you dream of seasons that never die
Tell me why did you go
I carved your ever fading figure
Into the ever dying snow
He hadn't done much with the place; with any of it. The furniture was still in drapes, the paintings still wrapped, and it otherwise had all the functional trappings of dissolution, of callous wealth like powdered porcelain underfoot. It was all white like that, heaven-white, the curtains basic muslin, everything liquid gray, and he was currently making a black line of his frame against the curtain he faced as if he could look right through it.
Mona Dahl strolled into the ghostlit, plaster shell of a house on Central Park West as if she owned it, called Dad three times, quite pleased with her own sense of humor. She came into the kitchen, and when the man that stood at the window didn't answer her, she snapped for his attention.
"Brande."
He didn't shift his hands from his pockets, didn't turn toward her, but made a sound like mm as if to assert he was listening.
"I'm putting your card in your wallet," Mona said, flicking a plasticine tune with the edge of the Amex, making broad motions when she picked his wallet up from the kitchen counter, the way one communicates intention, deliberately, to an animal to avoid starting it.
He made the same sound once more, didn't turn around, and Mona watched his back when she opened the worn, cool leather. Mulled his composure with a twist of her lips, as if debating a phrase like thanks, Daddy-O and deciding against it.
He just stood there, the crumpled jacket draped loosely over the hardwire line of his shoulders. His hair was uncombed, and he hadn't shaved at all, and Mona found him much more handsome this way because she fancied she was undoing him, liked to pretend she was, even though she knew, privately, that what was eating the alchemist was far, far beyond her. She knew she loved a snake; knew it was eating its tail, knew she couldn't understand it.
She thumbed quietly through the contents of his wallet, watching him sidelong at the corners of her blacklined eyes to see how much violation he'd let her get away with this time. He was the most unsettling, seemed possessed of the most insight, when he wasn't looking at her, and with the way he'd been lately, it was always impossible to tell whether he was letting her get away with things, or if he really was so absorbed in his darkness that he didn't see what she was up to.
Whenever she went in the alchemist's wallet, she peeked at the photobooth pictures of Brande with Phineas Gage. The strip always transfixed her, absolutely -- first, because it was ugh, Phineas, the little... and why is it her that can make him look like that, not like it matters.
Second, of course, because he ruined pictures. Once, after making a mischievous little parade of herself in the gearwell of Brande's new silver Benz, she'd decided to perform the appropriately bad behavior of taking a cell phone picture of herself with him; the result had been a picture of Mona with a smeared smile, and an indistinct, bestial sort of yellow-eyed blur lurking over her photos. In the sepia-printed photo strip of Brande with Phineas Gage, the ghosts seemed different, somehow; subtle, haunting, as if they were making expressions of their own.
And the photo strip; it was sad, like a pre-war memory, like something that somehow was of momentous importance to the world, or maybe Mona was just jealous or sensitive or getting her period or some shit like that.
"You're going to get rid of me as soon as she comes back, aren't you, Aden Brande," said Mona softly, and she had the words out before she was even aware of it.
Long silence, and she thought that maybe he was in one of those trances, reveries, and hadn't heard her at all. But then, unmoving, he replied.
"Possibly."
Mona laughed, a little bit, a complicated noise. She wouldn't have liked him, after all, if he wasn't this cruel. Just like me, she thought, and didn't it figure.
"Possibly?" She prodded, watching him carefully to see whether he noticed her digging, with her chipped black fingernail, at the edge of the photo strip.
"If she ever comes back," he said, and his lips were chilled, slow-leaden, although there was a certain opiate undertone, warm languor, manufacted into the back of his throat.
"So you're gonna go to that funeral, then?" Mona's tongue made a slow, calculating little ring around her dark lips, wondering whether he'd notice if she just ripped the whole little picture set in half. Fucking Phineas.
"Which?" Brande said, with a certain stillness Mona hated, because it was the tone he used when he wasn't actually listening.
"Phin's Mom's," said Mona, impatient, with an eyeroll, because if he hadn't even known about it then perhaps she really ought not to have brought it up, and did she really need him to look at her that badly? Like, c'mon.
And he did. Look at her, turned just a little over one shoulder with those feral yellow eyes, their color sharp sulfur, pupils pinpoint, sick and listing, in a way that curled her toes and chilled her to the bone and made her panties stick with how badly she wanted to run away.
And he said, "...Phin?"
He'd said it in such a surprised, disassociative way that it prompted Mona to ask, startled, "What did you think we were talking about?"
Silence, for a moment, and he said, with a modicum of further wakefulness, a weighting of his lids. "Mimi's funeral?"
The readiness with which he pet-named Phin's mother made Mona scowl; like the little photo strip she was worrying between her fingers, it was evidence of entrenchment, evidence of a Brande that had been different than the one who snarled into her neck, who slept without embracing her.
He looked vaguely awake now, focusing his eyes on her. And Mona knew if she hadn't said anything about Mimi, then he'd still be comatose, still have his back to her, and Mona dug her nails into her hand, ambivalent. But she couldn't escape that gaze, that black look, and all he did was look at her, and it was like he pulled the words from her mouth, her frowning little mole-crowned mouth, her sulking little lipstick kiss.
"Phin will come back to town for that, don't you think?" She let it come out like bitten flowers, drew her shoulders up tight, let her eyes drift shut, because she could feel him stalking toward her, stirring the air, feel the weight of all his ghosts pressing hungrily through the air and why didn't I notice this when he was just a playboy in a car?
Was like being preyed upon, when he stood so close to her, when he pulled the photo strip from her hands, his own dead cold leather; taking away with one hand, resting five chill fingers from the other on the edge of her hip without quite embracing her. She kept her mascaraed eyes tight shut, she waited for the guillotine of his breath.
"Possibly," he said, and she hated, hated, hated how the possibility thawed him, just a little, quickened his breath, bestial vitality, before he left her standing alone in the kitchen.
And you were dreaming of Los Angeles
While I was singing songs you wrote
You quietly gave away the winter clothes I made for you
While I made angels in the snow
I would have left if you just asked me to
Or come to me before the preacher
Now you’re surviving
And I think I mighta heard you on the radio
But the radio waves were like snow
And I think I mighta heard you on the radio
But the radio waves were like snow
