They fell.
OMEGA
“Are you leaving?”
She stood in the doorway, her back to him. Heard him roll over and crawl deeper into their bed, pulling sheets around him in the cool autumn morning. The window was open. He was asleep. He’d spoken in dream.
She walked the short hallway to the bathroom, business, and returned. Levered comforters from him and wrapped herself. Draped an arm around him. He took her hand. Squeezed. He was asleep and she wasn’t.
He’s writing me in.
She felt his heartbeat, traced the scar on his chest.
Something wormed within her, something without meaning, intangible and cold. She’d be leaving soon, but not yet. The layers of meaning in his sleep-mumbled question drew focus on lines in her heart. He expected her to leave—and she would, eventually. That something spoke through his dream, that something was aware of the future while his eyes were closed and his heart was slow, that was the break.
So she held him tighter. She would leave tiny notes in hidden places. She would wake him up by crawling on top of him. She would smile into the window light, and he would fall in love in that moment. He would push her hair back from her eyes. She wouldn’t leave yet. The question echoed.
Are you leaving?
He lay there with his eyes closed, rolled to the left, his arm coming to rest on a pillow, a space, reached farther, and remembered that he was alone.
Opened his eyes to find the cat staring at him from the banister bounding the landing. The cat resented him. He had been a cat person before he got one.
Swung his right leg, muscled straight so as not to aggravate the shattered knee and its cap of scar tissue, to the cold tile. Wiped sleep from his eyes and craved a cigarette. Looped chicken legs into gray boxers and sat on the edge of the bed. There had been a picture on his nightstand. There had been books. Itineraries folded between pages. A booth photo. There had been many things.
Stood and pulled cotton over his sex. Jeans.
The stairs were narrow and tall, and he wondered the shapes of the people who had built them. The stairs were built to trip him. He’d bought replacement treads and two tubes of adhesive, but he’d forgotten to improve, and now there was no time.
Down right angles into the kitchen, and he was still alone. There were birds outside. The cat made angry barking sounds and tried to trip him for food.
Through empty rooms filled with many things into a cracked leather chair on wheels. The floor was tilted, and he could roll the length of the office with no effort. It was difficult to remain in place before the monitor.
Hooked glasses around his ears and there was an empty inbox. Grabbed yesterday’s used coffee cup, three grounds, not much of a reading, at its bottom. There was a spoon. It circled as he walked, its bottom edge gummed to the cup with the residue of hardened hazelnut creamer. She had been allergic. He could drink that now.
His body woke him most days at 8:57, and he couldn’t remember what significance that time had or why it had been imprinted on his body.
The paper was late again. He could tell because he looked out the patio door and couldn’t see it sopping mud water in the puddled divot that was the end of his driveway. Sometimes it was in the ditch. He felt like an adult, reading newspapers that were delivered to him three hundred sixty days each year. He kept them stacked in a milk crate in his kitchen, out of the reach of the cat, which had once mistaken that archive for its litter box. The highlight of most days was the bra advertisements in the sale papers.
To the bathroom, still looking for tiny notes pressed into the edge of the mirror.
Four Kinney Brand acetaminophen tablets. Water. Two more to be safe.
He looked at pill bottles and ignored them.
Watered the cat. Stared for too long at a small ceramic vase, two dried yellow shoots of bamboo. He’d soaked them in his dishpan. Spent hours pondering their revival. Had decided to let them die.
Measured fifteen scoops of generic coffee into the twelve-cup maker, added water, waited, withdrew three. To the kitchen table. The first sip. The first smoke. He looked out the window and watched blue jays toss seed to the new concrete of the veranda. The cat wagged its tail and chattered. The coffee was hot and bitter. Considered the distance to the refrigerator to retrieve the creamer. Scratch flicker click. He breathed deeply of the smoke. It calmed him.
There had been other mornings, other coffee, places without cats. Eggs. The Tony Danza show. No underpants and yes plaid shirts. Messy morning hair and breath. The way people intersect.
There had been other mornings in other cities, or in cities at all. He looked out the window and saw fifty beef cattle across the road. He heard geese. The grass was too long; it was his responsibility.
Stirred the coffee and wondered if he’d painted himself into a corner. Two gallons of paint had been enough for eight corners, but there was still so much to do.
The kitchen had an island. He’d bought two stools for it in the hope of someday sitting with her. He’d have coffee; she could have tea. He could boil water. Quiet mornings sitting together. That’s all he wanted. Counted the chairs in his house, the seating surfaces: twenty-four. There was one of him.
Swished the coffee in his mouth and swallowed. Chained a smoke to it.
Went to the bathroom and ate an antacid tablet, because when all you consume is nicotine and caffeine, the stomach attempts to burn itself apart. Two more painkillers to be unsafe.
Sat back down, his back to the window. He could hear the birds. The cat glared at him. There was room for three other people at his table. She could choose any of them. He’d give her his chair. She could use his lap. He could feel her weight against him. She had been so small. He had felt so much smaller.
Such thought shunts the mind down recollections that break. Remembered the feel of her legs around him, in a chair, on a couch. In bed. His name, whispered. Oh, Paul Hughes. I love you, Paul Hughes.
Reached for the cup, and his hand shook enough to spill the bottom two thirds. Brown plastic clattered to brown china. Coffee rivuleted out to the place the newspaper should have been.
His hand shook more than usual. He held it in front of his face, looked, knew. Wondered if his hand could still bend to the curves of her by sense memory alone. Wondered if he could remember her textures and tastes and scents. The architecture of her laugh. A face framed by sculptures of plastic and metal. The way, as she looked down at him, her tears had skated across her glasses, and how once, in the dark, one of those tears had fallen to his face and broken his heart as he held her tiny, shaking form closer.
He slumped out of the chair and fell to the kitchen floor. His head bounced from linoleum he’d glued down. The cat looked on, mildly amused.
A line of silver snaked lazily from the holes in his face.
“Midsagittal plane breached.”
“It’s spread into—”
“Ready lesioning probe on my—”
“Physiologic confirmation of the target location.”
“Initial pass in three…two…”
Alina ran after him, just barely getting through the door into the construct before it slammed shut.
He spun, made to say something, didn’t know what to say.
“It wasn’t her, Paul.” Alina walked closer, remembered holding a hand and what had seemed something deeper. “Just Maire. Hope’s—”
“Merged. Maire took her.” He slumped into a chair that flashed to existence just before his behind made contact. “And now—If Maire’s merged with Hope, she knows everything that Hope knew.”
Alina stood a distance.
“If Maire has Hope’s code…”
“It’s bad.”
“More than bad. Hope had calculated the A/O line to almost perfect half. Now Maire has the modular calculus. The bleed—It’s going to get a shitload more than bad.”