“Are you okay?” she screams in horror as she grabs him, turning and falling to sit on the lip of the fountain.
“Yeah...are you still laughing,” he says clenching his teeth and gurgling through groans of agony and gasping breathes.
“Of course.”
“Sorry for this, all this,” he says.
“We have to go, C’mon,” she says, panicking, stepping from the water and pulling him to his feet, steeling herself to his stricken groans and straightening his back.
“Leave me here. Leave me, and they might not chase you,” he says pushing her away.
“Shut up!” she cries, “screw your senseless chivalry. You’re not gonna be a martyr! not today! and not for me. I couldn’t live with that. Now come on, get up!” she yells red faced with welling eye's, terrified for his life more than her own. He nods his head then paces forward as fast as he can, but stumbles under the agony of his shoulder a few steps later. Falling faster than she can catch him, he tumbles down the stout green slope and disappears with a splash into the murky pond with the faceless Ribbit floating like a lily pad on it’s still surface.
“Cider! Cider!” she shouts barreling down, tripping over her feet and belly flopping into the pond. She fumbles around the pond on her hands and knees, blindly sifting the through the silt.
“Cider!” She shouts again and again, then starts choking on the water filling her open mouth. The silt shifts under her knee as she coughs, until she falls feet first into a sinkhole and disappears into muddy waist high water, Leaving the surface still like she was never there. Then a second later she shoots, head first, out of the same body of water. Coughing in trying to cry out his name, then seeing it’s no longer raining, or wet at all. The hills are solid masses covered by dry grass, not wax dripping from continually renewing leaves. He’s sitting on the embankment with his feet in the shallow pond, holding his bleeding shattered left shoulder.
“Where d'ya go Carrots?” he says through short heavy breathes.
“Where did I go? Where’d you go? It doesn’t seem like we went anywhere at all,” she says.
“Oh yeah, where’s the dead Ribbit?” he asks.
“Good point,” she says scanning the ponds surface seeing no sign of anything floating.
“And we were just in a storm. It’s dry as a summer day out here,” he says.
“Is this my Alto? my home?”
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“Why not? it could be.”
“Is there a pond that people emerge from there?” he asks.
“No, I mean maybe. There could be, but I don’t remember there being one,” she says touching her finger to her chin. Feigning ponderous thought, though actually remembering very little of her standard.
“We should keep going,” he says, standing with a heaving breath of harsh pain. She doesn’t budge, but stays in place.
“Anna what’re you doing? we have to go. now!”
“No.”
“What?”
“No. No I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go home anymore, I want to stay. To stay with you,” she cries.
“We have to go or we’ll both die, what good is that?” he says and before she can answer, to give her heart’s response, the barking of hounds spurs her to run, out of reflex, from the pond to his side. Fighting him to wrap his good arm over her shoulders, she gives up and they run as fast as his wound will let them. Distraught, looking disheveled and fleeing from the trees with dismal chances of escaping the hounds, that he thinks of as the jaws of Cerberus closing in on the life of his love. They run through a stretch of four foot foliage and he tries to sit, but collapses on a rock, then stands. She stumbles past trying not to knock him over, she vanishes out of thin air.
“Anna...Anna,” he shouts her name, taking a few paces forward and passing through an invisible veil formed by the interceding of branches when arching overhead. He reappears under a different arch of interceding branches in a different place.
“Anna!” he shouts, again.
“Cider?” he hears from a bush, fifty feet away, that she appears from behind a second later, waving and biting her bottom lip smiling. She runs to him, then vanishes from sight through another invisible veil. He runs passing through the same place though going nowhere, not knowing why, he falls to his knees in pain and frustration. His shoulder's spilling blood down the side of his body, as he steps back, and tries another pass, but still stays in the same place. Writhing in pain, with his mind boiling in scattered thoughts of panic, racing with wretched images of her being captured or killed without him or lost through life as he would be without her. He charges the same space like a bull seeing red, wildly from all directions until he vanishes and appears near the edge of the park. He's bewildered, frantically scanning around him until seeing her sitting on a park bench behind him, watching as he nearly breaks his neck looking for her.
“I waited for you,” she says standing to her feet, and sliding under his good arm to help him walk.
“Thank you,” he says, relishing the feeling of her body against his. A feeling that's muddied in knowing the only way to save her life, is to set her free of him from his fate.
“There’s a station there,” he says.
“Where?” she says, not even lifting her head to look for it, not wanting to see it, thinking of it as the staircase that descends to the time of their departure, the death of their togetherness. When what’s grown between them ceases in growing and will begin to wither and fade to memory with no shared passion in the present. She's distraught, inescapably dwelling in the thought of his death, and her life without him.
“Anna,” he groans, “don’t be fool for me. I never thought I’d want to be away from you, but what else can we do.”
“It’s you who’s being a fool, we can make it if we try. We’ve been on the run for thousands of days before this, at least.”
“Don’t you get it. I’m hit, a sitting duck, we’ll both be lost. You'll be locked away for an eternity. The only way is to part paths and maybe one day see each other again, if we can even make it out this,” he says.
