I look away, out over the factories making clouds for Globeville, and say, “It’s the hiding thing. At first I thought it was cool. You know, when we talked to Gilberto and Lynne and that other chick it was like being in a secret club. It was being allowed to pull back the curtain and being welcomed into a special place. That part, the belonging part, felt good for a little bit. But then, after the rest of them, the further down the rabbit hole we went, I just started seeing them all for what they really are.”
“And what is that?”
“Like everyone else. Cowards, losers, children—”
Belle coughs loudly, it’s her choking on smoke, and gives me this disgusted look. “How can you say that? We’re trying to help you. We’re offering you insight for the first time in your life. These people care about you. I care about you.”
I say, “Yeah, you do. I know you do. But this whole thing, it’s just a charade. Sure, the Metal Sisters can poke around in people’s heads and Slow Bob can look at a map and get some vibes from it, maybe have a quick glance into the past, and Grandpa Razor, well, maybe he can kind of do what I can do, but at the end of the day, they’re hiding because they’re as scared of the future as anyone else. They have powers, you know, like superheroes, but really they can’t actually do anything. They choose not to do anything. You take away all the razzle-dazzle and it’s nothing but flair like at any chain restaurant.”
“And you, you think what you do is so much better? I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation. You want to know the real reason we didn’t even let you in? The real reason why you didn’t know about us until now?”
I shrug.
This just pisses Belle off even more. She says, almost shouting now, “We wouldn’t let you in because I told them not to trust you. I told them that you were gifted but so damaged, so beyond hope of repair, that it would just be better to pretend you didn’t exist. Only it was harder to do than I thought. I felt sorry for you. I still do. Ade, you need to think beyond yourself for a few minutes and think about the opportunities out there. For you, mostly.”
“Maybe the old me, the messed-up me, wasn’t ready for all this, and it’s probably true that I was beyond repair for a while, but not now, not anymore. But the only opportunity that I see here is the one to show all of you that you’re wrong. Enough with the navel gazing, you’re like a bunch of prima donnas who don’t like getting their hands dirty.”
To Belle I say, teeth grinding like a dog’s, “I will deny the past, Belle. I will change the future. And it will end the way I say it ends.”
CHAPTER NINE
ONE
Dr. David Gore—
Fuck you.
—Ade Patience
TWO
What I do first is go to Vauxhall’s house.
This is after I’ve dropped Belle off and after she told me that she forgave me for being so rude to her. This is after she told me that she knew I was just trying to process it all and probably just need a good night’s sleep. This is, of course, after she said, “You just call me when you’re ready to get back into it. Just think of me as your mentor!”
At Vauxhall’s all the lights are off. She is asleep. It is nearly one in the morning.
I have no idea how it got so late, but I need to see her right now. I walk over to her window and tap on it lightly. She doesn’t respond, so I tap harder. And I call out, kind of whisper yelling, “Vaux! Wake up, Vaux!”
There is a rustling behind the blinds. A soft light comes on.
Her face, all puffy with sleep, appears at the window, like a gorgeous spook show. When she sees me she grins and pulls the window up and open. Then she leans out, my Juliette, and asks, “Do you know what time it is?”
“This is important,” I say. “It’s crazy the stuff I’ve found out.”
“And what stuff would that be?” She is so cute the way she asks it.
“Jimi. This whole thing is him, him setting it up, and it’s ugly, Vaux.”
She puts on a sad face. It’s not acting.
I switch gears. “Come with me for a drive,” I say.
“Now?”
“Yeah. Right now. Jump into some clothes. Come on.”
Vauxhall shrugs, disappears back inside. I back away and watch a lone red car navigate slowly through a distant intersection. A dog barks. Leaves fall. Weather. Then Vauxhall reappears, jumps out of her bedroom window in jeans and a dark hooded sweater.
THREE
We drive to Stapleton Airport.
The streets are empty.
There’s this side road where the apartments edge the runways. I park there, right at the end of the street, with the hood of the car up against a chain-metal fence. We lie on the hood of the car. It’s hot but feels good.
“We need to talk more about Jimi,” I say. “I need to tell you what I learned about him. It isn’t good, Vaux. What he’s done is—”
Vaux shushes me with her index finger, soft on my lips. “Later,” she says. “Please? Just for a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
I calm down. A little.
Lying there, we’re looking up at the sky and counting stars. Vaux points out a blinking light. One so distant it fades in and out of existence with every blink.
“Satellite,” she says.
Still watching the sky, she says, “My dad worked on satellites. Engineer. Did mechanical stuff for recon satellites like the Corona, later ones. My dad, I told you he killed himself, right?”
I say, “No. At Oscar’s party, you just mentioned he’d died.”
Vaux says, “He got laid off from his job, some bullshit company reorganization. Couldn’t get work after that. He just kind of collapsed into himself. You really would have liked him, Ade, before, when he was working and happy. He had such a great sense of humor. Self-deprecating. My dad came from a religious home, Grandpa was a rabbi, but we didn’t keep Shabbat or keep kosher or anything.”
Looking at Vaux, at her looking up, I tell her I’m sorry, that I wish I could have met him. I tell her that he must have been an amazing person. I say, “Judging by you, an incredible person.”
She says, “A funny story, he once put a prayer into one of the satellites. Tiny, on this sheet of thin silver metal. Took him a few weeks to etch it. Prayer was the
Mi sheberakh
, for healing, for relief of suffering. Dad told me, after it launched and we were looking at the sky once, that he wanted something good, even a little something good, up there in the cold night. Those satellites, he said, were reckless. Just our hubris. He wanted to add some real weight to them.”
