Its contents would be enough to
Nick stopped. He could swear Phil lay on the bed. Phil's image wasn't quite solid, but solid enough for all details to be visible. He was fully dressed, in an unzipped blue jacket, dark pullover and black pants. Darker clothes than he'd ever worn. He was not Phil as Nick remembered him, either—the twenty-two year old, dead and grey in a puddle of his own blood—but an older Phil.
A living Phil, whose chest rose and fell with each regular breath.
Phil as he would have looked if he'd only been a little stronger. If he'd only dared
Fine lines etched Phil's features, adding character, but detracting none from his classical good looks. Even the white that had threaded itself through Phil's brown curls, didn't make him look old.
Nick stretched his fingers, tentatively, to touch Phil's curls. He remembered the soft tickle of Phil's hair against his palm.
His hand touched only air. Nothing was there. Nothing. It was just an image of Phil.
It was another sign, Nick thought Another sign that he was supposed to end it all that night. He opened his case. He'd need water with these many pills.
Half-asleep, as Phil was, it had seemed perfectly rational hearing Nick come in. He'd often go for walks after Phil had gone to bed.
Lying in bed, Phil had heard Nick come in, and drop his boots and jacket, as he'd done so many times during their vacation together, or even before, in the apartment they'd shared through their college years.
He heard Nick's walk across the floor, felt Nick standing by the bed.
What was he doing there, standing by the bed. Why didn't he undress and get in bed?
Phil managed to wake enough to half-open his eyes and stare at Nicky.
Nicky looked pale and tense; older and terrified.
What did Nicky have to be so scared about?
Nick stood by the bed, fumbling with the catch of the box. It was so difficult to open it, so difficult to do this with Phil looking at him.
Would Phil have killed himself, had Nick been awake and watching?
He frowned at the image of Phil.
Phil stared back at him, surprised, confused. He looked half-asleep, a state that always made him morose.
Ghosts didn't age. Yet Phil looked older—forty? forty-two?—as old as he would have been, if he'd stayed alive.
It was as if in some way Phil had gone on living.
In a world Nick couldn't reach, Phil still lived and breathed.
By some miracle, Nick could see him. Maybe even, could communicate with him. He smiled at Phil.
Phil smiled back, a soft smile, and closed his eyes.
Nick thought of the closing sentence in Phil's suicide letter,
We'll always be together in the songs you wrote for me.
They weren't together.
And yet, maybe, in a way, they still were. They could see each other. He looked at Phil, who looked asleep, but smiled still.
They obviously could see each other.
Nick grimaced at the case of pills in his hands. The catch gave under his fingers. Nick stared at the pills inside. Years of oblivion. Hours of escape. All of it in this circular plastic case.
He looked at Phil, on the bed.
Phil had settled back to sleep, the way he always did, with his arms wrapped around the pillow, his face resting sideways on the soft folds.
A wave of warmth washed over Nick. Phil hadn't left him forever.
If Nick killed himself, he'd be leaving Phil.
Nick couldn't do that.
He walked back to the bathroom, shook the pills from the case into the toilet, flushed. He wouldn't take these again. He wouldn't need the crutch again. He would keep his career. He would keep his music. The music he'd written for Phil.
In some other world, in some unknown way, Phil would know about those songs; Phil would hear them.
As Nick undressed, he looked at the vintage radio in the corner. It was a beauty, just like his grandmother's radio. Its wood case gleamed, waxed to a soft sheen.
Looking at it, Nick thought that maybe, just maybe
The music. Perhaps, the music could
Nick walked up to the radio, pushed the ivory buttons, changing stations, until his own voice, his own songs poured out. Advantages of being a star. Someone, somewhere, always played your music uninterrupted.
He set the volume to low, and went back to the bed, and lay down, and turned the lights off.
In the space between sleep and wakening, he felt Phil's weight on the other side of the bed, heard Phil's regular breath, felt Phil's head come to rest on Nick's shoulder, Phil's soft brown curls tickling Nick's bare skin.
