Swansong

by Rose Christo

  You can create energy from nothing.

  * * * * *

  Kory leaves the park before me. Apparently he has a date. "She's very pretty," he makes sure I know. I conclude that she's probably his mother.

  I toss my empty drink in a trash bin. I walk down the tiled park lane. Strangers wander past me like aimless specters. I think I feel sorry for them. I'm one to talk.

  The trees open up on an artificial pond. A peeling swingset stands abandoned, empty chain swings fluttering in the warm breeze. It shouldn't be this warm in November. A lot of things shouldn't be the way they are right now.

  A little girl and her older brother play together on the whirring, bright red roundabout. The little girl's shrieks of laughter are like a song. I smile. It almost hurts. I remember Jocelyn's song, the one she sang last year for her semester project. Stuck On You, by Elvis Presley. She shimmied around on stage in a tutu skirt. It was ridiculous. It was beautiful.

  The roundabout stops spinning. The little girl turns and points at me. "That's our girlfriend!" she shouts.

  I stir from my reverie.

  "Mashallah," her brother says. "Go say hello, then."

  Aisha Asad runs over to me. She pulls on my hands. She's as bright as a ball of energy, her wild hair framing her face.

  I laugh. "What's this?"

  "Wanna push me on the swings?" Aisha tempts.

  "You don't have to," Azel says, hands in his pockets.

  "I wasn't talking to you," Aisha rallies back.

  Azel's smiling. He looks so content. Why can't I feel that content? Aisha pulls me over to the swingset. My hands feel warm where they touch hers. She's so little. Children love the most, I think, until somebody teaches them how to hate.

  "Here," Aisha says, climbing on the chain swing.

  It looks brittle. It looks like it will give way. "Are you sure...?" I ask.

  "Just push! You can't hurt me."

  See what I mean?

  I give Aisha a gentle push. She sticks her stubby legs out as she sails over the ground. Her hair is like the wind, messy, soaring around her without direction. I want to catch it with my fingers, find out whether it feels like clouds.

  "She always gets her way," Azel remarks. At some point he must have come to stand next to me. His voice is close to my ear, soft, warm.

  "I don't mind," I promise. I like it. I think--I might as well be floating.

  "Can I jump off the swing?" Aisha asks.

  Azel twitches. "No!"

  "He's no fun, huh?" I joke.

  "Nope," Aisha agrees.

  She puts her heels down in the dirt. I let go of the chain swing. She jumps up--just like that--and runs back to the roundabout.

  "I don't know how she does it," I swear. "The swings always made me throw up when I was little."

  "Motion sickness?" Azel asks. He watches his sister vigilantly. It makes me want to put my arms around his neck.

  "Probably," I agree, when I remember he's waiting for a response.

  "And you tease me for the airplanes."

  "You're right." I turn my head to hide my smile. "Sorry."

  "I'm not saying I mind."

  The sky is flushed with early sunset, soft red and petal-pink. Even here, the horizon's not exempt from the shadows of greedy skyscrapers. I want to escape, I think. I want to get away.

  "Are you busy tonight?" Azel asks.

  My face heats. "No." Jude's working late.

  "Do you want to have dinner with us?" Azel keeps his eyes trained carefully away. "Dad's home."

  My pulse dances and my stomach flips. I am delightfully stupid.

  "If you don't want to," Azel begins.

  "Yes," I say.

  Gray floods quietly into the sanguine sky. The sun sparks behind the hungry shadows. My head doesn't hurt.

  * * * * *

  I slip out of my shoes when we step inside the maisonette. Aisha kicks hers off with zealous aplomb. Azel catches one of them as it soars through the air.

  "Dad! Dad! Dad!" Aisha croons, like an excitable goose.

  Azel closes the door. We head into the sitting room. Layla's sitting cross-legged on the carpet, her chin in her hand, ennui in her eyes. Next to her sits Kory, slack-jawed, fascinated with whatever's happening on the tiny television set.

  "Kory?" I blurt out, surprised.

  "Hi, Wendy," he says, but doesn't look my way. "Don't interrupt my date."

  I turn questioningly toward Azel.

  "What?" Azel asks, blank-faced. "I told you she's seeing a boy I don't like."

