Her last memory was a hand prying her jaw open and settling a small, round fruit on her tongue. She couldn’t tell whether the touch was coercion or caress as she bit down, teeth sinking into the explosion of sweetness and juice that spilled down over her lips, painting them red.
•••
Her first memory is a mouth full of bitter warmth.
“Vivi!” a voice calls. Julian’s voice. “V!”
She should respond to the syllables of her name, but it no longer signifies anything recognizable. She no longer knows who she is.
1.
She was Vivi when she first met Julian in his garden. Mother’s shouts faded behind her as she fled through the hedge between her house and the newly rented cottage next door and found herself under the low branches of his orchard. Julian stood on a carpet of rotting fruit, cutting through a peach’s lush flesh. The sun glinted on the tawny nap of his hair and made shadows in the hollows of his throat as he drank deeply of the juice that gushed up through the wounded skin. When he finally looked over, the color of his irises circled from golden to carmine and last to an ocean-dark blue.
“I thought you might show up,” he said. His voice had the texture of a handful of earth. “You’re Evelyn’s girl, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Vivi bent down and picked up a yellow pippin that was still mostly unblemished. “Why?” When her teeth broke the skin, the apple tasted warm and sweet and bright, like a kiss.
He stepped closer and plucked the apple from her grasp. She had to tilt her head back sharply to meet his gaze. “Because,” he said, “I’ve been expecting you.”
•••
She was V when they met in the campus greenhouse eight years later, her fingers blackened from charcoal pencil. She had been sketching for a class on botanical illustration: ailanthus, ferns, stems stripped of thorns, boring her with their own safeness. She passed the succulents and keyed her way to the inner sanctum, where the poisonous specimens flourished. Hellebore. Devil’s snare. Hemlock. Julian Wilder, his wrists streaked in dirt and his glasses slipping down his nose.
V stopped in the doorway, bracing herself against the backwash of hatred and delight from his remembered expression of concentration. Finally, he noticed her.
“I thought you might show up,” V said, and the way he smiled was her victory. “I’ve been expecting you.”
2.
Julian’s garden came from many different times. An apple tree was singed from where the Hesperides’ pet dragon breathed on it too fiercely. Rose grafts were cut from the briar hedge that once grew around a Sleeping Beauty. The oak by the back door was the oldest oak tree in the world, but Julian had brought it here when it was only a sapling.
“Six hundred years are trapped in this trunk,” he said, slapping it so that the bole swayed and the branches shook their shadows into a thousand shards of light. “Six hundred years’ worth of strength. This is how I travel.”
“Are you a wizard?” Vivi asked.
“I’m a botanist,” he said. She nodded, not quite disappointed. “The secrets of eternity are trapped in plants and trees, other forms of sentience that men disregard. Scholars in centuries past sought to understand the alchemy of metals. I’m interested in the alchemy of the natural world and its transmutation of growth and time.”
She rested the flat of her palm against the tree, pretending she could feel the weight of eons in the bark. An ant crawled absentmindedly across her fingers.
“I mean,” he went on, eyes unfathomable, “that I want to find the way into the other universes the philosophers speak of.” He didn’t laugh at himself, or act as though he were saying it simply because she was eleven years old, or look at all as though he thought he were unlikely to succeed. She wasn’t used to grown-ups talking to her like this and nodded again to show she understood perfectly. “What do you want most in the world, Vivi?” he asked.
She examined the question, turned it inside out to make sure no sanctimonious warning lurked in its secret places, so she could see he meant it plain and true. A question like that demanded a serious answer. She couldn’t say that she wanted the blue ribbon on Field Day or Todd Richards to ask her on a date before the end of the year. She settled on something partly noble and mostly true. “I want to do something important,” she said. “I want people to notice what I’m doing.”
A smile carved a shard in his face. “In that case,” he said, “how would you like to help me find another world?”
•••
“It took me a long time to find you,” said Julian, in his familiar voice like trampled ground. In the intervening years, its echoes had nestled themselves in the soft places in V’s skull, offering advice or censure so often that, even now, she wasn’t entirely sure if she was listening to the man in front of her or the man in her mind.
“It shouldn’t have,” said V. “I told you where I was going.”
“To find the heart of you, then,” he went on, fixing his glasses. They reflected the fluorescent strips overhead, so V couldn’t see the years swimming in his eyes. He might have been thirty. She no longer trusted the things he might have been. “I knew you planned to study art, but what have you learned here that I could not have taught you while walking through the long halls of time? You watched the Library of Alexandria burn and presided over the toppling of empires.”
