Chapter 25
“WHAT IS THAT?” DR. LEBEVRE shouts in the kitchen the next morning.
Dez looks down at her stainless-steel bowl of half-beaten eggs. What now? She didn’t sleep last night, tormented by the memory of that body falling from the sky.
“Aren’t we making Spanish tortillas?” she asks the chef, tightening her grip on the bowl to keep her hands from shaking.
“This is an abomination.” With his hand, Lebevre skims the surface of Dez’s bowl, then holds one scarred and mottled fingertip, dripping with egg, before Dez’s eyes.
She sees a miniscule white fleck.
“Eggshell,” he says.
“I’m sorry—”
“You fucked up. Again.” Lebevre seizes her wrist with his egg-coated hand. “Which of your fingerprints would you like to be relieved of?”
“None,” Dez says, barely breathing. “I’ll start over. Your grandmother’s recipe. Just the way she made it. No shells.”
“No fucking shells,” Lebevre says to Dez, to Simon, throwing his hand down before grabbing a bottle of sherry and storming out the back door into the snow.
Dez folds over at the waist, resting her face on the counter to catch her breath.
“He almost did it this time,” she says to Simon, who rubs her back. Lebevre threatens every day, but he’s never grabbed her hand like that, never looked at her fingertips like he really couldn’t wait to carpaccio them. She straightens, tosses the eggs down the sink, and grabs a new container.
“So I’m thinking of bouncing early for fall break,” Simon says. “Going home to Oklahoma for a minute. Or forever.”
Dez stares at him. “Simon.”
“This place,” Simon says. “The chef wants to cut us and …”
He trails off, and Dez knows what he means. There are worse things at Acheron than Lebevre.
“First that Charles guy,” Simon says, “then Alice. We knew Alice. And my anxiety is like—” He mimes his head exploding. “Jet keeps telling me it’s just another week, but I don’t know if I can make it.”
Dez nods. She gets it. And Simon doesn’t even know about the body Dez saw last night. Something darker than suicide is going on. Something she can’t begin to understand. Something worse even than Dez’s nightmares.
And worse still, if Simon goes home before the midterm, they’re not going to let him come back. He’s her firewall from this place’s deepest crazy. He’s the only one here who makes her laugh.
“Have you told Jet how you’re feeling?”
Simon shakes his head. “I don’t want to let him down.”
Dez has thought of leaving Acheron a thousand times, but her hand always finds that pill bottle in her pocket, reminding her of what she did. Even when classes dismiss for fall break next week, Dez will stay holed up in her suite, watching the sky for more nightmares. She has nowhere else to go.
“Simon,” she says. She has to tell him what happened after Alice’s service last night. He’s as affected by the suicides as Dez, and he deserves to know. “Last night I saw another one.”
“Another one what?”
“Another dead body.”
“What?”
“But this time I watched it fall out of the sky.”
“Dez …”
“It was a man. Older. Really broke-down looking. But the weirdest part is, Si, he fell from nothing,” Dez says. “I saw him land in the middle of the tri. Nowhere near any building he could have jumped from. And I think he was dead before he fell.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” Simon says. “I don’t think this place is healthy. For either of us.”
“Please, listen to me. The school is covering something up—”
“And let me guess, you want to find out what it is?”
Dez looks at him and feels a flicker of hope. “You want to help me?”
“Hell no! I want to book a six-hour session with my therapist and binge Kurosawa movies in my bathtub.” Simon sighs, glaring at her. “But now I’m scared that if I do leave early, you’ll get yourself in even deeper shit without me.”
“I will.”
“Fuck you,” he mutters, but he gives her shoulder a bump.
“Please stay,” she says. “At least until the break. Just one more week. I need you.” Dez bumps his shoulder back, and they stay like that as she pours her egg mixture over Simon’s potatoes and lowers the heat on the burner.
Not quite a hug, but the closest they’ve come to it.
“Don’t tell anyone else what you told me,” Simon says. “They’re already stockpiling reasons to kick you out.”
