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The bar is made from cut rock crystal, like a flask or an imperial casket, and it gives back the white light of the room — it appears this room is nothing but light, for all that it also conspicuously resembles the concourse at LaGuardia Airport; Stephen shields his eyes against it — so that the woman who sits alone atop one of the bar’s two stools seems to hold a faint, candle-flame luster about herself.
She has drawn back the long sleeves of her dress to keep them clean and glances at Stephen when he staggers over. Blood seeps from the wound through his middle, soaking the skirts of his blackened tunic and dripping into his boots, a condition that being dead for the past hundred or perhaps thousand years does not seem to have in any significant way ameliorated.
“Hey, look.” The fact that Christine has been dead a good while longer has not even smudged the carmine color of her lipstick. “He’s here — the Phantom of the Opera.”
Stephen steadies himself before sweeping into a grandiloquent bow. His voice is as soft as the creaking of a rusted gate but he manages nonetheless to carry the coy tune.
“Have you missed me, good messieurs?”
Christine lifts a glass goblet from which she has been drinking. It leaves behind a bight of condensation on the bar’s smooth surface and a cool, clear water fills it to the brim.
“Well, I definitely wasn’t sure if you’d left me for good or not — we ran out of drinks a while ago.” She nods at something. “That’s all I was able to save for you.”
Stephen follows her indication. A second goblet of ordinary water manifests itself before him and he attempts to pick it up, except the glass is too light and its bowl is poured too full and his hands are too unsteady. Most of it spills onto the frontage of his robes.
He sets the glass down.
“You might consider firing your caterer.”
Christine leans forward on her elbows as she looks past him along the airport’s empty concourse. The starlight gemstones in her earrings flash against her birthmarked cheeks, which hold a glow beneath their skin like that of a pearl. “I wouldn’t complain too much if I were you. You could probably use the hydration. No offense, but you look like crap.”
Stephen presses a hand against the wound through his stomach. It does not hurt as much as it ought to, but when he attempts to sit beside her on the bar’s vacant stool he realizes that he does not have the strength to stay upright and instead consigns himself to a lower place upon the floor.
“You should see the other guys,” he says.
She snorts. “Would you believe me if I told you they all made that exact same joke?”
“Did they? Well.” He leans against the bar and folds the quivering hands in his lap. “Truly something to ponder.”
“I guess — none of them were you, though. I checked to make sure.”
“How fortunate for them all.”
“Or at least none of them had your same third-eye business going on.” She lays a finger to her forehead. “Does it link with your ophthalmic nerve or do you think it’s somehow connected to your occipital lobe directly?”
Stephen mimics her demonstrative gesture. Where there was formerly a pulsating, vindictive pain within his skull he feels nothing, at least not at the moment. “I’ve been supposing it’s the former. Using it too often produces symptoms similar to those of trigeminal neuralgia.”
“Mm, fascinating.”
“I’m yours to dissect at your leisure, Doctor Palmer.”
“Thanks, but you’re more interesting when you’re in one piece.”
He pushes into his wound again. It produces another outflow of blood that reds both his hands. “Relatively speaking.”
Christine returns to her drink. A sign propped on an easel alongside the bar lists the prices not for beer, wine, and cocktails but for sandwiches and chips with sides of coleslaw or house-made dill pickles, which no description of the afterlife Stephen has thus far read ever mentions. It reminds him of the chalkboard in a Greenwich Village deli that stood down the street from the Sanctum, and when he blinks twice he realizes the board offers prospective patrons the option of a metaphysical ham on rye.
He looks away.
The concourse with its vaulted glass windows features artificial trees that have strings of white fairy lights woven into their silk-leaf branches. There are large pots of what look, impossibly, like Himalayan blue poppies, while the ceiling’s gilded and coffered arches make it most closely resemble Union Station in Chicago. There were no direct trains between New York and Omaha — less costly than flying, even if the journey took him nearly three days — while Stephen was in college, demanding instead that he change tracks half-way to finish the journey westward. This had provided a somewhat sensible explanation as to why he stopped doing it, since other explanations would have made no sense at all; Donna died at Christmastime during his freshman year and when he came home the following summer Stephen discovered that his parents had not even returned the library books stacked on her bedside table, that Donna’s lucky two-dollar bill was still inserted as a page marker just before chapter twelve of The Hobbit and there were still stray hairs tangled in her green brush atop the dresser. Stephen had lost almost fifteen pounds that summer because everything he ate felt like it was going to surge into his throat again; he spent the entire dusty, droughted months of July and August without so much as an oscillating fan in his bedroom because he would wake in the night with a cold sweat between his shoulder blades and a shuddering through his body for which neither the counterpane quilts nor the stifling heat ever gave much surcease.
Christine rotates on her stool to face him. The skirt of her dress trails past her ankles and fans over the polished marble floor where Stephen sits.
“So,” she says. “What’s a place like this doing in a guy like you?”
Stephen stares at his reflection in the floor and presumes he has misheard her. His beard is haggard, his hair mostly grayed, lending him the appearance of a desert wilderness hermit, but he notes with mild surprise that while his hands still bear their same old, crabbed scars, the webbed red taint of the Darkhold has been taken off his clothes.
He can remember his plunge through the Sanctum’s wheel-window, out into the shivering air that did not bear him up as he fell. He can remember the fence’s points running him through with a violent, anagogical pain like insight, and hearing Donna’s voice say as if in his ear wow, great job brainiac, and here I thought you knew how to fly. The various personal agonies and afflictions that have followed this hour and moment of his death — and followed it, followed it — are less comprehensible, although the reddened condition of his eyes would suggest he has been weeping.
