Strongest Conjuration Page 3

  Phil scrubbed his hands through his hair. He snapped an elastic band from around one wrist and twisted it into the brown tangle.

  “But I’m not dying,” I said. “I’m distracted. And tired. I’ve been spending too much time in the Garden, maybe.”

  “That is certainly true,” Ramon agreed. “But it’s not the point. You’re ignoring what you don’t want to see.”

  Phil reached across the chasm of sofa cushion to take my hand.

  “The Garden is very literal.” Ramon’s thin voice made a strange contrast to his new full lips. “But it’s entirely mental, constructed by, or of, minds, not brains. Shock, or trauma, or illness …”

  He waited for me.

  I took too long putting it together. “I am not mentally ill.”

  Phil kissed my knuckles, but he couldn’t meet my eyes. “Something traumatic must have happened to you in the Garden last night. Can you remember?”

  “Memory isn’t my best game,” I said, but it wasn’t funny. “Someone died,” I said, groping.

  “One of your Seconds?” Phil asked. “I’ve had deaths I still can’t think about. That happens sometimes, the best—”

  “No.” I was searching shadows transparent as my hand. “Not me. I was sad, but not in shock.”

  “Do you know where you were?” Ramon asked. “Or when?”

  It was odd to see so little emotion in a female face, and I wondered vaguely if Phil’s eyebrows had picked up their expressive tricks when he’d had a woman’s body.

  “Ren, do you know any of the axis points?”

  I shook my head.

  “Whenever and wherever you went,” Ramon said, “you left some of yourself behind, pinned in place by the emotional impact of whatever happened.”

  I laughed. “I’ve literally lost my mind?”

  “Just part of it. And lost is imprecise. Distributed, maybe.”

  I remembered my parents with their serious faces, my father beside Mom on the sofa, but not next to her. “No, Renee, ma chere, not divorced,” he’d insisted with his stupid fake French. “Separated.” But he never came back home.

  10. There’s No Place

  “I’ll go with you.” Phil looked at Ramon. “Are you coming?”

  It was delivered like a question, but Ramon understood the plea, and stood up. I moved closer to Phil to make room, and Ramon packed in beside me, wrapping his manicured fingers around the back of my neck and pressing the pad of his thumb to my temple. The tag of his sweatshirt looked like a miniature bib, or a priest’s collar. Phil cupped my cheek, index finger to my temple, and I closed my eyes, reaching for the funky marsh smell and the idiot taste of root beer.

  My Garden manifested around us, featureless and undifferentiated in all directions save one.

  “Interesting,” Ramon muttered, moving toward the solitary shadow a few feet away. “A hole on the zaxis. A hole in When.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Phil was counting again.

  “Perhaps the problem stems from the extraordinary distance between the Whens of then and now.” A tiny smile shadowed Ramon’shurriedly lipsticked mouth. “Or perhaps from the space between the Who you were and who you are.”

  “How about Where?” Phil asked.

  “If Ren went as far as I suspect, even the land and water masses were different.”

  “What’s that, Lassie?” I joked.“Ren fell down the mindshaft? We’d better get help!”

  Phil didn’t smile and Ramon didn’t notice.

  “We don’t have to find the memory, just the part of Ren trapped by it.” Ramon’s arm caught Phil across the chest. “Don’t.”

  “I’ll jump in and bring her out.”

  “That is (a) irrational—we don’t know why she got stuck; and (b) reckless—this isn’t your Garden; the limits of her imagination limit you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I rode the symbol down like an elevator. I don’t think you should jump.”

  Ramon hadn’t said so, but I knew I’d been irrational and reckless too—greedy to turn my deficits and Phil’s guilt into something sweet for us all.

  “What if you made another symbol?” Phil asked.

  Ramon shook his head. “I think we’d have the same problem: too much too fast.”

  “Hang on.” I closed my eyes, concentrating hard. Back to basics. When, Phil had told me in helping me find my Garden for the first time, usually ran up and down. Usually. I concentrated and Phil stumbled beside me. Ramon whistled. I opened my eyes, but nothing looked different.

  “What did you just do?” Phil looked dizzy.

  “She turned the axes,” Ramon marveled. “Time now runs ahead and behind, or to the left and right of us.”

  “So where’s the hole?” I asked.

  “An absence below makes a hole,” Phil figured. “A absence ahead is a vista.”

  “No buena vista,” I observed.

  Ramon ignored me. “Try picking a point a little bit ahead of you.”

  “There’s no point.”

  Phil turned sharply, but I shook my head. “I don’t mean like that. One point of mud looks like every other point.”

