Borderlands 6

by Thomas F Monteleone

  But they were not reaching because they wanted to welcome him, and they were not smiling because they were happy.

  Sheila, he thought, but when he thought of her he thought of the look on her face when he was finished behind the rendering dumpster. He hadn’t asked her for forgiveness then and he could not now.

  Their cold fingers pierced the formless cloud of his soul and began to tear it apart, leaving shreds and scraps that were a passing effervescence in the unfathomable waters of Lake Oxoboxo. He tried to scream in that final moment because, for the first time, in life or death, he could understand what was coming next.

  Time Is a Face on the Water

  Michael Bailey

  Another Boot Camp graduate, Michael Bailey has established himself as an energetic and visionary anthologist as well as writer. His stories are marked by their emotional power and originality, which remind us of the works of Gary Braunbeck and Ray Bradbury. In the following story, he examines an aspect of life we all share, but deal with in a variety of ways ranging from the sublime to the most depressing—the inevitable passing of time.

  “Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it,

  a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

  —Yann Martel, Life of Pi

  “I loved you then and I love you now and

  I have loved you every second in between.”

  —Stephen King, Lisey’s Story

  ACT 1: The Past

  What kind of play is this?

  Günay admired the rivulets interrupting the otherwise placid pool of water in the creek out back, the place he went to think, to reflect on life, and to figure out what the fuck it all meant.

  Death had taken his daughter, Airavata. He and Luci chose the name after looking through a book on names and originations. Airavata, sometimes Air for short, meant “child of water”, which they thought clever since Gün’s own name was Turkish for sun and Luci derived from the Latin lux, meaning light. From sun and light they had created a daughter they had sometimes called air and sometimes called water, and she was gone. Ten years ago she’d died. Like it was yesterday.

  A tragedy?

  Yes, life’s often a tragedy, but sometimes much more . . .

  A comedy?

  No, no one’s laughing.

  A history?

  Yes, there’s much history involved.

  Life was beautiful play, for the most part, full of rich colors, warmth, love, and characters, so many characters, full of dialogue—sometimes internal, but more often spoken aloud whether necessary or not—and of course life was full of memorable scenes, one after another after another, like rivulets of water dancing chaotically together; and yet, sometimes life quieted down and turned placid, allowing you to reflect more clearly on the three acts of past, present, and future.

  Act 1, in Gün’s case, encompassed approximately thirty years of his life, and could be summarized by the following: birth, childhood, adolescence, transition to adulthood, sexuality, self-discovery, finding and marrying the light of his life known as Luci, and then writing the first act of Airavata’s play, which, since life turns like a wheel, included her birth, childhood, adolescence . . .

  Airavata had lived a one-act play.

  And now I’m entering Act 2 of my own two- or, if I’m lucky, three-act play, Gün mused, staring at the water.

  The creek, like the rest of state, had mostly dried up. Sparse rain the night before trickled water down the creek, which travelled the long path from the mountain and eventually through their backyard. Such a wonderful sound. Small pools of black had welled where it could as insects skimmed over the surface; green, mossy river rocks below created the dark appearance. The rain often summoned newts and less often salamanders to the uncovered rocks, and Gün noticed now an orange-bellied creature with bubbly brown skin surfacing for air.

  He and Air had often carried these timid California newts around the property, and they didn’t seem to mind; they held on tight, in fact, with a strong embrace as if affectionate. The Taricha torosa, he’d later discovered, secreted a potent neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, hundreds of times more toxic than cyanide, the same toxin found in pufferfish and certain frogs.

  “They’re not dangerous by any means,” Gün assured Luci on more than one occasion. “Well, they are, but only if you poke them with a stick real hard, and only if you ingest what they excrete.”

  It was chain reaction of events, much like life, that made the California newt so interesting. To protect itself from birds, snakes, and other prey, the seemingly innocent creature had evolved over time to excrete the deadly toxin, arching its back and writhing to expose the bright-orange warning color of its belly if pierced, making the newt nearly untouchable as a species. Yet, as if a long-winded Darwinian joke, a few species of garter snake evolved as well, developing a genetic resistance to tetrodotoxin, putting this particular animal back in the food chain. And now they were nearly extinct.

  But who fuckin’ cares about newts, Gün thought.

  As if in response, the newt crawled ever so slowly onto a dry rock and studied him.

  A blue-and-white sky reflected against the black-mirror surface of the small pool, as well as the autumnal-changing yellows, browns, and reds of grapevines intertwined in the branches of the trees lining the creek bed. Seafoam-green Spanish moss draped over limbs like delicate lace. Rainbow colors surrounded him as sunlight permeated the canopy in stripes.

  Lux, he thought. Luci. My light.

  When placed together, their names formed the compound word sunlight.

  “Look, a heart,” Air had said one day, holding a large crimson grape leaf against her chest. Gün took in the memory, as well as the crisp smell of redwoods and birches and dying grapes as the wind offered all of it to him. They had sometimes floated leaves down the creek when it was running well, to see whose would reach the waterfall by the big rock the fastest.