This story was born of a—Brazilian—song about heartbreak and abandoned women. I started thinking how some women and men are more vulnerable, more likely to fall for someone who'll mistreat them or leave them behind. And then I thought that, even if we were masters of the universe, some of us would remain just as vulnerable.
At three p.m. the wind blew, lifting up the endless, red sands of the desert that surrounded the Earth-styled landscaped grounds of the recuperation home.
The ponderosa pines, planted eight deep in a ring around the gardens helped attempted in vain to protect the terran haven. But an attenuated breeze always made it past the trees, carrying sprays of sand that nestled on the manicured branches of the apple trees. Custodians at the home swept up buckets of the sand daily. Not even the tightly shut windows and magnetic screen doors could protect the shiny marble floors and the expensive wood furniture.
The custodians never complained. Gentle, faithful Sherzys, one of the first alien races discovered and contacted, they remained grateful to the humans who'd brought them civilization and science. They knew that every job, not matter how menial, brought them one rung closer to technology.
Kratrina Cryssa never complained, either. A high-strung blonde beauty of pure human extraction, she wore the exhausted look of one having her worst nightmares confirmed. Sitting under the apple tree outside the side door to the home, she pulled her yellow cotton dress away from her sweat-drenched body.
As the wind started and the sand fell like soft rain on the wicker table at which she sat and the three unoccupied chairs beside her, she wondered—not for the first time—why anyone would want to set a rest and recovery home in this desolate, nameless planet.
She swept the sand from her embroidery, held taut in a delicate wooden frame.
Why go through terraforming a useless piece of dirt to set on it a rest home for the emotionally fragile, when hundreds, thousands of habitable planets lay at the disposal of the few billion humans in the endless universe?
Other sentient races existed, but they didn't measure up to humans. Not in civilization, not in science, not even in administrative capacity. Humans were the Lords of the Universe, so why set their therapeutic facility here? It was an old question, and Kratrina didn't expect an answer. No one answered her questions any more. From the administrator of the home to her own father, every human she knew coddled Kratrina with comforting, meaningless pap.
Kratrina chose a pale pink embroidery floss and threaded her needle, squinting against the mirage caused by her sweat-soaked eyelashes against the glare of the merciless sun and the reddish tone of the sand-scourged air.
She remembered the history lessons her alien tutor had drummed into her, long ago and worlds away in her father's airy mansion. How he'd made her read all the literature of fear about what might await humans outside the atmosphere of Earth. Those fantasies, those childish nightmares had kept humans earthbound for centuries before they'd dared venture forth . . .only to discover that they were Lords and Masters of the endless galaxies, that the universe was their playground all habitable worlds their welcome mat.
So why, Kratrina asked herself, why put this home on a world that hadn't been habitable before humans had changed it? Why not in some pleasant, verdant paradise where restless feelings could be soothed and lackadaisical minds stimulated to work again?
She pulled her needle through the silk fabric held taut by her tambour embroidery frame. She worked at embroidering the bud of an almond blossom. Nothing to read here. They let her have no entertainment. No music, no sensies. Nothing. How could she recuperate when her mind walked, like a tiger jailed, the tight confines of one's own imprisonment?
"Evening, Lady Cryssa," a smooth, gentle voice said, behind her.
She turned and stifled a gasp of surprise at the man who stood behind her. He was a stranger to this place. Of that, she was sure, and not the type of man that ended in this home. Those tended to be pale, fragile, colorless creatures, as helpless-looking as she'd felt that day, almost ten years ago, when she'd been sent from her home and husband and packed away to her first rest home.
Her mind flinched away from the memory she couldn't quite pin beneath her conscious mind.
She put her embroidery frame down on the table in front of her chair, pulled at her sweat-soaked dress, and turned her best smile on the stranger.
A tall, broad shouldered, dark haired man, he looked powerful enough, well enough, not to be here at all. Except, perhaps, for his too-sensitive features, the pain etched in his expression, the haunted look in his dark grey eyes.
He walked towards her quickly, in easy strides of his long silk-encased legs.
