This Did Not Happen (and Nothing Is True) -- ACT II
Title: This Did Not Happen (and Nothing Is True)
Fandom: Uber - South of Nowhere
Author: L.N. James
Note: This Act is for montreal, written in reference to her story 7 Days in July. Which you should read please, not because of this, but because it is perfect)
Act II: Big Blue Marble
"We are mapping out the universe and we are laughing at the distances" - The Ellen James Society
Prehistoric. That word settles into her brain and she can’t help but say it over and over again. For her, it sounds a lot like forever. Before history: Prehistoric. There is some comfort in that idea - that something before history once existed. Still exists. Most of the things she knows about are not so permanent. She can barely see the world passing by through the window and permanence is just a streaking blur of land and trees and shabby houses.
She turns the pages of the old National Geographic magazine she found in the trash a week ago somewhere (Texas). She has spent enough time alone to find all kinds of ways to occupy her curious mind. She’s smart but no one sees it - they mistake her silence for disinterest, discount her based on age alone. Being underestimated and overlooked by her parents, by strangers, is the story of her life so far.
That will change (with time). Many people will notice Ashley Davies, she will be famous even, but she doesn’t know it. That story hasn’t been written yet. It will be.
Ostracoderms were the first fish and extinct by the Devonian period. Paleozoic era. This word, Paleozoic, she also says silently in her head as if pronouncing it will make it real. To most people, it is just a name, a meaningless marker of a time so far in the past it needs a word to define its existence. She’s young though and it is hard to imagine the kind of time she’s reading read about in slick pages. She reads over letters strung together to define the unknowable, the unfathomable. Prehistoric. Paleozoic. Unfathomable. She likes words.
Over time, though, she will say fewer and fewer of them until people begin to ask questions. For someone whose career will depend on words, her real life will contain a diminishing number of them (for a time). Only one person will hear her say I love you and actually mean it. Even then, it won’t sound like that, those won’t be the words she will use. Instead, it will be: Why the fuck do I have to be so in love with you? Words will leave and come back, leave and come back, marking time like eons for her.
But she doesn’t need a word to define what happened today. She might only be nine years old, but she’s not stupid. She knows her experience has no name, no marker, no definition. In just a mere nanosecond in real time, a flash in the pan, she will understand what it feels like to know the impossible, to touch something so prehistoric, it must be nameless. No beginning, no end.
It is settling so deep inside her, she will forget it by sheer necessity because it is so overwhelming; it is too much for her nine year old mind to handle. When she remembers it, and she will (eventually), it will be just as overwhelming. It will strike her first (years from now) in a darkened performance hall in a foreign country. One glance and she will remember it like muscle memory. The unfathomable will become the inevitable will become the uncontrollable will become history. Here in the present, however, all she knows is that who she is now is different from the one who woke up this morning.
Here. Take this. Remember me.
They say the Coelacanth - she practices pronouncing this many times -- is one of the few remaining living prehistoric fossils. It lives in the sea caves off the South African coast, floating deep and soundless. Only by bad luck do they encounter people. When the light of the Indian Ocean is not dark enough, not cold enough, a Coelacanth will drift out in search of the perfect conditions. Nets or hooks or misfortune announce their discovery to the world. There are, apparently, only two living in captivity. She tears out the picture for safe keeping.
One day, in the very near future (two weeks even), she will ask herself what would happen if she held her breath and sank deep under water, like an ancient fish. Would she find that elusive and rare name again? Would it help her remember being special? Or would the word become a living fossil, just like the Coelacanth - something mythological and unseen?
"Hey, make up a drink for your old man, Ash."
Her dad’s voice brings her back to the here and now (the present) and she blinks. Raife Davies’ face is turned towards her and he holds out his hand. She knows how to do this in a moving vehicle. Lots of practice. She knows how to balance and she is good with her hands, even now.
She stands up in the van, careful not to knock into the insane amount of equipment stuffed inside. One wrong move could send the whole lot of it tumbling into her space. Her seat is the old cooler they just filled up with beer and ice; she has only enough room to settle on top. She’s small and there is nowhere else for her. In some respects, she is almost an afterthought, wedged into the van with all of the rest of the band’s gear.