“To leave it to hope,” she sighs, though submitting, and leading him to the staircase. Each step forward enflames his bullet shattered shoulder, locking up and engulfing his spine in severe pain. Though merely a splinter to the anguish of them parting ways, lost to the other in the infinite breadth of the Altonevers forever stretching fractal rails of crystalline amber. Any optimism of their fortune drains from both their beings with each descending step. The only thing keeping them moving forward is the horror of having to experience the death of the other, even worse to have to watch them die.
Taking the last step onto the landing with no sign of any authorities, they saunter to the turnstile, that she hops and helps to pull him under. The few people passing their paths don’t even blink at the bloodied, dirty, disheveled two, who’re still soaking wet and permeating a sense of desperation that pours from their hysterically somber expressions. They continue along the path, staggering through a winding white tiled tunnel, one of an endless number of Central’s ceaselessly reaching catacombs of interconnected subterranean InterAlto stations.
Eventually making their way into a massive space with night and stars as a ceiling. otherwise in the shape of a light-years wide rectangle with walls of solid obsidian that gleam golden iridescence as the eye passes, splashed with swathes and blots of the colors of all the sunsets ever to be seen by the infinitely numerous beings born of the Altonevers. Garnet and silver metal arches crowning every ten foot door, spaced every six feet from the next, aligned in rows horizontally and vertically lasting as far as the eye can see, no matter where you are standing. Each is a doorway to a different set of amber rails reaching into the depths of forever to an infinite number of plains of reality, or Altos
“Where do we go from here?” she asks.
“Good question, I dunno. I mean how could we,” he says.
“We’ll never find the
right rails to ride,” she says, wanting to give up looking.
“Ask information,” he coughs.
“They’re never helpful,”
“Depends what you ask of them. C’mon let’s go,” he says as she darts her eyes around rapidly, scanning the scene like a nervous hare trying to see in all directions at once.
“Hey. Keep your head down and keep moving, we look sore enough to the eye as it is,” he says.
“But keep my chin up, right,” she smirks.
“Yeah, if you can help it,” he says sharing her sentiment with a flashing smirk of his own.
“Over there, there’s an information desk. I think,” she says.
“Where?” he asks barely able to shift his head without hot pain shooting through his spine and reaching down to his blood soaked socks.
“Over there, the lights. It looks like the top of a carousel, that way,” she says, and the two drift like wood through a lazy stream of people toward a carousel tent crowned desk. Manned by a bored looking desk clerk, who pops a bubble of her gum at the sight of strap hangers in need. Particularly those with questions, more so than that, when they're disheveled, looking as ragged as the homeless, like the two wily eyed travelers presently staring at her with a sense of urgency as their faces.
“Do you need help with anything,” the bored clerk asks, reaching for a nail file, and filing her nails instead of bothering to look up at them for an answer.
“Yes, she’s trying to get home, back to her standard. Maybe you can help,” he says, and the girl dressed in yellow pops her black gum then sucks it to a snap as though the question, which to answer is her occupation, is infringing on her in some way.
“Fine,” she sighs as sarcastically as she can , “where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Anna says realizing that she'd come from there but had never had to go back, that she isn't really sure where she's going. It was the only place she knew existed, that she knew she existed in, and she can hardly even remember any details of her own home.
“How can you not know where you’re going if you’re going there?” the clerk snaps.
“I’ve never had to go there before,” Anna answers.
“How’d ya get here?” the clerks says.
“Uh, I…” Anna stammers.
“Jeez lady, get it together,” the clerks says still filing her nails.
“It’s an earthy one,” he says.
“That’s something. But which one, there are, is, as you know, an infinite number of an infinite number. So, anything else to narrow the list down from that would be helpful to say the least,” the clerk says popping her gum to accent her condescension.
“The one, what was it? the one that had a collapse awhile back,” he says.
“C’mon guy, ya gotta give me something useful, there are a trillion of those at least.”
“That convulsed to its own destruction,” he says.
“And…” the clerk says yawning.
“The one where I went missing,” Anna says, losing her patience with the uncaring clerk, who pops her gum, and takes places and misplaces hundreds of plugs from the switchboard in front of her, then presses an incalculable number of keys in a matter of seconds.
“Leaves in nearly a minute’s time. Okay, ready?” the clerk briskly asks as Cider clenches Anna’s hand like his life depends on it. The clerk perks up and pops her gum as she politely places the last plug into a port, instantly pulling the two off their feet and into a winding path resembling an invisible tube that's twisting and turning through the air and ether. Traveling so fast they can see the frequency of light moving as slowly as molasses and hear none of their lung emptying shouts. Though still taking almost a minute to pop into sudden stillness under the silvery arch of their proper doorway. Both with toes teetering on the edge of the platform, thousands of feet above the ground they were standing on almost a minute ago.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Goodbye or hello
Anna is taking one last slow sweeping eyefull of the center of Central’s timelessly scaled grand station. A last glance of the particle people and peoples, different beings, hailing from more Alto’s then she could ever know or see, even if she lived to the end of an eternity. Each person on their own paths, walking up and down walls and pillars and flying and running through the air in all directions at once. Her eyes are breathing in every detail of the scene, every aspect of the colors, shapes and textures they can grasp of the entire spectra of resonance rendered to visibility. Until her pupils are dry and stinging red, glazed with tears of joy to have lived, to have perceived the experiences of the path she's been on, with him. Not realizing she's been holding her breath for nearly a minute before remembering how to breath and gasps for air. She gulps, stepping back when realizing she's on a ledge thousands of feet above the ground level, bumping into him, who yelps in pain.
