No sitting bolt upright in bed, sudden, clutching his chest.
It was just that he was suddenly awake, as completely as he’d been asleep (he thought?) moments before.
The future spread out broad and wonderful and full of promise. New Year. New warm body in his bed, temporary but appreciative, new things to accomplish.
They'd had him on triage for his past three mission, he'd told someone last night; he was ready for field work again. They'd put him on the front lines again. It had been a fluke, a fluke he'd privately feared was a sign that he was running out of usefulness.
He reached over to touch Peyton's frail freckled shoulder, and it was not there, and he stared at the harsh white sheets and up to the cramped dorm walls, disoriented, confused, alone. Without knowing why, he reached into his pocket and found there a strange missive, which he stared at uncomprehendingly.
He remembered waking up from the Tear amidst the red lights and the alarms and the distant yells and he remembered not remembering and that was when he shot out of bed, half-falling onto his desk, scrabbling desperately for a notebook and a pen and cursing his hands even though they weren’t yet shaking.
He didn’t want to forget. Fiona’s blade flared up suddenly in the darkness, and by the light of the runes he frantically wrote, cramming words into the tiny spaces of margins, making lists, sentences running one into the next without pause for punctuation. Too many things were dim and hard to snatch at, fragments of a forgotten dream already draining steadily out of his awareness, and these he attempted to get down first, shapeless and void though they were, emotions empty of context like the fragments he’d chased down in the Ruins and just as ephemeral. He closed his eyes while the pen still moved; he pulled up screens of text messages behind his eyelids and transcribed as much as he could recall.
And then he stopped, his throat tight, the pen suspended in his fingers above the page.
She hadn’t read it. She’d been kissing Clarice and Ben.
No time to think about it. No time for anything.
He wrote until his hand ached. He wrote until he’d run out of things to write, and then he re-wrote some things, more carefully, more clearly, in case they disappeared and his crazed shorthand proved difficult to interpret.
He read them carefully over the next few hours, and he reorganized, and collated, and with his obsessive attention to neatness and detail he tried to wrangle sense out of what had happened.
He thought of Peyton across the hall, and he pushed the thought aside, and with his cramping fingers he wrote: ”I know.” He’d written it before. He wrote it again anyway.
-*-
He'd been sitting on the ground for over an hour, and he hadn't yet mustered the willingness to say a single word.
The headstone said CLERISE WILSON but he knew that there wasn't a body beneath it; knew it was a formality designed for the living, not the dead. It was a mute and uncaring receptacle for confessions and tears, and it would never return a word. Talking to it, he felt, was ridiculous.
But he'd been sitting here an hour because talking to it was what he'd come to do, ridiculous or not, and he cleared his throat and hazarded a glance around to make sure he was still alone. The preternatural Island silence had betrayed no comings or goings. He lit another cigarette and cleared his throat.
"Christ," he said quietly. And for a few more minutes that was all he managed, proudly self-conscious, too stubborn to do what he felt he ought to.
"Never mind," he told the headstone eventually, and he pulled himself up and left.
-*-
Night two: he arrived this time with the same dog-eared notebook that now contained three cramped pages of tiny schizophrenic notes, with a pen and a bowl he'd stolen from the cafeteria kitchens, and he summoned Fionnghal and thrust the blade into the earth to light the page. Just has she hadn’t when he’d woken up, she made no mild complaint about this being beneath her dignity. She was conspicuously and graciously absent.
He had tried to write this ahead of time, but it had felt wrong, somehow. It wasn't as though she'd hear any of it, but somehow he felt strongly that it was like deleting an unsent text message to bring a sealed letter here and destroy it. Writing it by her headstone would be his way of speaking, the only one he had.
He wrote "Dear Clerise" at the top of the page, stared at it, and crossed it out.
He turned the page. He started over.
I know you didn't know me.
It came easier, this time.
