A Universe Akilter

“But you don’t love me.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you loved me, you ought to have greeted me with ‘miss Soli what a wonderful—take note of that word, wonderful—evening it is’ instead of a simple ‘hello.’ One can greet any acquaintance with a mere ‘hello.’ It is almost as bad as ignoring one altogether.”

“I don’t think that can be the case,” I tried to protest, but unfortunately the lady had already decided on her feelings and nothing would change them.

“I think you want me dead,” she proclaimed, in a loud, quavering voice; and all around her the ballpoint-pen eyes of her associates elongated toward us in mawkish interest. Behind feathers and fans, I could hear the trumpet-loud belch of gossip approaching. With every train-whistle shriek of the lady’s tirade—here is something like it, as far as I can recall:

Degenerate! Oh! Despicable! And not even washed your shoes! What reason did you have for leaving me that evening last June, when we were at the train station, waiting for the mail? Did the mail even arrive? No! not a bit! I have found certain letters in your own hand—oh yes, I’ve found them. Do you want to see?

Not letting a moment of my protest daunt her, she procured them: from out of her long furred parasol; reams and reams of the stuff all in brown ink, sludge-brown and beetled, as lame as an orange half-digested. “Explain. This.”

The utter silence was as curious and uncertain as a spider’s laugh, and quite as tenacious.

“I cannot,” I said, seeing the evidence before me. I stammered. “I cannot.”

“You see, you have treated me wrongfully. Take the damn things. Take them all!” She pushed them into my hands. Piled and dripping with the smell of overseas ash and heavy. They fell out of my paralyzed fingers, tracing circles around my shoes, which had been muddied from the rain last evening. On the way back from the opera, miss Soli had been in such fine spirits—it had been a flash of something brilliant in her that captivated me; and I can recall wondering if the hard times between us were over at last.

Still the papers were a complete mystery to me, for I had not written them. Yet it was without a doubt in my own hand, with my own name at the bottom, signing, dear, my love, little darling—to a lover I had never had!

The laughter began roiling. On every side, roiling, and the righteous fury of lady Soli made her face as red as a radiator painted red.

“Don’t! Not one word!” She turned to her fellows. “He says not one word in his defense! Have you ever seen such a reprobate? I feel wounded, utterly wounded—” her great black lashes clumped together as she blinked; her face shimmered with fat, blobby tears. They dotted the papers at my feet. They seemed to have enough force that I was not surprised when I gathered up the entire handful and edged out the door, because the salt of her tears repelled my hydrophobic spirit. But it was raining outside. The porch, a midden of a thing, stopped nothing. From the brim of my hat, the rainwater laughed at me, slipping over the words in my hand. I stuck everything in the pockets of my greatcoat until they were bulging open and I felt ill—sick and ill! The back of my throat was sour and scratched with sweetness. I walked out to catch a cab, and the mud slopped over my shoes. The laces were caked in mud. The sky was caked in a grime of smog and rain, stuck and cracked to the earth. By the time I had managed to pay the requisite amount, I was shivering, and I did not stop even as the heating turned up and great gusts of dry air blew into my eyes.

When one has just had a most public and humiliating rupture between one’s mistress and oneself—for reasons of a person of no existence—there is really nothing for it but to become familiarized with the crime. So having taken my things from our shared rooms to a hotel on the other part of town, I set all the letters upon the bed and tabletops and half-draped over the frowning face of the mini-fridge, and as they dried, timorously, I took off my coat and puddled it in a heap on the floor. I took off my shoes, and my socks which were grimed up to my ankles in an unpleasant arc, and my shirt, and my trousers, and my smallclothes, and my hat. Until at last, wearing nothing, I went into the bathroom to take a shower and found that the water was cold. Colder than the rain in fact, and so, staring into it, my spirit quailed. I couldn’t do it: step into that icy stream. It was more than I could bear. Instead I wrapped myself in a towel, still sweating and shivering and unclean, and returned to the relative emptiness of the hotel room.

The blinds were half-open. The chicken-colored light smeared its way through the fogstained glass. My toes shuddered on the miserable carpet. I had not eaten anything but hors d’ouvres at the gathering. I had been planning to make up for my lack of breakfast and lunch with lady Walstone’s famed dinner. But now my stomach rebuked me.

