Aria Remains
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

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The sun had set by the time Aria returned to her room, having been readying herself since abdicating the stage so that the stars could continue playing out their magnificent drama. She was convinced that something was about to happen, that the redemption for which she had been waiting, the absolution she needed so that she might move forward from this mystifying period of her life was closer now than it had ever been. In her preparations for what was to come, what would reveal itself to her, she had lighted candles and arranged them around her bathroom, filled the bath with hot, steaming water and soothing powders, and had then allowed herself to soak in it, to absorb it, until the water had lost almost all its heat. She had cleared her mind, had freed herself from all anxieties, had done all she could and all she could think of in order to make herself as open and accessible as possible.

Standing again by the bedroom window, uncaring whether anyone passing on the street below or looking from their window opposite would be able to see her nakedness amongst the gloom of her bedroom, she closed her eyes and calmed her breathing. She would know when the moment came, would recognise the sign, would follow the path that was to be indicated to her. She wanted to be ready, wanted to be free and unenclosed, to be pure. She almost considered herself a new-born, waiting with wonder and anticipation that her life was about to begin again. The pores in her skin still tingled at the memory of the hot water, her whole body feeling cleansed, electrified, her spirit uplifted. The stars looked down upon her, refracting her existence, seeing her here, now, as they had always seen her, no matter where she lost herself. They did all they could to help, and were eager to assist once again.

On the street below, still waiting patiently, stood the man who was always around, eager to disclose his secrets. Uncertain exactly where he should be or how long he could linger before he was called back again, suddenly an idea occurred to him. If it is so that I am unable to replace her, he considered, and if there is, as it seems, something blocking me from seeing her, from reaching her, then perhaps I might discover a way to bring her to me. Perhaps, if I were to think and to calculate, there may be a way I can draw her to a place where I am able to connect with her, where I can tell her all the things I need to say and all the things she must be able to hear.

He looked up and down the empty street, lights now starting to glow a creamy yellow through windows and atop lampposts, wondering what it might be that would attract her to a place he would be able to enchant. It must be a place to which she would be inexorably drawn and from where she would be able to break through, to replace him so he could replace her at last. He would, he assumed, need to replace a way to predict where she might be at a given time, what her routines and habits were, so that she might be spellbound, compelled to investigate and thus replace her egress from one place to another. He already knew some of the places she visited, could sense her presence even though he was imperceptive of her form, so it should be somewhere close to such a site, somewhere she was almost certain to return to soon.

His previous attempts to blindly make contact had been unsuccessful. Since he was almost entirely uninitiated in the workings of these bizarre and inscrutable objects he had come to learn were called computers, had no real knowledge of electricity and had received no clue as to the whereabouts of the small, stone bottle he had been experimenting with, attempting to bewitch it so that it would lead him to her and which had, instead, somehow disappeared into the ether, he knew he must try again and that it must be soon. In another place, and so in all places, there were portentous murmurings, an inescapable wave of change gradually breaking towards the shore. Such metamorphose would have their tumultuous effects felt not just in each place but above and below, its undulations spreading throughout the universe itself, rebounding around the epochal hexahedron they, and all others, shared. Eventually, as the warmth of the day became infected by a slight but cool evening breeze, he was finally seized by a brilliant notion, an infallible solution that, he felt sure, would prove to be the emancipation of each and all of them. And so he moved along, not wanting to squander another moment, enthusiastic for his plans to become conclusions.

Aria, seeing only herself reflected in the glass of her bedroom window and feeling the chill of the evening, reached for a tee shirt and her favourite pyjama bottoms, now a faded black although the white spots remained clear and distinct. Beginning to tire, she held onto her conviction that this night would be the night she would replace her fulfilment, deciding that merely sitting on the edge of her bed would in no way diminish the likelihood of its attainment. Just to rest, that was all. Just to reduce some of the strain on her back and legs, just so she would be as absolutely ready as she could be. It could be any time now, she thought, blinking heavily. At any moment it will come to me and I shall be shown all that it is that I have to…

Without any recollection of how she had come to be there, she was shocked to replace herself standing in the alleyway that lead to Ruby and Josh’s house. It was morning, a bright and clear, pleasantly warm morning and the ginger cat that liked to lay across the top of the fences looked down at her, trying to decide whether leaving its location in the sun, just to be stroked and talked to softly, was worth the effort. Determining that no, it would probably be best to stay where it was because now was not yet, not quite the time for interactions, the cat stretched a foreleg, yawned slowly and widely, and blinked at Aria as she stood below its position, slowly moving her head from side to side, trying to relieve the ache in her neck. She must have fallen asleep, she thought, yet could still not piece together her awakening, nor her journey here. She didn’t think she was prone to sleepwalking, had never been told she had ever done it before, and so was at a loss as to how she had arrived in the alley she knew so well.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ she asked the ginger cat, whose eyes had now closed.

Looking up at the perfect cobalt sky, at the position of the sun, she knew that it had to be very early, too early to call upon Ruby and so, noticing with relief that she had, at least, put on pyjamas before she had fallen asleep, she began walking home. She saw no one else as she went, heard no traffic, her only accompaniment the playful twittering of the birds and her soft footsteps along the path.

