That evening she fetched her favorite belongings and arranged them in a circle in Bumshed. Her ancient teddy bear, Raggedy Ann doll, her book on odd mating customs of the world, one on exotic computer viruses (for “safe” computing), her guitar, the picture of Maresy grazing, and the artificial carnation she had worn to the prom last year. The dance itself had not been great, her date had been gawky, she had been gawky too, being thirteen, but it had become her first significant dance, and now would be her last, so this symbol of it deserved respect. Maybe she would float it in the final basin of blood, her last deliberate act. A white flower on a red background, the opposite of a red rose on a white gown.
Then she fetched the knife.
But as she set up for it, she realized that she had forgotten the most critical thing: the basin. It was too late to fetch it; she would be risking the curiosity of her parents. Dad happened to be home this night, so naturally the two were arguing: “What’s the matter, dear—your paramour have a snit?” “What do you care, you tipsy lady?” That sort of thing. As it progressed, the language would get less polite, and finally they would come to physical contact and have sex on the floor. They fought verbally, not physically, but the sex was in lieu of hitting, and could get pretty violent. Her mother got bonus points for bitchiness if she made him cheat on his mistress. That made him angry, but the woman was sexiest when bitchiest, and he couldn’t resist. Colene hated that scene, but also was morbidly fascinated by it. Maybe if she had taunted Darius as impotent, the way her mother did her father, he would have gotten mad and put it to her hard. That tempted her now, in retrospect, but also repelled her. She did not like anything even hinting of rape. Yet at least she would have had him! Maybe then she would have felt obliged to believe him, and would have gone with him to his fabulous Land of Laughter. So what if she was a stranger there, unable to marry him? It couldn’t be worse than what she faced here.
So she had no basin, and was not about to go back to the house for it. What else would serve? She was definitely not going to spill her precious clean blood on the floor!
Her eye fell on the privy pot. Oh, ugh! Yet what else was there? And it had the remnants of his substance. That was about as close as any part of her could get to any part of him now. So it would have to do. What an image for a romantic song: Blood and Feces. A sure hit with the anti-establishment crowd.
She brought the pot and removed the cover. The stink smote her nose. Quickly she covered it again. Maybe she could put a clothespin on her nose, if she had a clothespin. Anything else? She leaned on the board over the pot, and set the knife down on it while she considered.
She concluded that it didn’t really matter. She would get used to the smell soon enough. So she sat cross-legged, in her nightie without panties, in a position that would have freaked Darius all the way out to the moon, dear man, drew the pot in to her, nestled it inside her crossed ankles, held her breath, lifted the knife, removed the cover board, leaned over, and paused.
Should she do the left arm first, or the right one? She was right-handed, so maybe she should do the right one first, so if her left-handed slash was clumsy she could do it again, and again until she had a proper blood flow into the pot. Then she could transfer the knife and do the left one with one excellent slice. Then she could grasp the far rim of the pot, keeping her arms locked in place, and watch the twin blood flows. It would be glorious!
So why was she hesitating? She was sure there was a reason. There always was.
She explored her motives, and found the relevant one. “Oh, Darius, I don’t want to die away from you!” she said. “I’d so much rather die with you!”
She pondered some more, then decided to sleep on it. She could slice herself as well in the morning as at night. Maybe she would have a chance to sneak into the house and get a better basin, after her parents had sex-sotted themselves out and turned in. It was worth a try.
She lay down, shivering in the cold. She wrapped the blankets around and around her, and curled up into an almost fetal ball. She knew she would not sleep, but at least she wouldn’t freeze.
SHE woke shivering, after an interminable, restless night. The floor was hard, the air was chill, and the blankets seemed to have holes that exactly matched the path of the draft coming in under the door.
But it was her troubled thoughts that caused the greatest disruption of sleep. She was reviewing her life, trying to total up the credits and the debits, to justify her decision to end it. In snatches of dreams she talked to Maresy: “Dear Maresy, today I decided to end it. Well, actually I decided several days ago, but today was the day to do it. Only I didn’t want to use a filthy potty for my blood.”
“You lost your nerve,” Maresy replied.
“No! I just want to do it right!”
“You really don’t want to die. You never did.”
“That so, smarty? Then what do I really want to do?”
“You want to love and be loved.”
Maresy was right. She always was. She knew Colene better than Colene knew herself, because she was more objective. Death was merely the most convenient escape from a life without love. That was why she had not been suicidal in the time she had known Darius. She had had love.
Now she had lost that love. Oh, she still had it, in a sense: she definitely still loved him. But he was gone, and he had explained how he couldn’t come back, because it had been a random setting. So even if he loved her—and she thought he did—it was no good. They were apart forever.
“Why do you think he loves you?” Maresy asked.
“Because he told me he did.”
“But men lie about that.”
“To get sex from women,” she agreed. “But he never had sex with me, even when I offered it. So he wasn’t saying it for sex. Oh, yes, he did want something from me! He wanted my joy. And I would have given him that, if I had had any to give. So he loved me, but couldn’t marry me without destroying me, and he wouldn’t do that. I believe him. I believe him. I believe him.”
“So you do love, and you are loved,” Maresy said. “So why do you want to die?”
That made her ponder for some time. She did have love; why wasn’t it enough? “Because it’s apart,” she said at last. “I want to love and be loved and have it close—like hugging close. Like kissing close. Like sex close. I want to be part of him, and have him be part of me, forever and ever. I want eternal romance.”
“You have foolish juvenile notions. It isn’t that way.”
“How do you know?” Colene shot back.
“I know from what you’ve read. The half-life of romantic love is one and a half years.”
“What do you mean, half-life of love?”
“Remember your physics? Radioactive materials keep losing their radiation, getting less dangerous but never entirely finishing. So you can’t say how long they last. But you can say how long it takes for their level of radioactivity to drop to half of what it was. That’s their half-life, which may be a fraction of a second, or millions of years. So when it comes to the declining excitement of love, the half-life is eighteen months, on average.”
“I don’t believe that! True love is forever!”
“Look at your parents.”
Accurate counterthrust! Where was the romance in her parents’ marriage? As far as she knew, there had never been any. There had just been absence and alcohol and occasional bouts of hostile sex. Yet there must once have been love, or else why had they married?
So apply the half-life law. Suppose they had fallen in love, and in six months gotten married. She had been born the following year. Presto: their love had halved by the time she appeared on the scene, and halved again in the next year and a half. How many times had it halved by now? Take her age, fourteen, and add that first year and a half before her birth: fifteen and a half years since their first love. Enough for ten halvings. Plus maybe a quartering, or whatever. So if their love had started at a hundred per cent, it had gone to fifty per cent, then twenty-five per cent, then—brother! How low had it sunk by this time?