I sorted through the letters by date in order to read of the affair I had had.

It started last summer, or rather at that time when spring is ending and summer has just opened its arms in welcome. I can recall that at the time, miss Soli and I were staying at the Hotel Rip. It was when her interest in cello had just begun to fade, I recalled, and the music that had filled our speech became laced with silence. Still the air had been bountiful and I had never seen bluer skies. Every day, if one cycled down the path, one could look over a small stretch of white sand dunes into a glittering expanse, and there were crowds of tourists at every corner—ourselves part of the throng of that unwilling designation.

Just as I read this, I recalled everything that I had written, but I knew that I had buried the letter in the sand, never to be found. Yet in its strange, formless, inexplicable way, I knew that she had answered me and written back, in a universe slightly akilter to this one.

I wished fervently that in some way I could read her letters as well, this nameless shameless girl, who lead a different me to start my next letter in such a manner:

This other version of me, whom I will henceforth refer to as the fool, was already leaping headlong into a tête-à-tête with our mysterious lover. Yet myself, I had picked up my pens, stuck my hands back into my pockets, and walked back up the long slope. I had picked up my bicycle and began skimming over the snap-pea clatter of cobbles taking me ever further from this mysterious her. I did not know what I was missing. I had no pang of regret in my heart, I did not glance back even once at that late-noonday sun and the black sharp shadows. The trees above whispered unfathomably, the red riots in them crowing, the marble top lawns falsely plastic shimmering. Then there was a light and I had to wait at the curb. The sweat on my skin dried as the wind of that rushing force paused, as I, the cyclist, was demoted to pedestrian, waiting in the heat, to be beset by flies. I waved my hand sharply and someone on the other corner glared at me, as though I had been gesturing rudely. The cool refreshment of water lay behind me in the ocean, the soft shadows of a bed in the villa, and in the town was the possibility for ratiocination. Ugh! What a bore, all of it (I had thought) full of my own artful ennui.

I should have done any one of those things, but instead I rolled into town and bought a newspaper, and cured my spirit’s malaise by depressing it with knowledge of the world’s spiraling futility.

Such went the missive, and I could taste the lightness of that previous summer, though the drizzle had grown colder outside the single stale room. The bed was flat and pressed down, where I lay piled upon squelching towels. Alternating bands of light darted, spinning, through the low blinds, as car after car went past, lighting up the empty darkness in a somber tone, red light hollowing its way over the dip of my own angled nakedness. I shivered, and the blank ceiling was still, and the heater blew a pallid steam that barely reached my toes. Nothing but a candle remained on the table, and the papers, crumpled and drying, tossed with the scent of travel.

How ever did I fall from such a whimsical height, I wondered. In that nothing-matters-mood, everything was sensible, and there was no such thing as the slow, creeping embarrassment of my situation. If only I had truly written these things. Perhaps the me-that-had was now sitting somewhere else, safe under a blue sky.

What a strange difference I found, looking back at a version of myself that had never once existed, except indeterminately. For when I had watched the selfsame butterfly I had only felt the crushing weight of the minutes and an uncomfortable daydream about flinging the chocolate sauce into miss Soli’s face. Yet here went the fool on a lengthy tangent about mythology, likening his lover to the sea. If in fact she was the sea, I wondered at his recklessness in diving toward the waves, wondered, in fact, how it was that we had diverged in such a crucial respect: that he made mention, even in jest, of reinventing himself as a river spirit to join her.

It was a hard irony that seemed particularly pointed, what with the stiffened papers still damp along the edges, and the incessant rain outside my roaring door. With one hand upon the pile that had begun to form as I sorted the missives by date, I glared outside at the soddenness and the muck and the cold. It is one thing to be enamoured of the sea on a fine summer’s day and another to be drowned in icewater.

I left the papers behind for a time, got up and began fiddling with the disdainful coffee maker, shoving the packet open and spilling what hardly resembled beans so much as strong-smelling dust and waiting for the water to boil. The machine churned and stopped, churned and stopped, boiling at the slowest pace and wheezing in between as though finding the whole situation above its meagre abilities, and myself beneath its notice. Then when at last the coffee appeared, it was scalding and torturously tasteless, even filled with ripped packets of cream that I turned into novelty wastebuckets for the pet cricket I had never owned.

