“Sounds familiar,” said clothed Ebon.
Nude Ebon made a sarcastic little frown. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“You’re erasing the past!” said clothed Ebon, infuriated.
“Yes, I’m erasing the past!” nude Ebon spat back. “Just like Holly did! Just like Aimee did! I’m sure you remember how Aimee chose her father over us, while we lay half-dead on the floor. But do you know what, Ebon? I don’t remember that at all!”
“You’re lying to yourself. To me. To everyone.”
“Aimee is perfect! All is as it should be! I was hurt in the past, but life is finally good. Now I feel worthy of love, not stuck in the self-effacing bullshit you insist on wallowing in. Think about this as you clutch your self-pity: Which one of us is a better partner for Aimee? Which of us is happier?”
Ebon shook his head. “It all sounds perfect until you realize it’s not true.”
“‘True,’” said nude Ebon, spitting the word out like a bad seed. “What does ‘true’ mean anyway, beyond our own interpretations and choices? Who is left to contradict whatever ‘truth’ I choose to believe? Who are either of us to pretend there is a truth out there that’s independent of what lives inside our minds? Holly is gone. Mark is gone. Aimee wouldn’t even disagree with my version of events. So who is there to contradict us?”
Still shaking his head, clothed Ebon said, “I know what’s real. I know what’s true.”
Nude Ebon threw his hands in the air, exasperated. “What’s so goddamn great about the truth? What has the ‘objective truth’ caused other than pain?” He began to tick off items on his fingers. “Truth gives us conflicted impressions of Holly, making us feel bad. Truth makes us unsure where we stand with Aimee. Truth forces us to watch the torment unfold in Holly’s journal — something I don’t think you’ve even fully seen. So let me take my hand off the head of a particularly dicey drowning memory and give you another truth you’ll love to wallow in: Holly felt worthless to us. Have you let yourself see that yet? Have you permitted yourself to recall the passages where, between bouts of ecstasy with Mark, she goes on for pages about how much she hates herself? Have you seen that, Ebon? Have you seen the two times she considered killing herself?”
Clothed Ebon felt the wind leave his stomach. His legs buckled. He’d read the whole journal, but somehow, he’d failed to connect the dots from end to end.
A sly, cruel smile creased nude Ebon’s lips. “Repressed that one yourself, didn’t you? Not so high and goddamn mighty all the time, are you? But if you want the truth, you have to take all of it, don’t you?”
Why did I read her journal at all? clothed Ebon thought. I knew what I needed to know already. Why didn’t I let sleeping dogs lie?
“The truth isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, is it?” said nude Ebon, pacing. “Haven’t we turned from other grim truths in the past because we didn’t want to know them? Haven’t we encountered macabre videos on the Internet and refused to watch them? Haven’t we seen homeless people with their hands out and passed without a glance? Haven’t we flinched from the news, deciding it was better not to know all the world’s evil than to be besieged by it? And yet you had to look at the journal, didn’t you? Because you had to know the truth? Well, you can face that horrible truth if you want, but I think it’s just unnecessary pain.”
Clothed Ebon was finding it hard to think. “We should have given Holly her privacy. We never should have read her journal.”
Nude Ebon smirked. “Speaking for myself, I never did.”
“We can’t just ignore everything that happened.”
“Why not? Life goes on.” For a disarming moment, the nude man softened, looking down at Aimee, wrapped in her blanket by the dying fire. “With her, as it should have from the start.”
“But it didn’t. And we can’t change that.”
“YES. WE. CAN!” said the other, his words coming out challenging, through half-gritted teeth. He tapped his head hard, as if angry with himself. “Our personal past isn’t a matter of historical record! It’s not immutable or able to be contradicted! What’s in here is all there is!” Again he rapped his skull with a finger. “Have you found a time machine? Or are you like everyone else — living here and now, in this moment, with no ability or plans to ever visit those old times again? So what good are they to you? How does it benefit you to remember things in any way other than how you want to remember them? What’s so goddamn great and noble about the truth?”
