Chapter 1

                                                                                          I                                                                                               


The door is open; it's always open.
He enters the room; it's the same room, every time.
There are others, but he can't see their faces; he has never seen them, but he knows who they are.
He sits down.
The projector clicks as it switches on.
The lights go out.
Everyone is quiet.
He focuses intently on the screen.
This might be conjecture; this might be a dream.
The film rattles unsteadily like an old roller-coaster as it tumbles from the reel and falls into place.
At first, the images are nondescript, simple geometric shapes that dance on the screen like shadow puppets.
But slowly, the indeterminable silhouettes sharpen into the distinct images of two people.
Next, their hands, arms and the rest of their bodies come into focus.
They are face to face, as if playing a game of chess.
They lean across the table, falling into each other, at once the same being, and then two, back and forth, as if on a seesaw. First he, then she, weighted down by the gravitational pull of reality. When one is there, the other is not, and vise versa .
Again, they move closer to each other, almost reaching the same place, and they are once again pulled apart, unable to resist like waves drawn back to the shore by the moon’s unrequited seduction. And like the waves, that always return to the sea, they surrender and curve into each other’s existence.
Then gradually, like a piece of paper that is torn in half a little at a time, they are pulled apart and two faces slowly materialize.
The girl, a pretty brunette whose beauty lies in the simplicity of her subtle, country smile, stares across the table. Her face, though slightly cherubic, and still only the face of a child, is old enough to reflect a life that has already seen its share of tragic experiences, whose effects are discernible by the tiny lines on her forehead and around her mouth, and by a passive inflexibility that veils her entire countenance, as if the nerves that allow one to express their facial emotions have been severed.
But he does not care about that, for it was her eyes that made him love her, and they are still as bright as the first time he saw them; unaffected by time or circumstance, somehow separate from the rest of her being, detached and incomprehensible like stars that are so faraway they can never be reached, but the heat and light they omit is blazing and hot enough to reduce his whole world to ashes. They are like mirrors where you are always able see yourself so clearly, as if it is the first time you have ever glimpsed your own reflection. And there, inside those two tiny spaces, he found the whole world, and realized why he is alive; she was his reason for living, and had been since he was fifteen.
As the dimming light of the early June evening shines on her hair, it reveals soft stains of reds and blondes dispersed throughout the dark waves, that dance and shimmer as she moves like sunlight on a swift, clear river.
A boy of nineteen, almost a man, sits across from her. His black hair is sleeked back with gel and shaved on the sides, the thin sideburns descending into a rounded, perpetually youthful face that is peppered with the light stubble of a beard, sparsely distributed across the pale, almost glowing cheeks like mud spatter.
They stare at each other, oblivious to the implications of every action, ignorant to the importance of every move they make.
This is the crucial point.
Until now they have been children.
Steam rises from the cup of coffee she grips so tightly that her knuckles have turned white. He reaches across the table for her hand. It is trembling, but not from the cold. She pulls away and grasps the cup of coffee, awkwardly. It is out-of-place in her hands, as often are the props of adulthood in the hands of the young.
“Do you care?” he asks. “Have you ever cared? For five years I have given you everything, even when I got nothing.“
His lips are out of synch, the voice wavering and trembling.
He watches her eyes for any sign of expression, any lapse in her stone facade that will give away her thoughts, but the silence hangs on her lips like icicles, as it always has, each time this scene is played.

None of it changes, but still he watches, every time hoping that this will be the one time that she says what he has waited for her to say, and everything after will be changed. He watches for that tender beat of the butterfly's wings that disturbs the changeable continuity of the past.

Every replay seems like the last chance.

This is not the shy, exciting silence between two people who have just met, overcome with the furtive speechlessness of a flowering romance, saying all that needs to be said with a glance, or a smile, so sure that in the future there be time enough to say everything that needs to be said.
This silence is different.
It is like a deafness. There are plenty of important things left to say, but not to each other.
They can no longer hear each other’s voices. It is like the eerie stillness after a storm that hovers over the scattered debris of obliterated lives.
Everything that could be said, has been said.
Like sound, not all silence is the same.

She turns to look out the window. There are rolling hills in the distance that stretch for miles in smooth undulations, gracefully swelling and receding. The cattle’s slow moos rise from the fields, mellow as oboes, and the sun sinks, slowly, silvering the tip of a pine-covered mountain with its flickering, purple light at it sways and dances sinuously like a wind-blown candle flame.

“I know it’s not your’s.”

“How can you be sure? Last week you were sure it was.”

“I’m leaving with him, tonight. We are going back to New Orleans,” she says.

In this silence the tick of his wristwatch is loud as a sonic boom, every second that passes shakes the walls and the world begins to tremble. Corey lingers in the distance, waiting for her.

“How can you go with him, after what happened before?”

“He’s changed.”

“I saved you from him once, I can’t do it again,” Andrew says.

“You won’t have to.”

As the walls start to fall away, there is nothing left except the three of them. The sky, the ground and everything disappears, leaving them untouched, as if they are all that survives of the physical world.

Corey motions for her.

She floats across the nothingness, weightless, gracefully as a swan moving across the undisturbed water of a pond. She looks over her shoulder at Andrew and takes Corey’s hand.

Her eyes (the bluest eyes Andrew has ever seen, beautiful and destructive, alluring like the dangerous, beguiling current of the clearest river), slowly emerge from the oblivion of this memory. They shine like the unending light from a bright, enduring singularity; the one star that lights this crumbling world, a perpetual explosion full of hope and light and all that is good and beautiful.

The silence is broken by the soundtrack, crackling and out-of-sync, skipping in places where it has been scratched.

At first, only voices, sopranos and altos a capella, then suddenly, a bow is pulled slowly across the taut strings of a violin like a knife across the pale, soft flesh of an exposed throat. Violently, the elongated half-notes are wrenched from the tight-stretched strings like the ear-splitting screams of the dying. The voices crescendo and decrescendo, they hold the last note until they lapse into silence, and a single voice, (obscured by static and broken up like a broadcast that has hung for years among the clouds) raspy, and weak, as if it has been screaming forever, takes over as the story begins.