The girl in black dropped her pants at the foot of Makena's vitased and slid the thick curtains so that there was no longer natural light in the small chamber. She glided along the side of the bed and positioned herself, kneeling near a round little table.
"You're reading...The Revelation of St. John?" She lifted the end of the club-like volume in her hands, and let it fall again. Makena gave the woman nothing in response but glared at her with a small contemplation, waiting for her to do the next thing that she would. The woman in black leafed over the rigid cover with her left hand, brushing past the first few score pages, until finding one and looking it a little intently. "This is very funky. To me, this is a funky thing for a person to read." She flipped back a few dozen pages and then closed the book, turning with the sway of yellow hair to view dust mote constellations in a shaft of white light. With a correct examination of dust, she thought...we can learn for ourselves the identities of what life forms have passed through a building space and what physical processes or activities have been performed there. In this same way, the unmanned Hayabusa spacecraft will someday snatch dust from the back of an asteroid and reveal the climate of our early system of Sol. When at last it returns.
"I read it because it reminds me that nothing good will last forever. It talks about the end. With my lifestyle under these psychotropic walls the end is going to come sooner than I would hope, darling. My thoughts must be directed at the end of everything."
The woman in black, who was no longer in anything, looked to the floor and scratched each of her knuckles uncertainly.
"Is this...the right consolation?" She said, touching the book.
"No...it's, it's the best consolation, darling," Makena said, stretching out his arm and taking her cold hand inside his. "I know you think I need something real. But nothing here is; I wake up and my house looks like a fucking Escher painting, the weather outside is different everyday so I can't make any plans anymore, and I try to build something constant out of my connection with you but every time you are here you don't act the same way. Nothing yields to prediction. Nothing takes its time or glides past soft and kindlily."
The woman walked a little away from him, releasing her hand. She closed her eyes to drown in thought. Her curves were plaintive in the twilight, half-existing, as she did nothing and ruminated on what she could say to him next.
"Then you make peace with the chaos." She turned her head upwards to gaze at wood panelling of the ceiling. The hibernating screen framed in white fibreglass softly sung a continuous D#.
"That's...that's it," he said, looking at her with wide eyes.
"I understand you, Makena." She turned at him impulsively, flitting the curtains behind. "I understand you more than the woman in your picture link."
"But you are barely here. Lumina is with me always."
"Then Lumina is a disastrous fool, for she doesn't understand you and she has you in this state."
"I would be in this state anyway. What do you even know of her?"
"I know enough that she is no consolation for you."
"I'm sorry. But I love her. Lumina and you are the same, you are aspects. I know we have been slipping...slipping into something that can only go wrong, that can only end in...in tatters and sadness. But I want us to try to start again. I want it to be the way it was."
"You think I am the same person but I'm not, Makena. You talk to me as I am the physical embodiment of Lumina. But it has been too long and you know me too well. We have slipped but we cannot go back; it is too late. Look into my eyes and hear me speak. I am a different woman. I invoke your God, listen to me. Look."
Makena trembled, blocked his sight, time passed and drove into him apprehension and guilt and disorder in the blank blackness behind his quivering lids. At a climax of horror it was enough; too much. He fought the fHe took his hands from his face and made a long glance at her. Softly, a transparent liquid sank out of her blue irises and weaved pathways down her sweet, dry face. Makena's eyes betrayed a look of unrestrained horror.