I look over at Vaux and want to kiss her. Soothe her the same as a prayer.
Without turning to me, Vaux says, “I got my smile from my dad.”
A few seconds later we’re surrounded by the unmistakable rumble of an airplane. I mention to Vaux that she should brace herself. The growl of the jet’s engines gets louder and louder. She takes my hand. Squeezes harder and harder as the noise of the plane comes closer and closer.
Squeezing until it’s on top of us.
And really, it almost is. The plane passes maybe a few hundred feet over us. For a few seconds, there on the hood of my car, we’re bathed in the red and white blinking lights of the plane as it glides overhead. Our hair blown wild by the rush of it. The car shaking. And then it’s over. The plane lands half a mile away.
Vaux says nothing but she smiles.
“Cool, huh?”
“You bring all your girls here?”
“Only the ones I think I’ll get lucky with.”
“Ha.”
“You must have some spot you take the boys? Your little nest?”
“I was never that practical. You bring that Belle girl here?”
“Belle?”
Vaux makes a face. “Yeah.”
“No. We weren’t like, you know.”
“Serious?”
“Right.”
Vaux says, “Okay.” Then asks, “So what did you discover out there?”
“There’s this whole world of people like us, Vaux. All of them with different abilities. All of them addicted and all of them lame. A world of losers who spend their days reading crystal balls and looking for lottery numbers. None of them is—”
“Did they help you?” Vaux interrupts. “Did they show you how to stop it?”
“Maybe. I’m getting closer.”
“Do you feel good about it?”
“Yeah. Underneath the bullshit, I think so. But Jimi, he’s known about these people too. He’s been to see them, asking them questions, getting his future—”
“Looking for his dad,” Vauxhall says. “That’s what this is about.”
“No, Vauxhall. It’s bigger than that. Did you know he killed his mother?”
Vaux’s mouth falls, her eyes spin wide. “What?”
“You never saw it?”
Vauxhall’s eyes start to water. Her lips tremble.
“I don’t know how come you never saw it. You saw everything leading up to it. The reservoir, where he swam in the snow and the ice. That day, he killed his mom. Pushed her out under the ice, weighed down with stones.”
Vauxhall swallows a few times, sniffs, wipes her eyes, says, “There were things always blocked out, you know? Times when scenes, memories, would just end suddenly like the film ran out. And other times when the memories were just so choppy. At first I didn’t think much about it, but…”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I don’t know who he is, do I?”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure you do.”
She moves close to me. Nestles up to me. Her face on my chest. Then she kisses me. I wipe her eyes and I kiss them. I kiss her face. Her neck. She kisses me back.
Then Vaux starts to say something, but the car rattles and her voice is drowned out by the throb of another plane engine.
In the flash of airplane lights, we kiss more and I move my hands along the lengths of her legs. My hands three places at once. The whole surface of them trying to take in the whole surface of her. I want to feel every inch and move up to her chest. These breasts that have enslaved her, the curves that make her a prisoner of stares, I have them in my hands and I want to sense every inch. I want to know every bump. Trace every vein. But we’re clothed. There are planes passing overhead. There are people watching us from their apartments. People in the sky.
We stop, both together breathless.
Vaux’s like, “Can we go somewhere else?”
On the way to somewhere else we stop at Safeway. For condoms.
Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The part of me that needs for Vauxhall to go cold turkey, the part of me that wants nothing more than to help her go clean, that part is gone. It’s frightening how I know that doing what we’re planning on doing will only make me her accomplice and yet I don’t care.
I’ve overruled myself.
In fact: I’ve got the devil in me.
We go to Sundial Park and I spread out a blanket from the trunk of my car under one of the fir trees at the far-west end. It’s late enough that the houses across the street are dark. No one on the road either. The cool air feels fresh and great on my skin. The moon is just a sliver, but it gives us the half-light we want. Just enough to make out shapes. We fold the blanket in half. Then we lie next to each other, both of us still as the park. We don’t talk and I run my fingers across Vaux’s face. Find her eyes. The faint brush of lashes. Her lips. Swelling. Warm. We undress each other. It’s not frenzied.
We kiss and then I ask Vauxhall if this is really what we should be doing. Even as I say it I know, deep down, that I don’t believe it. We need this. I need this.
“Why not?”
“The Buzz,” I say. My throat is parched.
“You don’t want to be with me?”
“I do. Want it more than anything.”
“What if I promise not to enjoy the high? Ade, I can do this. I’m only with you. It won’t be like that, like how you’re imagining it. Please.”
I can’t speak. My voice is gone.
Vauxhall giggles. “How about this is the last time?”
I think I growl. Something terrible inside me needing out.
Vauxhall laughs. “We’ll get married right after, okay?”
And I pull her to me.
There is no clawing and hissing the way you see people do it in movies. I am slow and convinced. We trace outlines, our fingers gliding and entwining when they meet the way planets spin around each other. I put my mouth on her. Vaux leans into my mouth. And then everything else, the supernova parts, happen magically. Our bodies take over and our minds shut off. I’m in the back of myself, watching myself explore. Watching myself relaxed and possessed at the very same time. Myself sweating and cooling off. Myself slow motion the way I am underwater.
What happens next is hard to explain. What it is is science fiction. It’s impossible mathematics. It can only be love.
My mind spins out above my body, above the roof of the house, and it goes up into the night between the stars and jumps through the clouds until the sides of everything come curling around me. The tunnel forms. It is a filigree of light and shadow and I move to the middle of it. The middle of everything.