I wonder if this is it, she thought, approaching her house. I wonder if this is the start of the culmination of the whole thing, that I was supposed to be in that alleyway and that, when I get back home, there will be something there, something different I am supposed to notice. Just like that strange little stone bottle, and those bizarre messages, those emails. They must all mean something, they must all be connected. And so, when I am home again there will be an answer there, and it is that I was meant to be elsewhere, even though I still feel as though I am at home, in order to realise it when I returned. I had to leave in order to go back, because it is my reappearance that is the most important thing. It is almost as if I am in two places at the same time, that by not realising I have left I still remain.

Aria saw no contradiction in her thoughts, found no difficulty in believing them, in taking them as being the truth. She was, instead, now being guided by something greater than herself, allowing herself to be shown and to experience things that were outside her ambit, beyond her influence. And, in that, she found no reason for apprehension or doubt. She was willing to offer herself, to give herself to whatever it was that wanted her, whatever had been calling her. It didn’t matter that she had no clear idea what it was, what she was immolating herself to, because she had now settled upon the theory that everything that had happened to her so far all had a meaning, a purpose, and she was now at the verge, standing at the very precipice of discovering what that aspiration was.

As she turned the corner onto Pearl Street she stopped, stepped back and gazed at the sight before her. There were three women, sitting at a long wooden table, all suspended just a few inches above the road. Young and beautiful, Aria immediately recognised them as the three sisters who had visited her previously, appearing in her garden while the darkness of the night tore around them and she had thought her best friend to have been slaughtered.

‘Aria,’ one of them said, her voice sweet and melodious, an etherial current. ‘We have waited to see you again, to be able to talk to you without witness.’

She was still spinning her thread around a spindle, around and around, filaments glistening in the morning sun. Beside her the second woman looked up from her large and heavy book.

‘Aria,’ she said, ‘it will soon be time. It is noted here, recorded quite clearly and deliberately and so it shall pass.’

The third woman didn’t look up. Instead she was examining a long and dazzling piece of the thread, holding it delicately between the fingers of both hands, her shears still on the table before her.

‘The time is now not far off,’ she said, ‘for you to be granted the prize of your destiny. Yes, there is still something of a journey before you, but you are now entered upon the right path and shall be shown the right direction. You should, however, be careful to pay heed, to recognise what is important and what is not as many things are revealed to you as you go. Not everything you see, nor everyone you meet, may be either real nor truthful, although that is not to say they never have been, that they have never been where you replace them.’

She paused, looking to her sisters, should they wish to speak.

‘Together we have journeyed so far’, the first of them said, smiling as she continued working with her spindle, ‘and we have shown you as much as we can, but now…’

‘Now,’ the second continued, turning pages of the book, ‘it is for you to show us, for you to guide us where it is we must follow.’

‘And follow we shall,’ said the third. ‘Until we, all of us, reach the end.’

She glanced at the shears on the table in front of her in such a way that Aria understood their importance, then looked again to her, smiling sweetly as they slowly melted away to nothingness, taking their place on high.

Unperturbed, having now given herself completely to the possibilities of impossibilities, the reality of fantasy and the fantasy of reality, Aria continued along the street, went into her house and began searching for what it might be that had been left for her to replace. She looked everywhere, upstairs and down, behind cushions and inside cupboards but, starting to feel disheartened, she found nothing out of place, nothing that had not been there before. After almost an hour she stopped, standing in the centre of the living room, scratching her head and wiping the perspiration from her brow as she surveyed the books and boxes and cushions and magazines now scattered across the carpet. She had been so positive, so certain that there would be something waiting for her, and now she wasn’t sure at all what to think, what to do next.

She went into the kitchen, noticed the clock on the microwave displaying 11.27 and, having not previously thought about being hungry and despite having little appetite, she decided it would probably be best to make something to eat. Quickly grating some cheese across two slices of buttered bread, she took the sandwich back to the living room and sat on the sofa, looking around in case there should be something different, something new she hadn’t seen earlier.

As her eyes moved around the room, taking in the framed photographs on the walls, the ornaments and folderol that spoke to times passed, memories half-remembered, a life already halfway through its third decade, they finally lingered on the comatose screen of the television. The flat, black rectangle mirrored her image and, though unclear, undefined, it showed her that she was no longer alone. She was surrounded by the hazy, fulgurating reflection of the four figures that had appeared to her in her garden, on the same night she first saw the three sisters. They were gathered around her, at the back of the sofa, still as a photograph, staring into the dead screen. Aria gasped and quickly turned around, letting what was left of the sandwich fall to the carpet, scattering cheese and breadcrumbs amongst the Chekhov and the Proust.

