by Libba Bray
“I’m sorry, but what the fuck do I say to that?” I ask her, and she laughs. It’s a terrible sound, that laugh, a harrowing, forsaken sound. And then she stops laughing, and I feel relief spill over me, because now she’s crying, instead. There’s shame at the relief, of course, but even the shame is welcome. I couldn’t have stood that terrible laughter much longer. I go to her and put my arms around her and hold her, as if holding her will make it all better. The sun’s almost down by the time she finally stops crying.
I have a quote from Albert Einstein, from sometime in 1912, which I found in the book by Kip Thorne, the book Charlotte caught me reading on Wednesday: “Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
Space, time, shadows.
As I’ve said, I was watching when she was hit. I saw when she fell. That was Saturday last, two days before the yellow morning in the kitchen, and not to be confused with the next Saturday which is the Four of Spades. I was sitting on the porch, and had been watching two noisy gray-white gulls wheeling far up against the blue summer sky. Charlotte had been working in her garden, pulling weeds. She called out to me, and I looked away from the birds. She was pointing towards the ocean, and at first I wasn’t sure what it was she wanted me to see. I stared at the breakers shattering themselves against the granite boulders, and past that, to the horizon where the water was busy with its all but eternal task of shouldering the burden of the heavens. I was about to tell her that I didn’t see anything. This wasn’t true, of course. I just didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, nothing special, nothing that ought not occupy that time and that space.
I saw nothing to give me pause.
But then I did.
Space, time, shadows.
I’ll call it a shadow, because I’m at a loss for any more appropriate word. It was spread out like a shadow rushing across the waves, though, at first, I thought I was seeing something dark moving beneath the waves. A very big fish, perhaps. Possibly a large shark or a small whale. We’ve seen whales in the bay before. Or it might have been caused by a cloud passing in front of the sun, though there were no clouds that day. The truth is I knew it was none of these things. I can sit here all night long, composing a list of what it wasn’t, and I’ll never come any nearer to what it might have been.
“Emily,” she shouted. “Do you see it?” And I called back that I did. Having noticed it, it was impossible not to see that grimy, indefinite smear sliding swiftly towards the shore. In a few seconds more, I realized, it would reach the boulders, and if it wasn’t something beneath the water, the rocks wouldn’t stop it. Part of my mind still insisted it was only a shadow, a freakish trick of the light, a mirage. Nothing substantial, certainly nothing malign, nothing that could do us any mischief or injury. No need to be alarmed, and yet I don’t ever remember being as afraid I was then. I couldn’t move, but I yelled for Charlotte to run. I don’t think she heard me. Or if she heard me, she was also too mesmerized by the sight of the thing to move.
I was safe, there on the porch. It came no nearer to me than ten or twenty yards. But Charlotte, standing alone at the garden gate, was well within its circumference. It swept over her, and she screamed, and fell to the ground. It swept over her, and then was gone, vanishing into the tangle of green briars and poison ivy and wind-stunted evergreens behind our house. I stood there, smelling something that almost smelled like ozone. And maybe it’s an awful cliché to put to paper, but my mind reeled. My heart raced, and my mind reeled. For a fraction of an instant I was seized by something that was neither déjà vu or vertigo, and I thought I might vomit.
But the sensation passed, like the shadow had, or the shadow of a shadow, and I dashed down the steps and across the grass to the place where Charlotte sat stunned among the clover and the dandelions. Her clothes and skin looked as though they’d been misted with the thinnest sheen of...what? Oil? No, no, no, not oil at all. But it’s the closest I can come to describing that sticky brownish iridescence clinging to her dress and her face, her arms and the pickets of the garden fence and to every single blade of grass.
“It knocked me down,” she said, sounding more amazed than hurt or frightened. Her eyes were filled with startled disbelief. “It wasn’t anything, Em. It wasn’t anything at all, but it knocked me right off my feet.”
“Are you hurt?” I asked, and she shook her head.
I didn’t ask her anything else, and she didn’t say anything more. I helped her up and inside the house. I got her clothes off and led her into the downstairs shower. But the oily residue that the shadow had left behind had already begun to evaporate—and again, that’s not the right word, but it’s the best I can manage—before we began trying to scrub it away with soap and scalding clean water. By the next morning, there would be no sign of the stuff anywhere, inside the house or out of doors. Not so much as a stain.
“It knocked me down. It was just a shadow, but it knocked me down.” I can’t recall how many times she must have said that. She repeated it over and over again, as though repetition would render it less implausible, less inherently ludicrous. “A shadow knocked me down, Em. A shadow knocked me down.”
But it wasn’t until we were in the bedroom, and she was dressing, that I noticed the red welt above her left hip, just below her ribs. It almost looked like an insect bite, except the center was...well, when I bent down and examined it closely, I saw there was no center. There was only a hole. As I’ve said, a pinprick, but a hole all the same. There wasn’t so much as a drop of blood, and she swore to me that it didn’t hurt, that she was fine, and it was nothing to get excited about. She went to the medicine cabinet and found a Band-Aid to cover the welt. And I didn’t see it again until the next day, which as yet has no playing card, the Sunday before the warm yellow Monday morning in the kitchen.
