Archive of Our Own

Cecil comes back from getting a glass of water and says, "Your light-"

Carlos follows his gaze to the lightbulb in the lab, but it stubbornly does nothing and Cecil makes a strange, frustrated whine. He sits backwards on his chair, his head uncomfortably pillowed on the sharp edge of the chair back. Carlos looks at him and says, "This isn't working, is it."

Mutely, Cecil shakes his head. Carlos resists the urge to get up, walk around the table and kiss his hair, breathing in the scent of him, all dark coffee and dust; that wouldn't be scientific. Instead, he picks up the deck of flashcards and says: "One more?"

Cecil nods and Carlos picks the top card off the deck, keeping it out of Cecil's line of sight, well-hidden in his hand. "Well?"

Cecil looks at him without looking at him, his eyes slightly out of focus. "Green star."

He's right. Carlos writes that down and places the card in the discard pile, trying to think. Scientifically speaking, this is actually working fine. Without repeating the experiment and running a statistical analysis on the results Carlos wouldn't like to say for sure, but as a rough guess it looks like Cecil is batting slightly above average, getting it right about once every four times even though there are five types of card in the pack: circles, crosses, squares, stars, and something that Carlos thinks may be meant to represent the sea, a child's drawing of wavy lines.

Scientifically speaking, he corrects himself, things don't work or not work: it's just what's observed, and what isn't. What he has observed, quietly, over months, is Cecil picking up phones before they ring; Cecil coming over to Carlos's apartment unannounced and taking out the pie that was just about to burn to a cinder; Cecil standing in the rain, his cupped hands spilling water before Carlos's feet are properly wet. And there are the eerie silent spaces in Cecil's radio show that Carlos doesn't know how to properly describe, that seem as though Cecil might be listening to some other broadcast of his own, speaking of the coming swarm before Carlos's windows darken.

Cecil makes that noise again, the one that sounds like incoherent hurt. Carlos picks up a card – blue wavy lines again; those ones are starting to make him feel nauseous – and puts it down. "Cecil," he says, "I think we should do this another way."

"Another way," Cecil repeats, tersely, and makes a strange gesture with both hands twisting, still evocative of frustration. Guiltily, Carlos looks at the sheet of paper on the table, the consent form that Cecil signed using a toothpick dipped in diluted toothpaste. That aside, it's quite in order: his future ethics committee will not be able to say Cecil didn't read it, because he did, nor that he didn't understand it to sign it, because he did, and Carlos will not tell them that in Night Vale, documents with meaningful legal significance drip blood and glitter.

Abruptly, Carlos gives up. He gets up and pushes away the rest of the flashcards. He has imagined, still guiltily but with something inside him turning over in horrible fascination, picking up his sphygmomanometers and scalpels and opening Cecil up to the light of scientific inquiry, but what they're doing here, somehow, is getting more crass than intimate: this is maybe breaking something down to its component parts when he doesn't know how to put it back together. He walks across to where Cecil is sitting and leans down to kiss him, tipping Cecil's head up, his fingers working into Cecil's hair. "Just do… whatever it is you do," he says, softly. "Just do it. If you can, and you want to."

Cecil looks up into his eyes and then gently, detaches; he gets out of the chair and stands in the centre of the lab with one hand raised as though he's waiting for something. His feet are bare; Carlos doesn't remember when he threw off his shoes.

"It's like a day long ago," Cecil says after a minute. "A day from long ago when the sky is so bright blue it hurts to look at."

Carlos resists the urge to say the future, Cecil, not the past, and goes back to his chair and sits down, quietly. Cecil is still standing in the middle of the lab, suppressed motion apparent in the tensed lines of his body. "A day from long ago, and you're reminded.