A week later, on October 31st, Dez skips the Halloween party at Villains to work on her O’Rourke film. She won’t rest until she meets the deadline. She leaves Simon getting dressed as a sexy devil and Yael getting dressed as a sexy unicorn, and she slips down to the Vault.
It’s empty. Every other first-year must already have finished their assignment. Every other first-year must be headed up the mountain, scantily costumed, to the bar. Dez doesn’t mind missing out. She embraces the solitude, actually. She opens her Lens.
A week ago, Dr. Ezekiel fixed the crack in Dez’s platform, but yesterday it came back again, and she hasn’t told Rafe yet. It seems to grow each time Dez gets immersed in her work. She edges away from it. She tries to focus on what she needs to do today.
The film opens in Egypt, where a young Lexa rides a stroller through pyramids, pushed by her father in a pith helmet.
She comes of age on the campus of the Connecticut prep school where her parents teach.
She writes and stars in a play where she plays Sylvia Plath.
She gets Lyme disease. International fame arrives.
She’s fired from a prestigious job. She marries a comedian woodworker who prepares all her meals.
She learns to fly and crashes her private plane off the coast of Patagonia.
Dez works all night, through the next morning, and into the afternoon.
She suppresses her anxiety that she’s missing something from the poet’s life, that she’ll leave out something essential and not do O’Rourke justice.
She focuses on the scenes she does have access to, and sometime deep into the afternoon, she settles on the closing scene.
It features O’Rourke as a young girl, caught outside in a harrowing blizzard, a moment Dez knows inspired her first collection of poems.
By the time Dez adds the opening credits—The Storm, the life and work of Lexa O’Rourke, a film by Desdemona Rae, written by Paul Rowan Wilkes—she feels catatonic but relieved.
It isn’t the best work she can do. Still, it’s solid.
It satisfies the requirements, which is often all an audience desires.
She wants to share the rush of accomplishment with someone, to celebrate completing her first assignment just in time to meet the deadline, to not flunk out of the program.
But she knows everyone else will still be sleeping off their Halloween hangovers, and hardly impressed that she finally finished something most of them completed well before the deadline.
She wants to tell someone who’d care. And she can’t think of a single person.
The high she’s used to after finishing a project crashes quickly. Dez hasn’t felt this lonely since the night she left her brother in the hospital to come to Acheron.
Her body aches with exhaustion. Her eyes blur, stinging like she’s about to cry.
Now the sensation travels backward, behind her eyes and into her skull. Hot, like something is cooking inside of her. She clutches her temples. The pain increases. What’s happening?
She remembers feeling like this once before. The very first time she used her Lens.
Her vision blurs, the screen fills with static, and then—
The spinning axis of light brightens the edges of her Lens. At first, she assumes it’s Mo, the only Lifeline besides O’Rourke’s she’s seen in her Lens. And yet there’s something different, something unfamiliar about the images, even from afar.
It makes her wonder: Has she found it? Has she accessed the missing piece of her brother’s life?
No, she realizes, looking closer. This is someone else’s Lifeline.
“Oh my God,” she whispers.
Teenaged Asher Ibrahim comes into view.
The Lifeline spins with scenes of Asher as a child, as a baby, as a man.
Dez’s eyes widen, and she stares at sunlight on his shoulders.
At Asher dancing in a darkened club. A bad fall on his skateboard, a broken collarbone.
A funeral where he sits numbly in the front row.
A heated kiss in the back seat of a car.
Goose bumps rise on Dez’s skin. She thought she’d never see Asher again. But here he is, a thousand versions of him spinning before her in the Vault, glorious and gorgeous, awkward and strange.
How did she access Asher’s Lifeline? In the month since she’s been at Acheron, she’s only ever seen the Lifelines of her brother and O’Rourke.
But she remembers what happened the first day she’d used her Lens, how Rafe said her emotions overrode the system, let her access her brother’s Lifeline when she was only supposed to see O’Rourke’s.
Dez had been too overwhelmed that day to really register what she’d done, but now she remembers how Rafe had seemed excited, even impressed by it. He said he’d never seen it happen before.
