Eros, Philia, Agape - By Rachel Swirsky Page 0,10
arm, she didn’t scream.
* * *
Lucian waited for a bus to take him to the desert. He had no money. He’d forgotten about that. The driver berated him and wouldn’t let him on.
Lucian walked. He could walk faster than a human, but not much faster. His edge was endurance. The road took him inland away from the sea. The last of the expensive houses stood near a lighthouse, lamps shining in all its windows. Beyond, condominiums pressed against each other, dense and alike. They gave way to compact, well-maintained homes, with neat green aprons maintained by automated sprinklers that sprayed arcs of precious water into the air.
The landscape changed. Sea breeze stilled to buzzing heat. Dirty, peeling houses squatted side by side, separated by chain link fences. Iron bars guarded the windows, and broken cars decayed in the driveways. Parched lawns stretched from walls to curb like scrubland. No one was out in the punishing sun.
The road divided. Lucian followed the fork that went through the dilapidated town center. Traffic jerked along in fits and starts. Lucian walked in the gutter. Stray plastic bags blew beside him, working their way between dark storefronts. Parking meters blinked at the passing cars, hungry for more coins. Pedestrians ambled past, avoiding eye contact, mumbled conversations lost beneath honking horns.
On the other side of town, the road winnowed down to two lonely lanes. Dry golden grass stretched over rolling hills, dotted by the dark shapes of cattle. A battered convertible, roof down, blared its horn at Lucian as it passed. Lucian walked where the asphalt met the prickly weeds. Paper and cigarette butts littered the golden stalks like white flowers.
An old truck pulled over, the manually driven variety still used by companies too small to afford the insurance for the automatic kind. The man in the driver’s seat was trim, with a pale blond mustache and a deerstalker cap pulled over his ears. He wore a string of fishing lures like a necklace. “Not much comes this way anymore,” he said. “I used to pick up hitchhikers half the time I took this route. You’re the first I’ve seen in a while.”
Sun rendered the truck in bright silhouette. Lucian held his hand over his eyes to shade them.
“Where are you headed?” asked the driver.
Lucian pointed down the road.
“Sure, but where after that?”
Lucian dropped his arm to his side. The sun inched higher.
The driver frowned. “Can you write it down? I think I’ve got some paper in here.” He grabbed a pen and a receipt out of his front pocket, and thrust them out the window.
Lucian took them. He wasn’t sure, at first, if he could still write. His brain was slowly reshaping itself, and eventually all his linguistic skills would disappear, and even his thoughts would no longer be shaped by words. The pen fell limp in his hand, and then his fingers remembered what to do. “Desert,” he wrote.
“It’s blazing hot,” said the driver. “A lot hotter than here. Why do you want to go there?”
“To be born,” wrote Lucian.
The driver slid Lucian a sideways gaze, but he nodded at the same time, almost imperceptibly. “Sometimes people have to do things. I get that. I remember when….” The look in his eyes became distant. He moved back in his seat. “Get on in.”
Lucian walked around the cab and got inside. He remembered to sit and to close the door, but the rest of the ritual escaped him. He stared at the driver until the pale man shook his head and leaned over Lucian to drag the seatbelt over his chest.
“Are you under a vow of silence?” asked the driver.
Lucian stared ahead.
“Blazing hot in the desert,” muttered the driver. He pulled back onto the road, and drove toward the sun.
* * *
During his years with Adriana, Lucian tried not to think about the cockatiel Fuoco. The bird had never become accustomed to Lucian. He grew ever more angry and bitter. He plucked out his feathers so often that he became bald in patches. Sometimes he pecked deeply enough to bleed.
From time to time, Adriana scooped him up and stroked his head and nuzzled her cheek against the heavy feathers that remained on the part of his back he couldn’t reach. “My poor little crazy bird,” she’d say, sadly, as he ran his beak through her hair.
Fuoco hated Lucian so much that for a while they wondered whether he would be happier in another place. Adriana tried giving him to Ben and Lawrence, but he