Switch

by Trevor Leyenhorst

pretentious; I think I’m going crazy—a great way to start Aron on a rambling soliloquy. As a result, the bunched, dusty brown capa around Aron’s raised arms bobbing along the path was a welcome reprieve.

  ‘Aron you should take a look at what I’m seeing right now it’s much funnier than what you’re seeing.’ There, I started it and there’s no turning back, Ravno thought.

  ‘I believe you Rav. Nothing like laughing with and not at, eh? Ha.’

  For a moment Ravno thought he lost his chance. Only their footsteps sounded out along the path. But he tried again.

  ‘I mean, I can actually see what you’re seeing,’ Ravno said. ‘I switch and can see exactly what you see, when I choose, more or less, if you know what I mean.’

  The awkward sentence caused Aron’s hands to slowly lower to his side, like a sun and new moon setting. With tight lips he kept his pace. Aquatic images still flashed through his mind, as they were before Ravno had spoken: The beach from afar, floating under a rocky outcrop, water lapping a boto under a dock. Aron’s frames partly hid his eyes, which opened and closed deliberately, as he attempted to dismiss the visions.

  ‘Come again?’ Aron managed to ask.

  Usually, the behavioral differences of inanimate and animate beings—the trees and their arms—truly intrigued Aron, but today his mind was too busy with vague images and daymares. The talking helped, especially with Ravno’s unerring tolerance for the whims of conversation.

  Talk and walk, talk and walk. Ravno felt like a complete fool.

  ‘It’s cool,’ Ravno said, ‘lately I’ve been able to sync up with other people somehow and then see what they’re seeing, like through their eyes, exactly where they’re looking.’

  He mistook Aron’s silence as a request for further explanation.

  ‘My sight is limited to what they’re focusing on. It’s not like I take control of their body or whatever….’

  He watched Aron’s loping hands out of the corner of his eye but they didn’t tell him much. He switched with Aron, just briefly, and felt a satisfied fear in his friend—a copacetic unease. But Ravno also sensed muted excitement, though he may have constructed that from his own imagination.

  ‘Do you think I’m just scuffing the dirt?’ Ravno asked.

  Aron stopped their progress at Phoyara’s cusp, where avenues mazed around the first of the resident packs.

  ‘Show me,’ Aron said, ‘let’s see this trick of yours in action.’ Tap-tap. ‘What, do you think you’ll get stage fright?’

  ‘No, but I’m not some mid-month art show for you to gawk at. I’d probably want you to do the same thing, I guess.’

  Tap-tap. ‘Exactly. Now on with the show, maestro.’

  At that moment, two young girls passed by on their way to the city. The taller one held a disc, coral-orange and molded of plastic, from the dark ages. The sweat of the game clung to their slick backs and temples.

  Ravno called out, ‘Utusar, right? You’re in a group with Temperance?’

  The girl without the disc, the one with short hair, and chestnuts for eyes, whirled around to face the two men. Ravno gave the young girl his first hand.

  ‘Cahaya, I’m Ravno.’

  ‘Cahaya Ravno, I’m Utusan.’ Butterfly wings brought the blood around her body and warmed her cheeks.

  ‘Utusan. Right, sorry. Yes, and Temper just loves you and all the things you do together,’ Ravno said. ‘Thanks for being so good with her and the other kids. May we have the disc?’

  As their hands parted, her sweaty palm left traces of its travels on his fingers.

  ‘Yes of course,’ Utusan replied quietly. ‘We’re done with it.’

  The girls pattered on while Ravno and Aron found a small patch of low grass and dandelions. Ravno handed the disc to Aron and instructed him to throw it so Ravno could try to catch it without looking. Ravno clarified that he would in fact be looking but not with his own eyes. Dubious, Aron obeyed and tossed a fast one. As Ravno walked the distance, he caught it with two hands behind his head—a fluke, possibly. Aron threw it again and Ravno caught it straight-armed behind his legs, with only a casual bend of the knees to reach the disc’s low flight. Aron still doubted that Ravno actually saw through his eyes.

  ‘Incredible that you caught those, but show me something else—something more convincing,’ Aron said.

  Ravno privately rejoiced in his achievement. He had completely switched with someone yet maintained full control of his own being, avoided collapse, and had in fact reacted with his own body to the environment he observed through Aron.

  As they walked farther into Phoyara, Ravno gave the orange disc to a boy, hardly older than Temperance and fair skinned and skinny, who sat on the ground eating bush beans and mint leaves.

