La Vie en Ronde

Madeleine E. Robins

She rolled away from the life she knew, into a world she never dreamed existed. 

The descent began in Winter. Vivey was pulling a brush through her thick, graying curls and humming with the January winds outside the bathroom window.  She had been working at home all day, compiling an actuarial report from stacks of printouts, still in her pajamas, with a quilt draped across her shoulders and a mug of tea cooling at her elbow. Now, getting ready for bed, she was sitting on the toilet, brushing her hair, still thinking about numbers, so that she missed the moment when the toilet, with her on it, began to sink into the floor.

It was a fast descent, but soft, pillowy, as if the toilet were dropping into cushions that were being lowered into the bathroom below hers. Only, of course, it was not. Her body was certain that this extraordinary thing was happening, but the evidence her eyes gave was that nothing moved; she blinked a couple of times and each time she was at the same height relative to the walls and sink. But she couldn’t suspend the sensation of sinking. Now the toilet was tilting to one side with a slight turning motion. Vivey tried to stand and felt the floor roll to one side; she lost her balance, dropped down and lay there. The thought that if she died she’d be found, arms outstretched to clutch at the base of the toilet and the pedestal of the sink, with her pants pulled down, made her giggle anxiously. Finally the sensation stopped, and Vivey got up.

She did not call the doctor, trying to talk herself out of anxiety with robust common sense. Just a cold. Or allergies, mold from the heating ducts. A perimenopausal estrogen spike. Calling her doctor would only get her a lecture, one of those ‘at your age” talking-tos that ended with a recommendation to take hormones and get out more. Vivey was not willing to be scolded. A good night’s sleep and she would forget all about it. And she did.

oOo

Winter slid into spring, then into the hot months. Late in summer Vivey was coming back to her office after lunch with her friend Rosemary, walking through the broad carpeted hallways of the insurance company where they both worked. Vivey was laughing at something Rosemary said when Rosemary stopped and looked at her.

“Viv, why do you do that?” Rosemary asked.

“Do what?” Vivey turned back to look at her friend.

“Walk that way. With your right shoulder almost touching the wall, and your head to one side.”

“I don’t. Do I?”

Rosemary nodded; her brows were drawn together. “You’ve always done it a little, but it’s been getting”—she paused as if she didn’t want to saw “worse—“more marked lately.”

Vivey thought about it. “Show me what you think I’m doing.”

“I know you’re doing it, Viv. Like this.” Rosemary went to the wall and stood against it so her right shoulder was pressed to the wall and her right arm huddled against her body. She tipped her head so far over that her right ear almost touched her shoulder.

Vivey shook her head. “I don’t stand like that. If I did, I’d know it.”

“You do.” Rosemary’s voice softened a little, almost pitying. “You do, Viv. Look.”  She turned Vivey to one 0of the mirror panels which punctuated the hallway. “Look,” she said again.

Vivey looked at the polished brass and saw there a woman with her red skirt and black sweater, her own short graying brown hair and brown eyes, leaning against the wall with her arms wrapped around her waist and her head tilted over. It looked exactly like her, Vivey thought, down to the brown sandals she had put on this morning. But she felt disconnected from that reflection; she didn’t recognize it as herself.

“Not me,” she said aloud. “That’s not me.” Tears began to roll down her cheeks.

oOo

Her doctor sent her to specialists. Vivey had never imagined there were so many parts of the body to specialize in. Each one agreed there was something wrong, but no one could tell exactly what it was. When they repositioned Vivey, put her head straight and moved her away from the wall, unwrapped her arm from her waist, she became panicky and unbalanced, as if she were about to fall over.

“This is all wrong,” she told the doctors. “Don’t you feel it?”

They talked to her and to each other. Tests ruled out a brain tumor, an aneurysm, an unsuspected stroke. The psychiatrist gave  his opinion that while Vivey showed some neurotic symptoms, her vertigo was clearly not emotional in origin. The ENT could find nothing wrong with her ears; her eyes and hormones were fine; and while the neurologists claimed the problem for their own, they could not say exactly what it was. They tried different drugs, in different combinations, but nothing helped.