“I saw things I never wanted to know,” said V. She hadn’t been aware of either herself or Julian moving, but they were much closer to each other now than when she came into the room. Was that how he arrived here? Traveling through space like any invasive species, slipping through the lock she had tried to hold against him? “You never said I’d have to drag all those years around with me.”
“Would you give them back, if you could?” At this proximity, she could see that the lines were drawn more deeply into his face and smell the pungent bitterness of dogwood coming off his clothes. She didn’t have an answer. She couldn’t have, not when everything of her went back to him, every memory dyed through so indelibly she doubted she could even remember that they had once showed different colors from those they now possessed.
3.
He showed Vivi his workshop—introduced her to the beakers and boilers and intricate silver tubing that stretched across the recesses of the garden shed. It always smelled faintly of mold and crushed leaves, and tumblers filled with unidentifiable liquid stood in the windows, curing in the sunlight. She drank a good deal of the brew—a distillation of hours, he termed it—while staring into the warped silver mirror hanging on the long wall.
The first few trials resulted in nothing but a good deal of sick out the back door. The second batch fared better, and, for several moments, the glass before her would ripple like overexposed celluloid to reflect a new landscape. She recognized some of them from her knowledge of history: a volcano raining smoke and fire on an oblivious town; knights before the walls of Jerusalem; three white ships cresting a bare blue horizon. But others frightened her with their strangeness: a robed man whispering fervent prayers in the center of a huge underground prison; a barren plain where winged creatures too huge to be birds wheeled and screamed over their prey; a hundred thousand stars exploding into steel-bright darkness.
Afterwards, he would place her on a soft chair, give her a chocolate to soothe her throat after the potion’s acids, and write down the visions in a red notebook. She liked watching him write, her own awkward words spilling smoothly from the point of his pen. He would always transcribe exactly without alteration—only adding a note or two in the margins to connect ideas or suggest changes for the next session, and that’s when she knew it was real.
When he let her go, there was choir practice or her part-time job at the grocery, and she constructed elaborate alibis for anyone who might wonder how else she chose to fill her afternoons. But, as weeks passed, no one asked, only her ordinary routines diminished in importance. With Julian’s brilliance burning her from the inside, she wanted to make some physical change, so that people would know she was no longer like them. Mother condemned flashy jewelry and makeup, but the absurd would go over her head as merely whimsical. Vivi discovered a gold glove and pink feather boa in the bottom of the theater club costume trunk and wore them everywhere.
“Strumpet,” said Mr. Tandy, the old church groundskeeper, peering at her across the rose hedges one afternoon. “No respectable girl’d be caught dead in a dance hall slut’s getup.” He injudiciously raised his voice into earshot, and Vivi gave him the finger over her shoulder. “Tart!” he shrieked, and several neighboring fishwives craned out the windows. “Harlot! The sins of Eve are always among us!”
Vivi left the main road, fuming. What did any of them know of her great work? Hers and Julian’s. She now thought of them as a set piece. When one of Mother’s coworkers saw their names written together on the inside of Vivi’s math notebook, she wanted to know who her friend was. Friend! But Vivi didn’t correct her. After all, she had so few friends.
It was the day for one of their sessions, and Julian waited for her at the front door. She glanced at her watch to see whether she were late. She wasn’t. He was merely early. The sun glimmered over his smile, as though put in the sky for his particular benefit. It might have been. If he could trap a tree, likely even the courses of the heavens obeyed his whims.
“Hey,” she said, standing on the step below him.
He reached out and toyed with the end of the feather boa. “I haven’t seen this before,” he said, letting the slippery material weave through his fingers.
“It’s my regalia,” she explained, waving her gloved hand. “So people will know what we’re doing is important.”
An expression played over his face that she couldn’t parse. Eventually, he tossed the boa back over her opposite shoulder. “It is important, and I’m glad you know it,” he said. “We may be able to change the world.”
As she followed him inside, she thought they ought to make a world without people like Mr. Tandy and those terrible spying women in it. Perhaps every new age started the same way—a girl in a garden with a snake wrapped around her throat.
•••
V chose a college across the country and declared fine art as her major—the furthest subject imaginable from the sweaty interior of greenhouses and the loamy world of biological processes. She wanted the human body static, captured by charcoal and ink, irredeemable by time. Her roommate was an English major addicted to coffee and afflicted by her crush on her advisor. V felt sorry for her, for someone who made the mistake of hinging her self-worth on a man so much more powerful than she was.