Smog. A blend of smoke and fog—a “fog” created of atmospheric pollutants. Something that crept slowly down the sodden streets and rose like an uncomfortably strong ocean. Inside the room, the gas-lamps’ wavering reflections did nothing for the uncertain yellow that pieced itself under the door and filled the entire space with a thick and tepid claustrophobia.

I took a sip of scalding coffee and regarded the room. In this saturated night, with the candle burned low, it was nothing more than an orbit, a cubit or a qubit of indeterminate size and shape. The dank paper smelled of mildew and soot; the windows were streaks behind the blinds, the bed, with its surfeit of pillows, was nothing but a galley moving ponderously through the dark. I had tried to avoid the sea, but the sea lapped in through the figmented, pigmented cracks between door and window, layered in air. I was still hungry, though the strong stench of the coffee that filled the room did something to assuage it. It was growing warmer, at least, and with a blanket thrown over my shoulder I absently picked up the next letter I had written, perusing it between sips of coffee that grew steadily cooler as my body warmed, the simple act of heat-transference one that reminded me of the impossibility of thinking one untouched by the world.

He truly was a fool, then; Love’s Fool. But the novelty had worn off, and something of the general hopelessness of existence had impressed itself upon him. Caked in melodrama, as usual, but he bared his sadly beating heart to the whims of the Capricious. There was an honesty on this page that almost unseated me, this something which had started as a lark, a sweet whim, an indiscretion to while away a deciduous summer. The other me, the Fool, had with every continuous word traveled further from the usual tracks of my own thoughts, until now it was less like looking into a wash-house mirror than a fun-house, and wondering at the strange distortions it implied. Like waves, certain parts expanded and contracted with each movement, until the head and all the limbs went jumbling together into a merry jig and lost all coherence, all semblance of the selfhood I prided myself on.

For the mind, which had opened itself to the sea, had begun to change its shape, as a coast does. Such a bewildering transformation had occurred in a universe akilter, while I meanwhile had dreamt of walking slowly to work in the morning, and finding that I had forgotten my hat.

Locked in the stillborn gloom, I pressed at the edges of the water-stained paper with my fingers and thumbs until it crackled like the snap of ice. The mug was empty; only a soft stain remained. As I placed the letter down, and drew the blanket more firmly around my shoulders, I considered the Fool’s words. He was right, of course, about the fluidity of meaning. Furthermore, some may place secrets within their works, while others will stumble through just happy to have placed a few sentences into a coherent context, only to find that others have created an entire latticework of secret meaning. But, surely, I wondered, interpretability only goes so far. To go further would be to strike out onto one’s own adventure, breaking the mass of the art’s finished illusion. Truly, unless one wished to have utter control over the end-point and the meaning of the personal existence which was the work, and therefore denied it out of base fear, one would have to admit that piece inspires piece until what is left is a continual work of references made, understood and misunderstood, used and misused, bartered and stolen, written and rewritten and transformed; and that the work—all work—is a mutable thing, created by many, influenced by time and place.

This missive was just as I expected, although in my reality I had spoken of it to no one. I began to wonder, in fact, if this alternate version of events was really a sunnier plane, or merely the same one put through contortions. For if, even in the kindest mirror, all blemishes are still accounted for, then why should anyone wish to be on one side or another? True, the Fool had his Sky—I also had a sky, and one that was invading my room even now with its yellow-sea grit. I had called it a flight of fancy; yet the mire had followed, as soon as the floodgates were opened to truth, and the Fool opened his mouth to a creature kin enough to listen.

These letters were becoming less and less amusing to me as I read. And now, finding my own failure of a half-finished work thrown back in my face—“Down in the Sungrove Garden” being the only play I’d managed to continue last summer, in between the increasingly ill-advised jaunts with miss Soli and the ever-more-frequent trips to the café to brood—it was nothing but a mockery. I had consoled myself for some time, during those languorous afternoons, when I drifted about the summer-house peering through gauzy curtains, that if the play fell through I still had miss Soli, and that if the ardour between ourselves had cooled I at least still had her patronage. It was really for that reason that I had not broken things off at once, and—in a tryingly convoluted manner—the same reason I had not been able to write. For I consoled myself the other way as well, based upon whim—that if miss Soli were to tire of me, as it seemed likely she would, I would have, at least, a new masterpiece to unveil to the public. Instead, I had nothing but a collection of love-letters which could not even be salvaged as a poetic device and published as a bunch.