In the fall, as the cold weather began, Vivey felt the sinking again. It was different this time: now it felt as if everything, the whole world, were falling away to the right. Straight lines had begun to curve and curl. Floors could not be depended upon to stay flat, to bear the weight of one step as they had the last. Walking through the long mirrored halls at work became a torture. Elevators were the worst: getting up to her office on the forty-fourth floor made Vivey so nauseated she could barely focus on her work. She left earlier and earlier each day.

The people she worked with were sympathetic and concerned. For as long as she could, Vivey’s boss distributed the bulk of her work among her co-workers. Vivey fretted that it would not be done properly, that none of them really understood her calculations. Math had not deserted her  yet. Vivey could still make numbers dance, make them explain behavior and chance half a world away. But it grew harder and harder to discuss her results clearly; words got jumbled and the sense of them slid together and had to be untangled and parsed. Finally the company could not carry her any longer. She was put on medical disability and sent home for the last time with her personal effects in a box. It was as if she had died, although everyone spoke brightly of seeing her soon.

Rosemary drove her home and walked Vivey to her door.

“Will you be okay getting upstairs, hon?” Vivey had to strain to understand the words, which slid together liquidly, sounds crashing into each other. When she’d made sense of the question, she nodded.

“Ahcawdenighdeseeowerduun.” More jumble. “I’ll call you tonight to see how you’re doing. Viv, should you be alone? Really, isn’t there anyone who could stay with you?”

“There’s no one,” Vivey said. “I’ll be okay.”

Rosemary shook her head. Vivey, watching, felt her own head moving to the right in sympathy, wanting to make the circle complete. When Rosemary leaned toward Vivey to kiss her cheek, Vivey drew back, panicked; she didn’t know where her space began or ended, and Rosemary seemed to be rushing at her, reading to knock her down. Vivey knew, with old knowledge, that Rosemary was hurt by her withdrawal.

“Sorry,” Vivey managed. Words were thick on her tongue; they wanted to curl and slide off one side of her tongue, or collect and jumble together and spit out all at once.  “Sorry, Rose. I’ll be—“ She worked hard and made a smile. “I’ll be okay. Thank you, Rose.”

Vivey let herself into the building, shuffling around the perimeter of the room toward the stairs. Climbing the stairs was hard, but it was better than taking the elevator, which was fraught with sudden lunges and rolls.  Better to take an hour to walk up the four flights to her apartment, poised for the funhouse tricks the stairs played. Vivey left her cardboard box in front of the super’s door and struggled to write a note in which the letters did not drip and roll off each other, puddling at the bottom of the page. She asked him to bring the box up to her.

Then she climbed the stairs. It took almost an hour and left her exhausted. Vivey went to her room and lay down, holding hard to the sides of the mattress as her bed rose and fell, rocked and fluttered. At last she slept.

She woke up a little after six that evening. The super had not brought up her box. It was hardly surprising; he never did anything then asked. She did not want to leave the box downstairs all night. She thought about the problem for a few minutes. It might take her an hour to get downstairs, and she knew it would take her an hour to get downstairs, and she knew it would take two to climb back upstairs with the box.

So take the elevator. It would only be a few minutes, worth the discomfort to get her stuff and come back with it. Vivey left her apartment, slinking along the wall to the elevator. Lately her left shoulder had begun to drop, and her left hand stretched toward the ground, her whole body leaned away from the clockwise tilt of the world. It was hard to press the call button. The elevator came, and Vivey slunk in and pressed the button for one.

Instantly the floor dropped away from her and she fell into the corner, rolling back and forth from wall to wall. She saw a circle of steel—the handrail—and tried to grasp it, but it rolled away from her. Then the floor threw her upward, until she could touch the arching ceiling of the elevator. And then it stopped,. And she was crouched against the wall with her left hand grasping the wavy line of the handrail as it uncoiled itself and began to slide toward the ground.

The door rolled open. Panting, Vivey crawled out.

No one was in the lobby. She coiled upward to her feet and found the super’s door, where her box and the note were still waiting. Vivey pushed the box back toward the elevator. When she got there she slumped down on the floor, white faced and sick. The floor arched away from Vivey, curving toward the ceiling; the lobby couch was sliding toward her, and she was at the bottom of a bowl, holding on to a cardboard box that melted and wavered in her arms. Vivey curled in on herself and rolled up onto her knees, long enough to reach endlessly for the elevator button that danced below the indicator light.

