The thought dazed Regan, arresting her in a state of half-awake, half-asleep. If she reclaimed all her things—snuck in like the thief that she was and stole back the life that she’d shared with him—would Aldo wake to feel relief? Would he recognize it as a favor? On the one hand, she wanted to bear his entire sadness for him; to hurt herself doubly, just to keep it from him, and was that illness or love? Was she really so broken that she wanted to suffer to spare him, and if that was true, then had he been right all along? Did she want him to forget （did she want to forget?） or was his pain something that she had earned, that she deserved, purely by virtue of existing? Was it fairer for him to come home to an emptiness he could trace like the scars along his shoulders? Should the echoes of her still linger for him beyond the pain?
It was something new to curate, Regan thought: the possibility that she could haunt him or free him, and that whatever she did or did not do was entirely up to her. The immensity of it was crippling. Bearing the responsibility for what happened when two people fractured and bled was not something she’d ever attempted before, and she felt weakened by the prospect of it now. She’d given him arrows and he’d shot, and now parts of her were gaping holes, flayed and filleted and left behind as open wounds. Why hadn’t she run after him, why hadn’t she stopped him, why hadn’t she told him the truth? Why had he left, why hadn’t he said to her this time, “I love your brain even when I fear it,” why why why? The effort of asking herself felt like the loneliest thing of all, and the silence that followed was deafening.
Regan imagined cradling the pieces of her broken brain in her palms and staring at them, molding them together and then shaking them like a Magic-8 ball. Try again later, it said, and obediently, she shook again. Have I already destroyed this little fledgling thing I tried to nurture? It is certain. Reply hazy, ask again. Perhaps he would return? It is decidedly so. Outlook not so good. Maybe she should find him? You may rely on it. Very doubtful.
So it turned out divination was useless. The future was uncertain, and the past was a series of cycles that she could only see once she had passed. She thought of Aldo, of time, and how time wasn’t the thing that couldn’t be fixed, it was them—it was humanity in general—because time was what gave shapes to things. They could not see themselves unless they could exist outside themselves; ipso fact, without time passing, they could never really know what they had been.
The multiverse is impossible to understand, Aldo had once said, because we can’t know where we are inside it—and if we don’t know where we are, then what is our basis for understanding anything else?
You’re right, Rinaldo, Regan thought, soothed by his mind in retrospect; by a past Aldo who had left her something with which to comfort herself now.
Give it time, she told herself. Let it breathe, take the space to find the outlines.
An ending is only an ending, she thought, when both parties agree they’ve reached the end.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER THEIR FIGHT, Aldo noticed that Regan had left him something. He couldn’t tell if it had been a recent Regan who’d entered while he was away or if a past Regan had left it for future Aldo to find or not find. Either way, he noticed one of her dresses in his closet as if it had been deliberately placed in his line of sight, slightly withdrawn from the other articles of clothing for the purpose of catching his eye. It was the sort of thing she typically wore to work, and it reminded him of that sacred space in their Venn diagram of existence: The Museum.
Aldo had already considered the possibility that perhaps they had done the right thing; the smart thing; the best thing. In some way, he was quite certain they were safer now, better protected. He was free to be devout about some other thing, to find some new, less fragile theology for survival. There was an ease in that, a simplicity, and was there not some value in such stability? They could easily revert to ancient cultures of themselves, carrying nothing, resuming their mindless worship of the stars.
The Art Institute was much as it always was, quiet on a Monday except for an exhibition which would have normally repulsed Aldo, because it was surrounded by a crowd. He had no intention to observe its contents, noticing the chatter that meant it concerned other people; but then he paused unwillingly when something caught his eye.
It was a view that was both familiar and not. It was new in that he had ever seen it before, but also, it was recognizable in that it seemed to have previously existed inside his brain. The colors, he thought, looked like something he’d seen once or twice among the fabric of his musings, and so he gravitated towards it, slipping through the crowd.