Yes, I considered it—pulling together these water-stained pieces of another life and trying to pass them off as my own genius. But it was worse than pointless. For not only did they lack titillation, they contained too much of my own maudlin thoughts, and to place them out for a penny for the public to look over would be a worse embarrassment than having to read them myself. In fact, I did not have to read them, and yet something compelled me to peruse the stack, some interest in what had changed and what was still running parallel, some morbid preoccupation with the Fool’s existence.

But I needed a break. I put the paper down, pulled my blanket even further about my shoulders, and went poking around the dingy room. There was an ice-box, sans ice; there was, of course, the bathroom with its cold water, and a great profusion of novelty soaps, there was the mirror which showed a wavering reflection, a pinched and tired face which seemed neither to have eaten nor slept. There was no miracle hiding among the folded towels or the rolls of toilet paper or the small tube of toothpaste. I turned on the water, again, hoping futilely that it would have warmed; but it was still nothing but ice minute after minute. I turned it back off, and watched the condensation drip down the tile.

There were no slippers, and my feet were cold.

I wandered back into the other room, closing the door.

I once read a book—I don’t remember the name—in which a woman did nothing but lie on the floor and consider making tea. It was a contrived set-piece, for a book, though as a play it would have been a tour-de-force. At the time I had chuckled at how contrived it was. For what would cause humanity, which of its own nature thronged together, to separate into pieces—and how long would such isolation really last?

All of a sudden I was struck with the knowledge that I needed to leave this claustrophobic room. And yet there would be no leaving while the air was still as thick as soup and as unbreathable. I was stuck here for the near future, and I had not even thought to bring a book, or entertainment, or even a few stolen éclairs. This severance from the world I had so derided was now foisted upon me.

With nothing else to turn to, I went again to the letters, and picked up the next.

There was some irony in the Fool’s curse. Indeed, I thought it not beyond the pale to imagine that it was he who had caused both this continual wet gloom and the fact that the water ran nothing but ice. In fact, I may have exclaimed an audible “hah” upon reading that last letter, and it was with some resentment that I put it down and looked about the strewn bedclothes. But I found that, to my great surprise, in my engrossed perusal of the Fool’s journey, I had missed the fact that the pile of letters yet to read had grown slimmer and slimmer, and now, with the placing of this last one upon the careful, rippled stack, there was nothing else left.

But this was impossible! I still had no clue, yet, how the affair with the young Sky had ended, or if she’d gotten into the gallery as she should; in some way I had assumed that these letters would have followed the entire loop of my past, leading up to when I’d had them shoved so unceremoniously into my hand last night, amid the peering circle of gossipful watchers. To find the missives cut off so abruptly—and with neither explanation nor apology for the fact—disturbed me greatly.

It was with combined distress and resentment that I got up and paced the room, first in a whirl of thoughts, and then merely to move, though there was nowhere I could go as of yet. The candle was now only a stub, and the darkness was nearly complete, except for the light that muddily threw itself between the blinds.

In the corner, upon the desk, stood a pile of empty creamers, like a rubble of stones or a great and miniature ruins.

There was no sense in an end like this. Worse than the senselessness, there was no satisfaction in it, even of an unpleasant sort. There was just an empty gap.

But there was nothing that could be done. What had been written had been written on a different path, in a life not quite my own; and it was done with, for whatever reason. This I tried to tell myself, as I paced with ever more frustration upon the mealy carpet. I began to shiver, for the chill was real, and I’d left my blanket lying on the bed.

I cursed the Fool, and the Fool’s curse on me—and I cursed his ever-present inability to finish what he’d started, even in a bunch of letters chronicling a love-affair.

It seemed a sorry state indeed to be so cursed by a self that didn’t even exist.

I paused by the window—the air was still thick and soft and entire against the pane, so that it was nearly impossible to make out any detail beyond the wavering light. And at once the surety came upon me that if nothing else I would—if nothing else I must—break the Fool’s curse.