Only a few more minutes, she promised herself. Just a little ride in the elevator.

She pushed the button. The door opened. Vivey rolled in with the box. She pushed the button for four, and the doors cartwheeled shut.

It was worse than it had ever been. The elevator threw her out, up into the darkness of the shaft, and spun below her as she sank down again. Her eyes insisted she was not moving but her body knew that was a lie; she was sinking into a floor that tossed, rippled, and rose. The rhythmic clicks of the elevator buzzed metallically in her head. Vivey vomited, watching the handrail spin and lash out like a Catherine wheel.

When the door arced open Vivey crawled out again, stained with vomit, dragging the box with her. Outside the elevator the hall curved upward toward a vanishing horizon. Her own door was on the right side, just past the stairs.

She sat and wept, and the tears rolled upward into her hair and eyebrows.

At last she got up, picked up the box and put it under her left arm; her right was curved protectively around her abdomen, and she leaned into the comfortable curve of the wall.  She sidled along the wall, eyes half-closed, stepping cautiously so that the floor’s sudden flexes and ripples would not throw her off balance.  She was doing well; then the floor bucked and tossed, and Vivey lost her balance and teetered to the right, and the stairwell curled up and took her, and she tumbled down and down and up again.

oOo

Vivey woke up in the hospital, strapped down and filled with drugs that kept the rolling and tossing of the bed to a bearable level. She had broken a leg, and her left arm. She was concussed. She would require constant care while her bones mended, and after that…

Vivey strained to understand what they were saying. The doctors’ tact, and her own churning senses, made it hard to understand individual words, but the sense was clear: she could no longer care for herself. She would have to be institutionalized.

Arrangements were made. Vivey lay there, grateful for the drugs that kept the world from tossing and let it simply roll in a circle, all straight lines arching, all the words rolling together. Her mother and sister came to arrange things, close her apartment, sign the commitment papers. Their faces, and the doctor’s and the nurses with their small round smiles, who cleaned her and fed her and chatted meaninglessly in sliding sentences, began to roll together. Everything wanted to return to the circle. Vivey was sliding further and further away.

Her mother sat at her bedside for hours, praying. Vivey dreaded her mother’s voice and the demands it brought; more and more she slid away. It was restful, giving up the effort to decipher faces and words. She had fought against giving in for some long that the release, now, was overwhelming, delicious.

There were also times she felt panicked and lonely, trapped in a world that spun her away from everyone else. She lay in the bed, eyes closed, trying to remember friends from when she was little, and from college and her first job, the people she knew from work. She had always been shy, there weren’t many to remember, but now there were none. The world and everyone she knew were rolling away from her, cartwheeling into the distance and leaving her behind.

A day came when she no longer understood what the people around her were saying; she could not decipher their faces or even read the meaning of the objects around her. The flush of warmth that accompanied her different medications would roll through her, and in the wake of it she sometimes briefly felt closer to understanding words and things again. Then, as the drugs ebbed, she spiraled down into incomprehension again. Only the endless rolling made sense to her. When she gave in to it, there was beauty to living in the circle, an adventure. But it was lonely.

oOo

For a very long time Vivey was just there, riding on the edge of the circle, learning to balance there.  Then something began to pull her deeper in. At first it was just a brush of sound, like air skimming the surface of her skin; as it got more distinct, as she listened longer, she became sure it was language. Only it was so low, so hushed, so round that Vivey could not force it to make sense. It was tantalizing, like something just out of sight. For the first time she began to work toward something; she wanted to understand what was being whispered. She wanted to see who was whispering. When she opened her eyes she saw only the ponderous orbs of darkness against the light that were shadows from the old place, nurses or doctor of family. She strained to look beyond them. Something was out there, and Vivey wanted to know what it was.

She listened. Closed her eyes, relaxed into a circle on the bed, and ignored the hands that moved her and tended her. Vivey put all her strength into listening. It took time, more days, but she began to hear the voices clearly, to pick out words as they rolled by her, curved like eggs with unpredictable paths. She began to understand the graceful, arching sounds. They were talking about her.

“…will be talking,” one voice said, like a whispering bell.

“Not yet; soon, though,” another trilled.

“She hears, I think,” a third.