“Sorry” he says, holding her tightly as he can.
“For what?”
“That it has to be this way. We should be on our way before the doors close.”
“You’re gonna come with me!” she shouts jumping with excitement.
“Only to your stop. I read the map, it’s only a few down the line,” he says.
“Oh, alright, thanks,” she says, only now knowing what he means to her sense of being, of being alive, and living a vibrant life as long as she’s with him. The misfortune of the chance of his path and hers, and him not wanting to bear the burden of her death on his conscience, knowing he outlive her by an eternity is inevitable. Even with constant travel through the Altonevers, she'll grow old, out of her prime to be eventually killed or captured, and he won’t. He’ll be left with a withering soul, alone again, dying on the inside in knowing she died to share her life with him, that he will be broken, alone for all eternity.
The disheveled two sit side by side in the middle of the train cars long light blue bench. Silent, with slips of sobs and sniffles, he and she weep in the other’s arms. She stares at the red, white and purple speckles starting to appear on the train floor, connecting the dots and seeing simple and elaborate shapes of them. A sign that her stop is coming up, as the train is beginning to assume the detail of her Alto’s standard. She squeezes him as tightly as she muster, only when he yelps in agony does she let go. They share a last taste of the others, their lover’s lips. Embracing only soul erupting emotion, unbound by thought in this last instance they'll feel the others presence exciting their own passion for living a vibrant existence. The simple expression of touching lips is like sipping from the fountains of gods, alleviating her of mortal cares, or question of what persists out of substance, existing in what is felt but un-provable as the only reality she can ever really know as real. She's free from logic or reason, and freed of freewill that she feels in this moment of freedom from thought or thinking. Knowing the soul enrapturing sensation of being inextricably tethered by the path forged and traveled while they were side by side, will endure in every sense of her being as long as she persists. She turns away and steps to the open door, pausing in place just before passing through it.
“Maybe we’ll meet again, on some street or dive in another time or place of whatever Alto,” he says.
“Hopefully, but what’re the odds of that, would you bet on it?” she says.
“I would bet on it. I would have to,” he says.
“Maybe the fortune of the infinite energies will favor what we have enough to let us see each other again,” she says teasing his philosophy of losing casino chips, and taking the thought from his head. The two stand in a moment of vacuous silence stretching for what feels like a century. She takes one step and stops, hesitating, gulping down a lump from her throat before she can take another breath, and he watches her stagger away with her head down, defeated. Telling himself over and over, the only way she can be safe is to be safe from him. She turns and waves weeping with snot filling her nose and tears streaking down her peach stained cheeks, as the door chime rings and the doors slide clos
ed with a mechanical clunk.
She watches as he slides out of view, and runs along the train to keep her smiling face on his as long a she can. He waves and smiles in seeing the last glimpse of her face, one that will be burned into the back of his eyes for as long as he exists. The train slides into the black of the tunnel, leaving her alone at the end of an empty, ordinary subway platform of Grand Central station. Listening to the last of the train carrying him an infinite number of Alto’s away from her, screeching against the tracks and echoing through the tunnel as he fades from her existence. She stumbles across the platform and up a flight of stairs, familiar to her again, known from her life before ever knowing the of Altos, before meeting him and traveling them for what feels like lifetimes lived.
She spills through with the morning rush, carried by their currents through wooden doors to the buzzing eight a.m. sidewalk of east forty second street. She walks out from under the park avenue overpass toward a breakfast cart, stopping to check her pockets for money to get a bite. Finding she has none just as a drop of water falls from the overpass onto the left side of her head. She looks up seeing the face of the moon plainly visible in the dawn painted sky of the west. The sun is rising radiance from the east, casting long shadows down the length of the inanimate, ordinary asphalt streets and cement paved sidewalks. She sees the statue of Mercury high above her, with his feet on the clock of Grand Central Station, holding a scepter and crowned with a winged helmet.
Anna shoegazes slowly along the edge of the curb with toes teetering inches over the sun bathed street. Disheveled, in filthy clothes and sweat and tears dried in layers coating her despondent face. She drifts along then stops standing paused in place for nearly a minute of squinting toward the slowly emerging sunrise with her hand over one eye like a sailor searching for the sight of safe shores. Seeming as though she’s waiting to cross the street, though at the moment there's no cars moving. The traffic light is red, and she isn’t standing at a crosswalk. She breaks into a burst of untamed laughter, disturbing the clean shaven and coffee fisted passersby. She reaches into her hoodie pocket, unwraps the chrome pistol from her tattered pink scarf and lifts her foot to take a step onto the blacktop.
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