Later, at home, Times Square on TV, Aaron’s mother apologized, said that Aaron was right about them being stubborn and ridiculous. She patted Aaron’s shoulder and smiled at Alicia. On TV, the electrocuted lychee of the New Year’s ball — spiked and radioactive as a child’s depiction of a thing — ticked smoothly down in imperceptible increments.
The next semester, Aaron — his stories widely rejected by literary magazines — began writing sort of science-fiction conceits for workshop; crude, uncritiqueable things that did not fuck around, but got straight to the point, which was always bafflement. In one, an alien civilization discovers that gravity is the cause of worry, love, and fear, the underlying desire of all things to occupy the same space (to correct the big bang, go against God’s, or whoever’s, big impulse move, that shady decision of somethingness) to again become one final, gravityless, unchangeable thing — and is baffled.
He thought it might make a good children’s book one day, a collection of them. Fairy Tales for the Young Disillusionist, or something. Handbook for Doomed and/or Disenchanted Children: a Pop-up Collection.
“I like you,” Aaron said in bed. He had begun to like Alicia more each day. She had become quieter and nicer — more lifeless. She felt physically softer. They rarely fought anymore, and when they did it was in a mollified and absent-minded way, with many accidental moments of agreement and overlaps of argument. But they laughed less, too — less loudly — and almost never joked or played, as there was, always, now, the danger of an emotion — any emotion, or even too instantaneous a physical activity — losing sense of itself and then recovering too fast and wrongly, asserting itself as sadness; causing, then, a sort of sourceless, disembodied weeping. They had to be careful of that.
“I like you too,” Alicia said. They talked no longer of love, but only of like. Talk of love made them feel banished and of the dark-ages. Like was beginning and new; like was when you grew wings that made you lithe and interesting; love was when those wings kept growing, became thick and unseemly — tarp-like — and then smothered you; wrapped you up, like a bodybag.
Though, still, Aaron kind of wanted to say that he loved her.
“I like you more each day,” he said.
“Really.”
“I like you more each day, and a lot, overall.” Lately, Aaron worried that Alicia would leave him. “Yes, really.” She had begun to talk to friends everyday, on her cell phone — friends from high-school. Aaron himself had not kept in touch with friends after high school, though maybe he should have. “I like to hold you,” he said. At night, every night now, for twenty or thirty minutes before sleep, Aaron would hold her, from behind, both of them thinking their own things, round-pupiled in the dark, looking out into their bedroom, at all their unseen but no doubt capering bugs, and sometimes forgetting the other person, the conscious, changing life of them, but just holding on to the warm, DNA heap of them.
For spring break, they flew to Alicia’s parents’ place in New England.
At dinner, at The Olive Garden, Alicia sat by her brother — who seemed, to Aaron, not handicapped, not at all, just a very shy person — but they did not speak to or look at each other. Alicia’s parents seemed more like grandparents, and they too did not speak. Only Alicia’s sister spoke; she ordered for everyone.
After dinner, in the parking lot, Alicia’s brother fell, somehow, into a tree. His face turned a reddish white as he unwrenched his clothing from the branches. In the car, he looked brutalized and war torn. He sat by Aaron and talked to himself. His voice was small and eerie and Aaron tried not to listen to it.
Late that night, Aaron and Alicia walked around her neighborhood. They did not hold hands, but — feeling wild and young from the airdropped newness of the first night in a different state — walked and sometimes ran a little in erratic, separate directions, over strips of grass and sidewalks. The houses were all dark and large and shoebox-shaped. There was a cool, quick movement to the sky above — a cold-watery moonlight, below the clouds but above the rooftops, as between the houses, on the street and lawns where they walked, it was black and still and breezeless.
Aaron thought of living someplace with Alicia. He was not good at meeting people, did not have the skill of escaping his body and so was always drowned in social situations by his own ducts and glands, thwarted by his own nerve-bundles, which would detach somehow and move stupidly into his bloodstream and bump, then, through his heart, and he doubted that, if Alicia left him, he would be able to meet anyone new. They used to, but hadn’t for a long time now, discuss moving somewhere together after graduating. Maybe he would bring that up tonight, ask her.
He could see them getting MFAs together, then university teaching jobs, being funny and halfhearted and sometimes extraordinary with students, and somewhere in all this taking care of their parents, into old age and death; and, themselves, then, too, growing old and dying.
As one had to expect very little — almost nothing — from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always be trying to seize the days, not like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in a froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie’d river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out and gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily, with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled — having allowed to be consoled — by the soft and generous worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.
And Aaron felt that he could allow this, could give himself up in this way.
He could, with Alicia, accept the stretched and meager thing of life, the little rush of youth and then the slow, vague drift of the rest, until the sidewards tug at the end, into something else, some fluorescent reward-world, perhaps, or just into the bizarre math of nothingness, the distant and sincere art of it — and if he could allow all this, if he could feel okay with all this, then, he guessed, so could Alicia and her parents, and his own parents. But he could not comprehend his parents or anyone else accepting things in this way, could not feel anything vicariously but fear, worry, and regret. And if his parents couldn’t accept, if no one else could, then maybe he couldn’t either. He knew he couldn’t, actually, because though he understood, now, the possibility of such a feeling he did not feel it, and if ever he had felt fine and worriless and accepting in the past it was, he knew, a fleeting, delusional thing. He knew now — knew only — that, in the end, there would be urgency and difficultness, there would be the oncoming and increasingly complicated need to resolve, to be convinced — to be, finally, appreciative, of having once lived, of having at least happened in this sudden and terrific (or was it terrifying?) world.