  Gün found a yellow grape leaf and placed it in the water. It floated alone, not moving anywhere, but spinning in slow circles because there was not enough current to move it along.

  Luci took Airavata’s death the hardest. She rarely spoke, burying herself in cleaning and other such chores, whether necessary or not, and she refused to touch Air’s room, as if waiting for her to return one day. It took her and Gün three days to talk about what happened, and even after they talked about it, neither had anything much to say. This lack of communication nearly wrecked their marriage, but they’d somehow stuck together and survived the roughest of times. It wasn’t Luci’s fault, but both their faults. Communication’s a collaborative enterprise.

  Will she stay? Gün asked the water, meaning Luci, meaning would she stay alongside him to see how their play would ultimately end, to see what kind of a play they had lived.

  He looked at his reflection and his reflection looked back.

  Ten years, he thought. Will she stay for ten more years?

  Water rippled from the wind, from the bugs, from floating hearts and other debris, from the deadly newt crawling back under the surface. Ravens fluttered and cawed from the treetops, as if laughing from above at his internal dialogue. The scent of leaves decomposing on the wet ground at the edge of the creek was aromatic, along with the mushrooms and lichen growing on fallen branches and the snapped fir tree dangling over the water.

  And then the face changed, much quicker than the season.

  His once brown hair was a little less brown, with perhaps some peppered gray, perhaps thinner; his facial hair appeared lighter as well, his cheeks more gaunt, his eyes a shade darker and baggier. He was older.

  Ten years. This is what I will look like in ten years.

  A hazy version of Luci’s face peered over his reflection’s shoulder, like a heat wave over hot asphalt. She, too, appeared ten years older. Crow’s feet had begun at the corners of her eyes, her fa
ce thinner, her expression as sad as his.

  This is what she will look like in ten years.

  She was a stunning woman, always. Add another ten years, and another ten years, and, hell, even another, and she’d still be as beautiful as the day he fell in love with her all those years ago. But that was more of the past. Love’s a hard thing to find after tragedy.

  Gün turned and was surprised to find Luci standing there. This was his daydream, after all, his glimpse into the looking glass.

  She didn’t say anything at first, only put a hand on his shoulder.

  He put his hand over hers and together they looked at the creek.

  The high afternoon sun had dropped closer to the horizon to become a setting sun, the colors changing once more before their final fade to colorless night; the yellows more orange, the oranges more red, and the reds becoming various shades of purple like the mountain range to the east. The colors seemed warmer, almost glowing, although it was much colder than when he had first come out to the creek to think.

  “I found something new,” she said, meaning something of Airavata’s.

  Ten years had passed and they were still finding pieces of her past scattered around them.

  A week after her funeral, which was also a week after Air’s tenth birthday, Gün found a shriveled balloon left over from her birthday party. He found it in the laundry hamper, of all places, and at first thought it was a bunched-up sock mixed in with the rest of her dirty clothes. Air had often worn bright socks, not necessarily matching. And he remembered knowing then that Luci would wash these clothes, even though she’d never be able to wear them again. It was a red oxidized balloon that he found, like a blotch of memory, with some of Air’s breath trapped inside.

  He’d held the balloon close to his chest, sobbing tearlessly, his chest caving painfully with each uncontrollable spasm. “Sometimes it hurts to cry,” his mother once told him, and it was then he finally understood her meaning. The tears eventually came, and they did hurt, and by that time, Luci had come looking for him because he’d been gone for so long.

  “I said I found something new,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where were you just now?”

  “I was just remembering the balloon.”

  She squeezed his hand tighter and he squeezed back, three times.

  I love you, it meant, one squeeze for each word.

  Some words were harder to say after losing a daughter, but some words could be said without talking at all.

  She squeezed back, two times, ever so softly.

  I know.

  Airavata had created the secret language, perhaps a dozen or so phrases through various hand squeezes. It was one of the few things of hers that didn’t hurt to keep.

  They held on to the balloon a few more days after finding it, and it sometimes joined them at the dinner table, or on the dash of the car when they went out for a drive, and every day the balloon shrank, and what was left of Air inside slowly dwindled and dwindled . . .

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “I remember the smell,” he said. “We were so afraid of losing her, you know? Her breath was in there, that small part of her we could keep, but holding on to the balloon and not releasing her breath meant we could lose her forever, even though by cutting open the balloon we’d get her for that brief moment, and still lose her forever.”

  She squeezed his hand, once, for a long time. It didn’t mean anything specific, but somehow meant something that couldn’t be expressed in words, and they both understood.

  Luci had squeezed his hand like that the moment before they cut open the balloon to let the last of Air go.

  “It smelled like huckleberry lip gloss,” she said.

  “It did.”

  Gün smiled, and although he couldn’t see Luci’s smile, he knew it was there.

  Luci pointed over his shoulder to another dry rock.

  The orange-bellied newt had returned, or maybe one of his friends.

