Mörbylånga

*

They did a lot of sleeping and a lot of lovemaking. After four days, Barry woke up before dawn and he was not in what Eugenie kept calling his bed, meaning the futon in the living room. He silently watched the grayish day struggle to break and to cast a bit of light inside the dark bedroom and listened to the sound of Eugenie sleeping next to him. He was aware that she had done the same while she had dreaded he would die the first time he crashed at her apartment with the dire need for her help, and that she had sat on the ledge of the window with a cup of tea and just watched him for hours in terror, the tea getting cold, her anxiety rising up and down. Thinking about her fright gave Barry a little bit of comfort from the grief he felt regarding her recent amnesia.

After a couple of hours lying in the stillness, Barry reached for Eugenie’s laptop and sat up against his pillow and started typing. “What the hell are you doing?” Eugenie asked sleepily at his side, her head half buried under her big thick comforter.

“I’m writing some emails”

“Barry” she sighed, and resumed her sleeping in. It was the Fall holiday break and she didn’t have to go to work at the post office for the week. He sent a message to Darlene informing the group of mutants on the other side of the city that he was still alive and ‘on vacation’ He took the measure of all the notifications he had received and ignored there, from food places offering him coupons out of fear he was not using their delivery platform website anymore, and of the desperation coming from the green owl of Duolingo after he completed two units of Na’vi language learning and giving up. Two out of the twenty coupons for the restaurants were still valid, one for a stuffed potato place, and another one praising the prowess of assembling sandwiches the length of a foot and a half.

“How would you transport such a sandwich?” Eugenie asked.

“I think they cut them into three portions and stash them in the bag on top of each other” That was Barry’s best guess.

“Order the potatoes” Then Eugenie stole the device from him and checked her own email, finding out that Joe was breaking up with her. Barry was surprised that it had not already been done, “I completely forgot about Joe” Eugenie confessed, which was the best response she could have produced, “you don’t think he’s going to be trouble for you” she asked him, “you know, since he is thinking you are a superhero and everything?”

“No” The concern that Joe could create issues in his existence was located very low in Barry’s list of things that kept him up at night. Some pain kept him up at night, because he had been turned into such a colander by the mrai boubou guns, but also because he was constantly gluing himself to Eugenie. No doctor on Earth would recommend making love many times a day as a secret to a quick recovery from actual holes that required stitches and even staples, but when he thought about it, perhaps a psychologist would. Eugenie seemed to have given up on her hopes to tame his wildness or talk some boring sense into him. Finally, he thought. “Let’s go to Brown County” he said while they were waiting for their delivery. At that moment of the day, such meal would undoubtedly qualify as brunch.

“It’s freezing. You don’t even own winter shoes”

“Hello-o, I’m the Bolt, I can muster literal heat with my feet”

“So while you are bolting through Brown County State Park to warm yourself up, what am I going to do?”

“We can go there for Thanksgiving” he suggested, “stay at the Abbe Lodge, or maybe even at this shelter built on a slope near Ogle Lake, it has a fireplace, also, it has a picnic table in the middle of a small clearing so when you lie on the table, you can see the stars at night, between the trees”

“We could be real cowboys” she approved.

The idea was so romantic that it was itching under Barry’s butt, it was tugging at his elbows, it was pulling his ears and it was bursting with buzzing blue light all around his body, but he had to admit that he was not in any shape to do any bolting for the moment. Of course, that would never be an admission that he would make out loud, to Eugenie nor to Alphonse, who had reached this conclusion themselves way earlier, but it was his reality. Thanksgiving, he thought with anticipation. His heart was jolly.

Of course, if he had known that he would soon be forbidden to bolt for the rest of his life, he would have done it regardless and happily bled through it.

*

To say that Eugenie’s feelings about sex were neutral was a rather neutral statement intrinsically. Having stepped into puberty in the second half of the 1990’s, she had been growing from girl to womanhood as the product of a society on its way to some mild wokism but which was still so patriarchal that she had not explored her feminine energy on the sexual side at all.

Already struggling to keep track of all the codes of the world in which people with autism take constant notes and barely adapt to the basics, she had simply believed the fact that having sex with a man involved the activities briefly mentioned by her guardians when they had released she was a teenager and had been alarmed by the urgency of the flowers-and-the-bees talk, plus stuff from the movies where people rubbed against each other, added to reports from friends who believed the same thing already, and some half-spoken truths from magazines she had read at the beach. Only in her thirties, during a long period of celibacy, had she perceived the possibility that female pleasure was more nuanced than just that and that she might have been missing out all this time.

