Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  You can control this, he thought. It’s about you. Whatever is going on, it’s about you.

  “Ebon?”

  If it’s really happening and nobody else can see it, that means it’s about you and for your eyes only. And on the other hand, if it’s not really happening and it’s all in your head, then it’s also for your eyes only. Either way, you can control it. You’ve lost control before. You’ve been at the effect, losing your grip because you refused to face what was happening. Face it now. Face it with Aimee.

  Ebon thought: This room is blue.

  He opened his eyes. Every object in the room had become a hue between robin’s egg and navy. When children wanted a blue crayon, they got a color several shades darker than this, but the room hadn’t become that color. It had become this color, because this was the color of a cloudless summer sky. Because this was Ebon’s blue — the one he’d always known here on Aaron.

  Aimee, her skin its normal color but clothed in blue from head to foot, was watching him with concern.

  “Ebon?”

  “Why did we make this room blue?”

  “You wanted it this way,” she said.

  Ebon closed his eyes. Normal. Just for a while, give me normality.

  He opened his eyes. The room was Ebon’s vision of normal: the same as Richard’s cottage had always been, but under light construction. A pile of supplies sat in the living room’s middle, partially covered by a dust tarp. Paintbrushes and buckets of joint compound were near the walls, and a ladder was lying collapsed on the floor. If he explored, he’d find dozens of in-progress renovation projects, testament to Aimee’s inability to stay focused on one thing at a time and her inability to complete anything.

  Music is playing. Something by Springsteen.

  But when the music came on, it was playing Oasis. “Wonderwall.”

  “Why isn’t this room blue?” Ebon asked.

  “Why would anyone want a blue room?”

  “Do you remember this song?”

  Aimee nodded. “Sure.”

  “When did it come out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But we listened to it together.”

  “It was on, I’m sure. I don’t remember listening to it, like sitting there and doing nothing else.”

  “But it was during those summers.”

  “I guess.”

  “Does it have any particular significance to you?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

  “Why is it a problem?”

  “What about that day,” he said. “That last day.”

  “When I was seventeen?”

  “Yes.”

  “With my dad.”

  Ebon nodded.

  “What about that day?”

  “How did you feel afterward?”

  Aimee scrunched her brow. “How did I feel?”

  “After … ” This was uncomfortable. “ … with your dad.”

  “I don’t know how I felt.”

  That couldn’t be right. How could Aimee not know how she felt? Ebon knew plenty how he’d felt, that last day together, without wearing the weight of grown-ups. It was a cornerstone of his childhood, as unflinching an event as his first kiss, also with Aimee. He’d spent weeks afterward replaying that day in his mind, imagining what Aimee must have felt. What he hoped she felt. There must have been anger, and fear. There must have been loss and love.

  “Angry,” she said. “Afraid. It was like I’d lost something, because I loved you.”

  “I loved you too.”

  “But we were kids. What does love mean to a seventeen-year-old? And for you, at fifteen?”

  It had meant everything. Even now, years and years later, that early love felt unchanged. Ebon’s emotions then had been beyond their years. Either that, or his feelings today were behind.

  “Things changed over the years,” she said, “but because we never lost touch … ”

  The room slipped. It became old. Ebon forced it back to newness. This was like using a new muscle, tiring and hard to hold. Clinging to the moment took tremendous effort, like trying to divert a stream that was supposed to flow elsewhere.

  “But we did lose touch,” said Ebon. “I lost track of you. You had to find me.”

  “Then things changed and evolved in my mind,” she said.

  “Because you carried a torch.”

  Aimee nodded. “I guess I did. But you did too.”

  “No. I didn’t. Not after those first few months.” The room was still slipping. Ebon saw the clean, new walls split to show rot underneath. In the corner, the roof caved in to cloudless daytime sky. He pushed back and it sealed. “I had Holly.”

  “Holly never loved you.”

  “She did. Of course she did.”

  Aimee’s hair grew short, the way he’d seen it in a LiveLyfe photo from a few years ago. Then it became lighter, blonder, straighter — an experiment in her twenties, again as he’d seen in a shared photo. He’d liked it that way too.

  “Of course she did,” Aimee echoed.

  “Aimee,” said Ebon. “Don’t you see any of this?”

  “What?”

  “The changes. The shifts.”

  “Things change. Things shift.”

  “I mean around us right now. Look at your hair.”

  Aimee held a strand of straight blonde hair and looked at it as if seeking split ends. The color turned chestnut as she stared.

  “What about my hair?”

  Ebon closed his eyes and laid his forehead in his hand. The room should be spinning. The fact that he didn’t feel dizzy or out of sorts was making this terrible. It all felt so real. Full of colors and smells and edges he could feel beneath his hands. The normality was a horror. He wanted to find himself sliding down a tunnel without brakes, his senses and sense becoming unhinged as he fell. But it was all so ordinary. So impossibly, out-of-the-ordinary ordinary.

  He looked up. “I need you to see this, Aimee.”

  “See what?”

  “The things that are happening. The things I see. I can’t be alone.”