*

"You are reminded of a sky you saw some place long ago, some place you can't quite remember. You are living in a new place now, a place with four seasons, and fall is turning over colours underneath a sky so blue. You have been somewhere, perhaps hiking in the mountains, although it's strange that you can't remember, because dust keeps gathering. You find it between your feet and the tiled floor. It accumulates in the shower. It feels like grit, not fluffy: perhaps it is sand. Your mother showed you a long time ago how to know the difference between types of sand: the sea smoothes the grains to perfect roundness and the sand on your kitchen surfaces is sharp like desert. You gather it all up together and you are surprised by how much of it there is. You put it in a plastic bag and seal it.

"A little afterwards you think of your friend, someone you knew before the thing that you can't remember, who makes jewellery to sell on Etsy and casts metal with a small kiln she keeps in her garage. You take the sand in its plastic bag to her and you ask if she will apply the enormous heat and pressure that will turn it into glass. She is surprised but agrees. She thinks it must be a gift for someone. You know it is not. You think it is just a whim, a strange axiomatic want, like when you were a child and wanted to go in a silver airplane and look down on the world below, something you cannot explain but know is needed to fill some distant, internal lack. You want what you want and you do not understand what you want, because it is buried in your mind, but you remember me"

*

"Cecil," Carlos says, and tries to get up, and can't-

*

"standing here, in your lab; you remember how I was standing, with my hand up and my eyes fixed on you. You do not remember my face. When the sand is cast your friend gives it back to you as glass beads, four of them, and they are on a string with a heavy knot at one end and a loop at the other because she still believes they are a gift for someone, perhaps someone whom you left, to go into the desert. You know there is no such someone and you thank her. You offer her money which she refuses. You would not wear glass beads on knotted thread, unless they were a gift, perhaps from someone who left to go into the desert, but you keep them close to you. They sit on your desk at your right hand; they sit on your bedside table. If you pick them up, clasp them in one hand so the glass is warmed from your body, and then you are careful to touch just one bead, the closest one to the end, just that one, you can close your eyes and remember"

*

They're in the backyard, under the old apple tree, and Carlos has never understood how it can be there at all, how this beautiful old gnarly tree, fruiting blush-pink and yellow, can have grown out here in the desert: whether it is something to do with Night Vale, and how Night Vale is strange, or just one of those earthly miracles that can happen anywhere, but whichever it is Carlos was raised to be grateful and he waters the tree on the hottest days, lets the hosepipe spill and splutter all over the roots.

"Carlos," someone is calling, "Carlos, tea" – and then someone else is laughing, a woman with beautiful hair and dark eyes and no name that he can remember

*

"-Dana-"

*

because Carlos has stopped concentrating and the concatenation of physical forces has gotten away from him all in a rush so water spurts upwards in glorious libation, and the woman is still giggling and through the sun, scattering the water droplets like jewels, through that wonderful prismatic uncertainty, Carlos can see someone else, a man leaning against the side of the house and saying, "Carlos, you-"

*

"…are startled by the intimacy and immediacy of it. You are not surprised that a memory, complete and perfect as its container, can be stored within a single glass bead, and you are surprised that you are not surprised: it is because a part of you remembers a life where such things were commonplace. Once you have learned how to understand one bead you can read them each in turn, but you string them out, afraid in some way that you cannot define to let them slip between your fingers too quickly. You reach out for the second bead when you can't wait any more, it's two in the morning and the moon, full and ominous, is glittering at your bedroom window, and you are startled when you realise…"

*

There is someone in the bed with him. Carlos rolls over and Cecil's body fits against his, a perfect spoon, his feet alarmingly cold against Carlos's legs. There is still a vague stickiness to the sheets, even though Carlos has cleaned up and the air in the room feels dry and sparse. He's breathing in warmth, comfortable and easy, when Cecil murmurs, "Window…" just before a desert breeze blows it shut.

Softly, Carlos gets up to open it again. He gets back into bed thinking that Cecil always seems smaller in moments like this, as though his constant chatter, and force of personality, and frightening, awesome capacity to love, all take up physical space. Sleep reduces him to barefoot bones and sinew, his heartbeat steady in Carlos's hands. When he twitches as though afraid of falling – myoclonic jerk, observes the part of Carlos's mind with all the research training and the last part, always, to fall asleep – the movement passes into Carlos's body and is absorbed by it, by that perfect lack of space between them.

