Quiet enfolds us as we walk off together after her shift, hand in hand. My thumb strokes Geneva’s palm tenderly, softly. A curse can alight as gently as a sparrow; its wings can loose flurries of sensation in skin.
Geneva seems bit wary, so I suggest we head for Grant Park. There will be secluded hollows and benches screened by greenery, but enough people nearby to give her a sense of security. We take a bus, sitting pressed together at the back, then walk the rest of the way.
It’s fine with me. When the kiss takes her and lassitude flows in to fill the emptiness left by her ebbing life, she won’t be in any condition to yell for help. Help won’t be among the possibilities.
How soft the grass is under our feet, how the leaves pitch overhead in the cooling wind. I won’t live to see a second autumn, though other Anguses will. All that remains of my single year of life I’ll devote to grieving for her, my luminous Geneva. I’ll pity the way her hard-edged realism worked against her, preventing her from recognizing dangerous magic when she saw it. I’ll remember my finger now, running up and down the inside of her forearm, and how she shivered at my touch. I’ll cherish those memories, dwell on them, because I know that when my year concludes they’ll be erased, or nearly.
To the next Angus, Geneva won’t be more than a pale trace, the bewildering impression of a face and voice that seems to come out of nowhere, lead into nothing.
We find a bench behind a scrim of late-summer wildflowers, black-eyed Susans raggedy above browning leaves. Sunset angles through the trees, painting the ground a strange, burnt amber-green, and the foliage above glares ocher against slate clouds. Geneva’s gone shy, nearly silent, as if she’s not entirely used to desire.
I kiss her cheek, slowly, savoring the soft yielding of flesh. I’m in no hurry to reach her lips. Even if I was programmed to love her, I refuse to accept that my love belongs to Gus. Here and now I’m staking a claim to it. My love. My crime. My lingering before the strike. Because fuck that guy.
She winds her arms around my neck and lets her mouth drift across my hair as I slide lower to scatter kisses on her neck. She laughs a little, breathlessly, and twists closer.
How can I say I love her when I’m going to kill her? Killing her is the only way to make her a part of me; her future diverted, her life pooling in my memory instead of flowing on and away. Oh, does that sound like something Gus would say?
No. It sounds like me. My evil, my savagery. No one will take this choice from me. And if I’m a walking curse, well, plenty of actual humans with all their fabulous free will and agency are no better.
Geneva’s head tilts back as I lick her throat, and sun-scattered leaves reflect in her wide eyes. Her hip meets mine in a warm compression, then one of her legs lifts to slant across my lap. I’ve felt this sweetness in so many bodies, I must have, and her touch wakes nearly gone memories from lives long lost to me. Her fingers slide down my chest, and my rib cage echoes with the thrill of hands buried decades ago.
I’ll draw out the moment as long as I can, but her excitement is building and I can’t delay much longer. As soon as I think it, she pulls back a little.
She could still save herself, anyway. All she has to do is love me! When I think of it like that, it’s obvious it’s not my fault.
She leans close again, her mouth near my ear.
“God, Angus, I wish you weren’t so beautiful. It’s making me stupid.”
“I know,” I murmur back, and slide both hands deep into her hair. “That’s the whole idea.” Our lips are so close that my mouth fills with her breath, scented with ginger tea.
It’s time. And even if I regret this later, even if I hate myself for it, well, there’s one advantage to being a beamer: my pain, like my existence, has an expiration date built in.
“Angus, my boy, you’re making progress. But you’re not there yet! Give her more time to see her way, won’t you?” Margo’s voice in my pocket, a curdled purr. I’m not surprised that Geneva can’t hear her.
“Oh, sorry, didn’t I tell you? She’s mine, not Gus’s. So what I do with her is my decision.” I say it out loud, because who gives a fuck?
Geneva starts in alarm at what I’ve just said, but it’s too late. My open mouth covers hers and my hands wrap her skull, holding her in place. You’ve made a terrible mistake, my love.
I can feel her life like a satin ribbon on my tongue. My lips give the slightest tug, still teasing, not hard enough to unwind her. Just a nibble of murder. I almost laugh at the rich taste of it, like blood and cherries. Oh, Geneva! I give her one last chance, a few more moments to love me the way she’s supposed to.
She gasps. It doesn’t quite sound like lust.
Then something hits me. A hammer the size of a cloud strikes down and sets my whole body ringing. My skin seems to jerk, up and back, and my heartbeat hits me with an iron clang. What is this?
