how. So tell me.”
I sat for a long time listening to Blake tell me about the number zero while I watched the sky outside my bedroom window grow deep and peaceful.
At least I felt something that wasn’t anger or dread. I wanted to shred myself apart and flow through the walls and into the sky and fly to Blake. I wanted to put my arms around her and hold onto her and feel myself materialize out of nothing into a real person again.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Talking to Blake again every day. Mostly about nothing but also everything. She’d text me about math class and I’d send her a pic of what I was drawing.
Some days she wouldn’t send me anything and now I understood it was because the fog was bad that day. Or she was in the minuses, minus-one or even minus-two. Or stuff was going on at school and she didn’t want to talk about it. I sent her jokes and cartoonish doodles. I sketched a hippo walking up the long side of a triangle and labeled it “hippotemuse.”
Every time I saw her name on my phone I grinned, even though it hurt to read her words and feel her so far away from me. It was like spikes of color driving down through the ice of my life. Like when you’ve been out in the cold too long and your fingers are numb and you run a bath—that first moment when the hot water doesn’t even burn, it jabs raw pain up through your nerves.
I felt more things for Blake in a week than I felt for Sierra in a month. I felt more for myself than I could ever remember.
I got impatient. I snapped back at my father when he’d ask why something wasn’t cleaned or stocked in the pantry. I let him write words on the asinine white
board and didn’t look at them before I went shopping. I bought the frozen dinners I liked and skipped the ones he did. When he was home I went out of my way to avoid him, but he never seemed to notice.
I researched colleges in the Cities and out east and I was afraid of both options. Would I get down to the Cities almost a year from now to find that I’d lost Blake to someone else?
Mom called every week, sometimes twice. I think she was checking on me. Maybe Isaac had talked to her. I kept wanting to tell her that I needed her help, that I couldn’t stay here all year again, but I didn’t know how to say it in a way that didn’t sound pathetic. I was nearly seventeen so, “Mommy, can I come stay with you?” was out. Plus she’d have to say no or leave her job and I didn’t want that.
“Are you dating anyone?” she asked on a call in early October.
“There’s this girl I like,” I said, hoping this was my opening to the bigger topic of moving. “But she’s in Minneapolis so we can’t really date. I wish I could move down there.”
“What’s she like?”
“Smart and…living here sucks. I want to move to the Cities.”
“I know it’s hard being far away from someone you care about. You could invite her to join us for the holidays. Do you know what she’s doing? Would she like D.C.?”
That was almost three months away. I managed to say, “Yeah, I’ll ask her. Thanks.”
I wanted to ask Mom to talk to my father, to get him to let me go visit a few times before the holidays, but they never talked to each other if they could avoid it. If she sent him an email like that, it would piss him off.
“How did you meet her?” Mom asked, all bright-voiced and trying super hard to be my cool, accepting parent.
“She was in the group writing the story together,” I said. “The one I was doing illustrations for.”
Talking about the story made me feel like crying. While I was trying to keep it together, Mom asked, “Did you ask her out or did she ask you?”
Brain melt: basement…spider…affair…cheating.
I made the world’s longest, “Ummm” sound.
“Am I not supposed to ask that?”
“Uh, no, it’s just not that clear. She said she’d ask me out if I lived closer to her and I said I’d say yes if she asked. So it’s not official but it would be. I want to go visit her.”
“I’m sorry, honey. Maybe you can go to the same college. Do you know where she’s applying?”
Eleven months away—if we even got into the same school or wanted to. What colleges excelled at both math and art? That was a mom-appropriate question, so I asked her and got the conversation on that safe track.
After the call I sat staring around my room, trying to figure out what I could say to make her understand when I couldn’t even describe my situation to myself. All I knew was that I felt miserable most of the time for no reason. The feeling of missing Blake was clear, but all these other sensations I didn’t have names for. What did you call it when your father was being strict about school and mostly gone and somehow this was worse than if he’d been yelling all the time?
It was easier to focus on missing Blake. When I didn’t, I dissolved again. Not in a fast, painless way, but slowly, from the inside out, aching.
* * *
At least all the missing Blake and remembering what it felt like being near her gave me a great brainstorm for how to save Cypher. I started writing it in a private document offline to see how it could go:
Cypher’s body lay on the floor for hours, cooling, the blood congealing, and only a careful observer would have noticed the way the shreds of burnt flesh around the blast wound were slowly knitting together.
A slender form appeared out of the zero point energy and knelt by the body. She touched its hand gently.
“Zeno, she’s definitely gone now,” she said. “Hang tight, I’ll get you more nanites. What a mess. I thought I’d look better dead.”
The real Cypher went to the secret compartment under her ship’s navigation console and pulled out the large crate of medical grade nanites she kept for Zeno. When she let them loose, they swarmed over the body. At first they tried to knit it together into Cypher’s pattern, but then they shimmered and, as Cypher watched, the whole form melted and shifted.