Something in the air stirs and Cecil's eyes open. On the edge of sleep, haunted by urgency, he whispers, "Carlos, remember…"

*

"…but in the morning you wake with the glass bead still in hand so the memory became a part of your dream. When you open your drapes you have already forgotten my name.

"You take the third bead to the edge of the water. The sky is that same shade of blue, deep and azure, but the sea reflects grey. Your ethics committee has been asking questions about your relationship with your experimental subject. You have no one to tell but the ocean. You tell it that you only vaguely remember the experiments you conducted. You read your notes, but the subject is never named and you cannot remember his face. You are not frightened that you hurt him. You know that that is something you are not. You remember very little but you remember what a monster is.

"You clasp the bead and you are in"

*

Carlos is in a lab. It must be a lab, because it is littered with Erlenmeyer flasks and empty pizza boxes. He is sitting at a table covered in a mess of Zener cards, squares and circles and wavy lines, which startles him, because he's never gone into for that kind of fringe research. There's a sudden movement. He turns and there is a man standing in the middle of the floor, tense and frightened, one hand outstretched in front of him. The man is barefoot with his jeans rolled up as though he has been here a long time, as though he has a right to be here, a right to space. Carlos is startled by the intimacy of that presence, of the way his mind is listing a dozen bodily details, like the sand embedded between the stranger's toes, the edge of skin showing between his T-shirt and jeans, his fingernails, ragged and painted chipped-green.

From a great distance, Carlos can hear the sound of the ocean.

*

"The last bead contains no memory. You are disappointed, and then you realise that if you wear the beads and touch the last you sometimes see eyes flash at the edge of the mirror. On days that all begin to feel familiar you try and find meaning in those eyes. You are not able to explain what you are looking for.

"Fall is becoming winter. The sky is no longer blue, but you are not afraid. You carry the beads everywhere you go, but in your hand and in your pocket: you do not wear the beads for too long. You know now that they are not yours. They are a gift for someone you left behind to cross the desert.

"Some day soon now you will cross that desert."

A pause.

Then Cecil says, "I think" – and there is such inarticulate distress there that Carlos half wants to laugh and half-wants to take Cecil in his arms and kiss him into some kind of calm. He feels like he's rising from some heady fugue, wet and bruised and blinking.

"Carlos," Cecil says, and Carlos considers.

He thinks about promising, I won't go, and knows without being told that Cecil will simply say, it doesn't work like that, for all that scientifically speaking, things neither work nor don't, they're merely observable, or not.

Then again, Cecil himself may not be scientifically observable. Carlos could break him down to his component parts, blood and body, passion and skin, never find love. Precognition must be half an art of not breaking things, just because you can.

"What colour thread?" he asks, gently.

Cecil shakes his head, still holding himself a little apart. "I don't know." Frustration and outrage have gone, Carlos notices, to be replaced by something distant and bleak. "I really can't always tell what's going to happen," he adds, as though this is some sort of moral failing.

Carlos gets up and grabs Cecil around the waist, pulling him close so they're warming the space between them. "I meant," he says, still gentle, "what colour thread would you like?"

"Oh." Cecil looks at him, head tipped back. "Green."

"Green." Carlos makes a mental note. He isn't asking himself, now, if he believes Cecil can know what will happen before it happens, in defiance of all known scientific method. One time in four, he thinks. One time in four he'll go out to look at the lights in the sky, above the Arby's.

"You are not afraid," Cecil says, eerie and kind. As he says it he turns over his left hand and Carlos takes it instinctively, his fingers closing in a circlet around Cecil's wrist.

"I am," Carlos says, honest, "but I'm always learning. How not to be, I mean."

Above them, the lightbulb burns brighter, then breaks.