  She put her hand on his arm, her earlier anger gone. “You’re not alone, Ebon. I told you, you can talk to me. I want you to talk to me.”

  “Not about what happened this spring. About … ” He swallowed.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s hard to focus. I feel like I’m coming apart.”

  “That’s normal, after what you’ve been through.”

  “Aimee, this isn’t normal.” He held up her hand, showing it to her as he made it old and wrinkled. Young and smooth. Small, like a child’s. She gasped and pulled the hand away as if burned.

  “You see it.” He had to work hard to keep the excitement from his voice. So it wasn’t just him. He was doing something, but at least maybe, judging by Aimee’s reaction, it was actually being done. “You see it, don’t you?”

  “Jesus. I saw … ” She shook her head. “I’m sure it was nothing.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Ebon leaned forward and grasped one of her hands in both of his. “It’s not,” he repeated. “Something is wrong. Since I’ve been here, something has been wrong. With the cottage. With you. With the island. With the other woman I told you about — with Vicky.”

  “The woman you’re sleeping with.” Her voice was edged with spite, a secret assiduously kept from her.

  “But that’s the thing. I don’t know her at all.”

  Aimee shook her head in disgust.

  “Not like that. I mean I don’t know how I met her. I don’t know what I’ve told you about her, or her about you. I don’t know how often I see her. I have no idea what she means to me.”

  “Men.”

  “I don’t know how this house is supposed to look, Aimee! How is it supposed to look?”

  She threw up her hands. Daylight had dawned, though Ebon wasn’t sure when. The sunlight looked warm enough
to be summer’s. The beach, from where he stood, looked clean and clear, ready for sandcastles. “Like it looks!” she said. “I don’t know what you want from me!”

  “I want help.”

  “Help with what? With tickling her G-spot? Why don’t you ask her?”

  Aimee was no longer seeing the changes. She’d seen for a moment, but she’d forgotten already, sucked into the slipstream. He could feel himself wanting to go into the slipstream with her, but even though the cottage (in partial repair, simple in its floor plan, washed with morning sun and open) seemed average enough to settle into for morning coffee, it wasn’t. Five minutes ago, Ebon had been sitting beside an indoor pool. Five minutes ago, it had been midnight.

  “Forget about Vicky! I need your help. I need you to be my anchor.”

  A small, female voice inside said, I want to be that for you, Ebon. Then there was a noise like a foot stepping in dry grass and the pleasant, sun-washed cottage wilted like time-lapsed flowers around him. The walls turned dusty and gray. The floor creaked where Aimee pressed it with her foot.

  “I was always your anchor. Always here for you.”

  “Yes, but … ”

  “Your port in the storm. But always at arm’s length. You could never make a decision, could you? And when I invited you here, you came right away.”

  “Because we’re friends.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Just friends.” There was something behind her words. Aimee had admitted to carrying a torch for Ebon all these years, but he knew for a fact that she’d had several serious, long-term boyfriends. Throughout her late teens and early twenties, she’d sent him letters — and then, later, emails. Aimee had never been shy in describing to Ebon all that she’d learned, her invitation to return seemingly always open. But that had been a hard time. There had been Holly. And before Holly, Julia.

  Aimee. Julia. Holly. Three beads on a braid. They weren’t just Ebon’s key relationships, independent and valuable for what they’d been. They were tied together, each an arrow toward the next.

  “Why did you really come here, Ebon?”

  He closed his eyes. Focused. When he opened them, she was ordinary Aimee — in her early thirties with soft, dark-blonde hair around her friendly face, somewhat tan but unlined by the sun. She had that crooked tooth, which she’d never cared to fix despite the way she hated it. She had the beauty mark on her chin, which she also hated. Somehow those flaws made her real. This was Aimee. The one he was supposed to see. He took her hand. She looked down, seeming pleased by his affection. But really he just had to hang on.

  “I wanted to start fresh.”

  “And you left your job. Just took all that time off, free to return whenever you wanted.”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “Why did you really come here?”

  Ebon sighed. “To forget.”

  “You didn’t come for me.”

  “I wanted to see you, of course.”

  “But not … for me.”

  “No.”

  Again the room wilted. One of the walls fell, and Ebon found himself looking out across the untidy, sparse-grass lawn in front of the dunes. The weeds had taken over, volunteer bushes and trees edging out even the tall and hearty beach grass. The wall decayed where it had fallen, the weeds seeming to surround and swallow it. Sun streamed from above, and Ebon looked up to see great holes in the ceiling. They were sitting around a rickety metal table in two wrought iron chairs that had turned into a rainbow of mold.

  “Do you see this?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, Ebon.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Maybe you should let go.”

  “‘Let go?’ What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. You don’t know what I mean.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Tell me about us.”

  “What about us?”

  “Tell me about Holly.”

  “I’ve told you about Holly!”

  “Was she a monster? Did she betray you?”

  “You know she did.”

  “Were you a victim?”