A while back, when she had followed a counselling at the beginning of her divorce, she had heard her therapist say, ‘the fact that you don’t miss sex should worry you’ and then even ‘the fact that you don’t worry more when you hear me talk about how worried you should be, that should worry you too’ Eugenie was not empty of sex but, as usual, she was different. She didn’t miss sex with a guy because she was seeing things inside her head, she had been seeing them since before she started menstruating, and those things were beautiful and gave her a warm and juicy feeling. She reached orgasm easily with the power of her mind, sometimes inside a tram listening to specific music depending on where in her cycle she was. She had never had the chance to conjure up those niceties during intercourse with partners simply because then, she had been too busy thinking about how boring the whole thing was.

She didn’t miss sex with her ex-husband or her cute little flirtatious Chedli because those men’s offerings were dull as hell, pleasant in the moment, with a nice attraction and a nice desire to connect, but disappointing in the end. Holding hands or booping noses would have the same effect. The fact that the therapist who had advised her to freak out about her apparent disinterest in sex was a woman was more shocking to Eugenie than her lack of worry on the matter and for once in her life, she had not taken those words at heart or doubted herself. That was the advantage of growing older, the color in your hair changing, the shape of your face sagging, the skin under your arms acquiring the same consistency as marmalade: at least, a person started giving less of a fuck about other people’s opinions in life, even the one who had autism and had relied on masking and copying off neuro-typical people’s behaviors for the longest time.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Barry was not the same, he was not from the same generation as she was and he had been evolving in a world where girls his age had been educated with more sophisticated expectations and complex needs than just locking two bodies like pieces of a puzzle and shaking them in a bed or in the backseat of a car. Or maybe that was because he was in love with her that she felt good sleeping with him. Or maybe that was because she loved him too. Mormor, of course, had not reappeared since her pizza night discourses, and she had left Eugenie clueless.

The Barry that she made love with was the same one that existed in the foggy spheres of their eyelock, his ego erased, his presence just there and just true. His feelings for her were so pure, she could see them when they were together, finally, and they were not complicated. Those times, it occurred to her that his feelings for her were more ancient than she thought and that they had never, ever ever, been complicated. That simplicity, in itself, reminded her of the crystal flow of her sexual onirisms, the ones that fulfilled her during abstinence or that made her hide inside her scarf if they popped up on a bus ride.

She was glad that Joe had emailed her his decision to end their relationship, as she had been slow reacting and willing to do the same but he had beaten her to it. He demanded just that they meet for coffee at his place to wrap things up in a civilized manner, and she was considering the day after or the day after the day after, to honor this legitimate request. In the short meantime, she meant to cheer Barry up after he had to back down from his Brown County park plans of next-level sweater-weather star-gazing romance. Now that she had allowed him to blurt out his truth and be honest about how harshly he judged her life choices and how pathetic he thought her firewalls were, what she saw in his eyes was simple love and calm adoration. “I want to climb a maple tree in Brown County and rattle its branches and make the little things with wings fall down from it” he said

“The what with wings?”

“The leavy things that spin as they come down from the tree, you know?”

“The leavy— The seeds?”

“I don’t know what they are Eugenie”

“Why would you make those seeds fall?” she asked, amused.

“Because you like to watch them, only this time, I want to make it like, a big shower”

“You’re not going to climb trees today, or tomorrow” she kissed him to make up for her intransigent speech. She drove around the city center until she found, rather easily, a large plank of wood discarded on the side of the road, which she hosed clean off flees at a car wash, brought it home, sweating under the weight of it. They screwed the dinner table to the plank, the very one which they had picked at Ikea some years before to replace the furniture Barry had destroyed, each of its leg strongly nailed, fixed, spiked and tightened to the board so no more destruction of tables would take place in the apartment. Of course, now, the table was wobbly, as the lumber was completely uneven, so Barry had to wear his builder’s hat again and think of a way to balance the thing by inserting cardboard folds, a piece of sponge and even a couple of old pencils to fill up the crooked spaces. There it was.

They lied on the table staring up, the laptop projecting a live show of some night sky in Oklahoma on the ceiling, a fake fire crepitating and snapping twigs on the television screen behind them. The advantage of a live broadcast was the uncertainty about the crossing of possible shooting stars on the celestial vault but Eugenie wasn’t sure that she would locate a wish if she saw a meteor burn in the atmosphere. Something had kept her from wishing near fountains or when all the digits on the clock aligned or when a lady bug landed and took off from her fingernail. She hadn’t even wished on rainbows or that time she had seen an albino deer peek out from the bushes near the cemetery. She was suspicious of wishing. Blowing her birthday candles and collecting coins from the ground had always been wish-less exercises for her.