V went through the daily motions of existence and accumulated something approximating a life: classmates who never became friends, passing grades on assignments from teachers that forgot her from one semester to the next, piles of sketchbooks filled with half-finished volcanoes and ships and besieged cities and a face in profile that never resolved into a resemblance but which bled into every study until she wondered if she would ever be capable of creating something without Julian in it.
For so long, she had glutted herself on his miracles and thought they would be all the nourishment she would ever need. When he showed her the notebook, she exclaimed over the scrawled glyphs as though they made any sense but paid more attention to the shadows of their heads bent close together, the fine lines around his mouth. He never seemed to age, while the seasons pushed her out of adolescence into an odd-angled womanhood. It was a foreign country she had no map for, and she relished their work as though it would save her, as though it could keep her static, irredeemable by time.
4.
Vivi’s visions clung to her longer and longer as the weeks went on. When she turned away from the mirror, the landscapes remained superimposed around the edges of the frame. When she told Julian, he produced another potion—this one viscous, purple as a slick of oil on a hot street.
“Is it still there?” he asked, his eyes turned sightlessly on the flat no-man’s-land she had summoned.
“Yes,” said Vivi dreamily. Another wind played in her hair.
“Then, we’re going to try something new,” he said. He dipped a paintbrush into the potion and splashed it across the glass. The substance hissed where it touched the illusion in the air, and the vision sucked and bubbled outward into the room. He stepped behind her and gripped the back of her blouse. “Hold out your hand.”
She heard his command as if from a great distance, standing half in his workshop and half in a diaphanous space where the light came and went. Running her fingers through the oily potion, she should have touched the liquid or the mirror, but she felt only a gentle push forward. The bubbles curved around her, smelling of sulfur and dead roses, and she stumbled—
––over stones and gnarled roots. She might have just walked out through the door to his garden. But clouds and ash obscured the sun, and dull echoes reached her from beyond the wall. Curious, she crept closer and glanced over.
A town lay beyond, and it was her town, almost as she had seen it this morning; except now, it crumpled like a dollhouse as if by a great weight. The houses jutted against the darkened sky where their walls and rooftops were cracked apart. Things lay in the roads, rooting uneasily against the curbsides. Vivi craned, wondering what creatures these were, and the press of her hand against the wall crumbled the mortar down in a grainy shower. Three heads whipped to face her, and she stifled a scream. They belonged to Mr. Tandy and his neighbors, the fishwives—their faces flat and papery, features scrawled on with a child’s crayon. Mr. Tandy raised and pointed a finger at her, opening his jagged mouth—
An explosion shattered the street. Vivi ducked, but the whirling shrapnel didn’t penetrate the wall, only filled the street with a sucking cyclone of noise. Figures ran past, but they didn’t seem to be any more like people than Mr. Tandy was, painted red with blood. They fled before a shape coming down the road, and Vivi squinted, because it was surrounded by a halo brighter than a supernova, but she knew who it would be. She knew that golden face better than anyone else in the world.
“Vivi!”
Julian stood behind her. She didn’t know whether it was he or the golden man who called her name, but her Julian’s eyes held the vestiges of destruction, as though the view were only reflected from his gaze. He looked like a fallen god, but it wasn’t his glory that broke her in that moment. It was the way he stepped around, stepped past her, turning away toward that future she could give him but never share.
“No!” she cried, grabbing his arm, but the sound or her motion broke the spell. The scenery splintered away from them in huge slanting chunks, and when he shook her off, she crashed to her knees on the workroom floor.
“What are you doing?” he shouted. “We made it, we were there! Why did you ruin it, how could you ruin it?”
“I hated it there, I didn’t want it to be true,” she babbled, not knowing whether she was talking about the ruined neighborhood or Julian leaving her. She knew only that today had been a threshold, and the new world she feared lay on the other side. The certainty that she had already passed over, and would never be able to get back again, was the greatest fear of all.
“What?” he asked. He went very quiet, holding himself with dreadful stillness. “You want to quit?”
She couldn’t explain that her wanting had exceeded all the bounds of what she could answer or what he could give.
“You can’t turn your back on me,” he said. “You know this thing you’ve been drinking?” He shook the fizzing jar of potion in her face. “If you were ordinary, it would have killed you months ago. You’re as strange as anything else I’ve collected here.” He shook her shoulders; she felt the pressure of his thumbs against her collarbones, unable to breathe. “My belladonna. This is your work. You claimed it yourself. You’re not fit for anything else.”
She pulled herself from his hands and stumbled outside, hoping to find something that was normal and familiar to reassure her that he was wrong—that she could escape this. But up and down the street, the shrouded windows still shrieked with death, and the flickering streetlamps echoed the flash and bang of guns. He was terrible, she thought, he was inhuman. If that was the world he envisioned, she wanted no part in it anymore.
