K Breese - Future Imperfect

She says, “A funny story, he once put a prayer into one of the satellites. Tiny, on this sheet of thin silver metal. Took him a few weeks to etch it. Prayer was the Mi sheberakh , for healing, for relief of suffering. Dad told me, after it launched and we were looking at the sky once, that he wanted something good, even a little something good, up there in the cold night. Those satellites, he said, were reckless. Just our hubris. He wanted to add some real weight to them.”

I look over at Vaux and want to kiss her. Soothe her the same as a prayer.

Without turning to me, Vaux says, “I got my smile from my dad.”

A few seconds later we’re surrounded by the unmistakable rumble of an airplane. I mention to Vaux that she should brace herself. The growl of the jet’s engines gets louder and louder. She takes my hand. Squeezes harder and harder as the noise of the plane comes closer and closer.

Squeezing until it’s on top of us.

And really, it almost is. The plane passes maybe a few hundred feet over us. For a few seconds, there on the hood of my car, we’re bathed in the red and white blinking lights of the plane as it glides overhead. Our hair blown wild by the rush of it. The car shaking. And then it’s over. The plane lands half a mile away.

Vaux says nothing but she smiles.

“Cool, huh?”

“You bring all your girls here?”

“Only the ones I think I’ll get lucky with.”

“Ha.”

“You must have some spot you take the boys? Your little nest?”

“I was never that practical. You bring that Belle girl here?”

“Belle?”

Vaux makes a face. “Yeah.”

“No. We weren’t like, you know.”

“Serious?”

“Right.”

Vaux says, “Okay.” Then asks, “So what did you discover out there?”

“There’s this whole world of people like us, Vaux. All of them with different abilities. All of them addicted and all of them lame. A world of losers who spend their days reading crystal balls and looking for lottery numbers. None of them is-”

“Did they help you?” Vaux interrupts. “Did they show you how to stop it?”

“Maybe. I’m getting closer.”

“Do you feel good about it?”

“Yeah. Underneath the bullshit, I think so. But Jimi, he’s known about these people too. He’s been to see them, asking them questions, getting his future-”

“Looking for his dad,” Vauxhall says. “That’s what this is about.”

“No, Vauxhall. It’s bigger than that. Did you know he killed his mother?”

Vaux’s mouth falls, her eyes spin wide. “What?”

“You never saw it?”

Vauxhall’s eyes start to water. Her lips tremble.

“I don’t know how come you never saw it. You saw everything leading up to it. The reservoir, where he swam in the snow and the ice. That day, he killed his mom. Pushed her out under the ice, weighed down with stones.”

Vauxhall swallows a few times, sniffs, wipes her eyes, says, “There were things always blocked out, you know? Times when scenes, memories, would just end suddenly like the film ran out. And other times when the memories were just so choppy. At first I didn’t think much about it, but…”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I don’t know who he is, do I?”

I shake my head. “I’m not sure you do.”

She moves close to me. Nestles up to me. Her face on my chest. Then she kisses me. I wipe her eyes and I kiss them. I kiss her face. Her neck. She kisses me back.

Then Vaux starts to say something, but the car rattles and her voice is drowned out by the throb of another plane engine.

In the flash of airplane lights, we kiss more and I move my hands along the lengths of her legs. My hands three places at once. The whole surface of them trying to take in the whole surface of her. I want to feel every inch and move up to her chest. These breasts that have enslaved her, the curves that make her a prisoner of stares, I have them in my hands and I want to sense every inch. I want to know every bump. Trace every vein. But we’re clothed. There are planes passing overhead. There are people watching us from their apartments. People in the sky.

We stop, both together breathless.

Vaux’s like, “Can we go somewhere else?”

On the way to somewhere else we stop at Safeway. For condoms.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The part of me that needs for Vauxhall to go cold turkey, the part of me that wants nothing more than to help her go clean, that part is gone. It’s frightening how I know that doing what we’re planning on doing will only make me her accomplice and yet I don’t care.

I’ve overruled myself.

In fact: I’ve got the devil in me.

We go to Sundial Park and I spread out a blanket from the trunk of my car under one of the fir trees at the far-west end. It’s late enough that the houses across the street are dark. No one on the road either. The cool air feels fresh and great on my skin. The moon is just a sliver, but it gives us the half-light we want. Just enough to make out shapes. We fold the blanket in half. Then we lie next to each other, both of us still as the park. We don’t talk and I run my fingers across Vaux’s face. Find her eyes. The faint brush of lashes. Her lips. Swelling. Warm. We undress each other. It’s not frenzied.

We kiss and then I ask Vauxhall if this is really what we should be doing. Even as I say it I know, deep down, that I don’t believe it. We need this. I need this.

“Why not?”

“The Buzz,” I say. My throat is parched.

“You don’t want to be with me?”

“I do. Want it more than anything.”

“What if I promise not to enjoy the high? Ade, I can do this. I’m only with you. It won’t be like that, like how you’re imagining it. Please.”

I can’t speak. My voice is gone.

Vauxhall giggles. “How about this is the last time?”

I think I growl. Something terrible inside me needing out.

Vauxhall laughs. “We’ll get married right after, okay?”

And I pull her to me.

There is no clawing and hissing the way you see people do it in movies. I am slow and convinced. We trace outlines, our fingers gliding and entwining when they meet the way planets spin around each other. I put my mouth on her. Vaux leans into my mouth. And then everything else, the supernova parts, happen magically. Our bodies take over and our minds shut off. I’m in the back of myself, watching myself explore. Watching myself relaxed and possessed at the very same time. Myself sweating and cooling off. Myself slow motion the way I am underwater.

What happens next is hard to explain. What it is is science fiction. It’s impossible mathematics. It can only be love.

My mind spins out above my body, above the roof of the house, and it goes up into the night between the stars and jumps through the clouds until the sides of everything come curling around me. The tunnel forms. It is a filigree of light and shadow and I move to the middle of it. The middle of everything.

The tunnel doesn’t end, but I take a detour out.

And what I see is not the future. I see Jimi.

Jimi talking to Grandpa Razor and they’re sitting at a White Spot diner on Colfax sharing a plate of pancakes and talking amiably. I can’t hear really what they’re saying, but it’s a heated conversation. Some snippets sneak through. Jimi, wearing sunglasses and a beanie, is forking pancake into his face and asking, “But does he really need to die?” And Grandpa Razor, his beard all slathered in syrup, saying, “Of course, that’s essential. You’ve done so well this far. Don’t let everything fall apart. Keep it hidden, keep it safe.” Things go quiet again, the dialogue getting all fuzzy, until Jimi stands up and storms out. Grandpa Razor, that fat man, just sits there laughing to himself.