  The side door bursts open. A large man with a beard waltzes out. He's wearing an apron and a keffiyeh. He mimes playing the harp with a sauce-laden ladle.

  "Dad!" Aisha croons again.

  "I seem to have fathered more children while I was away," Mr. Asad says, looking between Kory and me. "Bless the velocity of my swimmers."

  "Dad," Azel says through gnashed teeth. Somehow it doesn't sound as celebratory as Aisha's.

  "You there!" Mr. Asad waves his ladle at Kory. Sauce flies at the wall. "Have you come to steal my eldest daughter's innocence? Why would you do such a thing?"

  "Dad!" Azel warns.

  "Don't worry about it, Dad," Layla says. "He couldn't find it even if he tried."

  "Shh," is all Kory says, eyes glued to the television.

  "I'm going to light the luminaries," Azel says hastily.

  "Good thinking!" Mr. Asad gestures to me. "Do you want to help me in the kitchen?"

  "Uh," I stammer. "Sure, sir," I tell him.

  I follow Mr. Asad into the kitchen. It's cramped but cozy, the walls checkered white, the island sunny yellow. The Asads have one of those compact steel refrigerators, the type you can sit on if you're tall enough. On the other hand, the drawers to the island are open, bulging with packaged nonperishables.

  A pot of tomato sauce simmers on the stove. Mr. Asad drops his ladle in the pot. Big, cut peppers stand aside on a baking sheet, half-stuffed with mushrooms and cheese.

  Dad used to cook. Dad used to embarrass me, too. I miss it. I miss him.

  "You finish stuffing those for me?" Mr. Asad asks. He tosses toasted cumin seeds into the sauce.

  I wash my hands at the little round sink. I throw him a smile. "Sure."

  It's companionable. It's normalcy. If I close my eyes I can almost hear soccer scores on a distant television, the sound of Mom shrieking when she discovers a newly ruined tablecloth. I try not to close my eyes for too long. I stuff the rest of the peppers. The cheese is stark-white and smells spicy, sweet.

  "Do you know," Mr. Asad says. He heaves a sigh. "Nobody makes sauce like that whatsit guy. You know the one I'm talking about."

  "Um," I stammer. "Chef Boyardee?"

  "I don't know." So much for that. "You're a painter, are you?"

  I smile again. "Yeah."

  "Is that something you'd like to keep doing when you grow up?"

  I slide the peppers into the oven and close the oven door. I stop short. When I grow up. Somehow, in all my foolish infallibility, it never occurred to me that I haven't grown up.

  The kitchen blurs. I rub my eyes very quickly.

  "Hey..." Mr. Asad says, sounding concerned.

  "Sorry." I smile so hard it hurts. "Feels like I'm crying at the drop of a hat these days."

  "You've had a very rough year."

  "I guess you can say that." This year sucks.

  "It'll be over next month," Mr. Asad reminds me.

  That's right. He's right. Next month, this hellish year draws to an end.

  Maybe there is a God, after all.

  "You know--" I wish I could put a lid on my mouth. "Sometimes I think it would be easier if Mom had lived. But that seems wrong, somehow. That seems selfish."

  "It's not," Mr. Asad says. " 'Heaven lies under the feet of mothers.' There's a reason we turn to them when we are afraid."

  Mothers. Azel's mother. "I'm sorry--"

  "What do you want for dessert?" Mr. Asad says cheerfully. "I li
ke bananabread pudding, don't you?"

  "Y-Yes." Probably not. I don't like bananas. Is his wife still a touchy subject?

  "Good. Oh, make sure none of my evil spawn are killing each other in the next room, will you?"

  "That's a big concern around here, huh?"

  "Ask Azel what happened to his older brother sometime."

  I really hope he's joking.

  * * * * *

  Nobody's being murdered in the sitting room. Layla and Aisha have their hands in Kory's hair. Aisha attaches a bow to one of his cowlicks.

  "Now I understand why women go to hair salons all the time," Kory tells me. "This is very relaxing."

  I give him a weird look.

  "Azel's brooding out back," Layla tells me.

  "Oh," I say. "Is that bad?"

  "Only if he decides to drown himself in the pond." Layla pauses. "I hope he decides to drown himself in the pond."