It was only such a pity that she had to love him.
Because she did love him—for what he was and what he had done. He had succeeded at the thing he promised so long ago, sent her away to another world and brought her back again; and the realization of his power filled her body with light.
She leaned against the garden wall (she had forgotten the way out of the garden, but perhaps there was no way out of it now), feeling her skin stretch with the pressure of becoming. She clawed at her cheeks, and her fingers drew away something white and gummy from the corner of her mouth. She coughed a little, experimentally, and her throat heaved a soggy mass of wriggling, phosphorescent maggots. They came up by the hundreds, the thousands, and when she finally purged herself, she felt scraped—not clean and empty, but open, as though the topsoil of her soul had given way to a rotted, stinking mold oozing toward the sun.
•••
“Haven’t you ever wondered what it would have been like if we succeeded?” Julian asked.
It was a week after they met in the greenhouse. They sat together, eating ice cream in defiance of December. None of the students passing seemed to notice them or the ivy sprouting up the bench beneath Julian’s legs.
“You would have gone into that other world and left me behind,” said Vivi—the Vivi that was still inside V after all the miles she tried to put between them.
“We would have gone together. You know I always promised to bring you with me.” He turned, mouth sorrowful around the pink plastic spoon.
“And what would that have given me?” she asked.
“A new life. With six hundred years in our pockets, we could go anywhere, places no one but us would ever know. We could live forever, do anything and everything. Whatever you would have wanted.”
A new life, forever. V had grown so accustomed to making herself fit into her current one as though it were someone else’s cast-off sweater, but it didn’t belong to her any more than Vivi’s did. They both belonged to Julian. Any other would, too; she recognized that immediately. But at least, this way, she might gain refuge in the fact that she chose to place her head inside the wolf’s mouth, instead of waiting for the wolf to swallow her unawares.
“I kept on, you know, after you left,” Julian was saying, scraping the paper bottom of his cup. “It mattered that much to me. Someone burned down the workshop, so it was slow going, but I made some adjustments. I moved away from potions—they were too messy, too obvious—to baneberries. I cultivated some mutant varieties, capable of more than you would expect.”
“Like us,” said V absently, thinking instead about whether she would ever look back at this world that held her aslant to everyone else and wish she had changed her mind.
Julian looked at her for a long moment. “Like us,” he said.
5.
The first time Vivi saw a dead bird, she was seven years old. It had already mostly decomposed, feathers colored like rain among the exposed bones, but it struck her as indecent for any corpse to lie out in the open. She dug a shallow depression in the backyard and tried to move the bird’s remains there, but the force of her hands only broke apart the softening flesh until what was left in her makeshift grave bore no resemblance to anything that had been alive. Impossible that this meat ever had flown, she thought; impossible that it was anything other than the disquiet wreck of a meaningless existence.
•••
Julian met her in the middle of a field with a shovel and a pouch with two berries in it hanging from a string around his neck. “For you and for me,” he said. “Our passports.”
He had explained everything to her the day before, about the brief sleep, the ageless escape. He regretted that they couldn’t have done it in his orchard, but she knew she had never really left it. The oldest oak tree waited for them another ten years into the future—the first stop on the road to eternity. She would be twenty-nine in ten years. V tried to imagine what twenty-nine would be like if she had never met Julian and failed.
Julian carved two trenches side by side in the mostly frozen grass. The dirt flung up by the shovel caught on his skin as though finding a home. Once there was sufficient depth, she nestled herself into the scarred ground and let the thud and heave of his digging pattern the rhythm of her heartbeat until it stopped. He knelt beside the grave and leaned closer, so that his shoulders blotted out the sky, before pushing open her jaw and setting a small, soft berry on her tongue.
0.
Her second memory is a voice calling out to her.
She struggles to rise, pulling her limbs loose from the earth’s embrace. Beside her, a man lies in a grave. His eyes are shuttered behind their glasses, no longer seeking something impossible for her to give. In this silence, she could tear her roots from the dark soil of him that nurtured and poisoned her for so long, and she nearly walks away, feeling an indescribable peace.
A third memory returns to her—she has nowhere else to go.
Her breath huffs in the air as she regards the dead country around her. No time might have passed at all, and leaving Julian behind would mean she had nothing left of herself to call her own.
She bends over Julian and opens her mouth, so that the bitter red warmth bleeds down his face, and when she kisses him, it tastes of sweetness and resignation and eternity.