The first one loosed a string of mocking curls of sound: laughter. “Stupid! Anyone can hear.”

Vivey wanted to ask who they were, but her mouth wouldn’t form the rolling sounds. Still, she listened hard, and worked her breath to form the words she began to understand.

“Where are you?” It was not speech so much as an exhalation shaped into curls of whispering sound. In the quiet of where she was, the oddly shaped words rolled away, chasing each other, but she was understood.

“She speaks!” the bell voice cried out. “Hello, girl!”

“Hello,” Vivey said. “Who are you?”

“Hello, girl; hello, girl!” the other voices—four or five, at least—sang the greeting in a round that tumbled together.

“Stop, stupids!” the bell voice commanded. “It’s too much, all at once. We have to talk one at a time.”

“Who are you?” Vivey asked again. Maybe she was saying it wrong. Maybe they didn’t understand her.

There was a swirl of words too rapid to understand. “We are.” It was the trilling voice this time. The emphasis was not a hard line, but a sinking into sound, deepening the trill as it circled around its center. “You can understand us now?”

Vivey wanted to nod, but knew that wasn’t right. She moved her head in a circle, hoping that would mean something to them. “Understand,” she agreed. “Who are you?”

“You keep asking that. Your question makes no sense. We are.” That was the bell-voice, impatient.

“You live here?” Vivey asked.

“We live everywhere!” the third voice assured her. “In the round places.  Where are you?”

Vivey didn’t understand the question. “I’m here. In—“ She did not know the word in this language and tried to use English. “Hospital. We’re in the hospital, right.”

There was a rolling clatter of response, as if their words had been dropped all at once onto a metal floor. The sound made Vivey feel a little sick. Finally, one of the voices, the bell-voice, cut through.

“You are still being in that place,” it said. “You must come closer to the round places.” Vivey heard more whispering, as if the bell-voice were conferring with the others. “You are tired. We’ll go now.” And the whispering stopped, abruptly.

Vivey tried to call them back, but they were right. She slid toward sleep and slept for a long time.

oOo

Now Vivey had two lives, on sliding away into the past, the other rolling, tumbling into something new. Her body was cared for, there was sensation, feelings of pressure and hot and cold that curled into her consciousness, smells that coiled into her, the roll of medication in her blood, first cold, then hot. She must once have cared what these feelings were, but no more; her memory of them was soft and shapeless. The caretakers were dark spots on a wheel of movement and light, meaningless noises that lashed and bruised her as often as they comforted.

In her new life, Vivey was learning the language of the round people, her new friends. When she opened her eyes she saw them, sparkles of light darting in and out between the slow dark arcs of her caretakers, speaking so quickly and liquidly it was still hard to follow them. She could not describe them—seeing them was hard enough.

At first she was all they spoke about: how they could reach her, what she could do. The bell-voiced one was the leader, or spoke as if she were. Vivey thought of them as female, perhaps because their voices were soft and high-pitched. The bell-voiced one insulted them all, Vivey included, but she also fussed over Vivey, drawing the others away when she was tired, explaining little things to her as if Vivey were a child. She began to see herself as a child, too. A student of her new world, becoming one of them.

They seemed to have no names, and no idea of names. She tried to explain, but lacked the language and at last gave up. Vivey felt slow-witted and immature, still clinging to naming, but she did not know how else to think about the new people. Privately she named them: the bell-voiced one was Bell.  The one with the trilling voice, Trilby, whose voice tumbled and leapt like a fish through whitewater, she called Dance. Others came, but these three were the ones Vivey named first. They spoke to her constantly, a rolling delicious peal of commentary. Had she ever been lonely, as she rolled so far away from human life? Not now. Now Bell and Trilby and Dance and their friends courted her and gossiped to her and surrounded her with community. Vivey did very little but listen, but they seemed delighted with that.

“Are there others like me?” she asked on day. “People who’ve—“ she thought of how to put it. “People who’ve rolled into the round places.”

There was a burst of ringing clatter that she knew was their laughter. “You’re not in the round places, just nearby, close enough to see and hear us. “You can’t be in the round places.”

That stung. Bell’s laughter as she shut Vivey out of their world. “Why can’t I?”

