Adrian, meanwhile, picks up her idea from another end, as if with a pair of tweezers, places it on a glass slide under his mental microscope, and sets another on top, until hers is utterly unrecognizable. “I can tell you one thing, from the theory of probability, if you want to know. I read somewhere that statistically the actual number of accident survivors exceeds the projected number by five percent. Consistently.”
No, she doesn’t want to know anything of the sort. She doesn’t even want to make the effort required to decipher his abracadabra—like at a math lesson in school when you know you’re going to be called on next and will have to come up to the board and pick up where the previous victim put the chalk down. But Adrian is a kind soul—she’s being unfair—he’ll explain it all himself.
“Theoretically, the dice should roll fifty-fifty: the number that survives should be the same as the number that dies. But five percent more survive, consistently. These five percent—the X factor, the unknown intervention—that’s God. He’s mathematically proven to exist.”
“No kidding? That’s really interesting.”
She’s not being ironic—okay, maybe a tiny bit—she really finds it interesting, and the classroom is warm, and the lights hum cozily under the ceiling (it’s still dark outside, first period, winter), and the piece of chalk creaks on the blackboard peaceably—only it makes your fingers feel funny, like they don’t belong to you, unpleasantly woolly and slippery on your pen…. Her earlier reverie is gone, vanished; she’s only managed to latch on, like a bulldog, to the word threads, and now it’ll spin in her mind for the rest of the day, she’ll mouth it absently, threads, thready-threads. Threads. Threads that make up a pattern that we can’t see. That’s why no story is ever finished, no one’s. Death cannot put a period on it.
At this point, it finally occurs to Daryna that this deeply intellectual discussion will add a hefty charge to their cell-phone bills, enough that they could have had the discussion much more pleasantly somewhere nice over cake and coffee. Once again Adrian’s yuppie profligacy dulls her own poor-girl instincts: she sees—and apparently will always see—money as a set of opportunities, fanned out in front of her like cards, from which she must be careful to choose only one, the best, and, for Adrian, money is something to be spent on whatever strikes his fancy, here and now. And this, despite the fact that they make almost the same at their jobs (hers pays slightly more), so it’s not a matter of numbers—it’s about an internal freedom that no amount of money can buy; you either have it or you don’t. So it looks like she doesn’t, but so what? Let it go already.
“Why did you call me when you knew I’d be at the studio? Just to chat?”
“Actually…”
His voice changes, recoils as if upset with something, retreats like a scared little snail into the safety of a dark crack. Something happened, Daryna’s stomach sinks—but no, it can’t be, if something bad really happened (And why does she think it has to be something bad? Why is she always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the world to come apart, what is wrong with her?), he would have said so right away, instead of dragging things out—or wouldn’t he? They haven’t lived through a calamity as a couple yet—no accidents, ambulances, or financial disasters—only piddly stuff, the usual everyday vexations, problems that one has to solve and that are amenable to solving, so how would she know how he endured misfortune? Real misfortune.
“Well… I wanted to tell you right away, while it was still fresh. I, you know, dozed off after lunch, just nodded off right in my chair, so weird—that’s how I missed my prof.”
“Vitamin deficiency!” she laughs operatically, like a diva in the La traviata banquet scene—she can’t contain her relief: nothing’s wrong, everyone’s alive and well! “‘I fear daytime sleep: it dreams clairvoyant torment,’ that’s from Tychyna,” she throws in on the same breath, gathering momentum, like an ice-skater heading into a sparkling, spinning toe loop of inspired twitter—and slams on the brakes, with a gulp of deflating lungs when she realizes that’s not it, he hasn’t told her the whole thing.
“That could very well be. I had a dream.”
“A dream?” It’s as if the word was obscure to her.
“A dream,” he repeats stubbornly, which makes the word lose its meaning completely. “Of you and Aunt Gela.”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” she mumbles, automatically, echoing the meaningless word and groping around for a quote, anything to help her keep her balance as her world rocks: she has no business appearing in his already suspicious dreams in the company of dead people; that’s enough to send a chill down the spine all by itself. But she and Aunt Gela—Olena Dovganivna—do exist together in the waking world, connected by a completely reasonable project: that cursed film of hers, the agony of it, and the fact that still, after all the work she’s put into it, she can’t find the single right turn of the key that will unlock the story, that one twist of the plot that will set the entire mechanism in motion—could it be possible that Adrian, as sensitive and finely tuned to her mind’s frequencies as he is, unconsciously reflected her growing, unsettling obsession with Dovganivna?
“And what were we doing in your dream?” She giggles, and her giggle comes out pitiful, tinny—as if he’d told her a scary fairytale and she now needs him to say it wasn’t true. And yet she already knows—from her gut, from inside, where it resonates loud and clear—that things stand otherwise: he won’t. And it’s not about her film.
“First the two of you were in a café, a summer café; you were sitting under an umbrella. It looked like the place in the Passage… both in summer dresses, you were laughing… drinking wine.”
Aha.
“And then?”
“You know, it was complicated,” he gives up suddenly, and lets a genuine, unconcealed plea of alarm for her fill his voice. “I can’t remember everything now; that’s why I called you as soon as I woke up… I wanted to get it all across without losing any, but you weren’t there…”
I was, I was, clicks in her head—right when you called, I was looking at the same footage, only with a different dead woman!
“Let’s talk about it at home, okay? I’ll give you the full debrief, promise…. And, Lolly? Let me come pick you up, okay?”
“No way,” she says in her best not-a-care-in-the-world voice—to calm them both down. “I’ll get a ride. Yurko will take me.”
She does feel a true and urgent need for Yurko’s company, for their playful, easy banter in the car along the way, for the juggling of slightly off-color jokes and ironic comments about the day, their regular, pleasant emotional gymnastics, refreshing like a shower or a cup of coffee—one of the well-ordered world’s small rituals that give us the sense of security and stability. That’s exactly what she needs.
“Don’t worry about it, Aidy. It’s nothing.”
“I’m not so sure. Not so sure at all.” She could almost see the way he shakes his head, trying to get rid of the nagging idea that buzzes inside his head like a trapped fly. He looks so funny when he does that, like a boy—and he says, just like a little boy, “Promise me that you’ll be careful!”
She gives another operatic howl, more dramatically now, in a mezzo-soprano, out of Wagner.
“There’s always that margin of five percent, right?”
She shuts her phone and stares for another second into the blackness beyond the window, at her antipode fleshed out of the night by the trembling glow of a fire. The otherworldly, thunderously beautiful face with elongated Egyptian eyes and dark-blooded lips rises toward her, chin resolutely thrust up—and suddenly shivers with a quick chilly tremor, as if swallowing a sob that’s burst from deep inside.