Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,32

this. You shouldn’t be doing this, not on your—” she stops herself. “I kept meaning to—”

Alice keeps meaning to do everything in this apartment. It figures that when I try to help out, she feels she owes me an apology.

“It makes me feel useful,” I say. “Like I’m doing something useful with my life.”

“Do you want help? Giving meaning to your life?”

I don’t. The search for meaning is complicated enough without additional parties getting involved, but the dishes go by quicker with her help, though my hands keep shaking.

“Noah,” Alice says. She’s noticed.

I hand her a fork I just washed.

“Noah,” she repeats, louder. “When I came in here—you were smiling—you were thinking about him? Is that where you went?”

“I was thinking about doing the Macarena. It’s all in the hips.”

She lets out a sigh.

I am too much.

“It hurts,” she says. I glance up in worry; new PPV symptoms usually mean the virus is adapting to the medication. “You push me away a lot,” she explains. She dries the fork I gave her, replaces it in the silverware drawer. I listen to her thud up the stairs while in the background the rain patters lightly, the wind buffets our apple tree. Of course, the moment Alice leaves me, I miss her, I feel emptier. Her leaving is an ache in my chest, a shortness of breath. I want to yell after her, to tell her I’m terrible, to tell her I love her, but platonically. The sight of my blurry reflection in the kitchen window makes me queasy. Outside the rain falls harder, the apple tree bends. Without thinking I reach up, rub at my eye, get soap in it, and it burns.

“Fuck,” I hear myself say.

What does it even mean, to love platonically? Is that just a nice way of saying I’ll never love you?

I wash my eye out in the newly spotless sink.

“Thanks for the help,” I whisper to Alice, though she is upstairs now and can’t hear. I dry my face with the dish towel, after which I go up to my room, because my room has a door, and on this door there is a lock, and I use this lock to quarantine myself, so I can feel miserable in the perfect solitude of the gray walls that I call mine, without the risk of contaminating anyone.

Polo Club’s key is on my nightstand, exactly where I left it.

I pull a pillow over my face so I don’t have to look at it.

DREAMS OF DARWIN

Noah stumbles around and around Westing Lake, sipping at a bottle of vodka. His skin is peeling. He is falling apart, falling to pieces, which are scattered by the wind. On a hill overlooking the lake, a windmill spins.

A flock of finches appears on the horizon.

It grows larger.

Noah stares after the birds, brings the vodka to his lips. High above him, the windmill spins faster. It is a very picturesque windmill, and as the flock passes by, the windmill’s blades picturesquely cut the flock to pieces. A hail of severed beaks, wings, feathers meanders to the ground.

A talon clips Noah in the arm, draws blood.

“Ow,” he says.

Noah reaches to pick it up from the ground, holds it tight in his hand.

Overhead, a few finches have made it past the windmill. The males perform a mating dance to celebrate. The females accept or reject the males. Most of the males are rejected, and sulk. A small number of lucky couples proceed to mate and nest. The mothers lay eggs, guard them.

An occasional eagle drops out of the sky to make lunch of the happy parents.

Wind picks up, ruffling Noah’s hair. Trees sway. A nearby branch cracks, tips, spilling a nest of eggs. The mother squawks, either in dismay or out of habit.

The remaining eggs hatch, grow into finches, who take off in a much smaller, more agile flock that does not fall prey to the windmill’s blades, but that will eventually die out due to climate change. Noah knows he should feel triumphant at their momentary victory, but he does not. He bends down to bury that talon he picked up, only to find it has dissolved into dust.

“I will remember you,” he says to the bird, but when he turns toward the lake, he is surprised to find he has no reflection.

He did not notice his own disappearance until he was already gone.

BEGIN WITH A LIE AND PROCEED

A few days pass before I have the nerve to bring up Zach to Alice. To tell