  I decide to make sure he doesn't.

  The paper luminarias flicker and glow on the back terrace. I step outside through the sliding glass door; I slide it shut behind me. The pond plashes when the cool air touches it, lilypads drifting on black waters. The sky is black and velvet and powdered with stars.

  "Over here," Azel says.

  He's sitting under a small umbrella tree. I make my way over to him and sit at his side. Nearby there's a plastic white garden table, decorative lights tangled around its legs.

  "Are you really brooding?" I wonder.

  Azel's head turns in my direction. My eyes haven't adjusted to the darkness yet; I can't really see his face. "No," he says. "I just like it out here. Wish I could sleep out here."

  I try and picture it. I laugh quietly. My eyes adjust slowly to the stony terrace, the low wooden fence; the smile on Azel's face.

  I turn my eyes away. My face is tingling.

  "Your dad's really nice," I tell Azel.

  "He is," Azel agrees. It surprises me--but then again, it doesn't. "Wish he could retire, stay at home more."

  "He never wanted to remarry, huh? After your mom..."

  "No. Some people are just made for each other," Azel says. "That's what I think."

  I'm so stupid. I'm so young. I try not to think what I'm thinking.

  "I think so, too."

  This has been a very long year.

  "Are you feeling any better?" Azel asks.

  I don't know what he means in particular: the headaches, the weird space trips, or even just the absence of the people most important to me.

  "I am," I answer.

  Just being here, just talking to him, I can forget. I don't want to forget entirely--no, I don't--but for a little while, I want to escape. I can escape. I can pretend I'm not brain-damaged, and Azel's mother isn't dead, and we've been talking to one another for years, sitting under these very same stars.

  "Schrodinger's Cat," Azel murmurs.

  I smile quizzically.

  "A cat is locked inside a box," Azel says. "And in that box there's a bowl full of poison. Either the cat drinks the poison and dies, or the cat ignores the poison and lives. When you look inside the box, which outcome do you see?"

  "Why would a cat drink poison?" I ask. I like cats. I like rabbits more.

  "Maybe the cat's mind isn't made up," Azel says. "Maybe she doesn't really trust the poison, only she's very thirsty, and she doesn't know for sure that it'll harm her. So while she's deciding what to do, reality meets a fork in the road. Reality branches. In one reality, she satisfies her thirst. In the other reality, she exercises caution. So now you have a universe with a live cat and a universe with a dead cat. But when you look inside that box, there's no telling which universe you'll see."

  "Do you think that's true?" I ask, my mind reeling. "Do you think there's a place where--"

  A place where we didn't get in the car on my birthday, where I didn't take the steering wheel; a place where Mom and Dad are still alive and Jocelyn's singing in a tutu skirt; a place where Azel has both his parents, full-time, and his parents are friends with mine--

  "Yes," Azel says simply.

  "Why?" I ask. What I really mean is: How?

  "It's physics, right? Quantum mechanics says all particles act like waves. Like the waves of the ocean. A wave can move two ways at once. Part of it flows toward you, toward the shore, while the other part ebbs back to sea. You can't just say 'The wave is over here,' because the wave is over there, too."

  I think about Tillamook Bay. I can't push it from my mind.

  "That's called superposition. Any given particle is doing at least two different things at once. But you can only observe one of those two things. Something potentially happening is the same as something actually happening--in another universe."

  Another universe.

  My lack of a response serves as my response. I drink in the hope, the longing; the possibility. And then I say--

  "If anything," I say, a little windswept, "at least I'll pass Physics class this year."

  Azel laughs. It's one of those real, hearty, taken-by-surprise laughs, the kind you can't fake, the kind that speaks a thousand stories about you in a single syllable. It's the kind of laugh that makes you want to laugh by proxy. I laugh with Azel, and suddenly my sides are sore, and suddenly my voice has gone hoarse. We laugh so hard, I almost wonder why the luminarias haven't fallen over. We laugh so loud, the air rings with silence when the laughter has faded away.

  Silence. I tuck my hair behind my ears. I keep doing that, but it doesn't make much of a difference. My ears and my neck are already bare. My hair has betrayed me by virtue of its shortness. The lights from the garden table catch my swan bracelet at an odd angle. Luminosity bounces off of the swan's bowed, graceful neck, and her gilded, folded wings.