She poured herself a glass of iced Solarian tea that she’d developed a taste for these last weeks and sat at the little reading table in her sleeping chambers, watching Zeno cohere.
When Zeno’s mouth was whole enough to speak, she said, “Good thing we thought to have you give me the microchip. The Queen never suspected it was me instead of you. I had to beg a little for show. I hope you don’t mind.”
Cypher laughed. “That’s what she’d expect. You know, even if she knew it was you, she’d have shot you.”
“But not with a blaster. She knows I can recover from that. Not this fast usually. Thanks for those nanites.”
“Did you take a lot of damage?” Cypher asked.
Zeno got to her feet, kind of unsteady, and glanced around the sleeping cabin of the ship. There were scorch marks on the wall and bits of nanites that had been her head, now reduced to inanimate dust. She held out her hand and a stream of nanites turned into micromachines to carry the dust away and return to her.
“Enough damage,” she said. “I should probably lie down.”
Cypher gestured to her bed. Zeno held out her hand for Cypher to come with her.
Cypher quirked an eyebrow, “You won’t get any rest.”
“I don’t want rest,” Zeno said. “I want you.”
Cypher was in her arms in an instant, kissing her, hands roaming over Zeno’s body as if to reassure herself that it was all back together, all familiar. Zeno had assembled herself with the basic clothing she included in her pattern and Cypher’s fingers tugged at her shirt.
Weak from the blaster and weaker from the effect Cypher had on her, Zeno stumbled backward and fell onto the bed. Cypher laughed and climbed on top of her, sitting across Zeno’s hips and pulling her shirt the rest of the way open. Because she’d copied an Illudani body, she had all the sexual responses of any Illudani or human. Her nipples rose toward Cypher, begging her touch, and Cypher put her hand on one breast and her mouth on the other.
Zeno arched her back, holding onto Cypher, aware of nothing but Cypher’s hands and mouth on her.
That was definitely more than I wanted to say online. It had gotten away from me. But I liked where it was going. Of course in my mind it was me and Blake, but that was kind of the point.
I read it over and debated where I should cut it off. Should I stop it when Zeno said “I should probably lie down” because it was clear to the reader at that point that Cypher and Zeno were fine? Or should I go all the way to “I want you” or to Zeno holding out her hand?
“I want you” felt like too much to say where anyone could see it, but I liked the image of Zeno holding out her hand to Cypher. It was suggestive. And it would probably piss off Sierra in a highly deserved manner.
My bit of story didn’t break any rules and it didn’t do anything to a character that I’d need to get permission for, so I posted it.
I texted Blake: Have you been following the story?
She answered: Hey you, I’m trying not to. Bear says Sierra killed Cypher.
I fixed that, I said.
Ooh? I’m looking.
There was a long pause and I went down to the kitchen to refill my water glass. When I got back up there was an message from Blake that said: Blaster to Cypher’s head. That bitch.
Did you read mine?
Reading now. Very clever!
After a few more minutes she wrote: Where’s the rest of it?
I glanced from her words to the extra paragraphs and wondered how she knew that. Even thinking about the idea of sending it to her, of her reading it, made me feel hot and shaky.
I asked: How do you know there’s more?
Because if there isn’t now, there’s going to be. You’r
e going to write it for me, aren’t you?
Um, yeah. I’m emailing you the next few paragraphs.
I copied her the part from Zeno holding out her hand to the very end of what I’d written. After I pressed send on the email, I had an attack of shyness.
The scene as much as said “I want you” to Blake.
What if she thought it was too much? I mean, we were in some nebulous stage of couldn’t wouldn’t but would if we could going out-ness. And that was great, but was it “I want you” level great?
What if I was pushing too hard?
Blake wrote: Goose, do you know how much I love you?
I stared at the text. I scrolled back through our thread to see if I’d missed a line or two, but no, I’d said I was sending her the next paragraphs and, if you counted those, I’d said, “I want you.”
And her reply was “I love you?”
I didn’t care if it made sense or not. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I did and it was “I love you too,” but after all the times Sierra had said that to me, it didn’t mean anything anymore. I wanted a better way to say it.
What was more than “I love you?” This was like the thing with the infinities—that you couldn’t add one. There was no “I love you” plus one. Or was there?
While I was trying to figure that out, Blake called me.
“Hey, did I freak you out?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I mean…me too. With you. The love. It’s just, are there orders of love? Can you add one to that? Oh God, my brain.”
“Lauren,” she was laughing. “I don’t usually get to say this, but, slow down.”
I took a deep breath and said, “Can I ask…what are we?”
“Human, probably,” she said.
“You know what I mean. What is this between us? Is it, I mean, do you want to be in a relationship?”
“Ask me later,” she said. “Ask me when you’re here.”
I didn’t love that answer, but it seemed fair. I didn’t know what to say to it, though so I went back to the story.
