Before I can fling myself to the side, Lore’s fingers make contact. It’s the same soft, caressing gesture she used when she murdered the blond Angus. I cringe, waiting for the horrible telescoping pain to suck me down.
The pain doesn’t come. I can feel her touch on my brow, the pads of her fingers brushing me like autumn leaves. And at the same time I feel her hand passing straight into my brain. Somewhere toward the back, the fissure where that sidewalk crack bit me ignites with a white blaze. I can see it now: a ragged gap with icy light shining through it.
Who engineered that attack on me outside of Bluebell’s, again? Those ragged edges feel like a profile, a silhouette cut from dark paper: a girl, a girl I’ve known for more than forever—
Lore’s reaching hand catches something inside me. What is it, exactly? A crouching knot of Angus-ness, wadded and smoothed out and wadded again and again, until all the sneering creases can’t be undone and the edges are foxed and the whole thing flexes in an angry ball of scribbles and erasures and muddy dissolutions. I can feel her hand on it, so warm and certain by contrast with the godawful mess of myself.
She gives a fierce shove.
Whatever it is, whatever I am—there’s the sensation of hurtling through space and colliding with a hard surface. The craggy gap in the center prints itself into my flesh, reshapes my bones.
Then there’s the crunch, the crumble, as the edges give way. And I’m falling. Into the room behind the wall. A young, painfully beautiful Black guy is huddled on a bed, weeping so hard his body heaves.
And then I’m him, I’m Angus Farrow, nineteen years old and so grief-sick I can hardly breathe. She’s dead, she’s dead, what have I done? What did that demon make me do? All I wanted was to love her.
But I’m still falling deeper into his past, his words streaming by me like motion-blurred stars, and there’s a girl in my arms. A nightclub, that’s where we are, and we got in with fake IDs, and up on the stage there’s a singer whose voice swoons over the strains of an electric violin. This her is a shy, tall, pale brunette, her eyelids painted the iridescent green of a beetle’s wings. She’s excited, transported by the music and the heat of my body swaying against hers. She lifts her chin, just the way I’ve always dreamed she would, and her lips are sticky-bright with glittery black lacquer that catches the red and blue stage lights in colored glints.
“Just so you know, I can’t love you, Angus. Okay?”
“I know,” I tell her. “It’s all good.” But I don’t mean a word of it. I can’t.
When I take her mouth she feels the charge of the kiss, bliss shading into fear, but I feel something else. A breaking, an unplucking, deep within her. The first taste of who she is, drawn between my lips. It goads me on, and I kiss her more deeply, pulling her inmost self to shreds with my hunger.
By the time I slip out a side door she’s slumped in a corner—just a girl who’s had a drink too many, as far as the clubgoers can tell—and no one sees me leave. I can feel her life still unwinding from inside her, as if the end of some vital thread stayed caught between my teeth. Where I’ve pulled the life out of her, silence is entering, filling the vacated spaces.
She’ll be dead by morning. I lean against a wall, shocked by bitterness so acute that it becomes a new kind of rapture.
What was her name? Something weird. Right, Lorca, after the poet.
As soon as I’ve recalled it, I’m falling onward. Out of the Black Angus and into the Angus behind him. I have just enough time to see him before I crash into his mind. He’s a lanky boy with long blond waves and huge, sensitive moon-gray eyes, a fragile artist type going by his looks.
This time his face—my face?—is contorted by rage and spite as I watch a slight Asian girl with a shock of electric-blue hair leap into a car and slam the door.
“Fuck you, Angus!” she yells out the window. She turns to the driver, hidden from me in a tent of shadow. “Asshole tried to make me kiss him.”
The Angus in the movie was me. They’re all me. The realization shines through the crack in my mind. Then I’m back in my thwarted fury, watching her drive away.
A failed Angus, that’s what I am. A bad batch of myself. Because the blue-haired girl—Chloe? Is that right?—escaped me.
Because she lived. But for all my shame, there’s a sneaking relief that I won’t have to grieve for her—because once each her dies, that’s all there is left for me to do.