It took Eugenie and Barry three minutes before they saw their first shooting star and also determined that reclining down on a flat wooden table was very hard and uncomfortable, so they added a bunch of pillows. “I don’t have a wish” Barry said, “because I already have everything I ever want” She knew he was lying by the manner his eyes were looking through her and clearly trying to grasp a wish.

Eugenie bowed her head towards Barry and smiled, “I must tell you about Mormor’s house” She described the place to him. It was a little log cabin at the foot of the colossal Kebnekaise mountains in the North of her birth country. Everyone had been there for a summer occasion or two and hated the mosquitoes there but Eugenie had always stood at the entrance thinking that her bare feet and her toes spread out like the needles of a fan belonged there. She had imagined the place in the wintertime, the quick addition it would be to install some window screens just like people did in America, as easy as switching on a button.

“I thought your camper was your retirement plan”

She refrained from punching his arm because she could tell he was already thinking about having sex and he was challenged to maintain his concentration, “I did too” she nodded imperturbably, “until Mormor left me this log cabin, and to no one else”

“What did other people in your family get?”

“Some gems I suppose, some stones, some properties of stocks, I don’t remember well, people were very drunk”

“So other people inherited some money and you got a shed”

“Yes” she said, satisfied. In the corner of her eye, she saw another shooting star sparkle in the Oklahoma sky. They were resting their heads on the back of their hands, looking at each other lounging on their sides, recreating the shape of the tucked wings of the maple tree seeds Barry had mentioned he wanted to shake around and make fall like confetti on New Year’s Eve. She knew that he was going to ask her if she accepted him as he was, and that she would provide a false answer.

Sincerity was too difficult. Why? Because she loved Barry. Having not seen how she could lose him beforehand and almost losing him afterwards, she didn’t want to know this feeling again. There was no way to avoid the wall in front of which she was presently standing, or lying in the position of a half moon in front of his half moon. Release on the full moon, she thought. At this precarious moment, nothing was real anymore. Grief was real, she saw, absence was real. She needed more time to figure things out. She had no idea that her time was about to be cut short. “What would you do with the money? Since you seem to prefer it to my log cabin”

“Do you accept me as I am?” he asked just like she thought he would. She lied as he has prepared. “I would buy a better log cabin, I think, one that already has screen doors and the air conditioning”

“Smart, smart”

“Can you text me the coordinates of the house?”

“You mean email you?”

“I want to see where it is. By the way, this table’s surface, would you say it is an equivalent to the door in Titanic?”

“Which door?” Eugenie scoffed, dismissed another shooting star, focused on the crackling of the fire and the love she had for every little detail on Barry’s face.

“The floating door at the end of the movie”

“You” she pointed her chin at him, “keep making up things to have me convinced that you have watched it, but those are not true words you are speaking. What” she raised her eyebrows to quiet Barry down, “what was the shape of the door?”

“Trapeze, I think”

“Googleable”

“You want to live together in the little house of your grandmother, that’s what you’re saying?”

“Maybe”

“Why didn’t she leave it to another relative?” he was curious, freed a lock of her hair from behind her ear, pulled on it to make it shine when meeting with the light from the fake television campfire.

“I have a theory that it is because she knew that I liked it, and no one else did”

“Do you mind if I keep being in the Team?” he retrieved the topic, dragged it back in the middle of them, something she admired of him, his courage in the area of rhetorics and brainstorming. Fishbowling. Snowballing. “I… it’s because I love being in the Team”

“You love it. That’s making you a lover of bein—”

“A lover, not a fighter” he interjected.

“Yes, a lover of everything! You love and want everything, I guess” she said bitterly. But it passed in an instant. There wasn’t any more anger in Eugenie. She was fucking hygging. She was watching the remains of the bubble of social distancing that her autism had constructed around her, they had evaporated, this time very well. How many centimeter cubes a month, or week, did she know? That was something, to tackle a real introvert, she saw, and she respected him for the monumental task it had been.

“You first, then everything else, it doesn’t matter”

“Every time you lie” she murmured, “a shooting star wish gets cancelled for a child who needs it” the tip of her nose touched his.

“Every time you pretend you don’t love me” he replied, “wishes get banned from humanity altogether”

The table with the poison

(last part to be written)