Someone (in the future) will tell her that she is not an afterthought, that she is thought of first and always.
She is careful when she opens the Coke, fills the plastic cup with ice. She is even more careful with the sick-sweet smelling Jack Daniels she pours from a heavy bottle. Her dad’s favorite drink burns when she steals a sip and her eyes water. She can’t imagine why someone would drink this by choice.
Years later, it will become her best friend and her worst enemy. She will learn just how well liquor can blot out things like words, and actions, and memories. The quickest way to erase immediate history is to burn it away with bourbon. She will also learn, from experience (many), that such a fix is far too fleeting and not permanent enough for what she wants. It is nothing like the damage that can be done by time itself. If nature takes its course, every living thing can be forgotten and remembered and forgotten again in way less than the span of a given eon. Blink of an eye, really. Hadean. Archean. Proterozoic. Phanerozoic. She will never have that kind of time.
They are somewhere outside of Cleveland now, back on the road, traveling clear to another country. Canada. When they reach each new state, she looks at all the maps they have crumple-folded in the van, trying to trace their path from one map to the next, never quite knowing exactly where they are. Sometimes, she doesn’t really care, as long as she is going somewhere with him.
We’ll go on a little tour and then go record the new album, her dad had said. It’ll be fun. You, me, the band. What a way to spend the summer, huh? Whaddya say, Ashley? Get packed up, kid. We leave in the morning.What could she say? It sounded so cool and exciting; she didn’t sleep that whole night. She loved her dad and his music, thought it was the best idea she had ever heard in her whole short life. She rarely saw him, couldn’t get enough of him really. His attention is what she craves most of all.
She will later learn (years) that this craving will leave her body and a new one will take its place, something more ancient than mere attention from a parent. She will also find out that what she craves is better suited for darker and more primal times. Precambrian.
But now it is as simple as a young daughter’s love for her absentee father. Her dad had wanted her with him for the summer and this is pretty much her dream come true.
She would not find out until many years later, a decade in fact, that this particular summer trip had never been her dad’s idea. After a shouting match with her mother, fueled by bourbon on both sides, she will learn that he had refused at first to take her. But her mother threatened. She even claimed that if he didn’t take Ashley that summer, she would drop her "biggest disappointment" off at Social Services for adoption. That was not an idle threat either. Her mother meant every hateful word. Your father didn’t love you, he tolerated you, Ashley.
She had walked out without saying another word that night. It changed something inside her. She felt like her life had been one big lie. Everything she knew, a lie. Darkness seeped in and she slowly turned to glass, like she had been crushed between layers of the earth and hardened, all broken edges and impenetrable. Not a diamond, not something precious, just a cloudy piece of sharp glass. She would leave everything behind, her music, her career, in a few short years after that night. No one would know why and those words would never come from her mouth.
But now? She is blissfully unaware of what her future holds and is living in the moment, burning memories of the summer of her ninth year in stone, like a smooth fossil she will keep in her pocket. Today’s memory will be so sharp, she will not feel the cut for another decade (and a half). There will be no words like Paleozoic to mark this era in time. She will create a new word for it. She will be the one to define.
"Here, Dad."
She hands him the drink, not spilling a drop and he smiles at her before he goes back to laughing with Rob Briscoe, bass player and creep. She has learned a lot on this trip about her dad and his band. Not all of it is good.
Three weeks into the tour and too many late nights, she knows what tired feels like. She is a little tired of the van, tired of the smoke that always seems to surround her and make her cough, and tired of the strange girls who follow her dad and his band everywhere. She sometimes wakes up in one of the hotel rooms they all share with some woman she doesn’t even know sleeping next to her. She doesn’t like strangers being so close to her. What she hates most though is that she sleeps so hard at night that she never knows how these people end up in her bed. Sleeping that hard is dangerous. These girls, though, always try to make nice to her, thinking they can get closer to her dad through his young daughter. It never works.
The one time it almost worked will be in the future (five years from now) and she will think she is in love because she is learning French words from a girl who will be so nice to her and be so beautiful it will hurt a little. She will be older and pay attention to a fourteen year old girl like no one else ever had. But Ashley Davies will just be Raife Davies’ daughter and that means one step closer to Raife. It will crush her not because she was actually in love, but because it will be the first time she learns what it means to be used. She will learn from it and (eventually) use too. Then she will stop.