Falling again. Suddenly sheeted in rain, the gutters full of drops like tiny popping stars. I land in the pain of Lore’s hand snaking from behind and twisting the life out of me seconds before I can kiss a voluptuous girl with glowing brown skin and startling pale blue eyes, rain matting her hair against her full cheeks. You again. The words froth on my lips while the girl screams and leaps on Lore, trying to throttle her.
Every time? That’s what I do, again and again? Every version there is of me? But, God, I love her—Brittany?—so much, and I wouldn’t hurt her for the world. I just want to make her mine. To own her, to draw her into me with an endless kiss. Year after year after—
If they’re all me, then how many times has Lore killed me?
The fall speeds up. My own face flares in mirrors and in night-glazed windows; it streaks on the silver flanks of subway cars. And every time it’s different, its beauty gradually diminishing the further back I go.
Beamers. That’s what we are, and I’m just brushing against a sense of what it means.
Every time, there’s a her. A blur of running legs and unexpected smiles and furry hats tipped with fresh snow, on benches and in dark hallways and under bridges. Some of them evade me, some are seduced by me, some linger in a nebulous zone of mixed pity and friendship and bemusement. It doesn’t matter where we are or what each she looks like; there’s a certain refusal to accept the world’s terms, a brisk clarity; she’s blunt, snappy, intellectual.
And every time, there’s an urge to swallow her whole.
At first Lore finds me a lot of the time and sends me into an expiring torque, but the farther back I go, the less I see of her. More and more of the girls die, always so young—except for the ones who escape me on their own, their lives leaving mine and spreading into futures I can’t imagine, like sugar dissolving in the rain.
A few dozen faces flicker past before I see Vanessa, tilting her head so that her red hair cascades over one eye as she sips a milkshake through a straw, the other eye watching me with sparkling amusement; oh, she was one of the ones who liked me, who almost might have cared … but I would have killed her if Lore hadn’t intervened. Another jumble of hair and clothes and slim hands cupping chins, and then there’s Pearl in her black satin; Pearl, who barely liked me at all, and who died anyway when I claimed her by force.
When I kissed her. But if she’d just loved me, the kiss would have spared her. Everything would have been great.
The kiss always feels so right, that’s the bitch of it. The life pulled into my mouth tastes so pungent, like the tingling acid of a bitten orange peel. Bitterness might be all that’s left to me afterward, but that bitterness is so completely mine. As much mine as the girl I’ve undone should have been.
By the time I’ve understood that, I’m falling through versions of myself like a hundred panes of tissue-thin ice, one after the other. Her hair turns into a single river flickering in complex colors, frothing into curls at the rapids and smoothing into glossy sheets in the shallows. Her eyes spin by on the surface, green and gray and brown and midnight, like so many fallen leaves. This far back I can’t always remember her names anymore, or even whether each one of her died. There’s a dim lull where I don’t see anything. Where I feel like a little boy, waking afraid in a dark room.
And then I alight on a mossy bank. A watermill turns in front of me, steadily paddling at a green-brown current. Being myself feels different this time, fuller; I possess every intimate detail of my childhood, from the turned-milk scent of my first nurse to the black bristling fur of the puppy that fell in the weir just upstream of here when I was six and drowned before my father could fish it out. I can recite Shakespeare and Byron for hours running, and I’ll rage at anyone who presumes to point out the botched lines.
I’m Angus Alaric Farrow, nineteen years old, but I insist on being addressed as Gus. I’ll only tolerate Angus from my beloved great-aunt, Margo, because Margo is the one who charges those syllables with an ineluctable affection.
I don’t need to look to know that there’s a girl beside me, plucking the silvery seeds from a stalk of grass, and I don’t need to search for her name. Her before her proliferated, before it scattered into uncounted faces. Her, when what I knew of her had a singular slant to it, like the afternoon light of late autumn. Honey-colored hair, a white apron over her brown serge dress, because the Bildsteins are working people, unlike the Farrows. Catherine aspires to higher things, she studies her Greek and Latin by candlelight, but those efforts are a terrible waste of her real talents.