What Bell said translated in Vivey’s mind as something about square pegs and round holes. Vivey persisted. “Aren’t there others like me?” she asked again.

Dance gurgled roundly. “None that come this close. Too afraid of losing the long place.” That was what they called Vivey’s old home: the place of the too-long arcs.

Vivey thought of a circle that bound her to the old world, then of slivers of the arc shredding into tiny coiling wisps, fraying until the circle broke and she rolled free, freely toward the round places. “Will I lose the long place?”

“Why would you want that place? It’s dark. It’s ugly. Here it’s beautiful. You’re much better off here.” That was Trilby, wheeling in the air with unconcern. “Even if you cannot go farther.”

“Not ever?” Vivey had hoped that as she grew more familiar, more comfortable with the rounds one, they would take her with them, show her more of the round places. “Even if I wasn’t afraid of losing the long places?”

Trilby wheeled around Vivey’s head teasingly. “You’re tied to the long places, they hold you here. You see, closer, deeper, into our places, but you’re still there as well.  No rolling around for the girl!” She laughed with a harsh metallic sound like marbles rolling on a tin plate.

“Hush!” Bell broke in bossily. “She’s tired, she doesn’t understand. We will roll away now. We can come back when she’s rested.” Bell circled around Vivey’s head, rushing down to murmur in her ear. “Well go now. You must rest.”

“No!” Vivey said loudly. But the spinning light was gone, the warmth and the whispering were gone just like that. And she could not follow.

oOo

Bell whirled back later. It was the first time she had come without her friends.

“Tell around your home,” she hummed without preamble, as if she had waited long enough. “Tell me about your place.”

“Isn’t this my place now?” Vivey asked.

Bell loosed a chiming sound of impatience. “Oh, of course. Now. But tell me about your old home. Please.”

It was not usually Bell’s way to ask directly for what she wanted; more often she circled around a question and let Vivey ask it, agreeing that perhaps that would be interesting information to have. Bell asking now, alone and direct, gave the question weight Vivey could not ignore. But it was hard to answer truthfully; the words slid away from her, the concepts of straight and long and angular made no sense any more.

“Tell me,” Bell insisted.

“It’s hard,” Vivey said. “I can’t find the way to tell you. My place is not round,” she said. “It is not filled with light, the people who live there do not shimmer or roll or slide. They move from one place to another without arc—“

Bell’s light grew thin, unsatisfied and angry.

Vivey could only explain what the old world had not got, all the things it lacked. But there must have been some good things, Vivey thought. It was suddenly important to her that Bell understand that there had been good in her old life, but the harder she tried to tell it, the more it eluded her. “Lines do not meet their ends.” Vivey closed her eyes, defeated. “Everything is far apart.”

“You’re not telling me everything. You’re keeping things from me.”

“I don’t know how to tell you everything,” Vivey said. “What I’ve told you is the truth—as much as I know how to tell you here.”

“How could anyone live in such a place?” Bell challenged. “Arcs do not meet? It makes no sense.”

Vivey moved her head in the bobbing arc that meant yes.

“No softness? The heart would—“ Bell’s light flickered. “The heart would stop.”

It seemed to Vivey that Bell must be right, but she knew that once she had lived there, that it had made sense.

“The heart knew how to be there,” Vivey said to Bell. “And it was beautiful, its own way.” Rows of numbers telling tidy stories; the warmth of tea on a cold morning; birdsong and sunrise; a rose unfolding, spangled with dew. How could she explain this to Bell? “The heart knew hot to be there,” she said again.

“Then how did your heart learn—“Bell sang something Vivey did not understand, but the whirling motion of her light rolled broadly around, as if to include everything. “Could you teach the heart to be there?”

“Your heart?” Vivey asked.

Bell rolled away from the question. “Could you teach?”

“I don’t know,” Vivey told her. “You’re not made for the long place.”

Bell’s light was warm, cajoling. “You are not made for the round places, but you rolled here.”

Vivey had tried to explain this before. “I am sick, broken in the long place—that’s why I am here. I don’t know how to get back. I don’t want to go back.”

The sparkle of Bell’s light was cold as she spiraled away.

oOo

After that, Bell became more sarcastic, more bossy. She came, and brought the others with her, and they danced around Vivey and chimed and sang and gossiped to her. Sometimes Bell and Trilby, her lieutenant, asked about Vivey’s life in the long place. But Vivey sense that Bell, despite her anger, was listening, remembering everything she heard.