Quote:
I know you didn't know me. I guess I didn't really know you, either, in any real sense. Nothing that happened to me--to us--was real, according to most of the people around here. But I remember it. We are the sum of the things we remember. Amity wasn't me, just like Licraesa wasn't you, because we didn't have that. We weren't ourselves, in the Tear, until we got back what we gave away. I guess the person that's about to say all this isn't really me either, by that standard. So: ******** it, I'm not sure who's writing this, or who they're writing to. And that's OK, for now. I’ll figure it out later.
I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling, but that's fine, because you know--or you would have known, I don't know--that I'm never very good at articulating my emotions anyway.
But I feel compelled to say thank you for everything you didn't actually do. Thank you for making me try to articulate my emotions anyway. Thank you for not bitching at me for smoking, because I remember I was dreading it and kind of hoping you would anyway. Thank you for telling me my cooking was delicious and backing it up by eating like a starving hyena even though I think that’s just how you always ate. Thanks for the relationship advice I never heeded, whether the glasses were on or not. Thanks for letting me be the person you came to when you weren't sure whether Leia's diapers should be that color. I appreciate your faith in my expertise about baby s**t.
Thanks for the ********, you know? You knew that was coming. Or would know. The me that you ******** was in much better shape but the me that I am would probably have been a better lay. I can’t remember--I can’t ******** remember, you have no idea how much this sucks; I spend so much time wondering why spooning was in the prenup but I think I know why, anyway--so I can’t say for sure. Sorry about that, if it’s true. And thanks for every time you let me stay over and pretended it was because I wanted to make you breakfast and not because I was terrified of being alone with my nightmares. I know you did this, even if I can’t remember it. And I know I did it.
I loved you. You knew that, because I told you all the time. Not in some bullshit star-crossed lover sense, either. I have more respect for you than that than to use that sense of the word love. It's a word we used a lot in my family and I don't have any reason to use it any more--I haven't said "I love you" to anyone but my daughter or my mother in years, and not enough to them; I haven't said it at all since I got here--but I loved you. I don’t remember all the things you did to make me love you but I remember that I did. And even though, as people keep insisting, none of what happened was real, I remember it. So I love you still. You're the finest friend I've ever had the privilege of knowing.
This is an exercise in stupidity, of course. I don't think that Peyton or Rep or anyone else is the same person they were in those memories, so I don't know why I'm excluding you. Maybe it's because you don't have any way to prove you're otherwise. Maybe it's because the one true memory I do have of you tallies so exactly with the false ones. The Clerise I did know, that I can barely remember, would absolutely have left me red gogo boots in her will. Same color as her lipstick.
(I kept them, by the way. I don't know why. I guess in the real timeline of my memories we couldn't even be called friends, let alone best friends. I damn sure don't think you'd have slept with me. But I appreciated the fact that you'd thought of me. When I first got here I was still in a mindset where I was sure not many people did. Things were complicated, and still are, when it comes to me being thought of.)
Maybe it's because I need you to have been that person. I need you to have been real. So I'm using you, just like, in a sense, I always did. I like to think that you'd be OK with it. You always were before.
Thank you for the boots, if nothing else.
I love you.
I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling, but that's fine, because you know--or you would have known, I don't know--that I'm never very good at articulating my emotions anyway.
But I feel compelled to say thank you for everything you didn't actually do. Thank you for making me try to articulate my emotions anyway. Thank you for not bitching at me for smoking, because I remember I was dreading it and kind of hoping you would anyway. Thank you for telling me my cooking was delicious and backing it up by eating like a starving hyena even though I think that’s just how you always ate. Thanks for the relationship advice I never heeded, whether the glasses were on or not. Thanks for letting me be the person you came to when you weren't sure whether Leia's diapers should be that color. I appreciate your faith in my expertise about baby s**t.