Catherine.
I’ve loved her since we were both children. It doesn’t matter that we were both children a very, very long time ago now. I look at her long neck bent over a fresh stalk, one she’s twirling between her fingers to make the seeds shimmy and click, and I love her still.
Still. Going on two centuries, is it now? Why won’t she look at me? Why does she find those seeds with all their unadorned potential so mesmerizing? How can something that just is, that doesn’t require the intervention of my talents, enchant her so?
“I want to show you something,” I say, tweaking the stalk from between her fingers. She flicks me an irritated glance, but I press on, glad to have her attention at any price. I cradle the seed-tuft in my palm, willing it to open a view of the miraculous city. Seeds by their nature are susceptible to surprises, and it takes only a little coaxing to redirect that impulse until what sprouts is not a seedling, but a wisp of away. I open my hand, hold up the stalk. “Look closely!” Catherine hesitates and then angles toward the dancing scintillation, now clearly far too brilliant to be the product of dull mud and drizzle.
Each of those dangling silver seeds has become a minute mirror, but as they jostle in the breeze we can both see that they don’t reflect our faces, the mill, the willows. Instead the image, broken into tiny glints and only reassembled by the seeds’ movements, is of a woman unnaturally beautiful, with skin like liquid bronze and her head covered in close-set coppery feathers instead of hair. She doesn’t appear to see us, but her lips curl in a private smile, as if she felt herself observed and found our spying amusing. A lady of Nautilus isn’t caught off guard as easily as all that.
I wait for Catherine’s wonderment.
I wait for her to love the one who can bring such otherworldly splendor to our drab environs, where an evening at the piano counts as a notable pleasure. Catherine has always loved my playing, but I hear the desolation lurking in each note. We live in the emptiness of the everyday, but I can bring her more than that.
Catherine slaps away my hand and the stalk goes flying. “I can’t bear any more of your sorceries, Gus. Why, I hoped for a moment that you meant to show me something true, some particularity of the species, perhaps! Haven’t I told both you and Darius a hundred times that I have no use for your nonsense?”
“I wanted to give you a glimpse of rarer truths! Catherine, I’m a citizen of Nautilus now; I became one a week ago. Once you come with me, once you see it—”
“Once I see it? Shouldn’t you turn your efforts to training up Miss Diantha Sprague as a sorceress so that she can live there with you?”
I shake my head brusquely. “That’s nothing. She’s nothing.”
“Nothing? Aren’t you still engaged? Gus—”
“Of course it’s a sham engagement! How could you believe for one moment that I would marry Miss Sprague, when I’m already married to you? And even if I did go through with it, a legal marriage is chaff compared to a spiritual one.”
Her eyes flash alarm, but only for a moment. Then her mouth sets in cold fury.
We can share an endless life in moon-pale halls, wearing bodies sculpted from living fire. A life made true by magic. In time the people here will seem to us like so much ambulatory clay, lacking the animation of the beyond—if we bother to return here at all.
“There was no marriage of any kind between us, as you know very well. I could hardly have been more explicit in my refusal. As for Mrs. Hobson, you yourself called her a charlatan.”
How can I make her understand? The busy twinkling of the enchanted stalk plays on like clustered embers where Catherine knocked it onto the bank. Sometimes the sparkle dims, then stirs again with renewed vitality.
“Charlatan or not, the bond she named was real, and unbreakable. Catherine, let me show you! What I mean to give you is beyond the reach of queens.”
“And supposedly precious to me for that reason? Well, then, the life I have now is beyond their reach as well. The freedom to study, to roam, to seek solitude when I want it—what queen could hope for such happiness?” She hesitates. “Gus, there is something I must tell you. Thomas Skelley asked me to marry him on our trip to see Blondin. And I accepted.”
The words touch my ears like wind. A roar devoid of sense.
“I hoped you would be happy for me, as I was delighted for you when I heard of Miss Sprague. Now I find that you persist in clinging to your old misconceptions. Well, it’s time to dispel them for good. There’s nothing between us but our former friendship, and there never will be. We have no future, Gus. Only a rather sorry past.”