Stephen looks up at Christine. Her fingers wear no rings.
“I fell,” he answers.
“I know,” she says. “It must’ve been a long way down.”
“The landing could’ve been a little easier.”
Which is the truth: in the immediate aftermath of the incursion, having killed and killed and killed and killed himself and killed the things within himself by doing so, creating each time — are you happy, are you happy, are you happy, Stephen — a heart that was a little more irredeemable, and therefore a little more unbreakable, Stephen had thought of her. It had occurred to him that everything else in the universe was dead, that Christine was dead along with it, and the worthless heart from which his subsequent wails had arisen was evidently not unbreakable in the slightest. In the months leading up to the world’s final ending she had left him voicemails, sent him emails, stood on the Sanctum’s threshold to knock upon his door as she called and called for him to please come and speak with her, and Stephen never answered because she had told him she never loved him and there were no words or truths to strive for beyond those.
He passes both unclean hands through his hair. There had been sheets upon sheets of music at that piano in the grave-silent Sanctum, but each time he sat down at its keyboard he had been able to read less of the notes until he was left only with what he could play strictly from memory, those songs he once learned on his mother’s old spinet piano in the farmhouse, and then it became a matter of which songs he had not yet forgotten. By the end he was left only with some Bach and the nursery song “Frère Jacques”: dormez vous, dormez vous?
He moves his eyes briefly from Christine’s face to the white expanse of her gown. He wants to clutch its hem, as if in supplication, but his touch would soil it, presuming he would be able to touch her at all.
“And what about you?” he asks. “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“What do you think, brainiac?” Christine sets down her goblet. Somehow it is still filled to the brim, in spite of the sups she has been taking from it. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Stephen studies her again.
He has spent the last hundred or thousand years studying her, his memories of her, recollecting all the ways in which he has ever hurt and failed her in all their possible lives as well as the life he himself lived, but her expression above him now is a second surprise because everything he would have expected to encounter here — if he had believed he would ever see again at all — is absent. She is instead looking down at him with a protective and penetrative intimacy that is well-known to him indeed.
You said that losing my hands didn’t have to be the end, he had told her. That it could be a beginning.
Yeah, she had answered. Because there are other ways to save lives.
A harder way.
A weirder way.
At that moment Stephen might have done anything for her, he thinks. He might have risked anything, offered and given anything; at that moment all his slow careful transitions of the past year had been repeated in one compressed, ascendant instant that transfigured his desire itself into a kind of selflessness, and in that same bygone moment this displacing surrender had seemed so simple it was like a thing his soul was made for.
And in every universe, every place in which he ever found and killed himself again, that other Stephen always carried some version of a memory just like this one. Christine’s face had always flashed in a blaze of lightning across his other self’s mind as he died, along with the memory of a little girl who stood beside him in a summer field or garden to say oh, look, Stephen, look at the butterfly. He has thought about Wong, the Ancient One, Mordo, a boy named Peter Parker and a man named Tony Stark, his mother and his father, about all the people whose names he cannot recall or never truly learned but into whose nervous systems and brains — as animated as galaxies, alive with motion and creation — he has ever stretched his hand. He has thought about himself.
Stephen stares down at his robes and wounded body.
“And why would you be waiting for me, Christine?”
Christine collects her white skirts to get up off the stool.
She lifts the second goblet Stephen has left atop the bar and lowers herself to kneel beside him. She takes his hand, guiding it to lay its stiffened, scarred fingers atop hers so that together they are holding the goblet’s bowl steady.
“Like I said, we ran out of drinks.” She inflects her gaze up and over towards the place where the bartender would usually be standing. “I told everyone they’d have to be patient and you’d be coming along sooner or later.”
“How long has that turned out to be?”
“Long time.” She smiles as she moves the goblet a little, playing her fingers lightly across his scars. “Do you mind?”
He watches the water’s shuddering, overrunning surface, since this second goblet also appears to have refilled itself.
That trick had taken him several days to perfect in advance of her wedding. She would think it was funny, Stephen thought, even if it was a little too on-the-nose, although the spellbook’s Latinate instructions were hopelessly esoteric; use this only when your inferior vintages and libations have already been poured out, it said. Your guests will doubtless be irritated at you for having saved your finest fruits to the last, but such a wonder cannot be worked towards any other purpose. Use it when you have nothing else to offer and then raise up your emptiness.
“I don’t know if I remember the whole spell,” Stephen says. “It’s more complicated than it looks.”
“But which parts can you remember?”
His other hand joins hers around the goblet. He thinks. The brilliance of this place serves only to emphasize how dirty he is, a shame indeed, although it helps him remember at least one other portion of the spell’s necessary preconditions. It is another thing that has been the same in every place, every life, every universe into which he has strayed, along with Donna’s death beneath the water and the broken hands and the immovable fact of his own burdensome, breakable heart.
Something is slipping down his face into the unkempt beggar’s beard. He must make for a miserable sight, Stephen figures, but Christine has asked him a question and now he must answer her.
“That I love you,” he says, “and I’m sorry.”
A dewfall sort of light comes into her eyes. After the leather of the Watch’s wristband rotted off Stephen had taken to wearing it beneath his tunic, on the left side and with its inscribed steel pressed against his cold, dead-man’s skin.
“Thank you, Stephen.” Christine crinkles her nose in the way she usually tends to before she is about to make a joke that will annoy him. “Now — I’d like some red wine, please.”
Stephen bows his head.
“Oh, allow me, miss.”
He moves his fingers, twined between hers. Something changes to a brilliant festal color inside the cup. Christine lifts it to her mouth, for a first taste, then she holds the wine up to his lips for him.
He drinks and it is good.
…