Bookstore! I’m standing out front, a little vague on the process that brought me here, but I remember the important thing: it’s part of my mission.
Book-stacked tables and Babar onesies hanging behind the register and a blue-haired boy with narrow glasses looking bored. But out of all these thousands of books, which is the one that would impress her most? I have no idea.
A journal, I decide. If I’m writing in a journal, it’s open to interpretation; for all she knows, I could be jotting down the most amazing ideas. She’ll have to talk to me to find out.
So I pay the blue-haired boy for a classic black Moleskine, the fattest one they have—because I must have a lot to say, right?—and keep wandering. Pick up some pens at a drugstore. There are girls on the street, and I check them as they pass, waiting to feel the zing of her-ness, but I don’t look that hard because I can already tell there’s no point.
If she came within a hundred yards of me, I bet I’d know it. Even blindfolded, I’d sense that she was there.
Afterward, I window shop, ogling these beautiful sparkly guitars and wondering if I ever learned how to play an instrument. When I try to remember, there’s a glass-fine flash of my hands flying over a keyboard, then nothing but a sharp sensation like a bead of blood welling on my mind. Like, it literally hurts my head when I push too hard at an image.
One piano in particular comes back to me: the keyboard is a row of blocky teeth and the whole thing is densely covered in short golden hairs, a beautiful, lustrous coat. But it’s a real bitch of an instrument, jumping and scuttling until I smack it hard in frustration.
I can practically feel the piano’s hide under my fingers, and my head throbs. It’s as if I peeled a pretty shadow off the ground, then discovered the hard way that its edges were sharp enough to cut. Anything else, then; think about anything else.
Fifteen minutes later I’m staring up at Carmen’s warehouse again, a take-out bag in my hand. I guess I stopped somewhere?
“I’m here,” I shout once I’ve entered. No one answers. There’s a single clip-on work light beaming from an exposed pipe on one side, but all it does is punctuate the dark bloat of the place. Cracks in the floor ravel like negated lightning bolts barely visible against a lifeless sky.
So I hurry to lock myself in my room, sit at the little yellow table. I blather in my journal, or at least I assume I do because the pages seem to be filling pretty fast. Get through most of the decent burger and the distinctly mediocre, squishy fries before there’s a fizzip noise and I’m dropped into utter darkness. It’s so overwhelming, so hard and flawless, that for a moment it’s as if I were embedded in a solid block of black stone. My heart judders and I sit paralyzed, completely forgetting how to move.
A beat later, I realize it’s just the power outage Carmen promised me earlier. The two boxes are sitting inches from my hands, and I can get out a candle and light it and send my panic packing with no trouble at all.
I fumble a candle free of the packaging, slide the matchbox open, and strike up a tiny flame on the second try. Then I use a few drops of molten wax to fix the candle to the tabletop and light it. I seem to remember that these candles are way more expensive than they look, and I should use them judiciously; no more than one at a time. The flame flings its bobbling light around, sloppy as a drunk throwing punches.
In the exact same instant, my lamp flares back on. I lean in to blow out the candle.
The smoke wreathes up. God, it’s beautiful. Who needs TV when you can just light candles and blow them out over and over, and watch those incredible feathery filaments doing their air ballet? The smoke scrolls and weaves in midair until I start to see pictures in it. Forms.
A face. It’s not a face I’d ever choose to see.
The smoke twists into the half-scrawled portrait of a creepy, hateful old man. Diaphanous, looping, but not nearly vague enough. I stare at it, appalled, and see two green-white eyes staring right back at me, even while the lampshade behind glows right through them.
It’s just smoke, though; I’m obviously imagining things. I swing my hand to disperse it. Maybe in a convulsive kind of way, if anyone was watching.
But his lips are already moving. There’s a puff, barely distinct, like the sigh of an extinguishing flame. Find her, Angus. Not even a real voice; it’s more like a suggestion breathed into my ears. Claim her love. Carry my—Then there’s another word I can’t quite make out. Was it kiss or curse?
Kiss seems bad enough. I’ll go with that.
And anyway, that did not just happen, that did not just happen, there is no way that happened.
The smoke is just a soft white blur rising gently toward the ceiling. Shapeless and silent. I gape up at the haze where it’s settling under the bumpy plaster, and there is no trace of anything weird about it.
I need something normal. Grounding. With a sort of flailing reflex, I realize I’m calling my aunt Margo. She’s the top contact in my phone. No surprise there.
“Angus, darling! If I hadn’t seen your name, I’d think I had some masturbating pervert on the line. All that labored breathing. What’s troubling you?”
Hearing her voice knocks the dread right out of me. “Margo, I am so, so happy you answered! I—” Margo’s open-minded enough that I can trust her to evaluate what just happened to me. I do my best to describe it all, the smoke, the face. Before I’m halfway through the story I can feel the bemused shake of her head transmitting over all the miles between us.
“You’re an excitable boy. If that brain of yours gets any more high-flying, you’re going to flip clear off your trapeze, Angus, my dear. Try descending to Earth once in a while. Spend some time with us poor, tired, gravity-bound mortals.”
“Oh, Margo! You’re right. I was getting carried away.” The smoke-face was lingering in my head, clinging all over my mind’s eye. But Margo’s brusque tone swings through it like a broom and sends the wisps flying.
“You certainly were! Otherwise you would have taken a gander at the time before you called me. Why, I’d been fast asleep for two hours already.”
Shit. Of course. I didn’t even consider what an early bird Margo is.
“I’m sorry, I forgot—”
“None of that, Angus. Get your wooly head to bed and see if sleep can do anything to improve it. Personally, I have my doubts.”
Great, now even Margo’s insulting me.
So why do I put up with this crap? For her, for her. For the one who slides into the definition I carry in my mind. I’ll know her the moment I see her.
A refusal to accept the world’s terms, a certain brisk clarity. Snappy, impatient realism. Pragmatic, intellectual, merciless. The perfect complement to my burbling soup of romanticism and impulse.
The perfect fulfillment of an unfinished dream.