In November Mindy ceases to be real, which is great. She haunts him. She becomes each girl he drives by; she slips her name between words. She sets herself to music.
She’s looking forward to going off alone, too, until she begins to understand that time is passing between these moments. Sometimes minutes. Sometimes months.
Mindy tries to look away, to watch how the world is changing. She can’t get very far. Things accelerate like those videos of flowers growing; her glimpses get shorter: a minute, ten seconds, a second.
Sometimes she’s just a name, blinks of hearing, scattered over years.
“Death is so loud!” The pigeons puff and shuffle; Spiro pulls the stitch through awkwardly, left-handed. “Maybe for other people it’s quiet. You’d want it to be. In bed. When you’re old.” He jerks out a smile.
The patch is almost done. He bites off the thread and blows on it, waiting for the superglue to dry.
“No,” he says, “for me it’s all roars and bangs and whistles. Bullets and trucks, hot fires and mudslides. Showoff!”
The pigeons scatter. Spiro laughs and hauls his ragdoll body up, testing his right arm on the wall. It only leaks a little.
Patricia was wearing these jean shorts ten years ago but she’s still got the legs for them, right? Yeah. She wouldn’t be getting waitress work otherwise.
Her boyfriend Burke’s going to get her car running again soon, but meanwhile the bus is screwing her over. Her hands flick and flutter: white moths in a bubble. They have long Lee nails with French tips like you’d get in a salon.
Patricia’s face is wound and gathered like tie-dye around her unhappy mouth. Her eyes are a dark, thick blue, like the water in Jacques Cousteau books, too blue to be real.
“Duffy?” The rabbi touches his shoulder. “It’s getting late.”
Duffy’s kneeling. His lips are moving.
“We don’t really do vigils?” says the rabbi. “I know you need to grieve for Saul in your own way, but it’s…” Duffy hasn’t looked up. The rabbi sighs. “Hit the lights when you leave, okay?”
And Duffy is fighting the demons of orthodoxy, of their refusal to believe. His prayers are bursts of light and force against them; he is burning, burning. The time to save his lover’s soul is so short.
This aye night, he whispers, this aye night, fire and fleet and candlelight.
Above, Quan-Ti doesn’t turn around. “I expected the blonde boy,” he says.
“I’m lighter,” Toe mutters.
“Do you even know anyone in China?” He does turn, now, tapping the bronze dagger on his lips. “Did they ask for your help?”
Toe glares.
“Where were you when they burned four thousand years of art? Tortured monks? Locked up authors? Where were you in Tiananmen Square?”
“Eating crayons.”
“Even if you could stop me, how do you expect to erase the past?”
“We’re fucking nerds, man,” says Toe, “our job is the future,” and Hugo’s sword falls smack in his open hand.
Hugo bellows a laugh. “How many of you do I have to throw off?”
“You came into my home,” says Daniel. “You threatened my family.”
“I also killed your friend,” says Hugo.
“Sure,” says Daniel, “that too.”
The sword comes up lower than Daniel expected, so he changes plans and runs up the blade. Putting his knee in Hugo’s face feels good.
Hugo screams with his mess of a mouth and brings it up again. This time Daniel steps aside and touches the point on Hugo’s wrist that opens his fingers. The sword flips up, way above them, end over end.
The chimpfall in Puebla is like dew, not rain: around four a.m. they start to accrete on awnings and car roofs, anything flat that stays cool. But they don’t evaporate in the sun.
“They just sit in the street,” grumbles the chief, “not like we need streets in the morning, and eventually they move off some random way. To make room for the next ones! I’d blow their monkey brains out–”
“But they’re endangered,” Chili John nods.
“I’m ’bout to endanger ’em. I don’t know what you’re planning, stranger, but…”
“Can’t fight spontaneous generation, Chief,” grins Chili John, “without a degenerate.”
Cosette walks through the door of one hundred North one hundred Up and the walls are gone.
It’s flat, empty and cobbled, twenty feet wide, two yellow lights and some dead leaves. There’s a bench and a sign that says 12. The tracks below are exactly as long as the platform. Beyond the platform, it’s black.
Her footsteps sound different: this place is open, echoless. Cosette walks to the bench and tucks the last map page inside her jumper. She sits with Millicent on her lap. She watches a lonely moth whirl around one cast-iron lamp, brave against the dark.
It’s easy to make an episode a marathon, when they’re there to watch. Elaine and Sterling get up on Saturday and the VCR’s still on, so why not see what happens next? They pull up blankets. “I’m gonna shower,” says Elaine, “you want a pizza?”
Sterling sorts her brother’s fansub tapes, stacks of them, yellowing meticulous labels. “Nobody does anything in anime,” he laughs, “without doing it,” and Elaine thinks maybe they’re the same. Face forward, hands splayed, action lines through the TV forever! There will always be Bubblegum. There will always be pizza. Grace, grace, and the lie of summer.
“Please, sit down,” croons Madam Zaganza, Personal Readings.
Holly stands. Her hand’s still bandaged. “My friend Rowan,” she says, “she did this.”
“Good! Then you know to shuffle–”
“I caused the drought,” Holly blurts. “I killed all those people.”
“Oh, honey,” says Zaganza. She pulls off the turban and becomes a tired man in lipstick. “Sit down. You know how many people have told me that?”
“I’m different,” Holly whispers. “I was–Rose and Roger–and the rain doesn’t fall–”
“It falls on the just and the unjust.” Zaganza smiles sadly. “You don’t change the weather, honey. The weather changes you.”