Dez is far past wondering about how the Vault works, its secret restrictions and unsettling archive. Her muscles surge with excitement as she watches Asher’s life spread out before her. She reaches toward the spinning scenes and selects one at random.
She’ll only stay a little while.
Asher stands on a stage in an auditorium wearing a bone-colored suit.
The scene looks recent. His hair and tan are the same as they were when Dez met him, but he’s also somehow different from the man she filmed in Ventura.
A large screen behind him reads Dr. Asher Ibrahim, Eden Labs, on the Fountain of Youth.
“Doctor?” Dez whispers, spellbound.
When Dez edited Glimpse, she studied Asher’s mannerisms for days.
She labored over every second of her film.
But there had always been a limit, a ceiling to what she could see.
As intimately as she knows the six hours of footage she shot of Asher that day—there’s a lifetime of him that Dez has never seen before.
That she never dreamed she would see. Until now.
She stares at his clear skin, at his hazel eyes, and the confident motions of his hands.
He’s as attractive as he’d been to her that day, even though this version of him is entirely unexpected.
Professional, commanding. In her mind, Dez had reduced his identity to his skating pastime, and this is all so … new.
“Thank you for coming,” Asher says as the applause in the room dies down.
Dez is stunned by how comfortable he looks in front of this crowd, as at ease as he was midair above a half-pipe.
Why hadn’t she ever wondered what his job was, how he spent his days when he wasn’t at the skate park?
Maybe because the man she’d met that day already seemed full to bursting with life.
This surprising, intellectual glimpse of him is almost too much for Dez to bear. It’s like falling for him twice.
She remembers what he said to her that night in the bar:
I like everything I’ve seen about you so far, Desdemona Rae. What else you got?
She can see how easy it would be to fall into Asher’s life and not come out. To simply watch him, beautifully, live.
“I suspect the reason you’re all here today has nothing to do with my infamous geroscience puns,” Asher says. “Though I do often reflect that these conferences resemble meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Of course, here we’re metaboliholics. We love that sweet metabol-ahol—”
Scattered, polite laughter sounds in the auditorium. Dez finds herself smiling, too.
“No,” Asher says. “You’re here because of the lure of the Fountain of Youth.
” He paces the stage, barely glancing at the notes in his hand.
“At some point or another, we all hear its call. But I didn’t always want to study the Fountain of Youth.
In fact, I snuck in through the back door.
When I was young, I was a professional skater.
My career was thriving. Then my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. ”
“Asher,” Dez says inside the Vault.
“The only way I could cope,” he continues, “was to study her illness, to look for ways to alleviate her pain, methods for increasing the time I had left with her. Eventually, I found myself at Eden Labs.” He pauses, gazes out into the crowd.
Dez holds her breath, sensing a shift.
“My mother died two weeks ago,” he says, more quietly. “I couldn’t save her life, but I can’t help wondering if the Fountain of Youth is real.” He holds out both his hands, as if he’s trying to touch something intangible. “What does immortality look like? What would it mean for life on earth?”
Dez wishes she were in the auditorium, so she could raise her hand, and he could see her, and they could have a conversation. But before Asher can speak again, the screen fills with static. And goes dark.
“Wait,” Dez says, willing the burning to come back to her brain, willing Asher to come back to her Lens.
She gropes for the place his hands had just been.
But they’re gone. She can’t control how she got him on her Lens in the first place, and she doesn’t know how to get him back.
It feels like something inside her is breaking.
Her Lens retracts, and on the other side, Rafe stands with a worried look in his eyes.
“Rafe—”
“Did you finish?”
Dez struggles for composure. Does he have any idea what she just saw? No, of course not. And she can’t let on that it happened.
Obviously, he’s asking about the O’Rourke film. Her due date. He’s her mentor, here to make sure she completed the assignment.
“I just put the title card on,” she says, catching her breath. “Do you want to see it?”
“Not the O’Rourke,” Rafe says. “I’m talking about your brother’s film.”
She stares at him. “What about my brother’s film?”
“You asked me to get it to him when you finished it,” Rafe says, glancing around the empty Vault and dropping his voice. “I have a window of time where I can do that today. If I leave now. There won’t be another chance.”