Trilby seemed offended by the idea of the place Vivey described, asking about it only for the sport of denying it. As they swung and swarmed around her, Vivey realized that Trilby was always in Bell’s orbit, that Bell was the star Trilby followed, and her trilling voice was sweeter when she spoke to Bell.  Vivey considered this, amused; it might explain why Trilby dismissed Vivey’s stories, afraid of anything that might lure Bell away from her. As for the others, none of them listened as closely as Bell or denied as vigorously as Trilby. Dance was amused by everything Vivey said, her laughter cascading in swells of sound which were sometimes delightful, sometimes oppressive. Vivey craved their visits and was exhausted when they rolled away.

On a day when Vivey was drifting, watching distant circles of light and color that she suspected made a village or a settlement or a gathering of some sort, Trilby wheeled toward her. Her light was sparking cold, her movements abrupt.

“She is gone.”

“What?” Vivey did not understand why Trilby was upset, although she clearly was. “Who is gone?”

“Stupid girl, listen!” Trilby roared. “She is gone!”

In the inflection of Trilby’s light and music Vivey heard what she had not heard before: she was Bell.

“She is Bell? Bell when where?”

Trilby roared at her. “Stupid girl! Stupid! She went to see the long place. You did this! It’s your fault. You!”

“But how could she goes to the long place? I told her she couldn’t! I told her—“

“She does not know what she does not want to know,” Trilby said. She wheeled threateningly around Vivey. “Now she is gone. You must bring her back.”

“What? I don’t know how to get back. I told her that, too.”

“You must find Bell.” Trilby did not wait. She wheeled away in a huge, angry arc. Vivey was alone, trying to think what to do. Find Bell? How would she start? How would she begin? It was not her fault, Vivey thought. She had told Bell not to, had refused to help her. What more could she do? But if she had not come here, had not told Bell and Dance and Trilby about her old world, would Bell have gone looking for it? You must find Bell.

Simple to say.

Vivey turned ideas over and over in circles and figure eights, trying to imagine how she could return a little way into the long place. She had worked so hard to sink into the round place, to cut herself adrift from attachment to the long place. Now she would have to find her way back, away from the light, remembering what it had been like to really occupy her body and experience the arcs and spirals of this place as harsh and intrusive and frightening.

When she had thought and remembered enough, Vivey tried.

First she found her breathing again, respiration not in a line but in a long, sighing oval. One dragged the breath up and over and down into exhalation, then rolled downward into the curve that rose, drawing breath in again. When she found the breathing, she let it reach out for her and remind her about her body. Gingerly she sensed her own perimeters, the curves of muscle, the roundness of bone, the gyration of blood through her body. For a long time she simply breathed and explored, gradually narrowing the arc of respiration until it was a pistoning line; gradually making herself remember the line of her femur and the finger’s reach from the wrist. Making sense of the lines and straightness even in her own body.

It was terrifying. Vivey made herself go slowly, eyes closed. After a long time she opened her eyes and saw dark shapes. The weight of them, even at a distance, was so crushing that she closed her eyes, hoping to drift back to the light of the round places.

You must find her.

Furious, Vivey opened her eyes again, looking for Bell’s darting light.  She saw a landscape of grays, light and dark, unmoving or so slow it was hard to tell the difference. Bell’s light should have been easy to spot. Instead, Vivey saw one of the dark shapes above her, stretching ponderously toward another shape. She had a sense that she should know why, but it was not until she felt a hot flush spear through her veins that she recognized what had happened. Medicine. The stuff that was piped into her veins to hold her in the long place, only it had never had this effect before. The gray blurs sharpened, acquired edges and weird, distorted shapes. For the first time in a long time Vivey was aware of a swooping drop under her, then a slow rising, a tilt to one side. She had been so detached from her body; now she felt its reactions to vertigo: nausea and panic. The medication spread through her body, recalling her.

From the corner of her eye Vivey thought she saw a cartwheel of light: Bell, dancing across the long place. She tried to call out to her, using Bell’s language. It was unbelievably difficult, staying in the world of rolling curves. Like being pulled from the inside out. She cried out to Bell again.