  I hold still.

  "Dad probably needs help with dessert," Azel says. He unfolds his legs. He stands.

  "Azel?"

  "Yeah?"

  The swan. Her wings are folded. That's not--they can't be. Her wings can't be folded, because when Jocelyn gave her to me, her wings were spread out in flight.

  Wings. Dizzy. Head pounding. Dull.

  Oh.

  Oh, wait.

  "Azel?"

  He should be annoyed with me. He has every right to. But by all accounts, he isn't. He stands still, patient, waiting. I stand up, forming my thoughts, gathering them.

  "Did you buy me a new charm bracelet?" I ask. My head, my shoulders, they feel light. "When I lost the old one?"

  He doesn't answer. Not immediately. And though his face is carefully guarded, perfectly expressionless, I can see the surmisement flitting through his bright green eyes. I can see he's been cornered, and he's figuring out his approach.

  I know him. I know he won't lie.

  Azel doesn't lie.

  "Yeah," he finally admits.

  I throw my arms around his neck, like I've wanted to for months. I can hear the way the air catches in his throat, can see the way his face freezes with beautiful shock. I kiss him. It's a little harder than I meant for it to be--a little clumsy--but what am I if I'm not sixteen? And what is he if he's not seventeen? And he puts his arms around my waist so fast, it's like he anticipated this, like it was only a matter of time. And his mouth is soft on mine, guiding, This way, not that, and it feels like nothing I've ever felt before and everything I've ever felt before all at once. The stars--the nebulae--the interstellar dust. They have nothing on this. This is why we have bodies.

  Azel's hands are at the small of my back. His curls tickle my collarbone. I want to wind them around my fingers, pull them taut, see if they spring back into shape. I bury my face between his shoulder and neck. He kisses the top of my head. His mouth passes over the scars hidden beneath my hair. I try not to tremble.

  "Thank you," Azel says.

  "W-What?" I don't understand. "Why?" I don't show him my face.

  "Thank you," he says again.

  Maybe that's all there is to it. Maybe it wouldn't make sense if he explained.

&nb
sp; That, I understand.

  * * * * *

  Mr. Asad has us eat dinner outside, at the garden table. Nobody seems to mind except Kory, who wants to get back to his three-hour special on protons and positrons. Layla makes sure he sees it when she gags. Azel carries an extra chair outside, because we're short one. Aisha tags along at his heels. Azel ruffles Aisha's messy hair. Such a small gesture, but so much love behind it. The warmth is welcome on a chilly night like this.

  "Fascinating," Kory gushes. "There are more protons in the human body than there are stars in the universe. Can you imagine? Somewhere out there I bet the government is farming humans in secrecy, harvesting us for our energy output..."

  Azel fumes quietly. I push my plate away, my stomach turning. Suddenly I'm not all that hungry.

  "Do you do taxes, too?" Mr. Asad asks Kory. "Can you do mine?"

  "Dad," Azel mutters.

  "Sure," Kory says breezily. "Long form or short?"

  Azel rounds on Layla. "He's never coming back here again."

  "Fine by me," Layla says, and doesn't hide her contempt.

  After dinner Mr. Asad plies everyone with a kind of bananabread pudding he calls masoub. Kory takes two bites and breaks out in hives. He whips an epi pen out of his pocket and jams it into his arm. Aisha starts crying.

  "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Kory pleads.

  "You monster!" Aisha wails. She runs inside to play with her dolls.

  I can't resist a little girl in distress. After we've carried the dishes inside I join Aisha in the sitting room. Her mouth is puckered in a surly pout. She holds a doll in each hand.

  "Who are they?" I ask. I sit with her on the carpet.

  She calms down. "This one's my Lovely," she says. She shows me a doll in a purple headscarf. "This one's my Friendly." She shows me a doll with googly eyes.

  I laugh. "He sure looks Friendly."

  "You can play, if you want," she says casually.

  "Aisha, she doesn't want to play with those stupid dolls," Layla says. She strides into the room and collapses on the sofa.

  "Of course I do," I say quickly. "They're having a tea party, right? Is it Lovely's birthday?"