Clothed Ebon felt like he was stuck in a loop. He could only repeat what was already obvious, feeling weak, knowing his argument had no teeth but compelled to fight for it anyway.
“It’s true,” he said. “It’s what actually happened.”
“It’s arbitrary! Even people who stood by our side would remember things differently as our truth clashes with theirs. Holly would see a different version. So would Aimee. Think back to the day Richard found us with her. Our truth is that when forced to choose between comforting us and comforting her father, Aimee chose him. But do you doubt for a second that if we ask her about it when she wakes up, she’ll say anything other than ‘I had to calm him down in order to save you?’ Or Holly: do you think Holly would cop to being a cheating whore if she were here now, or do you think she’d say she felt lonely because we’d been ignoring her? That she’d needed to feel special and pretty and loved and adored, and that we’d stopped giving her those things years ago because our affection was on someone else? Someone who we’d always considered the end-all, be-all, effectively eliminating any chance Holly might have had?”
Clothed Ebon sat on the couch, clamping hands to his ears. Everything his opposite was saying made sense, but somehow his own argument had been twisted into a blunt weapon against him. It was true that there were many sides to every story, but where he’d been so sure that he should face his own side, the naked man said there wasn’t a point. There was no objective truth. So why not choose a reality that didn’t hurt his heart? Who would fault him for it? Who would even know?
I’d know. I’d have to look in the mirror every day. I’d know I was washing the face of a liar. That I was shaving the chin of someone without enough of a spine to …
He looked down at Aimee.
… to Own His Shit.
He stood, feeling a sudden surge of confidence.
“We cheated first,” he said. “We never stopped, not since we found Aimee online. When Holly reached out, we pushed her away. When Holly felt low and tried to open up, we made jokes.”
“That’s not the way I choose to remember it,” said nude Ebon.
But clothed Ebon was feeling stronger by the second. Aimee was still as motionless as the snow outside the window, but he now felt as if she were standing beside him. The deceitful version of himself could manufacture any past or present he wanted, but even he couldn’t pretend his way into Aimee’s allegiance. It was one thing to change memories inside your own mind, to create a version of events in which you were the hero. But it was quite another to win over someone as strong and bossy as Aimee. Someone who insisted on taking responsibility and never making excuses.
The blanket stirred. There was a strange doubling as a copy of Aimee emerged from the original’s skin. The new woman crouched beside her sleeping sister, then stood. She picked up a discarded robe from the couch and shrugged it on, then moved to stand beside clothed Ebon. Both of them watched the naked man, waiting. The original Aimee stayed sleeping on her side by the fire, eyes closed, oblivious.
“She’s not part of this,” said nude Ebon, disarmed.
“I choose to believe she is.”
“She’s just a projection,” he said, looking at the standing Aimee. He pointed to the Aimee sleeping by the fire. “That’s how she really is right now.”
“What is ‘right now’?” asked clothed Ebon.
“Now. Here.”
“While time is frozen. While I am standing in a kind of mindscape, arguing with a different version of my o
wn memories. Is that the rational universe in which I should refuse to believe the impossible?”
“She’s something you made up,” said nude Ebon, sounding less certain. “This isn’t real, so she isn’t either.”
Clothed Ebon smirked. “Believe whatever you want. But if your version of the future requires Aimee Frey to not see through your bullshit or call you on it, I think you’ll be very disappointed.”
“She’s not part of this,” nude Ebon repeated. To clothed Ebon’s ears, the words were exactly the same as he’d said them earlier, down to the smallest inflection. Exactly. He was like a robot in a loop, without the programming to push through something unforeseen.
“She is. The minute she wakes up, she is.”
“I don’t need her approval,” said nude Ebon. “I just won’t talk to her about Holly. I’ll only talk about us. Things she can’t contradict.”
But the tables had turned. Clothed Ebon took Aimee’s hand. She looked over at him, a very real, very Aimee smile forming on her wide lips. Together, they took two steps forward.