Bell did not turn. Vivey strained after her and called again, watching the angular landscape, breathing into rolls of fluting language. It was hopeless, she thought.

And then something new happened. For the tiniest part of a second, everything snapped together. Vivey saw both circle and line, saw how they met, what they gave each other. She saw how to describe the long place in the words of the round world. It was so beautiful she caught her breath.

It vanished.

There was no use seeking the moment again: the harder she tried, the further away it moved. The medication was ebbing, the effects gentling. The shadow’s edges blurred, the world had stopped its fierce bucking. Bell’s darting cartwheel of light was gone. I don’t have to stay here, Vivey thought. If I close my eyes I can still break away. She looked one more time, searching for Bell’s dancing light, but it was gone. She was afraid to stay longer. Vivey closed her eyes and curled and spun and sank toward the round places again.

oOo

Vivey woke and saw lights hovering near, and heard the swooping whisper of conversation just out of earshot. One of the voices was Dance’s, she thought.

“What happened?” she said. The time in the long place had made it hard for her to speak; her voice came out as a stammer.

The voices came nearer, their lights subdued.

“Are you awake?” That was Dance.

“Awake,” she agreed. “Bell came home?”

The lights near her moved in slow, tight circles. From behind them came another, a dark reddish light. It was Trilby. Vivey knew before she heard the words that Bell was dead.

“How?”

Trilby did not speak. In mourning she was more line than circle, rolling slowly.

“I tried to find Bell.” Vivey said. I damned near got stuck there myself, she thought. “I told her not to go. I’m sorry.”

The words rolled like hard little balls across the wide open space between Vivey and Bell’s friends.

Trilby rolled away, with Dance spinning around her agitatedly. The other lights followed, in twos and threes, until Vivey was left alone.

oOo

She thought they would never come back. She wept and sulked and cried out into the pale, shifting emptiness, and finally gave up. Bell was gone. Trilby blamed her for it, there was really no reason for any of them to come back to her. She waited and gave up waiting and began to accustom herself to loneliness again, shut out of two worlds. Sometimes in the distance she saw a haze of moving lights, the round ones meeting, maybe even dancing around some other person intruding from the long places.

She was accustomed to seeing the lights far off, so she did not understand at first when the lights began to roll toward her, in twos and threes, not always the same ones. The first ones spun cautiously at a distance, then one approached, demanding bossily to know what she had seen when she went to find Bell. As she collected her thoughts Vivey felt a pang, missing Bell. She struggled to convey what she remembered: the dark, ponderous world, Bell’s light briefly wheeling through it, and that tiny moment of seeing both worlds knit together in impossible, glorious beauty. She made sure to make the long place as dire as she could: Vivey did not want to be responsible for another one of Bell’s folk spiraling away to die there.

Dance came once or twice, her light riper with passed time. She danced more slowly now, but the movements were so graceful they made Vivey want to cry. The movements of the youngest ones were hectic and wild, just as they lights were the brightest they came the most often to hear, to spin around Vivey and tease her. Trilby did not come again, and Vivey did not know whether to be sad or relieved. But she was not lonely. She named, and began to know, a whole new group of them, and as they grew older, a group after that.

A word circled through Vivey’s thoughts when she considered her role in the round places. Like many words from her old life it seemed to roll away from her when she sought I, but when she was still it would sometimes come to her: Grannie. She had become the grannie. She stayed where she was, where the body she barely remembered was moored to a world she had released. But she hardly noticed her stillness. They came in dozens, in swarms of circling light so thick the air sometimes buzzed with them: the young ones of the round places came to her to hear her stories, to laugh at her marvelous stories of that other world. She watched for one like Bell, with fear and hope, wondering what she would do if one of the bright cartwheeling lights stayed behind to whisper “show me.” She watched for the one who would be able to understand both the circle and the line. She thought it was important, that one day someone would have that gift. But not me, Vivey thought. I was only almost.

“Tell it again, tell it again!” one of the new ones sang, wheeling among her fellows on the spark of her laughter. “Tell it again.”

Again, Vivey told the story. The curling laughter of the youngest round ones rolled over and around her and took her with it.

© 2001 by Madeleine E. Robins

Originally appeared in Starlight 3, , Tor Boosk.