With this sudden purpose—I went into the bathroom, and checked again—the water was still cold. I stared down at the unrevealing porcelain as the few shivering droplets swirled down the drain.

Another way needed to be found.

So I put myself to the task. If the water would not heat itself, I would heat it.

I went back into the bedroom, filled the small coffeemaker with water, and stuck my empty mug underneath, plugging the whole contraption in. It boiled, in slow fits and starts, and then wheezed the water out in a great jumble of complaint.

The small mug in my hand was scalding hot, the water steaming and smelling still strongly of cheap coffee. I brought it into the bathroom, threw a towel into the tub and poured the water onto the towel, then filled the coffeemaker once again and stuck the mug underneath.

This I repeated, for at least ten repetitions, waiting with no small impatience in between, until the towel in the bathroom was soaked completely through. Finally, I stepped into the tub and picked up the sodden cloth, wrapping it around me. It quieted my shivers at once. I closed my eyes, feeling the water drip itself over my stomach, down my legs, pool itself at my feet; I brought the towel over my neck and scrubbed it across my hair, I covered my face with brilliant warmth and an odd coffee-esque perfume.

Then, the tiredness that I had not felt before descended upon me with sudden force.

I left the towel in the bathroom, dried myself with another, and returned quickly to the other room. I placed the letters upon the table and crawled under the covers, tucking them up to my chin. I therewith closed my eyes.

My dream came upon me as all dreams do: without beginning. I was wandering through the street-corner on a June evening, and beyond the low hunch of the station the shrieks of trains went by at convoluted intervals. Miss Soli was beside me, holding a feathered fan in one hand of an ostrich, and it moved the slow, hot air only slightly, providing momentary respite against the continual heat. We were soon to return; the holiday was over, and there was a careworn inevitability to every movement.

“Do stand still, would you?” she complained. “You’re giving me conniptions.”

I obliged, and leaned against the brick, but that didn’t help, for in another moment—

“And now you are tapping your feet. Why, what is this great impatience of yours? We’re only waiting for the mail, it’s hardly an excursion.”

“I’m only—”

“I know, I know,” miss Soli sighed ponderously. “Your artistic temperament. It hates stagnation. You’re too flighty to be held down. Something of the sort, yes?”

“…yes. Something of the sort.”

“Mm-hm.” She sighed again. “Why, I do believe the train is late. Can you imagine? And by nearly half an hour! Oh, there’s the station-master—perhaps he’ll know what the issue is.” She strode off in regal fashion, bearing down on the station-master with the full force of her intensity, and saying in a clear, clipped voice, “my dear sir—”

I took the first opportunity to slip away. Down past one geometric corner, where the sere grass was hiding, and over a low stone wall. I suddenly found myself behind the whole contraption, in that empty nothing-land which has not been prettied up. Following the back of the station for some time along the bare, windowless back wall, further than seemed plausible considering its small size from the front, I finally turned a sudden corner and found myself on the brink of the city.

The pyracantha were in a riot to the left, reddish berries bowing down with jeweled, smoky precision, and I knew there would be no passage in that direction, the thorns were too great. To the right, there she was, waiting at the appointed spot, as she had not been last time. I recalled her hastily-sent note:

She turned around, then, in surprise as I approached. “Oh!” she said, and a soft smile graced her features. “I didn’t think you’d arrive. It takes far longer to drive from the villa, and the times don’t line up any way I make my calculation—”

“In dreams, all things are possible,” I said portentously, and she raised her eyebrow in my direction. I grinned in awkward amusement.

“You sound like a coffee-mug,” Sky said matter-of-factly.

“Yes, it’s just because I’ve had it on me,” I explained. “The smell lingers.”

“I see,” she said, and leaned forward to discover if that was indeed the case. (It was, and we spend a few delightful moments taking the time to taste a sweeter indulgence; with a few swirling kisses pressed from tongue to tongue.)

Finally, it was she who leaned back, with a rueful sigh. “I didn’t regret our parting, but I regretted never having this last conversation, you know,” she admitted. “I still do; I go over it constantly in my lonely moments, imagining what you would have said if you were really here.”

“I know,” I said.

She reached down to pull a stocking that had begun to slip. It only sagged further, and with a distracted scowl, she plopped herself onto the dusty ground, hiking her skirts to her knees in order to tie the ribbon round it more securely.