For the first time today, she turns her face fully toward me. Heart-shaped, with a long nose, and lips as pale as apple blossom, and a knowing, sardonic look.
A refusal to accept the world’s terms, a certain brisk clarity—that’s it, that’s what I’m made to find. I’ve seen it before. Catherine’s face stutters and I see Geneva, looking at me with an expression nearly the same.
“No,” I say once I have my breath again. Thomas Skelley? I can’t entertain the idea of him as a rival. It’s as if Catherine told me that she is engaged to a shed hair or a tuft of lint.
“No?”
“No. I won’t allow it. You must go to Mr. Skelley directly and tell him you misspoke. You belong to me. You are me.”
Catherine’s brows arch in disbelief. I know that look too! Geneva, that river I saw, the flooding hair and watchful, spinning eyes: it flowed straight into you.
“And why would I act in a manner so contrary to my interest and inclination?”
“You don’t see your own interest!” A blast of words like raindrops carried by a driving wind. “You think you know your inclination, and that you are the best reader of your heart, but you are thoroughly mistaken! Catherine, I have not loved you all my life only to fail now to understand you, even where you can’t! You have always been mine. I will not renounce my claim.”
Catherine is already standing. “I came today out of regard for our childhood friendship, Gus. I did not come so that you could inform me of my sentiments or direct my actions. I wish you well.”
It cannot be permitted. Catherine can be truly herself only in the glow of my love.
I have her by the ankles, and I yank her legs out from under her. She falls with an indignant huff, and for an instant it feels like a game, a joyful tussle like the ones we engaged in as children. I throw myself on top of her and pin her shoulders to the bank, half expecting to find her laughing and all her mutinous plans forgotten.
Darius always insisted that you were stronger than me, I hear my old self think. But the real strength is mine, claiming yours, taking it in. He’ll see what I am now!
Catherine screams at me full force and her nails pierce my wrists. I must make her understand that by the laws of nature, her nature and mine, she must belong to me and to no other. It comes to me that I have never kissed her; I’ve been too diffident, believing that there would be time and kisses enough.
I’ve heard this scream before. It’s the same voice that shook in my ears as I plummeted toward that shining city. Catherine’s scream has been sustained across decades, rising to meet my fall.
All I long to say to her, everything in my heart that seems to soar above the reach of language, I must convey to her through the medium of my lips. I force her head back with one hand and swallow her scream with my mouth.
Catherine ceases to claw at my wrists—and instead tries to savage my eyes. I shut my lids tight, and her nails prod and pry at them.
I press my hands on her throat, if only to weaken her back into her senses.
It does nothing of the kind. I kiss her harder, deeper, as if I could gnaw out of her everything that stands in our way: her disdain, her resistance, her failure to love me as she should. And at the same time my hands bear down on her throat. When she shudders, when her fingers droop against my cheeks, I tell myself that at last she feels the persuasion of my love.
At what point does it occur to me that Catherine has stopped moving entirely?
The river beside us halts its flow and the birds stay pinned like specimens to the sky. Nothing moves but me. I shake and slap and shriek at her, but my voice can’t stir the air into sound. If Catherine is dead, nothing else should have the impudence to go on living.
But it does. By the time I recognize that I need to flee—and not to anywhere on this vacant earth, no, but to there, where I can study and perfect my new art—the birds are gabbling callously again, and the river is splashing.
And once I reach Nautilus—oh!
Catherine has come with me, but in a way so unlike all my dreams. She treats me to a constant dinning of unlove, of refusal. What happened long ago must be undone. It falls to you, my wandering son and wandering self, to find her spirit in another. To prove our marriage true.
Magic means nothing if it can’t give me the only thing I’ve ever truly wanted. It means nothing if the only thing it can’t command is another heart.
Carry my kiss to her. Let it be the test. If yours fails like the rest, there will be another, and another, until either death or love is enough to prove me right.
Then I’m caught in a helical gale, moody blue, and the glowing city waits at the bottom like the pupil of a stormy eye. I’m falling again, and the wind beats with her scream.