An elevator. A dropping through space. All I am is one pulsing foot. The rest of me is ether.
We are three people, not looking at one another.
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Ivy whispers. “Why didn’t you tell her you’re through?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“But love should make things easy.”
Ash looks at Ivy with disbelief. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
And I think this is it. This is the moment he confesses he never had any intention of leaving Tami, that he never planned to give up being a prince. Being different was only ever a hobby, a place he went when he felt moody and misunderstood. But being understood is not his goal. What matters is being worshipped, being surrounded by special people. Ivy was once one of those special people, but she has lost all her shiny things.
“Ash,” she pleads. “I—” But then her voice cuts off and her face softens. Her eyes turn slightly dull. “Oh,” she says.
Ash is smiling, his eyes as dull as hers. “Yes,” he says.
“I think the Freedom just kicked in,” Ivy says. “What were we talking about?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
With the right pill, nothing matters. With the right pill, all you are is a body falling through space and you don’t care if there’s anyone to catch you.
In the parking garage, Ivy’s car comes to greet her, drives right up, headlights blinking in some automated, false friendliness, loyal like a pet dog.
“Get in,” she says. “I’ll put it in self-driving mode.”
“I want to drive,” says Ash. “I’ve always wanted to drive one of these.”
How can he think about cars at a time like this?
I get in the back. We sit in the car, unmoving, as Ash runs his hands over everything, eyes sparkling. It is so easy to forget the world is on fire.
Ivy is in her own little world, miles and miles and miles away. “It’s going to be okay,” she says. Then she says it again, and again, and again, and every time she says it, I believe it less.
“Why have I never tried this pill?” Ash says.
Ivy smiles and meets his eye. “We’re free.”
But I don’t believe either of them.
“Car, on,” Ivy says.
“Would you like to engage automated driver assistance?” says the car.
“No,” Ash says. “I want to be in control.”
We peel out of the parking garage, and for a split second everything is weightless, and the world shifts and there is no gravity and the constant pressure in my chest turns to bubbles, and I think I can feel the Freedom too, and now, yes, I believe in them, I believe in us, I think this could really happen, Ivy and Ash could really happen, Ivy’s dream could actually come true, this could be a world with possibility where people can transform themselves and start over and go anywhere. We are flying onto the street, wheels not touching the ground, and I think we may just keep going, up and up until the car transforms into a jet, with a course set straight for that island in Brazil that the ocean has not claimed yet, with the perfect beach where true love was born and where fruity drinks with umbrellas will be waiting for us.
But the car is just a car, and whatever air we temporarily gained was only centimeters, and now we are on the ground again, heavy with all we have done, heavy with laws of nature and truth we cannot outrun, and there is a thump of something else, something soft and rounded, in front, then beneath us, not road, not something tires are supposed to touch.
“What was that?” I say.
Ivy says, “Keep driving.”
We cannot hear the people on the street, so many anonymous, masked faces, some bare, braving the smoke, their mouths open wide like fish, fingers pointing, other hands pulling out phones.
“Did I hit someone?” Ash says.
“Keep driving,” Ivy says. Calm, so calm.
I say, “Stop!” but no one hears me.
Ivy and Ash are somewhere manufactured, in a present moment unburdened by shame. Is this what Daddy is always talking about? Is this equanimity? Is this what it means to be at peace no matter what happens? Are they islands made out of rock, unmoving in the storm? Is Freedom the shortcut to awakening?
No. They are running. They are made out of fear and want. They are always leaning forward.
There is a fine line between feeling shame and having a conscience.
I am the only one who looks back.
I am the only one who sees the body on the ground, the pool of blood, the muscled arm bent at an unnatural angle. I see the familiar tattoos, those corporate brands he paid to be advertised on his skin, images and words and patterns made meaningless from being repeated on so many bodies. Now this body, this life, has been made meaningless.
Of course he was on his way to Tami’s condo. He missed us at his house by only seconds. If only he had arrived seconds earlier, or later. If only he had stayed with Raine. If only he had never started wanting what he couldn’t have.
There is a theory that souls travel in packs, across lifetimes, repeating the same stories together over and over again, everyone playing the same roles, everyone on their own karmic journeys, waiting for someone to wake up and break the cycle.
Of all the thousands of people who could have been walking in front of the parking garage at that exact moment, of all the anonymous people who could have gotten caught under Ivy’s tires, of course it was Vaughn.
None of us will ever wake up.
I scream, but of course no one hears me. I scream so hard, my throat, already raw from the smoke, tears itself to shreds. That is where it starts, the splitting, at my throat, the place where my voice lives, the pressure valve that opens and closes to let me out or keep me in, the place where my voice dies.
The tear slices through me. I am unzipped, cracked, split down the middle. I am two halves, no longer connected.