Chapter Twelve
It seemed like days - not hours - ago that I'd been so depressed I'd raided the booze stash in the basement.
I stood in the kitchen, rooting through the cupboard for something to eat, and Gliese was sitting on the counter top, watching me dig. I glanced over at her a couple times, the way her ankles crossed and wondered at the fact that DNA could control so much about a person. CowBelle used to sit on that very spot of the counter, with her ankles crossed that very way, and I would go over and kiss her and put my hands on her hips and she'd wrap her legs around my waist and cling to me and we'd fall into the couch and have sex and she'd taste so good and the world would spin and alternate going in and out of focus until we lay there exhausted at the end...
I looked away from Gliese and the ankles and wiped the thoughts from my mind.
This phantom only looked like CowBelle, I reminded myself, only bore similarities to her. It wasn't really her, it was really someone else, from somewhere else, somewhere far, far away... a Keplar.
Whatever that meant.
I cleared my throat. "So, tell me more about your people. Like what do y'all do for fun?"
Gliese shrugged, "Oh you know, nothing extraordinary really. We're not that much different from you, really. We have films and music and art..." She leaned back and looked up at the ceiling lamp. "My grandparents still live on Planet E in our galaxy, and my mum and dad were among the first to uproot to Planet F... so we'd take weekend trips in the winter to Planet E. It's so warm on Planet E now, with the climate change and all, and my sisters and I would sunbathe and we'd go swimming in the Dying Lakes."
"Dying Lakes?"
"They're big lakes. I suppose they're like your oceans here, but not quite that large..." she mused. "They used to be called something else, a long time ago, but they're drying up because of the sun coming closer and the beaches are almost a mile wide now, you know, because of it receeding, and they're called the Dying Lakes."
"You're lucky there is another planet y'all can move to once that one dries up," I commented.
"We learned our lesson too late," she answered, shrugging, "We were destructive to our ecosystem too long and too hard before we did too little to prevent it's death."
"Go green," I said, employing the slogan of the tree huggers -- like Kevin.
Gliese gave me a funny look.
"It's a saying. For being earth-friendly," I tried to explain.
"Oh."
I pulled out a box of pop tarts, finally deciding that I'd relied on take-out for too long to actually scrape together a real meal. I ripped open the silver foil and held out one of the pop tarts to Gliese. She took it and turned it over. "What is this?"
"A pop tart," I said. "Wildberry."
She stared at it. "It's blue."
"It's supposed to be. It's wild berry."
Gliese slowly lifted the poptart to her mouth and took a bite. She chewed slowly, processing the flavors thoughtfully. Finally, she said, "Well, it isn't bad. This is earth food, huh?"
I shrugged, "It's not really a delicacy or anything, but it'll do for now." I sat down at the table and broke my own poptart in half. I hate the crust. I started folding the edges off mine as she nibbled hers like a rabbit. I looked up at her. "Tell me more about your planets, about things like the Dying Lakes. You work for Lyra, you must be like, in the military or something, right? So you must've seen a lot of your planets."
She chewed the pop tart. "I am in the military, yes," she nodded. "I'm a high ranking official." She was copying me, snapping the pop tart into four squares, one mostly eaten already, though. She watched as I threw away my crust. "Keplar is less...organized, I guess is the word...than Earth is. I mean we have the Dying Lakes, like your Oceans, but we don't have such large masses of land spread out so far apart. The land is smaller, but spread out around more. The Dying Lakes are everywhere all over the planet between the land masses. In the primitive days before hover craft were used people got around our planet in boats. You can go around the entire planet in a small water craft because land is so near at all times."
"That sounds really cool," I said. "I'd do that if I lived there."
"It takes forever because you have to weave your way, of course, but it's possible. I know a guy who did it once."
"Really?"
"Yeah. He was bored one day so he set off on this great adventure and nobody knew where he was until one day a really long time after we'd all assumed he'd died or something, he showed back up and all the while he'd just been navigating up and down and all around our planet." Gliese smiled, "I'd never have the patience for such an endeavor."
"No?"
"No... I've never been on a boat. They seem too... slow."
"Boating is fun," I said. "It's relaxing."
"Do you boat?"
"Yeah, I used to when I lived in Florida."
"Is Florida far from here?"
I shrugged. "It's about a thousand miles, I guess. It's not that far. I just... I don't go really anymore. I mean I've lived here for five years and I used to live in California before that... I haven't gone in awhile. I was busy."
"Busy?"
"Yeah."
"With what?"
"With falling in love and stuff," I answered, shrugging. I picked the frosting off a piece of my poptart and ate it. I could feel her eyes on me. I looked up at her. "The stuff I used to be interested in and put above everything else suddenly didn't matter anymore when I met Belle," I said. "The only thing that mattered was her and her happiness. The only thing that mattered was her smile." I looked back down at the pop tart.
Gliese was silent. "I am sorry for your loss," she said after a long moment.
"I am too," I said.
Gliese chewed the inside of her cheek. "If I could alter my DNA so that I was not a reminder for you every moment I would," she said.
"It's okay," I answered. "It's nice sort-of having her back in the room..." I took a deep breath.
"We should probably talk about strategy," Gliese said, suddenly changing the subject in an almost awkward way. She jumped down from the counter, landing on her feet and swooping into the seat opposite me at the table. She tossed a piece of Poptart into her mouth and stared up into my eyes. "How do we get the paperwork without alerting Borucki's croney?"
I chewed thoughtfully on my own Poptart. "I have no fucking idea," I admitted.
Whitenoise by Pengi
