Red Sky: Chapter 8
“I bet I’m stronger than you.” Aya said as we sat across from each other in the dimly lit bar near closing time drinking Margaritas and feeling the effects of the previous two hours of alcohol consumption.
With a smack, she put her elbow down on the table.
“I’m not going to arm-wrestle you,” I told her.
“What, are you afraid?”
She loved challenging me to an arm-wrestling match when she was drunk even though she was little more than half my weight. She never won. I never let her win. But that never stopped her.
This was the first of those challenges. The first time we were alone together at night. The first time we were together drinking. She smiled when I refused the challenge. Her unforgettable smile that showed small incisors like baby teeth that had never fallen out.
“You know you’d lose,” she kept taunting me. “You’d be surprised. I’m pretty strong.”
“I’m sure you are. That’s why I’m afraid of you.”
Aya let out a small laugh. Her laughter, that brief little exhalation of air like a gasp for breath, was as much from the alcohol as the conversation. It was the same gasp she would make when we made love, but I didn’t know any of that yet.
Aya’s hair fell about her face like cascading vines. She would it brush it away from her eyes now and then, scrunching up her nose at the annoyance. As the night wore on, she pinned it back, baring her neck to me. I rolled up my sleeves. Without realizing it, we had both started undressing.
We had returned from our trip and decided to get a drink at a local bar. We talked about our classes. We talked about the Academy. We talked about sitting next to each other on the first day of class. Such a simple random decision. A simple random decision that was the start of a friendship that led to that speedliner ride that led to that bar.
“I was at a family reunion last week,” Aya said. “All of my little cousins were there, all seven of them, the youngest one, Anna, said I was her favorite cousin in front of my sister. Isn’t that embarrassing? Since she said I was her favorite cousin, I let her paint my nails.” Aya laid her hands on the table showing fingernails painted in bright orange. I hadn’t noticed the color before.
I leaned in and took her right hand in mine. I marveled that the ancient ritual of painted fingernails still survived in today’s world. I kept hold of her fingers, maybe for too long and drunkenly looked into her eyes, which I could see more clearly now she had put her hair back.
I let go of her hand.
“I think she did a nice job.”
Aya laughed.
“What?” I had thought I was being sincere.
“Nothing.”
“No, what, tell me.”
“Nothing.” She laughed again.
Aya continued her story of the family reunion. I listened as she described her family, her background.
“They sound nice,” I said. She shook her head.
“They are, but they don’t know me as well as they think they do. They see me in a certain way. I’m the responsible eldest sister.” She shook her head again. “I don’t want to be a category.”
“Does anybody want to be a category?”
“Yes, some people do. A lot of people do.”
“Who?”
“Everyone I just described for starters. Most of the other people at the Academy. Most of my friends. All of the true believers. They like living a defined role. They like the reassurance of the crowd.”
“But not you?”
“Not me.”
“You’re the contrarian.”
“I want to live, explore. I want to get out on the open road without being monitored or chipped or scanned. There’s a lot to do in life, a lot more to do than staying in my hometown.”
I looked her squarely in those eyes. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Now?”
“Now.” I was certain.
She started laughing again and held up a card, my ID card. “Okay, I’m paying.”
“Hey, when did you take that?”
The server came by our table. She turned to him. “We’ll have another round, put it on this card.”
“You’re shifty.”
“I like to think of it as clever.”
We kept drinking and talking. Up to closing time. We were properly drunk.
“This is all going to end you know.” She said right before they turned off the lights and ushered us outside.
“This night?”
“The Federation. All empires end eventually.”
“And where will you be when it does?”
“My cabin, my family’s cabin, I’m the only one who uses it now.”
“I thought you wanted to be on the open road.”
She turned serious. Drunk but serious. “The road won’t be a safe place when the Federation falls.” She said this solemnly, like she knew something, like she could see the future. There was a prescience in her voice. Such a statement could have gotten her kicked out of the Academy, could have gotten both of us kicked out of the Academy. The lights behind me shut off. We were the last two customers in the place.
*
Two weeks before that night we were sitting next to each other around a conference table with five other students. We were listening to a presentation. It was the third week of class. We had become comfortable, even flirtatious, with each other. I have no memory of the subject of the presentation. I only remember I was doing my best to pretend to pay attention. Aya seemed more interested, her leg rapidly going up and down as we listened. I found the constant movement in the corner of my eye distracting so I put my hand on her knee to stop it. It was a simple gesture, almost an involuntary one, taken without thought to calm the person next to me. Of course, it was more than that as well.
She didn’t look at me when I did this. Her knee stopped jerking up and down. I quietly took my hand away, embarrassed by my forwardness. I don’t know if any of the other students noticed. The rest of the presentation continued. After it finished, we walked outside together. We talked about our classes like we normally would, but there was a new energy to our conversation, a delightful mixture of tension and anticipation. We left each other that day without mentioning my gesture. She didn’t slap me and I didn’t apologize, yet something had changed.
Over the next couple of weeks, we would continue to sit next to each other, sometimes our legs would touch underneath the table and we would leave them resting in their embrace. It was so chaste in its simplicity. Then she invited me to ride with her on the speedliner trip. And then we ended up back at the bar.
At various points that day and that night it would have been difficult to tell which one of us was seducing the other. After we left the bar, we discovered I had missed the last Metro. I had no way home. We went back to her place. We sat on the bed in her little one room apartment talking. Tired, drunk, very late into the evening, we fell back into the bed, into each other’s arms. Our clothes came off. Our bodies rolled and hid and twisted under the covers.
I had fallen in love with her on that speedliner ride. She had fallen in love with me that night as we made love or maybe the next day as we lay in bed together. If I hadn’t missed the last Metro or if she had decided to work instead of drinking with me after the trip, we would have never been together that night. If we had never been together that night, we never would have taken our relationship beyond brief moments of infatuation.
That is the way of life. There are stories of people who missed a flight that ended up crashing or who moved from a house the day before it burned down. And there are people who lose out on good fortune because they let a person go ahead of them in line to buy a lottery ticket or who miss running into an old flame by only a few seconds.
There are many tales of near misses but it works the other way as well. Affirmative actions are as irrevocable as near misses. We like to think since we are the ones acting we can undo it at any time, but there are moments we cannot reverse just as there are moments that once missed are lost forever. Once we start down a path it’s impossible to stop the momentum. The human heart is an avalanche waiting to crumble. After that night, even before that night, but after that speedliner ride, I could no sooner forget Aya than erase my memory. She was imprinted on me. We were imprinted on each other.