I’ll call that Sunday by the Two of Spades.
It rains on the Two of Spades. It rains cats and dogs all the damn day long. I spend the afternoon sitting in my study, parked there in front of my computer, trying to find the end to Chapter Nine of the book I can’t seem to finish. The rain beats at the windows, all rhythm and no melody. I write a line, then delete it. One step forward, two steps back. Zeno’s “Achilles and the Tortoise” paradox played out at my keyboard—“That which is in locomotion must arrive at the halfway stage before it arrives at the goal,” and each halfway stage has its own halfway stage, ad infinitum. These are the sorts of rationalizations that comfort me as I only pretend to be working. This is the true reward of my twelve years of college, these erudite excuses for not getting the job done. In the days to come, I will set the same apologetics and exculpations to work on the problem of how a shadow can possibly knock a woman down, and how a hole can be explained away as no more than a wound.
Sometime after seven o’clock, Charlotte raps on the door to ask me how it’s going, and what I’d like for dinner. I haven’t got a ready answer for either question, and she comes in and sits down on the futon near my desk. She has to move a stack of books to make a place to sit. We talk about the weather, which she tells me is supposed to improve after sunset, that the meteorologists are saying Monday will be sunny and hot. We talk about the book—my exploration of the phenomenon of the literary Terrae Anachronismorum, from 1714 and Simon Tyssot de Patot’s Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Massé to 1918 and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Out of Time’s Abyss (and beyond; see Aristotle on Zeno, above). I close Microsoft Word, accepting that nothing more will be written until at least tomorrow.
“I took off the Band-Aid,” she says, reminding me of what I’ve spent the day trying to forget.
“When you fell, you probably jabbed yourself on a stick or something,” I tell her, which doesn’t explain why she fell, but seeks to dismiss the result of the fall.
“I don’t think it was a stick.”
“Well, whatever it was, you hardly got more than a scratch.”
She stands and pulls up her T-shirt, just on the left side, and points at the hole, though there’s no way I could ever miss it. On the rainy Two of Spades, hardly twenty-four hours after Charlotte was knocked off her feet by a shadow, it’s already grown to the diameter of dime. I’ve never seen anything so black in all my life, a black so complete I’m almost certain I would go blind if I stared into it too long. I don’t say these things. I don’t remember what I say, so maybe I say nothing at all. At first, I think the skin at the edges of the hole is puckered, drawn tight like the skin at the edges of a scab. Then I see that’s not the case at all. The skin around the periphery of the hole in her flesh is moving, rotating, swirling about that preposterous and undeniable blackness.
“I’m scared,” she whispers. “I mean, I’m really fucking scared, Emily.”
I start to touch the wound, and she stops me. She grabs hold of my hand and stops me.
“Don’t,” she says, and so I don’t.
“You know that it can’t be what it looks like,” I tell her, and I think maybe I even laugh.
“Em, I don’t know anything at all.”
“You damn well know that much, Charlotte. It’s some sort of infection, that’s all, and—”
She releases my hand, only to cover my mouth before I can finish. Three fingers to still my lips, and she asks me if we can go upstairs, if I’ll please make love to her.
“Right now, that’s all I want,” she says. “In all the world, there’s nothing I want more.”
I almost make her promise that she’ll see our doctor the next day, but already some part of me has admitted to myself this is nothing a physician can diagnose or treat. We have moved out beyond medicine. We have been pushed out into these nether regions by the shadow of a shadow. I have stared directly into that hole, and already I understand it’s not merely a hole in Charlotte’s skin, but a hole in the cosmos. I could parade her before any number of physicians and physicists, psychologists and priests, and not a one would have the means to seal that breach. In fact, I suspect they would deny the evidence, even if it meant denying all their science and technology and faith. There are things worse than blank spaces on maps. There are moments when certitude becomes the greatest enemy of sanity. Denial becomes an antidote.
Unlike those other days and those other cards, I haven’t chosen the Two of Spades at random. I’ve chosen it because on Thursday she asks me if Alice counts. And I have begun to assume that everything counts, just as everything is claimed by that infinitely small, infinitely dense point beyond the event horizon.
“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those roses?”
Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began, in a low voice, “Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake...”
On that rainy Saturday, that Two of Spades with an incriminating red brush concealed behind its back, I do as she asks. I cannot do otherwise. I bed her. I fuck her. I am tender and violent by turns, as is she. On that stormy evening, that Two of Pentacles, that Two of Coins (a dime, in this case), we both futilely turn to sex looking for surcease from dread. We try to go back to our lives before she fell, and this is not so very different from all those “lost worlds” I’ve belabored in my unfinished manuscript: Maple White Land, Caprona, Skull Island, Symzonia, Pellucidar, the Mines of King Solomon. In our bed, we struggle to fashion a refuge from the present, populated by the reassuring, dependable past. And I am talking in circles within circles within circles, spiraling inward or out, it doesn’t matter which.