  “She used to love carrying those around,” she said. “Remember the second year we lived here, she found five of them, or six, and she came running to the back patio holding all of them at once?”

  “And the next day she found ten.”

  Another long squeeze, which didn’t mean anything, but meant the world to him.

  “What did you find?”

  “The music box,” she said, and he understood her melancholy.

  They had kept Air’s baby teeth in a cheap music box Luci found one weekend while thrifting. The box was wooden, covered with intricate carvings of flowers. When you opened the lid it smelled like cedar, and what was left of the ballerina inside—just her feet and ankles since the rest of her had broken off long ago—spun round while the tune of “Swan Lake” played on what sounded like the world’s smallest xylophone.

  “I forgot all about the music box,” she said. “I was dusting the dresser in our room and moved a pile of books out of the way and knocked it to the floor. The lid won’t close, so the music kept playing and playing, so I spun the shoes by hand until the music stopped. It was an awful sound, like mechanical crying. I think I broke it for good. And then I saw her teeth, Air’s teeth, scattered on the carpet. I found them all. I counted. Some with dried blood, and—”

  “Luci,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder.

  It was the first time they’d looked into each other’s eyes since the reflection in the water of the creek, but that wasn’t really looking; that had been a cheat.

  She had aged ten years.

  She’s been crying, he told himself. She’s been crying and her eyes are puffy and dark—no, no, she can’t be older—and her eyes are tired, like mine, that’s all.

  Luci always had dirty-blonde hair, but it seemed dirtier now, and longer. Her hand, still in his, felt lighter, her skin more delicate, papery. She had definitely aged.

  And his own weathered hand—

  “I just wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t be upset,” she said.

  “We’ll find a new music box.”

  Gün squeezed her hand, three times.

  I love you.

  The secret message went unanswered as Luci slid her hand free. She offered an expressionless, flat smile, turned away, and headed back to the house.

  ACT 2: The Present

  “You’ll find love when you stop looking for it.” This was another of his mother’s sayings, and for most of his life, Gün had thought she was full of shit. Many years before crashing into Luci, he had dated, looking for his match, the perfect woman—woman after woman—and at first he’d thought he found the right one and married his mistake, then divorced, and almost married again. He had eventually given up on women at the age of thirty, telling his friends he was happy alone, better off alone, in fact, that he was happier, that if he had to live alone for the rest of his life, so be it. He was good with that.

  Gün had stopped looking for love, and that’s precisely the moment he found love, without looking at all. His mother had been right all those years.

  Luci found him, in other words. They fell in love, stayed in love, made love, and together created a beautiful child. Happily ever after, or so they’d thought.

  Gün found himself at the end of Act 1, the past, and the end of an agonizing transition to Act 2, the present. Life, the unforgiving wheel, turned every once in a while, making everything look all so familiar once again . . .

  “You’ll find love when you stop looking for it.”

  True then. True now.

  Airavata haunted their lives whenever they stopped looking for her, it seemed. Scattered pieces from her past kept cropping up in the strangest of places. It was a different kind of love, but still love. Sometimes the haunts were good, but more often they were bad.

  This went on for another nine years, their daughter now gone for
twenty.

  After much counseling, they decided to throw it all away. Everything. And it was about damn time. “Holding on to the past only brings heartache,” they were told by some shrink. “It’s unhealthy.” Airavata was gone, but as long as her things were still around, her absence would continue its assault on their emotions, and would ultimately destroy them.

  That’s all they really were, just things; the memories of Airavata mattered, not her personal belongings. They got rid of it all, donating her life possessions to thrift stores and charitable organizations, where they would never have to see them again, and it was hard, so very hard. But sometimes these material things resurfaced when they least expected, like the teeth in the music box, or the mood ring Gün now held in his hand.

  Her bed—not slept in for twenty years—was the last of her things to go, or so they thought, their neighbors next door finally taking it off their hands. Gün found the cheap silver ring smashed into the carpet beneath one of the drawers built into the bedframe. He slid the ring next to his wedding band and within seconds the plastic disc or stone or whatever was set in the center turned a light-green color, whatever that meant. When he removed the ring, it left behind a similar color on his finger. Air had worn the cheap ring—a keepsake from some game at one of her friends’ birthday parties—until the day she’d lost it.

  Gün knew why rings turned fingers green, but that’s not what bothered him now. What bothered him was the fact that his finger was green. He hadn’t worn it long enough for the chemical reaction to take place between the acids on his skin and the metal of the ring, which meant Air’s skin had caused the reaction however many years prior, and he had transferred a part of his dead daughter’s past onto his finger.

  He tossed the ring into the trash container next to the toilet in the bathroom and made his way to the sink to wash off the green, but it wouldn’t come off with water. The soap dispenser was also out, so of course he checked under the sink, where he found Airavata’s pink hairbrush hiding among the toiletries, with some of her hair caught in the bristles—his dead daughter’s hair. He brought the brush to his nose, but the scent of her strawberry-blonde hair was long gone. It smelled like the pipes under the sink. He tossed the hairbrush into the trash and missed and—