He knew he would never see her again, not of her volition. Perhaps they would meet in some unlikely place by accident, in an eastern European country, in an occult bookstore, passing each other in a metro turnstile; perhaps she would come sing again at his club and have a drink with him like tonight, or maybe in a green room waiting to be a fifteen-minute guest celebrity on some vapid talk show. Their lives had a way of intersecting at the oddest times, each conjunction a warp or a woof in the fabric of a larger pattern neither one of them could see. Sometimes he suspected they were actually the same person with only the convincing illusion of separateness about them; they were like the two ends of the cord that gets woven into the infinite cosmic knot, and they were afraid of joining together because then they could know no beginning or end — and beginnings and ends were so terribly important to them. The first time they had seen each other in college — it had been so easy, like old friends running into each other — no, like relatives, siblings, fraternal twins seeing each other after only a short time apart. She had even said something like that as they sat in their pastel-colored chairs, looking oddly out of place in their black clothes. She was in the middle of a crossword puzzle, stuck on a clue about a Dr. Suess character who had saved the world from a sticky green precipitation called Ooblek, and he had pulled up a chair, read the clue upside-down, and pronounced the solution just as she said it herself: 'Bartholomew Qubings.' 'We would have been whiz kids,' she said. 'Gee,' he'd said, rubbing the base of his neck in mock modesty, 'my five hundred hats are off to you.'
They only said a tentative goodbye as they finished their vodka. He told her that he'd be there that night to watch her, that he'd come backstage afterwards and meet her band; and as he told her these things, as pleasantly and sincerely as possible, he knew that it was just a social charade, that she could see through it but was going along with its momentum because it allowed her to be pleasant, too. They parted with a "See you tonight," but they both knew it wouldn't happen. She excused herself to get some sleep before the performance; he supervised the stage crew long enough to do the first sound check, and then, when they had killed the feedback on the mic, he left to drive up the coast in the fog. He drove Gabriel's red Porsche — his other expensive hand-me-down — playing old college tapes all hissy with magnetic rot, and he didn't come back for the performance — or for the aftermath.
Odd, how the past refused to go away. When he'd looked at Sophie's face he had seen the attrition of fifteen years: crows' feet, a sag here and there like a casualty to gravity, healed-over scars, a certain etching of the expression that passes for one's character. Had he seen her for the first time that day, not knowing the younger Sophie, he might never have recognized her. Another man, in a tactless mood, might have told her she looked like the mother of her younger self, perhaps an older sister; but to him Sophie's face was richer for all the years — he could see through her skin as if he were watching a backward time-lapse in a film, and behind it was the face of the younger woman with its innocence just dead and its potential for sin still radiant. He had misread her then because he, too, had been young; and as he headed back in the early morning, the fog having cleared into the blackness preceding dawn, he suddenly recalled something else he had misread in her presence. They had been out at Sunset Lake one night — the place where lovers went on spring nights to listen to the soothing hiss of the water through the sluice gate. It was cold that night and the lakeside was deserted; they could see their breaths against the starlight as they came down the path through the dark woods. He had slipped on something, and he had grabbed her hand to break his fall; she pulled him so that he spun in a quarter circle and stood up again, weirdly disoriented, and he had looked out toward the lake to see the night brilliant with fireflies — a dazzling array of them in constellations, receding into infinity — blinking on and off as far as the eye could see. He had gasped at this incredible vision, and just as he was about to say something, just as he opened his mouth to describe this indescribable beauty to her, his vision had somehow snapped back into the mundane, and he had seen the rippling reflections of the stars in the black water. 'What's wrong,' she'd said, hearing his exclamation, and he, at a loss for words, had just told her, 'Nothing. I hurt myself.' Fifteen years, and the hurt was far worse then he'd imagined.
Just before daybreak, back at his warehouse studio, he breathed the breath of fire — a yoga exercise to leave himself light-headed — and he performed a long Tai Qi form — one he hadn't done in years — just to make himself leave his body and watch from that high, oblique angle that felt so quiet to him, like watching a beautiful movie without sound. He followed that cinematography for a while, until he saw his body grow weary, disconnected so long from its soul, and then he snapped back and felt himself winded and covered in an acrid sweat of physical and emotional exhaustion. And then, without showering, without cleaning the unpleasant taste from his mouth, he lay on his bed, spread eagle like Leonardo's diagram of the ideal man, and flowed directly into a dream he knew was the answer to his day. It's cold, he thought as he went under. It's cold and the wind is blowing the first flurries of a late winter snow from the northeast. He is naked, his flesh already blue-tinged. He is squinting into that wind, and as the tears blow from the corners of his eyes they freeze instantly into diamonds of ice, and he can hear them clicking on the ground behind him. I am stoic, he says to himself. At least that is the expression I wear on my face, which is a mask I have tied to my soul. His words sound insubstantial to him, as if there were a leak in his windpipe, and he reaches down to touch an odd, ticklish sensation at the base of his throat, and he finds an arrow there. He pulls it out and warm air hisses from the slit in his trachea, a bubble of bright red blood bursts into the shape of liquid rose petals upon which the crystals of snow vanish without a trace. A puff of steam, and then his voice is healed. He can call out now: 'Sophie! Sophia!' and not even an echo in response.
And now he is walking in the dream world, the soles of his feet not quite touching the frozen earth, and he is approaching an intersection — a crossroads where it is the custom to bury witches and execute highwaymen. He sees her there, in the northwest quadrant of the crossroads — Sophie — laid out on the icy ground, her arms folded over her breasts as if she were in a casket, her face, exposed under the tatters of a black lace veil, covered with powdery snow. She must be dead, he thinks. She must be frozen to the earth. And though he is certain of her death he approaches her tentatively, as if he could possibly wake her, and when he is finally standing above her, looking down at her blue-white body and the white, snow-covered sockets of her eyes, he feels such a crushing sadness than he kneels at her side, tiny diamonds sprinkling her, tumbling from her cold flesh into the drift she has caused with the wind shadow of her body. He looks down at her face, full of desire to see her features for one last time. He reaches out to dust the snow from her face, but just then the wind howls in the distance and a strong gust scatters the cold powder as if it were sand in a desert wind, and he reels back momentarily because, with the snow gone, he can see that her eyes and mouth are wide open — eyes so intensely blue they look like the reflection of a clear winter sky, mouth gaping not in blackness but pure white, filled with snow frozen into ice. 'Sophie,' he says, filling the air again with steam. He reaches out to close her eyes and halts in mid-gesture as flecks of deep red appear on her cheek, her forehead, in the hollow of her collarbone. At first he thinks he must be weeping blood, but then he looks up into the sky and sees the heavens full of rose petals — red as blood, purple as the lips of the drowned, yellow as jaundiced eyes — showering down and swirling in the gusts of cold, pure wind from the north. He wants to embrace the colors. He wants to clutch each rose petal to his heart and weep out his sorrows to melt this world into a place where he can live. He spreads his arms wide and collapses backward under the deluge of flowers, expecting to feel the cold shock of impact, but he found himself upside down instead, his head towards the foot of his bed, arms splayed out, one leg outstretched and the other folded under, forming the number four. He was facing northward like the dead, and outside he heard the black branches creaking in the wind, and he lay back, with a weak smile on his lips, to remember it was snowing roses.
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