What is good, though, and what makes most everything else okay is the music. Up close and personal, the music fills her up so completely, she knows she wants to be around it forever. She lives for it now. The beat, the rhythm, the crowds, the energy, and her own voice (eventually). It is everything. It will become nothing. The vans and the smoke and the strange girls will happen again, she will be the one living that rock star life (eventually).
She will own the world and then she will disown it all. She will disappear and then she will resurface.
She is learning to play guitar from Rich, he says she is a natural, despite her small hands. She is writing little songs too, she has a few in her head, even if they aren’t that good yet. She loves the idea that a song she could sing will say more than any words she would dare to speak in a conversation. She thinks songs might (eventually) replace the need to speak at all.
The first and last thing she will write about will be what happened today. Even when the memory of it is gone (remember, it will go quickly), she will still try to bring to life the prehistoric. It will take many years for her to tell the story and only then, it will be in bits and pieces, a verse here, a line of chorus there, one word, a syllable, a sound. The melody will burn in her brain and no amount of bourbon will help her remember or forget. She will curse it while she desperately searches for it. It will be elusive. It will be her Coelacanth.
Two hours, 28 minutes, and 12 seconds ago, a new era began for Ashley Davies. She will learn its name then and it will start like this:
Piling out of the van, the first thing she notices is how very bright the sun is. The tinted windows and the stored equipment blocked out all but a small glass square near where she sat. The air is warm and it feels a lot like California. Heat is rising from the black asphalt parking lot in waves. She squints at the store, her hand over her eyes to shade, and then runs to catch up with her dad.
They had stopped for ice, cigarettes, toothpaste, batteries, clean underwear, pretzels, gum, and because she had asked, notebooks and more pencils. They were driving straight through after this to make it to the recording studio by tonight. Morin Heights. She would also ask her dad for a map of Canada so she could figure out where they were going before they got there.
(Tomorrow) she will meet one of only two people who will ever really mean anything to her in Morin Heights. It will be someone who will recognize the prehistoric in her and be a living link that connects pieces of history. This person will also save her from herself more times than can be counted, except for one time when she can’t.
It doesn’t matter what city or what state they are in, Wal-Mart is Wal-Mart. Her dad gives her some cash, tells her to get what she wants and meet them back at the van in a half hour. That is not nearly enough time for her to find what she needs, look at everything she wants. So she practically runs down isles, eyes searching, grabbing here and there. Arms full, she is nimble and quick, she has always been fast when she is on the hunt.
She will (almost always) be in a constant state of looking but never finding. She will find poor substitutes for what she wants. There will be exactly two times when she will find not the substitute, but the real artifact. The first time will be in exactly two seconds. The second time will be in fifteen years, 1 month, 5 days, 9 hours, 13 minutes, and 3 seconds. She will stop looking after the second time because she will have found. She will also be found.
But it is now (one second, two seconds) and she is rounding one of the isles near the office supplies, her speed, the velocity of her body, comes to a complete and sudden stop. She collides with another body at rest and everything she has in her hands falls to the floor. So does the body she knocked over in her rush. There is the brief exhale of breath from both bodies, the soft noise of air as it is forced out before air returns. Then words.
"Oh, are you okay? I’m sorry."
She says this to a girl about her age, all legs and shorts and tank top and long blonde hair. It will become increasingly hard for her to apologize and over the years, only one person will hear her say I’m sorry and mean it. It would be cosmically funny for her to realize that she will only ever really mean the words she speaks to the girl she is speaking to right now. This girl alone, the one sprawled on the floor looking up at her, will be the only one to ever feel the truth of Ashley Davies’ words again. But she realizes nothing of this now, of course (it is unknowable).
"No, it’s okay. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you coming."
She laughs a little because she can’t help it, and because it was clearly her fault, the girl is blameless. She will learn (eventually) that this girl will blame herself far too often for what other people do to her.