Fear. It slams me again, and I’m reeling back from Geneva with my arms flung up: a panicked instinct to ward off something, anything, although there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there, and yet the fear digs into my intestines with cold fingers and I’m thrashing, weeping, fighting for my life—
On my back on the grass, Geneva standing above me with frayed hair and crazed eyes, clutching her face and then darting away toward a group of passersby, yelling, “Hey! This guy just fell over in a fit! Hey! Help!”
I’ve never felt anything like that before! Like evil was reaching out of him—is that even possible? It was so clear.
Wait. Those aren’t my thoughts but they shake through me anyway, and with them comes that reverberating terror. My whole body struck like a gong, my teeth biting at the ground—
Idiot. You knew there was something wrong with him.
Wrong, yeah, but I didn’t think it was anything like that! It was like he wanted to kill me.
Geneva’s thoughts. They inflate to fill my whole drumming head, squeezing me from inside. She looks at me in a glazed, wild way, and fear claps through me with the look.
Shit. It’s hers. The fear is hers!
I’ve passed through dozens of other Anguses. I’m absolutely certain that none of them has ever been assaulted by the consciousness of his her, her anguish and her disgust. Why me, then?
What is forcing me to feel Geneva’s mind?
A sympathetic-looking older couple are calming Geneva now, the woman with her arm around my love’s quaking shoulders. A strange man crouches down and urges me not to move; they’ve called for help, he says.
Geneva glances at me and her face contorts: the look of a child on the edge of a nightmare. The world clashes against me again, cold and metallic, so that my head slams back against the ground.
Then I get it. It’s the pendant Lore gave me, surging with wakeful purpose. My attempt on Geneva must have activated some dormant magic.
It’s the pendant shining Geneva’s fear into me. I asked Lore if the stone would protect me, and she said, If not you, then someone you love.
Nice one, Lore!
Geneva smiles awkwardly at the couple reassuring her. “Thank you so much. If you can just make sure he’s safe—I’ve got to get going. I can’t—”
And since they believe she called them to help me, not to save her, they murmur comforting things. Geneva gives me a final look, and I feel it like an iceberg splitting in my brain.
She turns and runs. For as long as she lives she’ll wake up screaming from dreams of my face leaning to meet hers.
Distance takes the edge off. My cold slamming sickness eases enough that I push up onto my elbows under clouds dripping with arterial sunset.
“No, no, no,” the prim-looking man next to me says, trying to ease my shoulders back to the grass. “Lie still. You’ve had a seizure of some kind.”
“I’m fine.” I clamber to my feet while he flutters and presses on my chest.
“No, no, no. You need the hospital. A scan to see what brought that on. No, no, rest for now. Rest.” His gray face crimps with worry, and the couple who were crooning to Geneva come over and bustle at me too.
What I need is a place where I can huddle and cry undisturbed. Where I can weep and howl and bang my fists, because she left me, she left me, and there’s no way I’ll ever get another chance with her.
“I’m fine,” I tell the old man again, and he grabs my arm. I shove him back so hard that he falls with a sharp cry. There’s a sort of vague clamor from the couple, an anxious shifting of their weight. I turn on them with my face bent into a snarl. “I said I’m fine! He shouldn’t have touched me!”
And I run behind a tangle of trees, then on across smooth lawn. It’s incredible how quick I am, how light. But where do I think I’m going, and what does it even matter now? I thought I was so special, so much more than just another beamer, but no. I’m a failed Angus like all the other failed Anguses: the ones whose hers escaped them, who lived the rest of their single shitty year hollowed out by spite and regret. Geneva was right there in my arms, ravenous for my touch, and I still failed. She’ll live unclaimed, as free and vibrant and beyond me as if I’d never been.
Beyond me. Beyond what I am, beyond the stifling span of my life. I want her to love me so much that she can’t live without me, and now living without me is exactly what she’s going to do. I’ll be ground down, spat up, and reused in the form of dozens of new Anguses, and she’ll be in graduate school, or traveling somewhere, or walking up a staircase in Montreal with a girl she met at a party—
Claire. Where have I heard that name before? I see Claire, plump and supple and sensuous, with wavy ice-blond locks and a wicked smile. And it’s not Geneva with her, but a very young girl, shy and gawky and golden-brown, her hair in a bookish dark bob too short for her face. They’re together on a shadowy landing, a few colored beams lancing in from a tiny stained glass window.
Claire catches the dark girl by the wrists, pressing her against the wall. The dark girl gasps and struggles to raise her eyes, then flushes and lowers them again. “You can become the truest possible version of yourself, Dolores,” Claire whispers, and I know she’s continuing a conversation they were having earlier. “And isn’t tonight the perfect time to start?”