  Ravno and Aron found some flat stones around a thick and uneven stump table near the intersection of two avenues. They sat on the stones; Aron faced the intersection and Ravno sat opposite him.

  Aron said, ‘When someone or something comes around the corner I want you to shut your eyes and describe to me what it is, or who it is. We’ll do it a few times to factor out the chance of a random right guess. And, go.’

  Ravno laughed at his insistence but decided to play along and practice his art.

  Aron sat up straight. ‘Wait, did the thing at Vesta’s have something to do with this? When you bit the sand?’ His broad, tight-lipped grin was gelastic and contagious.

  ‘Maybe,’ Ravno said, ‘but I’m sure you’d be more interested to know that the boy we gave the disc to is coming up the avenue behind me.’

  The skinny boy came up as Ravno described and stopped to introduce himself. He held his second hand up to his heart, still holding the pale-orange disc, then carried on with his adventures.

  ‘Lucky and sensical guess,’ Aron said. ‘More.’ Tap-tap.

  Ravno detailed the eucalyptus that sat across the avenue behind him, directly in Aron’s field of view. He counted the main branches—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven visible from the front—and noted which were mostly bare and which still dripped stringy bark, and how that one, that stretched to the left above the big knot on the trunk, was mostly bare. In order to ease Aron’s lingering disbelief, he counted and described the strips of bark in color, from the first to second side of the trunk: ‘One beige, two pale red, three and four beige, five grey—’

  ‘Good, good—impressive,’ Aron said. ‘But you’ve seen that tree before and might have a better memory than I know. Actually, I don’t think I’ve heard you talk enough to tell what kind of memory you do have. So let’s have another.’

  At that moment a heroic, dreamlike and adorable creature appeared around the corner. Her little nose curved in tandem with her upper lip. Her black kawaii strands of hair lay like brackets along the sides of her face, brushed her chin and brought focus to her shrewd eyes. Her shorter bangs played at her brow and her two fleshy lips lolled open like the volcanic gap on Notou’s peak.

  Ravno didn’t speak at first, though his mouth opened as if he made to. Aron pried his eyes off the woman to see his friend’s reaction and to wait for his description. The look on Ravno’s face convinced him immediately. Ravno’s enchanted gaze mirrored the thick jelly feeling that wobbled in the bottom of Aron’s throat. Aron looked down as the woman crossed their sphere of existence and smiled his smile with teeth hidden and tucked inside. His eyes shot to Ravno’s.

  ‘Enough said, my friend, you have proven your insanity!’ Aron said.

  They both laughed, though quietly so as not to make the passing woman feel uncomfortable. She continued on her way, presently out of hearing range.

  ‘Where did she come from?’ Aron said.

  Ravno thought for a moment. ‘I think I saw her on the boto recently. Yes, just after my switch with Mister Sunshine.’

  Ravno remembered those rushes of black hair behind Helena’s curls. He recalled that a few more people were around, but forgot what they looked like.

  ‘You’ve alread
y done your stunt with Mister? What was he looking at?’

  ‘Well, me, and then his time piece and then me falling,’ Ravno said. ‘It was on the way to Pelajaran the first time.’

  ‘Oh I didn’t know you met him before the forum started.’

  ‘I’d hardly say I met him that morning.’

  ‘Ravno you were in his head, that’s a lot more intimate than most of us get with people we meet for the first time. Or anytime thereafter, actually,’ Aron said. After a pause, he added, ‘What’s your plan with this madness anyway?’

  Ravno was lost in his own mind and looked down from Aron’s eyes at the old creases in the table.

  At the same moment, an old woman buried under a thick capa stopped to rest by the eucalyptus. She squinted down the avenue toward her destination. Her creased hand lay against the wrinkled bark—against the eleventh strip of grey.

  The boy must learn to move on, she thought to herself.

  Silas, the boy in her thoughts, had his heart lacerated with grief after his adopted daughter disappeared. The woman hoped to be a source of relief to him because her saudari, Silas’s mat, could not make the trip from Pangsi. The woman thought of Silas’s daughter’s chubby cheeks and ever-curious eyes, the sweet face that soon escaped her memory. Little Samato’s body had presumably gone back to the ocean and, she reasoned, Silas needed to transfer his energy from Samato’s heart to someone or something else. But that takes time, and time she could offer.

  The old woman had let her eyes droop with her head