She let go of the cotton and proffered her hand to him, the right hand, as she'd been taught by her nursemaid. She expected him to shake it, or perhaps to hold it.
Instead, he dropped to one knee, took her hand in his and rested his lips on her skin.
The tingle of it made her breathless. "Oh. And who are you . . .. Sir?"
He stood up, a smooth movement that barely disturbed the glossy perfection of dark curls that framed his oval face and emphasized the haunted look in his eyes. His dark grey silk tunic, exactly matched to his eye color, fell smoothly, without a wrinkle, outlining the muscles on his broad chest. "I've just arrived. It's been ten years, but, surely you still remember me? Ryv Endall. We met in Miccar, was it not? At your debutante ball?"
Kratrina's mind skidded away from any memory of her debutante ball the brightly lit crystal halls, and flawlessly attired gentlemen who'd traveled there for the occasion. Beneath the thin ice of her forgetfulness something deep twisted within the icy waters of memory.
She sucked in breath, and turned her charming, social smile on the young man. "One forgets. I mean, it's been so long and one has been here and there and everywhere and seen so much." Mostly the interior of euphemistically named
rest and recuperation homes
, and the puzzled faces of doctors and nurses, and the shiny needles penetrating her clear white skin, and the screaming, screaming, screaming that overtook her when the memories broke through their barriers. But she wasn't about to tell handsome Ryv that. And never mind if he was a fellow sufferer.
Pulling back straight blonde hair, that she thought compared not unfavorably to his coal-black locks, she moistened her lips and gestured vaguely to one of the other chairs, beneath the tree. After he obeyed the gesture and sat down, a handbreadth from her, she asked, "A new arrival? But then, how come outside? I thought they only allowed outside those of us who are . . .composed?"
He tilted his head sideways. "Oh, but I've been elsewhere first," he said. "So many worlds. So many different worlds." Tiredness veiled his grey eyes. His smooth white skin wrinkled over his perfect, broad forehead.
She reached for his hand, touched her fingertips to his in sympathy.
He looked up. His eyes cleared. An almost-smile tugged the corners of his lips upwards. "But let's not talk of that," he said. "Let's talk of pleasant things."
"Yes, let's." She allowed her mind to drift to her pleasant childhood, the adoration of her father, the unfailing attention of her nannies, the green meadows and shaded woods of her native Miccar.
He talked very little, but he was a good listener and watched with avid, hungry stare as she described the frock she'd worn for her sixth birthday party, and her little friends crowding around her. So many friends, none of them human, because human families were thinly spread through the universe.
Time went by quickly. Shadows of impending night surprised them in the garden.
He rose, hastily, bowed to her. "We should go in." He chuckled, the giggle of a child who has evaded too-strict a guardian. "Before we are sent for. Only . . ." He smiled. "Perhaps you should go in alone? You know how they are about patients fraternizing unsupervised."
Kratrina nodded. The medical personnel of the rest home, members of a stolid and empathetic but unimaginative humanoid race who called itself Kelter, were as obsessed with getting humans to fraternize under their benevolent eyes as they were about keeping humans away from each other when unsupervised.
"I was naughty, otherwise we wouldn't have met at all." He winked. "They put me in the side garden and I walked around."
"Around?" she said. "But you'd have to cross the desert, I mean, the non-terraformed area between" She thought of the area she had glimpsed on the few occasions she had ventured beyond the edge of the ponderosa pines. What looked like an endless stretch of scorched red sand, and the trees beyond it, in the distance. It would take at least ten minutes to cross between a small garden and the next and the sun would be intense, yet here he was, his suit unruffled, his hair innocent of red sand.
He bowed. "I had heard you were here. And the memory of your beauty made it worth to cross that island of hell." He reached for her hand and kissed it again.
She remained, with her hand pressed to her own lips, reliving the tingle of his touch, as he walked away amid the apple trees, until the glimmering, silk-clad shape vanished through the ponderosa pines.
"Well, dear," the nurse said, smiling, as she opened the curtains of the room. "You sure are looking better."