“I’ll never stop pestering you,” she said.
“The past is the past,” the nude man said weakly.
“I’ll never stop prying. I’ll never stop asking questions. I’ll never stop rehashing the past.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “I’ll never stop making you feel more guilty than sad about Holly’s death … until you Own Your Shit enough to move on.”
“I have nothing to feel guilty about,” said nude Ebon.
Aimee took another step, now leaving clothed Ebon’s side. He knew she was just a projection of his own mind — no more “real Aimee” than the woman who’d worn high heels during one of his episodes, baking batch after batch of cookies — but still her every word surprised him, as if they were genuinely her own. Her tone was sufficiently bossy, her pitch perfectly blending condescension with pity. Aimee might be sleeping by the fire in reality, but this was what she’d actually say, and they both knew it.
Repression wasn’t the same as forgetting. Repression was pushing down, but Ebon’s Aimee memories weren’t like his Holly memories. Holly was dead and forever mute … but as long as the real Aimee was around to call Ebon on his bullshit, the things Ebon knew deep inside, regarding Aimee, would have enough strength to fight back.
“You hated the way I pushed you to remember, Ebon,” she said. “You ran off to Vicky when I pushed. But Vicky wasn’t who you wanted, was she? She wasn’t even the woman you thought you’d seen that day, with the red hair and the porcelain skin and the big curves. Vicky was just a stand-in for Julia, and Julia was some strange blend of me and your mother. You’ve seen through your projections before, Ebon. You saw it at Vicky’s, when you finally began to realize who she truly was and who she’d never actually been. But you didn’t like realizing that either, did you?”
Clothed Ebon watched his naked double blink. No, he hadn’t liked that at all. When the veneer of Julia-ness that Ebon’s mind had laid across Vicky had finally thinned, the realization pushed his world to spinning. He couldn’t go forward to back. His only choice was to wipe the world clean and restart with the one person who might be able to help him. The one person who’d never faltered, never left, never relented.
“You might hate what I do,” Aimee continued. “You might hate what I say. You may get tired of me telling you what to do, silently judging you, patiently and maddeningly waiting for you to get your head out of your own naked ass and see what’s right in front of you. But you always come back to me. And that’s why you will never, ever be able to forget the truth, fake Ebon: because you want to spend your future with me … and I won’t let you forget!”
Nude Ebon backed up, his retreat arrested by Richard’s ottoman. “We’ll talk around it,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you want to hear, but won’t believe it myself.”
She laughed. “Do you think I’ll ever stop talking about it? What have I ever stopped talking about? When do I ever stop talking, fake Ebon? Is there anything, by now, that you don’t know about my father? Anything you don’t know about my mother, my grandparents, my family history on this island, my boyfriends and lovers, my motherfucking love for flowers?”
As she finished speaking, the stark, firelit room seemed to explode into vibrant color. Lilies first: white, yellow, pink. Orchids followed, blizzard-colored blooms with bright-purple throats. Antique hydrangeas blossomed behind them, tinted in lavender, terra-cotta and cranberry. Roses exploded through the room, embellishing every surface in hues that shouldn’t exist. Ebon could smell the sweet lavender roses, which he remembered held their scent from the moisture in their petals, alongside the almost sickly pungent perfume of pink lilies.
“What do your flowers have to do with any of this?” asked the nude man. But it was barely a question; it was almost cowering and defensive — the verbal equivalent of lying on the floor beneath someone with a raised fist, holding up arms for protection. “I choose to believe you ran into town for these. You took the truck. You went down to Main Street and you loaded the bed with thousands of …”
“YOU CAN’T HAVE A FLOWER SHOP ON AN ISLAND!” Aimee yelled.
“But what…”
“YOU CAN’T FORGET IF YOU’RE AROUND ME! I WON’T ALLOW IT!”
