When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Zoe was sitting on the loveseat.
“My flight was good,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
“How was your flight?” I asked, numbly.
She frowned at me. “What is going on with you?”
I held up a finger. “Just… give me a minute.” I went into the kitchen, a steady drumbeat in my ears. I opened and closed cupboards at random, looking for something I couldn’t name. I turned, shouting in surprise to find Zoe standing inches away.
“Christ! Don’t do that!”
“Sorry.”
I abandoned the cupboards and started opening drawers. One was filled with tea towels. Another held batteries, rubber bands, and pens. I jerked open the cutlery drawer and stared at the knives.
“What are you looking for?” Zoe asked.
I exhaled and shut the cutlery drawer.
“Babe?” she said. “Are you mad at me?”
“No.” I bent over, trying to catch my breath. “I just… I didn’t realize you’d left.”
“I’ve been gone for two weeks.”
“Wow. Okay.”
“Maybe you need to lie down.”
I straightened, slamming my head into the corner of an open cupboard door. “Fuck!” I shrieked, holding my head. “Motherfucking fuck!”
Zoe stared at me (or seemed to, behind the sunglasses). I checked my hand for blood, wished there was blood, but it came away clean. I stalked out of the kitchen, stumbling over Boris who’d fallen asleep in the living room, then grabbed my keys, and left the apartment altogether. The boy who’d gone missing was down by the elevator again, this time with his mother, who gave me a hostile look and pulled her son closer. I opened the door to the stairwell and started to climb, hauling myself up flight after flight until I came to a barred door with a sign reading “Maintenance only.” Breathing hard, I shouldered the door open. No alarm sounded, nothing to keep me from stepping out onto the flat asphalt roof.
The rain was gone, the roof completely dry. A weak orange light mounted beside the door buzzed. A breeze tugged me forward. As I approached the roof’s edge, the asphalt underfoot looked grainy and unreal. The low guardrail would have been easy to climb over. If I jumped, it would take less than five seconds to hit the ground. The street below looked like a poor rendition of an actual street, like something a child might draw. Far off, in the direction of the ocean, I could see a handful of small lights that must have been boats. I reached in my pocket, unsurprised to find that John Ayes’ note had returned. I still hadn’t looked at it directly, sensing that the information it contained was dangerous, that in reading it, I would become someone different. Of course, that did nothing to change my desire to see Jasmine, to wind myself around her like a strand of DNA. Before I could reconsider, I opened my hand and let the breeze sweep the paper away.
A crushing pain gripped my chest as I watched it vanish.
Back in the apartment, Zoe was putting on dinner. Not only had she changed her clothes, she’d cut her hair. Boris was sitting at her feet, waiting for a stray morsel of food to hit the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said, miserably.
She kept her eyes on the lettuce she was cutting. “About what?”
“Everything.”
She laughed. “Is that all?”
“I don’t mean to be this way.”
She peeled the plastic film off a frozen lasagna and tucked it into the oven. “It’s fine.”
“No, it isn’t. I hate the way that I treat you.”
“So treat me better,” she said, simply.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Annoyance flared up in me. “Okay? Christ, Zoe. What if I knocked you across the room right now? Would that be okay too?”
“You’d never do that.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
I pushed the heels of my palms into my eyes until stars came. I felt like I’d made Zoe out of cardboard and propped her up with a stick, like I was alone in the kitchen, talking to myself. But when I dropped my hands, I could see that she was crying behind the dark lenses, an actual person in real pain—pain that I’d caused. “Hey, don’t,” I said. “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry…” I put my arms around her and she buried her face in my chest, sobbing. I stared at the oven timer over her shoulder, watching the numbers tick down. The floor vibrated under us, as if from a small magnitude earthquake. I was about to ask Zoe if she’d felt it when I found myself swept off in a roar of colour and sound, a cataract of time ripping through the apartment, bringing me to a gentle hill studded with grave markers. The rectangular stone in front of me held my mother’s name and the span of her life. Nothing else. No poem or commentary on the woman she’d been. A second marker sat beside the first, etched with my father’s name and birthdate, the death date blank. Dad was on his back in the grass in front of his marker, directly above the spot where he would eventually be buried, his hands behind his head. A warm breeze blew through the graveyard, disturbing his thinning hair. Eileen had wandered off, playing some game that involved leaping over the markers.
“It’s funny,” Dad said, “how suddenly it happens. One second you’re up here, the next…” He trailed off, staring at the empty sky.
I watched Eileen, wishing I could join her.
“Somewhere up there,” Dad said, “there’s a meteor the size of a mountain. Bigger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Tumbling through space, headed straight for us. We all know it’s coming. We just don’t know when. But what if we did? What if we knew the exact moment it was going to hit? What would it change? What would we do differently?”
I shifted uncomfortably, feeling that he shouldn’t have been talking to me this way, as if I were an adult. Eileen was practicing her cartwheels now, spinning off through the graveyard like a flywheel.
“Nothing,” Dad answered himself. “Absolutely nothing. We’d do all the same things. Make all the same mistakes…” He frowned. “I wonder if it’s all still back there somewhere. Everything that happens. Everything we do. Like a groove on a record. Only we can’t see it because we’re stuck riding the needle.”
Little white moths fluttered around us in the grass. I turned my face to the sky. When I looked down, Dad was watching me with a bemused expression.
“Do you remember your mother?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“That’s probably for the best. You remind me of her so much sometimes, it’s scary…”
I understood by the way he said it, that this wasn’t entirely a good thing. He stood up and brushed the grass from the seat of his pants. We could hardly see Eileen anymore, but Dad didn’t seem concerned. Feeling suddenly lonely, I slipped my hand into his. He allowed the contact for a few seconds, then pulled away and gave me an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Enough of that,” he said. “It’s time to go home.”
Another jolt brought me back to the kitchen, with Zoe in my arms, the oven timer running down. I had the sense of being in multiple places at once: the kitchen, the graveyard, my old apartment, the school bathroom with Chad. I held Zoe at arm’s length, tunneling into that one specific moment. I took off her glasses. She gazed at me steadily, and I noted that her eyes were green.
“I love you,” I said.
The oven timer went off and suddenly Zoe wasn’t in my arms anymore, but on the other side of the room, taking the lasagna out of the oven. She set it on the stovetop beside a large knife. She had her sunglasses on again. I couldn’t remember returning them to her, or for that matter, if she’d told me she loved me back. I sat down at the kitchen table and we ate in silence, as one does after someone has died. Then we were in bed, Zoe underneath me, naked, letting me make love to her, Boris sprawled on the other half of the bed. At the moment of my climax, he shifted and heaved a long sigh. I lay still a moment, breathing hard, before withdrawing from Zoe, who gave me a peck on the shoulder and headed for the bathroom. I stayed where I was, listening to the shower, thinking about the note I’d tossed off the roof, wondering if it was too late to reclaim it. Zoe came back with one towel snugged up to her armpits and another turbaned around her head. She sat down on the bed and I waited for her to ask me what I was thinking about.