Lore, that’s Lore, but no older than eighteen, torn between anxiety and desire as her confident friend leans in and—and isn’t just her friend anymore. All at once the two of them are kissing in a frenzied tangle, Lore’s patent leather shoe skidding sideways until she loses her balance and they both wobble, and then Claire is pulling her upright with her hands already somehow under the saggy argyle sweater that doesn’t suit Lore at all—
I don’t always find you in time. That’s what Lore said in the movie I saw, where she tracked one of my old selves. But when I do, you will remember her.
Her. Claire. Lore’s first and deepest love, who also had the misfortune to be a her of mine.
Why can I remember this scene, though? I know I wasn’t there. I found Claire a few months later, I’d guess, killed her months after that. But I can feel their kiss so intimately that it’s as if someone else’s memory is reflecting into me, the way Geneva’s fear reflected into me before, and—
Oh.
I’ve been running senselessly over grass banded with dying sun and dusk shadows, but now I stumble to a halt. She can’t be far.
“Good evening, Angus,” Lore says at my elbow. I stand still, my breath heaving, but I don’t look at her. Why give her the satisfaction of gazing straight into my shame? “You activated your pendant just now, so I know my memories must have reached you. It’s a mirror, you see, made to reflect whatever suffering you inflict back into you. A mirror that brings home the curse. And I told you, didn’t I?”
You will remember her. The pendant was intended to keep Geneva safe from me, yes. But that wasn’t its only purpose. As Lore stands beside me I feel the transformative blaze of her old love for Claire, and the years of wilding sorrow that followed on Claire’s death. What a pity, I want to say. So terribly, terribly sorry. Now fuck off.
“That was a long time ago,” I tell her. It’s not my usual voice, not even Gus’s, but something more bestial. I finally turn. My shoulders hunch and my head lowers under the weight of her stare. Her silver hair catches the sunset in a red gash while blue shadows steal all but the barest outlines from her face.
“It was,” Lore agrees. “Do you suppose you’re in a position to tell me to get over it on that account? For both of us, Angus, time isn’t a flood that extinguishes the past, but the fuel that keeps it burning.”
It’s true. Claire is as bright and immediate in Lore’s mind now as she once was in her arms; her breath remains a downy percussion against Lore’s ear decades after her lungs went cold and unmoving. And Catherine in my memories still reflects through Claire, and Pearl, and now Geneva, like a candle flame multiplied by a roomful of mirrors. The past only gains in heat and strength through the restless play of memory, until Lore and I stand at the center of a conflagration.
“So kill me.” I take a step closer to her, scowling down. My hands twitch at my sides. Lore’s almost certainly too powerful for me to slaughter her with crude physical force, but where’s the harm in trying?
She doesn’t waver. “I don’t think so.”
“I tried to murder Geneva.”
“And you failed. Why would I bother now? Why would I spare you one instant of agony, now that you’ve broken yourself? Gus is deeply disappointed in you. He’ll enjoy mangling you at his leisure once you return to him; he’ll savor your pain. He’s done it before to Anguses who especially annoyed him, I happen to know. So live on, and live with the horror of what you are.” I can barely make out Lore’s face, but her voice tightens with bitterness. The pendant reflects that bitterness into me, a kind of biting light. “Learn from it, Angus.”
For a moment, we stare at each other. I could throw myself in front of a truck, I suppose. But would that be enough to kill a thing like me? Maybe not.
Lore’s emotions curl catlike inside me, becoming a cruel smile. She guesses what I’m thinking. The boughs of distant trees tangle like black lace above her head.
“Oh, please try it. Your year won’t end as easily as all that, but you can be maimed, and your body can experience torment. But why take my word for it? Or, if you truly want to die, why not do it right?”
Do it right. When Lore asked me to kill myself, and every future version of myself, she wasn’t referring to anything as simple as ditching this particular incarnation. But I find I’m looking forward to living again.
To facing off with Lore again. One of these times, I’ll figure out how to get back at her for everything she’s done to me. And, okay, the next Angus won’t be me me, but maybe he’ll be close enough.
Lore finally steps away. Is that a slope in the ground lifting her, or is she suddenly taller? She turns, and the sun’s last vermillion rays strike her face and pool on eyes like dimpled mercury. Red light runs in liquid scrolls over her pewter skin. What I took for tree boughs behind her a moment ago resolves into delicate antlers, endlessly branching into capillary-fine tips that glitter with mineral frost.