She reaches her hand out to help the girl up. They are alone in this aisle amid the staples and the notebooks and the tape and the scissors and the envelopes. When the other girl takes her hand, when their fingers actually touch, her right eye twitches and she momentarily feels the eternal.
They will not actually touch again for 15 years and when they do, this memory will crystallize and fall on her like drops of water. In fact, there will be water and it will drop and that will start the third epoch in this particular era. The second epoch will have already occurred, a year earlier, at a modern dance performance in that darkened hall, marked by a glance (remember). And of course, the first epoch starts now.
This girl smiles, actually smiles at her, as she is getting up from the ground. The smile is toothy and wide, there are faint freckles on her nose and blue eyes shine brightly. The girl is impossibly tanned and she is skinny, maybe even a little scrawny. She is eight or nine or ten. She cannot get over those eyes and the way they look at her. Like she is a friend or someone familiar. She is not a friend (and won’t be, for many years). She is familiar though, but they don’t know it yet. Their hands are still together and the girl is saying something now because she can see her lips moving before actually hearing any words.
"Want me to help you pick your stuff up?"
She nods because that is all she can do. Then she looks down at their hands and knows she should pull hers away because she is in Ohio of all places holding hands with a girl she does not know in a Wal-Mart in the office supply aisle. Plus she is nine and it is all a little too much, what she is feeling. But then she sees the girl’s hand and she sees red. Bright, crimson blood. This girl is bleeding on her and she can only stare.
It will not be the last time she will have blood on her hands and it will not be the last time that blood will be this girl’s. When it happens, years from now, it will be uncontrollable. It will be primal. The girl, the one standing here with her now, will not be surprised and that will be one of the times the girl will blame herself for what is done to her. The next time there is blood (and there will be), it will be controlled and there will be no blame at all.
"Oh…"
This is all she can say as she brings both of their hands up and gently touches the palm of the other girl’s hand where a tiny cut glistens ruby red. The girl, for her part, looks at her shyly from behind a curtain of blonde hair.
"It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt."
She wants to believe her, but she can’t stop staring at the blood. The girl gives her hand a little squeeze and their eyes meet.
"I’m okay. Really"
The girl reluctantly pulls her hand away and holds it while they both stare. She holds her own hand out too and her eyes are glued to the stain left behind. Then she looks at the girl, really looks at her, and sees a glimmer in those blue eyes. She is not ready to name this, can’t find a word that will explain this or define this, whatever this is. And it is something.
"But how?"
Because the floors of Wal-Marts are not sharp, hard yes, sharp no. Glass is sharp though. The girl points to small shards of clear and blue glass on the ground and she has to bend down to see them.
"It was in my hand."
She will discover that it does not take something sharp to cut. In fact, she will (eventually) find that many things can cut: her bare hand, her words, her actions, her life. There will be hurt and there will be pain. She will also realize some people do not flinch at the primordial sting of pain. Some will crave it to feel alive. This girl will be one of them. She will find that she has the gift of giving the unspeakable. She will (eventually) make this girl feel everything.
Now, all she knows is that her hand is stained with this girl’s blood and she forgets the feeling she is having right now in an instant (it is overwhelming, remember). It is gone and will not resurface from its deep and elusive hiding place for many years.
"What was it?"
She crouches down and touches the glass fragments with her marked hand. The girl kneels next to her and gently brushes them up and into her marked hand. Their eyes meet again and she takes a breath because she is suddenly breathless.
This girl will take her breath away again in a decade (and a half). She will not know that she will make this girl breathless before then, in exactly nine years, and she will not even be present. She will learn six years after that it was her words about this that took the girl’s breath. She will then say those same words to this girl, in her ear, 15 minutes before the uncontrollable will happen. There will be blood shortly after those words. It will hurt.
"It was a marble."
She looks more closely and can see a few rounded pieces. The blue center swirl is completely intact and the girl holds her hand out so she can see it.
"I’m sorry. Was it yours?"
She whispers because it feels like they are sharing something secret, like they have excavated something prehistoric amid the ruins. In the future, these two will share many secrets. People will guess, people will assume, people will judge, but no one will ever truly understand. Their secret is unknowable, unfathomable, and inevitable. It is history itself. Both will forget it (soon).
