Light, and ...
Waking up at dawn
[Eyyy I’m going to have to give these stories their own title. I’ll call them the Sanguine Experiment. The first two are the novella, The Sad Guy on the Bus. I had to divide it up to fit the Substack format. Then last weekend we had Eeyore and the Sanguine Spell (which needs work but by the time you clicked this maybe I’ll have knocked into shape a bit) and now this story, which takes place about 14 hours before Eeyore.]
Light and again light. Light through greasy, small panes marked with his handprints. Light through the fingers he held crossed in front of his eyes against the morning sun. Crossed, like the bare branches of the oak tree outside, knobby, like its smaller branches. But all light. Knobs on fingers like the joints in the floaters that sometimes plagued his eyes. He let his vision shift inward. The floaters moved in graceful jerks as they always had. He looked sunward again and could not distinguish floaters from fingers from the patterned, blue gleam of dawn.
He, too, floated, rising and falling —
Linen sighed.
It came over Walter Uhlmann that he was not floating but lying along top of Linen, lying so lightly that the rise and fall of her breathing lifted and lowered him.
The experiment had succeeded.
He had wanted to strip himself down to pure form, extension with no mass — he had made elaborate calculations —
He knew all along, of course, that the experiment was no more than a countdown to suicide, a way of giving measure to madness. But years ago, he really believed.
And now Linen, the Annoying Passenger (as he always thought of her), had given him the last component, the over-abundance of soul-stuff. The Gift.
He thought of it like that, with a capital letter.
Linen’s face was translucent, blurry; she was too far gone from mortal for him to make out much of her features. His general impression built up over the past months was of a tall, slender person with long corn-silk hair that clung to everything, the back of the seat, her coat, his shoulder when he had the misfortune to sit beside her on the bus.
A nosy do-gooder, probably. A nasty fetishist, possibly. Nasty fetishist was Walter’s term for anyone who did for kicks what he did by compulsion; vampire cosplayers, for instance, were nasty fetishists.
But she had not been any of those things. She had been so far outside his reckoning he did not know what she was. Having fallen into the devil’s bargain, she did not try to weasel out of it but went along cheerfully as she could manage, only asking Walter not to leave her at the end. He, in turn, set aside his distaste for her and tried to make her last hours pleasant.
And then at the last minute something snapped. He tried to give the Gift back.
So maybe the experiment did fail.
Not a complete failure, he thought, but — there was only enough soul-stuff for one of them. Either one take all or both go halves. He tried to work out where the flaw had wormed its way into his calculations.
A round shadow rimmed his vision, as if he was looking at the brilliant ring of an eclipse.
You will never think this clearly again, he told himself. He saw equations marching tier upon tier, rank upon rank.
He made a decision.
Then the aperture constricted to nothing and he did not remember what he had decided, or what the question had been.