  “Pick an arbitrary one and focus.” Phil’s voice stayed steady, but it was the steady of a man on a surfboard, not a floor. “Do you know what the mud over there is?”

  “Same as the stuff under our feet,” I said. “Until I get rid of the extraneous stuff, it isn’t anything. It’s everything.”

  “Can you bring it closer?”

  I nodded, already trying. Nothing happened. My Garden stayed exactly the same muddy mess. “Don’t force it,” Phil whispered. “It’s not a willpower thing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Willpower I’ve got.”

  “Imagine it.”

  “I’m not very good at pretend.”

  “Not pretend,” Ramon corrected. “Make believe.”

  I refocused on the distant point, made it closer, and believed it.

  “Ren.” Phil pointed at a mound in the mud, grinning. “Do it again.”

  I did, and time ran like a tablecloth wrinkle before smoothing fingers to pile up at our feet.

  “But this is too little too slow,” I said. “I’ve heaped up maybe a couple of years here. By the time we’ve raked up just the Celeste years, we’ll have a mountain to scale or a canyon to span between us and wherever the rest of me got lost in my Garden.”

  “Maybe the problem isn’t When,” Ramon suggested.

  I went on dragging time into sludgy piles.

  “Maybe the problem is Who,” Ramon said. “Perhaps the trauma of experiencing a self untranslated over culture and language—across Whens based on moon and mathematics—separated Ren from herself. Think how much you change in just a single lifetime. You’re not the same man you were even a year ago.”

  “Neither are you,” Phil said with a glance down Ramon’s body.

  I pulled again, and sludgy time inverted at my feet. I stared into the hole. Maybe its dark was where I belonged. It was where I came from. It was where I had held love in my arms, and I carried the shape of its face in my heartdark.

  “Ren?”

  On the cave wall in front of me, the symbol was crude, but unmistakable: two eyes and a mouth.

  “Ray, can you see Ren?”

  I touched my fingers to the ash smudges on the cave wall: two circles and a line—the first shape infant eyes pattern, when all our world is Iandentire comfort, or its terrible lack. Not until that world splits into Me and Not Me, I and Thou, do we learn that we, too, look into the world from behind two circles and a line.

  “Ren!”

  The cave wall was a glorious welter of umber, rust, and charcoal—long, inverted triangles with heads and feet bleeding into the fluid backs of horses. A red patty-cake blotted out their haunches, half of it scraped white into the cleft circles of female hips and breasts. I wanted to press my palms against the handprints. I wanted to see if torchlight made the horses run.

  “Fuck. I should ha
ve stopped her! No. Don’t give me that look, Ray. If I had told her last night I thought the experiment was dangerous, she wouldn’t have—Well, at least she might—I mean …” Phil’s voice was muffled by mud and time. “You can’t jump a chasm in two leaps. I should have told her.”

  I couldn’t see him.

  I couldn’t see us either, but we were there, the many of us in the cavestone. Not the one I loved. She was dead. Herdark hurt me.

  “What does it mean for her to shade in her own Garden, Ray?”

  Mydark hurt Phil. Fear woke up in me at last.

  I had no idea what anything meant: mother or face or home.

  I didn’t know if horses ran over the stone of our original Garden, or if I’d finally lost my grip on reality. Panic gathered low in my belly. I could barely drag my hands from the cavestone. It was where I came from, and I didn’t belong.

  I had tampered with When, and Why crushed me. “Stop!” I said and showed my teeth.

  “Is it so much to ask, Ray, to get a year, maybe two, of just me loving her and her loving me back? No drama, no upset?”

  “No change, Phil? No growth?”

  Why swallowed me in solid liquid ribbons.

  “Yes. Exactly fucking that. Is that too much?”

  Why? Because Celeste had stolen When from me and Who from Phil.

  “Not too much, I think. But too slow, perhaps. A day or a weekend? Sure. But not months. Certainly not years.”

  Why? Because the women in my family lose their memories. Trying to save them, I’d lost my mind.

  It caved in.

  “Shut up, Ray.”

  “It’s Ramon.”

  11. You Can Never Go

  My thoughts were eels through oil, no more solid than the air, and no less opaque than mystery.

  I wasn’t suffocating. Minds don’t breathe and my brain was in Tucson. If I opened my eyes I would be there, sitting on the sofa, and not a bit muddy.

  I’d probably want a bath anyway, but Phil was showering. Ramon had made him. “I have pieces of myself pinned to half a dozen memories I will never look at again, Phil. So do you. Get cleaned up.”

  I loved him, and I wanted to kiss him with no guilt on his mouth.

