“Which is?”
“A little different from the Pirah?,” he said drily. “As in, I expect to wake up in the morning. I need light, refrigeration, all that, so I pay the electricity bill every month. That sort of thing.” She was looking at the bend of his knee, tilting her head to scrutinize the angle of it. “I can’t possibly understand what time looks like because I’m inside my experience of it, but whatever version of time I’m inside has to be different than the version the Pirah? occupy.”
“You say that like you’re trapped,” Regan noted. “Or they are.”
“Well, aren’t I? Aren’t we? We can’t speed it up or slow it down. We can’t navigate it.”
“Not yet,” she said, sparing him half a smile.
“Well, we only know that time can’t possibly exist within the Babylonian denominations of sixty. Not actually. A second is only a second within our perception. We try to standardize it, to make it useful, but we don’t know the rules. We’ll probably never know the rules.”
“And how does that make you feel?” She was chuckling to herself, making a private joke.
“Trapped,” he said, and she looked up.
“Does it?”
“Yes. From time to time.”
“Like you’re in a mortal prison?”
“You’re being facetious,” he observed, watching her mouth quirk with confirmation, “but yeah, kind of. Do people ever ask you what you’re doing next?”
“Always. All the time.”
“Right,” he said. “So that’s my point.”
“Don’t drop your chin,” she told him.
“Right.”
She turned her attention back to the parchment, continuing to draw.
“I don’t mind being trapped,” she murmured, the little strokes of her pencil like caresses to the page. “Sometimes I like it. Easier. Nothing to think about.”
He drummed his fingers on his knee. She looked up warningly, telegraphing a glance that said, Stop that.
He obliged.
“You don’t actually want things to be easy, do you?” he said.
“No, not really. But I wish I did.”
“Why?”
“Well, if time really was a trap and I was on some sort of predetermined course, that would be a relief,” she said. “The idea that I might have options or other time-spaces to occupy is a little overwhelming.”
“Don’t you like being overwhelmed?”
A blink. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You just seem like you’re looking for something to overwhelm you.”
“I seem like I’m looking for something?”
“I think,” Aldo said slowly, “that if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here.”
She looked up again, pausing the motion of her pencil this time.
It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye. Though, he reminded himself, maybe if he committed it to memory then he could return to it in another shape, with better understanding.
Eventually Regan cleared her throat. “I’m going to draw your mouth,” she said, “so we probably shouldn’t talk for a bit.”
“Okay,” he said, and as she dropped her attention back to her parchment, Aldo contemplated going back to live in that single second of time, when he and she had existed in perfect synchronicity.
* * *
HIS SECOND TOE WAS LONGER than his first, his feet were narrow, the arches were high and largely free of calluses. Had he been born to wear high heels he would have blistered unrelentingly, and Regan was relieved that he’d probably never know that pain. His calves were narrow and thin and so were his quadriceps. They were well-proportioned, though something had happened to his knee. There was a scar there, maybe surgery, maybe he’d fallen at some point. There had been no mother to kiss away the pain, and now the mark of inattention would remain.
His remarkable lines were, by chronology of looking: the one along the side of his thigh, the curve from his shoulder around his bicep, the ridge along his clavicle, the edge of his jaw. His color gradient was more saturated in his legs and then faded near his hips, then warmed again in his arms, his neck, his face. The most distinctive space was the one unseen between his eyes and thoughts, separated by what seemed to Regan to be a distance of miles, eons, lightyears.
His fingers, which she already knew better than anything aside from his mouth and his eyes, started to move after only a few minutes of silence. His brain had gone somewhere else and his fingers danced along with his thoughts, almost swaying. He was drawing tiny shapes in the air, little letters, feverishly recounting his theories to empty space. The room felt full and perhaps even crowded with everything he’d injected into it, though his chin remained level in allegiance to where she’d placed it. There was no noticeable cleft there; the whole of him was smooth and uninterrupted, aside from the stubble of facial hair he was never fully rid of, and the natural shadow beneath the bones of his cheeks. He was breathing steadily, rhythmically, his pulse visible along his neck. Regan counted his heartbeats, tapping lightly and telling herself that was important for an accurate representation. Man at Rest, she’d thought to call the drawing, only he wasn’t nearly at rest at all.