Despite the humor of the situation, she seemed far older than I had recalled, in an indefinable way I could not express. It had nothing to do with her beauty; which was, as always, artless and sun-bronzed. It may have been her clothing, which was sensible travel stuff I had never before seen her wear. It might, also, have been the way that, when she tilted her head back and closed her eyes, a great weariness seemed to fall upon her.

Without another word, I sat beside her on that curb against the brick, that continual city stretching on before us into a haze of mist, the tangle of bushes separating us from the small town where we had met. There was a sense of endless expanse on every side but our own, and yet no way to get there.

On a sudden thought, I reached into the pocket of my coat—as thick and heavy as a winter coat, even in this heat—and pulled out the stack of yellowed papers, which I had read and sorted; the letters I had sent to her. “I noticed you lost these. You’re welcome to keep them—that is,” I stammered, suddenly blushing, “if you want to.”

She opened her eyes, then, and smiled again. Leaning forward, she took the papers and pressed them to her heart for one moment. “Thank you,” she said. “I had another drawing to give you, as well, but I left it outside of the dream. I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I assured her. “It was you I wanted to see, anyhow;” I said, and I brushed the fingers of one hand through her frizzed curls, and rested it against her cheek. Her solemn mahogany eyes, deep and reflective as an obsidian mirror, fluttered in and out of sight under the line of her lashes.

At last she said, “I was thinking, about what I told you once; of Galatea. I said I might as well be both, and I said it flippantly, but the thought has been turning over in my mind these past months. Sometimes when I move my arms under the cool afternoon shadow of a mausoleum, I feel everything like Galatea crafted from stone, and I know then that the inevitability of our parting was always fated. Other times, when the light shimmers against the glass, or I see the stream of water into a bowl filled with dandelions, and I place my hands inside against the grit, I know that I am instead a nymph, and that I will do anything to keep you with me. I am both. But not only that—for when recognize your face in the drawings I make, I know indeed that I am Pygmalion, creator of what seems most beautiful to me, finding through the lines I place what was already there in the paper’s emptiness. Other times, when my sadness is great, I know that I am Acis the lost, and it is you who transformed me into a creature of the waves. I am both, and I am all.

“And,” she continued, at last, slower, and her eyes traced their way across me as her lips spoke; “once I had realized that I came to recognize another thing. If I am all—so are you.”

“That seems,” I said at last, in a voice very wavering, and quiet, and deep, “exactly fitting.”

I awoke with the disorienting feeling that I had traveled a great distance; I recalled my dream with perfect clarity. Because I knew how these things faded without proper attention paid to them, I did not get up immediately, but caught, first, the precise reflection of Sky’s brown eyes in my mind, and the dusty place in between and beyond the rest of the world. Once I had that, I cast my thought over every part of the dream I could recall, starting from the train station and my wandering off, and went through the whole thing, paying close attention to every color, every building and unimaginable vista, every word spoken, not once, not twice, but three times entirely, until I was convinced it was as firmly in my memory as it was going to get.

At that point I allowed myself to take stock of my surroundings. The half-closed blinds let in a cheerful afternoon light, and the smog had finally lifted, leaving the air feeling clearer, lighter; as though a pall had gone from my very lungs. Even in this dry and stuffy room I could feel the difference.

All the detritus of last night was still laying about—my coat, in a sad heap on the floor, my clothes hung over the mini-fridge; the indubitable coffee-maker. And beside me on the table, right where I had left them, were the letters that had been given to me. I got up, re-dressed in my clothes from yesterday, which were still as grimy and unpleasant as ever, though at least they had almost dried in the night, now being only vaguely damp. I tidied up the room as best I could, and then picked up the letters in order to fold them and place them into the pockets of my greatcoat. But it was to my great surprise that, when I saw the topmost sheet, I knew quite at once that it was a letter I had not read before. A new one! And not written in my own hand, but Sky’s. Unimaginable!

Eagerly, I sat down to read.

I folded the letter, when I had read it, and placed it on the stack. I tucked the stack carefully into my pocket, turned around once more to survey the room, making sure I had not left anything behind—and then, with a strange lightness in my step, at odds with the preoccupation invading my thoughts—I left.