  “Aimee … ”

  “Were the two of you too different from the start? Was she a sex fiend, caring about nothing else, unable to adapt into something more, unable to grow, caring only about herself, stealing for thrills when she wasn’t screwing around to feed something inside, something you never had and didn’t know how to accept? Did you accept? You tried, didn’t you, but she said she had no filter and really that meant that she only saw what she wanted to see, only lived how she wanted to live, only looked at your relationship through her own lens and never yours, never offered more, could never become more, was just a party girl who you should’ve never hooked up with because you weren’t right for her any more than she was right for you, because some people never change, and … ”

  (I could be your —)

  “… and you tried and tried, didn’t you, but there’s no pleasing some people, there’s no getting through to people who you just can’t match, who are selfish, who don’t believe in quid pro quo, who don’t believe in fair trade and give and take, who don’t so much as not believe in compromise as never consider compromise because they live myopically, a horse wearing blinders, not bad but not good either, not willfully cruel but not voluntarily kind, like a manic breed of Asperger's, or ADD, you were sure she had ADD because she never stopped trying to find the next thing just because she was born clutching selfishness in her fists, and … ”

  (I have my own painful past)

  “… and sometimes, like the expression goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, or maybe if you can’t even join ‘em, you let ‘em go … ”

  (Let go)

  “ … and every person is responsible for themselves, of course, and it wasn’t your responsibility to tell anyone how to live, not me and not her and not Vicky, not Julia, it’s not your job to fix everyone; you’re a good guy, and you do your best, but they were all big girls, we were all big girls, and you can’t hold a person’s hand through every step of life. Some lessons you have to learn on your own, the hard way. So you want to leave, Ebon? Well why don’t you just goddamn go already?”

  Aimee stopped. Ebon found himself staring gape-mouthed. Behind her, the walls pulsed as if breathing. They bloomed from the ruins like vines, coloring from dust gray to bright white and brighter blues and yellows and reds, then cycling down, decaying, growing holes, mending apertures, sewing the ceiling shut, growing the roof high like a double-story great room. Décor changed; years marched backward and forward. Framed photos leaning on shelves changed occupants, tarnished, grew polished, curled and aged in sepia.

  “‘Leave?’” said Ebon, shell-shocked.

  “I like this game where you just repeat what I say,” she said.

  “Where should I go?”

  “You can control it, can’t you? So control it. Leave the island. Leave me behind. Get out of the loop, and you know you’ll be free. Go back to your life in the city. Beg for your job back — ”

  “I still have my job. I’m on sabbatical.”

  “Beg for your old job back. Grovel. Get on your knees. Catch up on your rent. Pay your bills. Move on, and let it all go. All you have to do is to choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  “To leave. To go.”

  “I’ve been trying to go.”

  “Have you?”

  “Jesus. Yes!”

  “So do it. Go.”

  “How?”

  “Take your boat.”

  “My boat was destroyed.”

  Aimee gave a little laugh. There was some odd emotion in it that Ebon couldn’t place. It was part humor, but it was mostly a mishmash of a dozen other things. Scorn. Irritation. Loathing. Self-loathing? Impatience. Condescension.

  “What?”

  “Un-destroy it,” she said.

 
; CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Weathered Boards

  EBON REACHED THE FOOT OF PINKY Slip to find his boat whole and undamaged. It even looked like someone had come down in the middle of the night and given it a fresh coat of paint. He’d told Aimee that his plan included removing the boat’s many shiny pieces over winter and making them even shinier, but that was a laugh; somehow, despite owning the boat for just a few days, he’d already done it … this time without losing time to a mysterious skip.

  He’d had his fill of boating from the day before but couldn’t help taking a peek. The vessel looked ready for puttering about on the bay, ignorant of the month and coming winter. Its snap cover had been replaced with a new one that hadn’t yet met the savage, relentless abuse of daily UV exposure. Most of the dock lines had been upgraded and were coiled into nautilus-like spirals on the planks.

  Ebon opened the cover and stepped into the cockpit. There were photos taped to the dash of him and Aimee together, open water behind them and their hair whipping in the wind. She was wearing a bikini top and looked stunning. Ebon realized that he hadn’t seen that much skin on Aimee since she’d been seventeen. The thought made him shiver, as if he’d just barely missed something important without seeing it. As if he’d been racing a car and had missed a pedestrian by inches.

  He turned from the photos and looked into the cabin. The downstairs had been tidied, the bunks reupholstered, upgraded plates and utensils in the small galley. But Ebon still smelled the slight stink of fuel, and peering into the bilge he saw the same rainbow sheen standing atop the small amount of bilge water. He pressed the bilge pump button, which ran without needing the key. Were all boats like that? Ebon wasn’t sure. He watched the rainbow of fuel sift into the water, feeling a flush of environmentalist’s guilt, seeing it broken apart almost immediately by the gentle surf.

  He climbed out of the boat, then buttoned it up. His thoughts were churning. Not only because of his most recent surreality with Aimee, but because his mind had become a soup, all inputs equally valid and worthy of his attention. He should be afraid. He should feel like he was grasping a relic as it turned to sand and sifted through his fingers. But he didn’t. Somehow — deep, deep down — this was all acceptable. This was, in some way Ebon couldn’t articulate, to be expected.