Our Infinite Sadness

Discovery

Ben drove southeast, into the gathering night, with the waning vestiges of cool embers on their backs. He felt no particular urgency and often simply coasted thoughtlessly, mindful of nothing but the lingering honey-cinnamon taste of Edythe in his mouth, impossible to entirely dispel, no matter how many times he tried to swallow, persistent as peanut butter on his palate yet altogether pleasant and welcome. She leaned across the central transmission stalk to snuggle and seemed content with inattention to the road, the time, or their intended destination. Always in the past her personality had been typified by brooding discontent and impatience. No more.

His hand often lingered intentionally on the transmission gearshift for no particular reason— he hadn't changed gears in ages— apart from giving Edythe access to his hand. She poised her own hand tenderly on his, as always, her movements slow and cautious, as though she were caressing the fragile wings of a dove. He felt her fluid, investigatory touches as she traced the whorls of his fingerprints, each twist and bend in the patterns, as though running a mechanical pencil in the concentric ovals of a maze. As her deft explorations persisted he gathered correctly that she was busily memorizing him, down to his fingerprints, as though painstakingly cataloguing every facet of a newly acquired and most treasured possession.

Edythe ruminated on their emergence together from their abyss and its possible implications for Alice's dire prediction. Were they still constrained by the two possible fates that she had foreseen, either his premature death or damnation to this eternal non-life for her darling one? They were together now, and she knew that she could no longer bear to be parted from him. What future did that leave for them? To persist forever upon the knife edge between Alice's two futures? They had shared and given of each other in so many ways today that her family would have adjudged impossible, even to the point of kissing, and she couldn't bear the possibility that they might never kiss again, or that she might never feel the labyrinthine complexity of his fingerprints down to her crystalline bones, or that she might never again lose herself in his depthless chocolate brown eyes.

Ben dwelt on the taste of Edythe's mouth and at the same time recalled the eternal moment when she had placed his hand on her breast. She had pressed his palm and fingers hard against her firm cold softness, and she had set him to gasping breathlessly, yet the most dominant sensation in hindsight had been the silence beneath his palm, the lifelessness of her heart, its cold petrified stillness within her chest. He knew that she had died at some point in the past, to attain her present form. She no longer possessed a heartbeat. What did that make her? Something both less than alive and less than dead? Had she become a lifeless automaton? He couldn't believe it. She was full of life, it seemed to him. A different kind of life, certainly. But a better life. A superior life. Supernatural. Angelic. Sometimes she glanced up from their hands and stared into his eyes, and every time she looked up at him, her expression lit up with genuine happiness to match his own. In the darkness her eyes were glistening. He already knew from painstakingly gathered inference that she had her own particular way of crying, that there were never tears, a verity that he'd acquired to his own sadness, since she had looked that way in his presence more times than he could recall. Now she looked like she was shedding tears of joy; her eyes were glassy, her smile huge, her contentment so evident that it couldn't be denied. Her eyes were wet, closer to tears than he'd ever seen her, but the exact opposite of sadness.

Her elation took his breath away.

She also sang to herself, whilst idly flipping randomly through the AM stations in range of the old Chevy's rusty antenna. For the most part she toyed with variations of a slow, melodic nocturne that he couldn't quite place, as pretty as Chopin yet definitely a different appellation, unknown to him yet somehow familiar, as though perhaps he had heard Edythe singing it before. She sang almost inaudibly, in a dulcet yet ringing double soprano, that would set the air to trembling. Now and then she would stop on some tinny radio station and sing along to whatever happened to be playing. She seemed to know the lyrics to everything, regardless of decade. Once she even stopped on an old-timers' history show, a lecture on the run-up to World War Two, a replay of Sir Winston Churchill broadcast to England over the BBC. Edythe spoke along with uncanny baritone mimicry of the elder statesman, right down to the raspy incipient tuberculosis exacerbated by his affectation for cigars. Edythe knew every word. At the end of Churchill's polemic, she dialed down the cut to commercial and despondently said, "The abomination preceding was called the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, before humans were forced to acknowledge that horror requires enumeration."