I am arriving, very soon now, at the end of it, at the Saturday night—or more precisely, just before dawn on the Saturday morning—when the story I am writing here ends. And begins. I’ve taken too long to get to the point, if I assume the validity of a linear narrative. If I assume any one moment can take precedence over any other or assume the generally assumed (but unproven) inequity of relevance.
A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden; the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red.
We are as intimate in those moments as two women can be, when one is forbidden to touch a dime-sized hole in the other’s body. At some point, after dark, the rain stops falling, and we lie naked and still, listening to owls and whippoorwills beyond the bedroom walls.
On Wednesday, she comes downstairs and catches me reading the dry pornography of mathematics and relativity. Wednesday is the Seven of Clubs. She tells me there’s nothing to be found in those books, nothing that will change what has happened, what may happen.
She says, “I don’t know what will be left of me when it’s done. I don’t even know if I’ll be enough to satisfy it, or if it will just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I think it might be insatiable.”
On Monday morning, she sips her coffee. We talk about eleven-year-old boys and BB guns.
But here, at last, it is shortly before sunup on a Saturday. Saturday, the Four of Spades. It’s been an hour since Charlotte woke screaming, and I’ve sat and listened while she tried to make sense of the nightmare. The hole in her side is as wide as a softball (and, were this more obviously a comedy, I would list the objects that, by accident, have fallen into it the last few days). Besides the not-quite-ozone smell, there’s now a faint but constant whistling sound, which is air being pulled into the hole. In the dream, she tells me, she knew exactly what was on the other side of the hole, but then she forgot most of it as soon as she awoke. In the dream, she says, she wasn’t afraid, and that we were sitting out on the porch watching the sea while she explained it all to me. We were drinking Cokes, she said, and it was hot, and the air smelled like dog roses.
“You know I don’t like Coke,” I say.
“In the dream you did.”
She says we were sitting on the porch, and that awful shadow came across the sea again, only this time it didn’t frighten her. This time I saw it first and pointed it out to her, and we watched together as it moved rapidly towards the shore. This time, when it swept over the garden, she wasn’t standing there to be knocked down.
“But you said you saw what was on the other side.”
“That was later on. And I would tell you what I saw, if I could remember. But there was the sound of pipes, or a flute,” she says. “I can recall that much of it, and I knew, in the dream, that the hole runs all the way to the middle, to the very center.”
“The very center of what?” I ask, and she looks at me like she thinks I’m intentionally being slow-witted.
“The center of everything that ever was and is and ever will be, Em. The center. Only, somehow the center is both empty and filled with...” She trails off and stares at the floor.
“Filled with what?”
“I can’t say. I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s been there since before there was time. It’s been there alone since before the universe was born.”
I look up, catching our reflections in the mirror on the dressing table across the room. We’re sitting on the edge of the bed, both of us naked, and I look a decade older than I am. Charlotte, though, she looks so young, younger than when we met. Never mind that yawning black mouth in her abdomen. In the half light before dawn, she seems to shine, a preface to the coming day, and I’m reminded of what I read about Hawking radiation and the quasar jet streams that escape some singularities. But this isn’t the place or time for theories and equations. Here, there are only the two of us, and morning coming on, and what Charlotte can and cannot remember about her dream.
“Eons ago,” she says, “it lost its mind. Though I don’t think it ever really had a mind, not like a human mind. But still, it went insane, from the knowledge of what it is and what it can’t ever stop being.”
“You said you’d forgotten what was on the other sid
e.”
“I have. Almost all of it. This is nothing. If I went on a trip to Antarctica and came back and all I could tell you about my trip was that it was very white, that would be like what I’m telling you now about the dream.”
The Four of Spades. The Four of Swords, which cartomancers read as stillness, peace, withdrawal, the act of turning sight back upon itself. They say nothing of the attendant perils of introspection or the damnation that would be visited upon an intelligence that could never look away.
“It’s blind,” she says. “It’s blind, and insane, and the music from the pipes never ends.”
This is when I ask her to stand up, and she only stares at me a moment or two before doing as I’ve asked. This is when I kneel in front of her, and I’m dimly aware that I’m kneeling before the inadvertent avatar of a god, or God, or a pantheon, or something so immeasurably ancient and pervasive that it may as well be divine. Divine or infernal; there’s really no difference, I think.
“What are you doing?” she wants to know.
“I’m losing you,” I reply, “that’s what I’m doing. Somewhere, somewhen, I’ve already lost you. And that means I have nothing left to lose.”
Charlotte takes a quick step back from me, retreating towards the bedroom door, and I’m wondering if she runs, will I chase her? Having made this decision, to what lengths will I go to see it through? Would I force her? Would it be rape?
“I know what you’re going to do,” she says. “Only you’re not going to do it, because I won’t let you.”
“You’re being devoured—”
“It was a dream, Em. It was only a stupid, crazy dream, and I’m not even sure what I actually remember and what I’m just making up.”
“Please,” I say, “please let me try.” And I watch as whatever resolve she might have had breaks apart. She wants as badly as I do to hope, even though we both know there’s no hope left. I watch that hideous black gyre above her hip, below her left breast. She takes two steps back towards me.