There was a heavy beat of silence. Clothed Ebon blinked. Both Aimee and the other Ebon had frozen like the last scene of a play’s second act.
In that moment he saw all four players in the room for what they really were. They were his own mind warring with itself. Two against two: an Ebon in denial and a passive, sleeping Aimee versus himself and Aimee as she truly was. But the fight was already over. The disparate versions of Ebon’s memories could spar for years, but Aimee’s presence gave clothed Ebon an unfair advantage. Aimee had always held the upper hand in their relationship — and Aimee, as long as she stood by him, would never stop being Aimee.
Ebon’s head turned on a swivel, taking in the room’s suddenly vibrant colors. Screaming purple and white lisianthus, gloriosa so red and yellow they looked licked by live fire, tiny vases stuffed with snow white lily of the valley, bright blue muscari, and rich chocolate cosmos. Ebon knew them all by name and shape and color. All those long, tedious, one-sided discussions about floral arranging. All those hours spent watching her work and all the floral links she’d sent him online. All those boring stories about trying to resurrect the family’s island flower shop before finally deciding to close it. It had sunk in after all. Ebon didn’t care about flowers in the least. But he cared about Aimee with all his heart.
As long as Aimee was around, the truth would follow whether he liked it or not. If he didn’t free it now, the truth would forever be a burr in his mind’s braid, slowly sawing its way out from the inside.
“I don’t want to remember Holly,” said nude Ebon. His voice was quieter, less forceful. He’d grown shorter, his hair now darker. Diminishing. Becoming small. “I want to let her go.”
Aimee, her demeanor now calm, walked toward the other Ebon and took one of his hands in both of her own. The smaller man looked up. He’d seemed so sure and intimidating moments ago, but now he looked frightened. He’d grown even shorter, summer clothes now shimmering onto his body as if emerging from his naked skin. His features had softened, becoming less edged and more rounded, less whittled away by life’s relentless grinding stone.
By the time Aimee pulled him into a hug and he began to sob against her shoulder, she’d changed as well: growing younger and smaller, the gray vanishing from her hair. Ebon had become the fifteen-year-old boy he’d once been — beaten and bleeding, wearing the same clothes he’d worn on the day Richard Frey had murdered his innocence. Aimee became the seventeen-year-old girl who’d once taken her father’s side in a one-sided fight — now mature enough to Own Her Shit and take Ebon’s instead.
“That’s what you aren’t seeing,” young Aimee told the boy. “You don’t have to choose between remembering and letting go.”
The boy l
ooked up.
“You can do both,” she said.
Ebon — now the only true Ebon in the room — watched them embrace, watched the boy cry into the girl’s chest. Then they faded like a sepia photograph in the sun, ghosts before they were nothing at all.
Snow outside returned to falling. The day, arrested just after sunrise, slowly broke. Ebon looked down to see Aimee — the real Aimee; his Aimee forever more — stirring in front of the fire’s red-gray pile of coals and ashes.
He looked around the room. The flowers were gone, and everything was back to normal. It was dusty beyond the circle they’d cleared in front of the fire, tools everywhere and tubs of joint compound in the center. The scene was appropriate, Ebon decided, for a day several months into a renovation project conducted by two non-professionals who were in over their heads.
Beyond the piles, through the window, Ebon saw Aaron sleeping beneath a white blanket. Down the snow-covered beach, there would be an old deserted carnival on a pier and a small path emerging from the brush where a red dock had once been, now as gone as the summer crowds.
Aimee rolled from one side to the other and turned to face him. She blinked as if sensing something amiss, then craned her neck to look at the boom box, still playing the Oasis CD on a loop.
“Has that been playing all night?” Aimee asked.
The song currently spinning was, of course, “Wonderwall.”
Ebon said, “I hate this song.”
But then it ended, and the next song began. It was “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
“Come down here.” Aimee beckoned with a finger and a sly smile.
“It’s over,” Ebon said, looking at the boom box. “It’s finally over.”
Axis of Aaron Page 45