Thanks for the ********, you know? You knew that was coming. Or would know. The me that you ******** was in much better shape but the me that I am would probably have been a better lay. I can’t remember--I can’t ******** remember, you have no idea how much this sucks; I spend so much time wondering why spooning was in the prenup but I think I know why, anyway--so I can’t say for sure. Sorry about that, if it’s true. And thanks for every time you let me stay over and pretended it was because I wanted to make you breakfast and not because I was terrified of being alone with my nightmares. I know you did this, even if I can’t remember it. And I know I did it.
I loved you. You knew that, because I told you all the time. Not in some bullshit star-crossed lover sense, either. I have more respect for you than that than to use that sense of the word love. It's a word we used a lot in my family and I don't have any reason to use it any more--I haven't said "I love you" to anyone but my daughter or my mother in years, and not enough to them; I haven't said it at all since I got here--but I loved you. I don’t remember all the things you did to make me love you but I remember that I did. And even though, as people keep insisting, none of what happened was real, I remember it. So I love you still. You're the finest friend I've ever had the privilege of knowing.
This is an exercise in stupidity, of course. I don't think that Peyton or Rep or anyone else is the same person they were in those memories, so I don't know why I'm excluding you. Maybe it's because you don't have any way to prove you're otherwise. Maybe it's because the one true memory I do have of you tallies so exactly with the false ones. The Clerise I did know, that I can barely remember, would absolutely have left me red gogo boots in her will. Same color as her lipstick.
(I kept them, by the way. I don't know why. I guess in the real timeline of my memories we couldn't even be called friends, let alone best friends. I damn sure don't think you'd have slept with me. But I appreciated the fact that you'd thought of me. When I first got here I was still in a mindset where I was sure not many people did. Things were complicated, and still are, when it comes to me being thought of.)
Maybe it's because I need you to have been that person. I need you to have been real. So I'm using you, just like, in a sense, I always did. I like to think that you'd be OK with it. You always were before.
Thank you for the boots, if nothing else.
I love you.
He took a minute to read and re-read over what he'd written, resisting the urge to edit, to amend. It was too late, and made no difference anyway. He knew this was an exercise solely for his own benefit.
He added a single word as a postscript: eunoia.
His theory--the thing he'd told Peyton, the thing he'd told Jordan--that a person was a sum of his memories: that theory fell apart under the weight of what he knew now. He had nothing with which to replace it. He was, now, two people: the Taym he was, broken and inept and terrified of his uncertain future, and the Taym he could have been, self-assured and competent and so close to death that his future might not have existed.
Maybe this meant that everyone around him was two people as well. Maybe Peyton harbored a vindictive, sniping mean girl; maybe Rep was secretly housing a quietly bookish lab tech.
He looked down at the headstone with CLERISE WILSON engraved on it, and he folded up the pages neatly by the light of Fionnghal's blade, and carefully, after clearing a spot of bare, snow-damp earth, he lit his cigarette and then the letter. He waited until it caught, until the embers crept all the way up the sides, and then he dropped it into the bowl to let it burn. It felt cliche and ridiculous, but he’d found several mint condition books on the beach and others had turned up electronics and stranger things, and he did not trust the island, the strange island, not to toss up this letter into some stranger’s hands.
They weren’t words for strangers. They were words for her, for the one who’d kissed his wrist and told him she was going to hold him by force if she had to, who loved him and who he loved and who hadn’t read his text message.
He smoked calmly, several seconds elapsing in peace, and then, with the silence he'd learned to hone over years of crying too easily, he cried, pouring out all the mourning that hadn't been in him when Clerise had died, grieving the loss of a best friend and a lover and of himself as he could have been, respected and capable and surrounded by friends. He cried for a reality that had never been real, until the choking sobs were too powerful to still, and for the first time in a very long time he let the barrier break, and he wept as openly as a child.
-*-
When daybreak came Clerise's headstone was marred by a smiling face drawn in ashy fingerprints, and in front of it, on a patch of cleared, bare earth, someone had offered up (of all things) a single nicotine patch.
