2312

“It’s too hard for me to remember. When I hear it, it always surprises me. I mean, I recognize it when I hear it played, I’ve heard it ten thousand times, but if I’m not hearing it out loud, I couldn’t whistle you the tunes from memory, they’re too… too elusive, I suppose, or subtle. Glancing. Unexpected. And they don’t seem to repeat. Listen-it keeps moving on to a new thing.”

“Beautiful,” she said, and whistled another nightingale descant.

After a long while, he turned the music off. The silence was immense. Again she could hear her breath, her heartbeat. It was thumping away in its double thump, a little faster than normal, but no longer racing. Calm down, she thought again. You’re marooned in space, they will rescue you eventually. Meanwhile here you are, and Wahram is with you, and Pauline. No moment is ever fundamentally different from this one. Focus and be calm.

M aybe to say that someone was “like this” or “like that” was just an attempt to stick a memory to a board where you organized memories, like butterflies in a lepidopterist’s collection. Not really the generalization it seemed, but just a stab at understanding. Was Wahram anything like what she might say about him, if she tried to say something? He was like this, he was like that-she didn’t really know. One had impressions of other people, nothing more. Never to hear them think, only to hear what they said; it was a drop in an ocean, a touch across the abyss. A hand holding your hand as you float in the black of space. It wasn’t much. They couldn’t really know each other very well. So they said he is like this, or she is like that, and called that the person. Presumed to make a judgment. It was such a guess. You would have to talk with someone for years to give the guess any kind of validity. And even then you wouldn’t know.

When I’m with you, she said to Wahram in her mind as they floated there together, waiting, holding hands-when I’m with you I feel faintly anxious; judged; inadequate. Not the kind of person you like, which I find offensive, and thus behave more like that part of me than ever. Though I want your good opinion too. But that desire I find irritating, and so contradict it in myself. Why should I care? You don’t care.

And yet you do care. I love you, you said. And-Swan admitted to herself-she wanted him to feel that way when he was with her. That way-is this what love was, this desire for a feeling that remained unclear even when felt? Is that why people sometimes thought of it as a madness? The words stay the same, even the feelings stay the same, but there are slippages between the words and the feelings, hard to track. The desire to know, to be known, to be cherished for what you are and not what others think you should be… But then, what you are… It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error. And thus they must be some kind of fool. And yet it was precisely that misplaced love she wanted. Someone who would like you more than you do. Someone who likes you despite yourself, someone more generous to you than you are. That was how Alex had been. And when you see that, when you feel that-feel loved beyond justice, from some kind of generosity-that sets off certain other feelings. A kind of a glow. A spillover. It caused something to start that felt reciprocal. A mutual recognition. The hall of mirrors again. Set a lased beam of light between two mirrors, back and forth the beam bounces, two parts of something more; not just the beast with two backs (though that too, for sure, and a great thing, a great animal) but something else, some kind of… pairing, like Pluto and Charon, with the center of gravity between the two. Not a single supra-organism, but two working together on something not themselves. A duet. A harmony.

S he whistled one of the other Beethoven tunes Wahram had often whistled in the tunnel; she still had trouble sorting which was which, but knew this was the other song of thanks, the one after the big storm, when all the creatures come back out into the sun. A simple melody, like a folk tune. She chose it because it was one of the few tunes Wahram could whistle a descant to, forging an elaboration he said was in the original. He fired it up and joined in. He wasn’t as strong as he had been before, though he hadn’t been strong then. His whistle had pain threading it like a golden wire. He was not much of a musician, in all truth. But he had a good memory for the pieces he loved; and he loved them.

She took off and trilled all around him, and he fell back into the main melody in relief. Maybe that was what duets were all about.

“Maybe I love you,” she said. “Maybe that’s what I’ve been feeling these past few years. Maybe I just never knew what it was.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Did he mean that maybes don’t count, or that maybes are better than nothing?