  But my subtractive Garden filtered noise from signal, and I was made of static. There was no order left to pattern me. I was the mud suffocating me. Mud in my mouth would turn guilty in Phil’s, and spitting was part of what I’d come here for.

  “Phil, listen. Sometimes the best you can do for someone who loves you is just to be okay yourself.”

  I spit, and the cave floor ran under my feet in a soup of data points. Each held as little of me as a face holds, and as much.

  “Go play poker. You can’t do anything from here.”

  “I need to do the dishes first. Ren hates leaving the house with—”

  “She’s not—”

  “Dammit, Ray!”

  If my Garden filtered me—stripped out everything extraneous—Phil would be what was left.

  “I’ll be at Casino Del Sol if you need me.”

  I was Phil’s Who, the axis he knew best, and trusted most.

  I turned my Garden Who-side down and slid out backward.

  I woke up in free fall, terrified and inert. Phil had left—and I was falling too fast to recalibrate his absence into anything less shattering than abandonment. But hurtling through desertion’s hole, I recognized it. The Garden—how it is and isn’t—exists (or doesn’t) symbolically. And I was that sort of shaman. Phil’s absence didn’t have to be a hole. He loved me, and love comes with strings attached.

  So I threw an attached string across the emptiness. It caught like a Tarzan vine, and my tumble turned into a swing. I swooped sideways.

  Bleached white bone, smooth and shiny, rounded like ears or sweet peppers, held a hole I recognized, but could not name. I let go of my vine with one hand and reached, swinging past, shaking, and missed. But it was the sole still thing in a world of falls. I stretched out again—almost too far—and put three fingers into the empty space. They caught and closed and held on. It yanked my shoulder joint, but stopped my fall.

  I was still.

  I still was.

  I hung one-handed, suspended and trembling from the D-ring of a mug handle. Behind it, others in a line of Phil’s care and presence waited, not tidied up, because Phil doesn’t clean as he goes. My fingers ached, but I could almost hear Susi bark.

  The caves I came from aren’t who I am, but my emergence is. I would ape-swing my way home on the messiness of love.

  But it was gone.

  Ramon was straightening up, and I was falling apart again. I scrambled from meanings that slipped when I grabbed for them, but whispered when I looked away. The only axis left was Where.

  Where comfort returns.

  Where the faces we love come back.

  Where the Me-and-Not-Me split world is knit up into We.

  Where there are many of me, and one was speaking. “I’m not checking up on her, Ray. That’s not what this is. I just came—”

  12. Free

  “—home!” I opened my eyes.

  Phil closed the door behind him, eyebrows screwed down in concern.

  “It isn’t where it used to be,” I said.

  “No.” Phil’s voice was wary. “We moved.”

  “Let’s stay,” I said and beamed at him.

  Phil threw himself onto the sofa next to me like into a summer lake. “Welcome back.” His voice was hearthfire warm, and he folded me against him. “Need tea?”

  “Nah.” My empty hands felt warm and full with Phil’s shoulders under them. “But I learned something.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said and kissed me. His mouth tasted of nothing but love.

  “I’m still the little Jewish girl who wrote a huge school report on Easter eggs rather than ask to be invited to a backyard hunt.”

  He nodded. “It’s hard for you to reach out when you feel like an outsider.”

  “It’s like I parachuted into the Incrementalists, but I got stuck in a tree. I thought maybe I could use my vantage point to help map the terrain.”

  “Come down here where you belong,” he said. “You can always climb back up the tree.”

  “Phil?” Ramon came into the living room, mascara repaired, hair neatly pinned, carrying his suitcase. “Ren?”

  “All better,” I said. “I’m not so sure I’m a symbol shaman, but I’ve found some cool stuff to explore.”

  “Up trees?” he asked. “Are they safer than holes?”

  “I’ll start small,” I said. “You know, incrementally.”

  Ramon nodded, and we walked him to the door. “Phil, Ren, you have a lovely home.” He gave me a quick, silk-hair-and-perfume hug. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”

  Phil shook his hand. “No problem, Ray. You’re welcome anytime.”

  “It’s Ramon.”

  Phil grinned, and we stood together, watching from the door as Ramon climbed — high heels and panty hose — into his rental car, and drove away.

  Phil and I ambled back into the house. We went into the kitchen together, and Phil picked up the egg-scorched pan. I took it out of his hand, and pulled him toward our bedroomdark.

  “Stop.” I showed my teeth. “Come play.”

  Copyright © 2014 by Skyler White

  Art copyright © 2014 by Wesley Allsbrook

  eISBN: 978-1-4668-8183-9

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

 

 

 
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