"Yeah. I collect them. I like how they feel in my hand. Smooth and kinda cold. But real, you know? Solid."
She looks at the girl and there is an expression on her young face and it comes from her eyes. She will see that expression again from this girl (in the future). It will look a lot like faith. It will be called trust. She pokes her finger at the broken blue swirl in the girl’s hand. There is still a little blood mixed with the glass and her eye twitches again.
"I like how it broke open though and this was inside."
The girl looks at her and nods, her voice is a thin whisper.
"This will happen again, I think."
She doesn’t need to ask what. She looks deep into blue eyes and this time what she sees looks a lot like hope. It will be called knowing. She will also see this expression on the girl many times (years from now).
"I know."
They look down at the glass in the girl’s hand and are silent.
"Here. Take this. Remember me."
The girl picks up the blue swirl bit, small as a pea. Her fingers are careful when they hold the sharp edges, and the girl hands it to her. She takes it and runs her thumb along the edge, not enough to cut, just enough to feel
Over time, the edges of this glass piece will smooth out and she will forget where it came from or why she kept it. She will (eventually) have it made into a ring, smooth and cold and real on her finger. She will never take it off. It will be taken off of her only once and that will be by the same person who gave it to her a decade and a half ago (right now). That, of course, is the girl standing in front of her now. She will (eventually) give it back to her, as a promise, and that will bring it all full circle again to this moment. Here. Take this. Remember me.
"I will."
She whispers and this too is a promise. Unfortunately, she will not be able to keep it for very long. She will try, but it is too overwhelming and too sharp. It will slip from her mind quietly and slowly, drifting out until it finds the perfect conditions again to make itself known. Like the Coelacanth. She will only remember this when she catches a rare glimpse of it (in a darkened performance hall), and then when she studies it night after night (in a crowded bar). She will only know it when her hands touch this girl again.
It ends (this secret moment). An outside voice enters their world and ends it quickly, abruptly, and cleanly.
"Spencer! I was looking all over for you! Where were you?"
Spencer. They exchange looks and the era now has a name attached to it. It has been defined. It will be the Spencer era. This is its start. She will forget the name of it though (two weeks from now); it will leave her even though she is saying it over and over again in her head right now. She will say this name when she sinks below the surface of a pond in Canada and she will count seconds and with each passing one, the name will slip further from her memory
A young blonde woman comes up to them in a rush, her hands are pulling the girl up and her eyes are searching for clues from them both. She averts her eyes from this woman’s gaze and looks down at her feet, slipping her hands into her pockets. This must remain hidden. Before the other girl catches on, before she realizes there are things that no one will understand, the woman sees the blood on her hand and has a minor freak out right there in Wal-Mart in the office supply aisle.
"What happened!? No more leaving my sight, young lady. Come on, let’s find a bathroom and get you cleaned up. We’re late."
The girl is being dragged away and all she can do is watch her go. All the things she plans on buying are still scattered on the floor, notebooks and pencils and gum and two packages of clean underwear. Right before the girl is pulled around the corner, she looks back.
To both of them, it will feel like that millisecond lasts the span of time from Phanerozoic to Hadean. It will seem like everything and nothing all at once. The reason for this is unknowable, of course. The reason for this is: After matter came into being in one explosive bright burst (forever ago, before time), a little piece of everything finds its infinitely tiny neighbor, the piece that was with it when it was nothing and then when it was everything. They (eventually, sometimes, rarely, never) find each other, these little pieces of history. This is either by luck or by design. This is overwhelming when it happens. This is ancient. This is nameless.
This is why the body knows before the brain is willing to admit.
She raises her hand just then, the one that is marked, and waves to Spencer. She sees a smile that will sink deep inside her and then it is gone and she is gone. They will meet again though (eventually) and her memory is already slipping.
There is nothing left to do but pick up her things and make her purchase and meet her dad and climb into the van and tear out a picture of the Coelacanth and make a drink with bourbon in it and watch Ohio pass outside a small piece of window and look at maps and wonder about Canada and practice saying words over and over again.
Spencer. Spencer. Spencer. Spencer. Spencer. Spencer. Spencer. Spencer.