The city was already bustling, for I’d slept in late. I took myself over, first, to miss Soli’s apartment, where I began to pack everything of mine as well as I could; it fit easily into a carpetbag. I left her the key she’d given to me when we started our affair, on the counter where she’d not miss it. And then I made my way back to other lodgings, staying for a time with a few old friends of mine in what amounted to a gabled attic. Though it was small and drafty, it was rich in cheer, and continually filled with music and talk late into the night; always with one visitor or another and plenty of food that seemed to turn up in dribs and drabs, brought along by the innumerable visitors.

From this place, I took stock of my life, and bodies of work, of which they were all, unequivocally, a mess. “Down in the Sungrove Garden” was unsalvageable. Of other pieces in progress, I had some sketchy beginning of an operetta involving a haunted house and the adventures of a few siblings; a monologue about a small, inlaid box that was far too scattered to be any use to anyone, and a monograph upon the subject of perennials, which I had no desire to continue at all—a pity, for it was really the only one of the four that was of any quality.

And of course, there remained the letters between myself and my mysterious Sky.

I had thought the letter I found from her might be the last, but to my great interest, that was not the case; there were still a handful left, each one appearing at odd moments, always laying on top of the stack that remained. They did not come with any regularity; I recalled that she’d had many obligations that left her little time for anything but a few sketches here and there, and her letters—the memory became clearer as I read, and recalled those that had come before, that I had once had the pleasure of laying hands on not in this universe but another—had always been less frequent than my own.

The very next one from her started, in fact, in this way:

Though it seemed unlikely, I did believe Sky’s promise. Though there were weeks, now, where nothing else appeared; and I knew she was correct that the strange alignment between our universes were fading. One afternoon I went out walking, hiding under an umbrella for the drizzle was chill and increasing. The park was quite near, and I picked up the pace, hurrying with a sudden knowledge that if I was to get to the river soon enough, I might see something uncanny.

Along the way, I’m afraid, I bumped into a young woman, and had to apologize profusely. She was wearing a veiled hat, and there was something about strangely familiar. In fact, I was just about to ask if we had by chance met before that—well—I still am not certain what happened. Perhaps I blinked; or turned my head at a sudden noise, or something of the sort; for in the next moment she had managed to walk away—somewhere down the wide street, which was empty enough that I could pick out every individual, and unless she’d gathered up her skirts and sprinted, well, it was rather unlikely for her to disappear so quickly.

I followed the road again and did make it to the park and the river at last; the river which was now frothing, fed by the rain. But nothing happened there; and quite soon, tired by the chill, I made my way back.

That evening, when I opened my desk-drawer as had become habit, I saw that there was one more letter; a very small one, this, taking up a few lines only of the sheet. I knew, without even reading it, that this was all she’d been able to send through, and I knew also that there would be no more letters; we had really drifted from each other’s orbits from the last time.

So it was with a certain amount of ceremony that I sat down by the desk, lit a candle, and read this message in the quiet evening, imagining her sitting at her own desk, toiling over what to say, her mouth a frown of concentration, her hair loose in her own chambers, her fingers smudged with paint and ink, as they always were under her gloves.

I had no paints on me at the time, but I did as she instructed, and though I ruined a few canvases at first on trying to figure out the hang of the brushes and how to spread the stuff round, she was quite right that as soon as that was down I knew exactly what I had to create. It did come to me in a dream; though if it was a dream the night I got her last letter or another time I cannot now recall.

But that is how—in all honesty—I came up with the painting that is now the talk of the city. It was not my work at all, but another’s, and I rest humbly under her, my tutor.

It has taken some thinking, this past year; for that is how long this strange interaction between us has lasted. It has taken much thinking, in fact. I have considered the Fool—and I have considered how much I am, or could have been, he. If I was not, it was of the same cowardice that Sky admitted to herself, in honesty and in private.

But I am grateful to him, this other version of myself, for pulling me along this path, for without him I would never have met Sky. And—mayhap I am also grateful to myself. For I know indeed that if I had not taken steps to break his curse, I would never have been able to find the right dream at the right time.

Perhaps that is how all life is, though. A series of steps and missteps, chance and the seizing of it. If you, dear reader, have seen the painting—take another glance. For sometimes it’s the second look that matters most of all.