The quartet had already left, had slipped away in the tiny sliver of time it took for her to turn her head. She looked back to the television, for a second or two seeing only herself before a blindingly white flash of light filled the screen, its beams reaching beyond the boundary of the screen and drawing close to her, tentacles of light wanting to make contact with her, to take hold of her and bring her to them. She closed her eyes, lowered her head, the silence in the house now a high-pitched dissonance in her head, a burst of warmth settling across her shoulders as if sultry and sympathetic hands had installed themselves upon them. Slowly she opened her eyes again, partly frightened, partly exhilarated about what she might replace.

Once again she was standing in the alleyway that lead to Ruby and Josh’s house. The ginger cat, still laying across the top of the fence, lazily opened first one eye and then the other, yawning and stretching. Aria looked around, shielding her eyes from the midday sun, trying to understand what was happening. Had she been here all along, her meeting with the three sisters and the search of her house being nothing more than vivid scenes from her imagination? Or had it really happened? Perhaps it was still happening and all of this was in her head, in her mind’s eye. Or, maybe she was sitting on her sofa, even looking through her window to the darkening evening, fresh from her hot bath, all of these incidences nothing more than abstract misconstruction.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she thought she heard the ginger cat say, its voice a lazy drawl, its accent hinting at nobility. ‘Time, you know. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s merely space, the same as space, and therefore it can have no tense, since everything is just as real as everything else. Change, you know, my dear, is just an illusion because nothing is changing. It is just there. Past, present and future.’

It was only after the words had fallen away that she found she was able to turn her head to look at the cat. It opened its eyes again, blinked at her three or four times, then appeared to go back to sleep.

‘Have you always been able to speak?’ she asked, surprised at the innocence in her own voice.

The cat neither stirred nor stayed still.

‘Do you know why this is happening?’ Aria asked.

Again, the cat gave no sense of motion, yet was no longer at rest.

‘Why am I here again? Or have I never left?’

As Aria spoke she became overwhelmed with the sensation that she had just left Ruby’s house, walking through the alley with the clear, bright moon lighting her way. She was feeling a little bit drunk, a little uneven, and now it seemed as though she had just said goodnight to Robert, that it was the evening they had first met. She again sensed the affability she had felt, the slow awakening of the desires that had, for so long, lay dormant.

‘Would you like to share a cab?’

‘Thank you, but no. I only live a few minutes away so I’m happy to walk. I’m free on Saturday, though.’

‘Yes, that would be great.’

‘What is it, Ruby?’

‘He died. He was killed.’

Aria closed her eyes, squeezing them shut as tightly as she could.

‘Sauvignon?’

‘Maybe… Maybe you’d like to do it again?’

‘Yes, maybe I would.’

’Can I give you a ring?’

‘If my friend gave your friend her number, then you can ask him to get it from her.’

She was getting out of the cab, leaving Sam behind, and then she was leaning against the rough stone wall of the bridge, looking down at the dark water. It moved steadily against the brickwork on either side of the channel, heading out to the docks across the other side on its way to the ocean a few miles further on.

She covered her face with her hands, eyes still jammed shut.

‘The only reason for consideration of the past is that our brains contain memories,’ the ginger cat may have said. ‘Time is, after all, nothing other than a reflection of change and, from those changes, our brains construct a sense of time as if it were flowing. But then, as I may or may not have mentioned, change is just an illusion.’

All around her, with neither sound nor pressure, a tumult began to build, a swirling frenzy of light and shade, coldness and heat.

‘All events, whether past, present or future, coexist. The past is both dead and gone, yet immortal. In the same way that all towns and cities exist at the same time, in different locations, so the past still exists, just as the future already exists. It is just that they are somewhere other than where we are now present.’

Aria opened her eyes and looked at the ginger cat, still sleeping on the top of the fence, staring directly at her, standing up, arching its back as it stretched, still fast asleep.

‘Everything continues to exist and always will, on the grounds that it had, at some time, been present. What an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past. Do you understand physics, my dear?’

‘No, no,’ Aria shouted, although she had no need to raise her voice since, while the maelstrom continued around her, still it gave forth no sound.

‘In physics we know that objects exist in a suspended state until they are observed, when they collapse into just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until some time in the future, and may even depend on actions not yet taken. And so it is that reality begins and ends with the observer.’

She lowered herself to the ground, squatting on the path, an arm across her face while the other bent over the top of her head.

‘If you were to go back in time it would not be possible to change anything, because your past is always simultaneously someone else’s future. You see, what you do tomorrow will make it the way it is. You will be fulfilling a certain destiny writ in time, which is in itself more a deception that a fundamental property of nature.’

‘I don’t know,’ Aria cried. ‘I don’t understand what is happening.’

‘Eating cornflakes instead of toast tomorrow won’t change the future, it just makes the future the way it is. In the same way, and this shall be where I leave you, though I have very much enjoyed not only this meeting but all the times we have met, but in that way, travelling to the past doesn’t change it, it just makes it the way it is and has always been. If you travel to the past you are part of the past. The events are there for all time, and they do not change. It just makes that time, and later times, the way they are.’

The tempest ceased, the vortex disappeared, and Aria was left on her haunches, the ginger cat fast asleep on its fence.

‘What kind of shrubbery?’ she had asked.