Eve Line

As far as I know, it has always been a front and-center world for me. I say, as far as I know, for the simple reason that I only know so far, what I know, so...

Noir told me that I was an eve-line as soon as I was able to conceive, which must have been when I was twelve.

By that time, I was entirely certain, by any imagination, that I was not of the adam-line. Ugh, what a sub-species.

So there I was, eveline and all, twelve, and being given my first lesson in major stings. It was important for a girl such as myself to be entirely cognizant of the workings of the sting, on account of my natural stinginess. Why not. Fuck the world. I am simply a poor girl in a poor neighbourhood in a mixed sweat-pond that stinks.

My name is Kyra, and I am a girl behind glass as far as you are concerned. Unless you are some fat piece of shit that lives on my own orbit, in which case, my name is a-n-t-h-r-a-x.

I sing, write poetry, play any instrument that I can find, and, to pay for my private extistenz, have undertaken to do stinging on order.

I have been at the game for a while. Recently graduated, although you might say I was honours all of the way, and knew that all that I had to do was feed myself something along the way and the trip was set.

So, I'm seventeen. Retired from stinging. Why? I have been busy attending to a sister, I'm tired, and poisoned by the sting itself.

Actually, I'm a sting-carrier. I built up an immunity to it over time, but make no mistake, it kills you, and cyanide is entirely a potato.

I'm a trickster. Too good to pass up. I am the carrier. My purple lips are a kiss away and with certitude, are an invitation to a party, which in its stinginess, obligates you to empty yourself before my consciousness in a game of truth or consequences. Want to spike? My hands are covered in Aina's rings. During the last months of her breathlessness, she removed them, in turn, placing them upon my own fingers. She wore three sting rings. One on each thumb, and another, which she wore on her right index finger. So, now I wear four. I need only wear one, but four means eight stings, if I flip the ring after I use up one end.

I have no idea how I would have paid for my personal passions if it wasn't for stinging. It's not like I was born with anything. Except my mother and a half-brother that is the spot-on identical for his mama, as much as I am the spot-on for my papa, whoever the sperm-delivery man was. Planned parenthood was not on the scene, on either occasion, or who cares? I don't think that I ever did.

I'm a cat-nap girl. Old habit. For me, the idea of a deep sleep comes from a secure place that I had no access to -at all- during my weaning. I passed my infancy entirely aware, not particularly afraid, but ready to pounce. I'm a cat. Look at me. See the arch over my forehead. That's my cat-eye. Look at my upper nose-ridge. It's wide, just like the cat.

I can cat-nap anywhere, and will often do so for spare cash. I do it on the subway, or the bus and with hands as quick and gentle as the wind, remove from the stooge whatever properties he might have. This isn't a sting, by the way, but rather a bit of easy congress. Everything that I get, is used. Oh-so-fast. And to catch the stoogie, unawares, as he peers down my blouse, with some really valuable tidbit is always worth a payphone call to my own operator.

The clincher is to get the coin for the call out of the stooge. Point to his obvious embarrassment as he feels his pockets for loose change, et cetera. If it's a sweaty moment for him, I can often pinch his briefs and sell the case, before he has the chance to recover and follow me out of the subway as its doors slam shut.

No, that's not a sting. It's just a little slice of side-action that a poor girl like me will use to advantage.

But, I'm always sting-ready. But there has never been an occasion when the sting economy and normal small takes have collided. I never saw my victims again in either case. Would I care? Would I care, to? I'm not certain. It might be fun to run through the procedure again, perhaps at a swank party where a congressed fool could endure a moment of embarassment in front of a co-worker or a wife. Now that would be a priceless moment.

I can only imagine it, since I don't go to those sorts of parties.

Don't need to. I live the party. That is, when my magic trio materialized. Spotted Noir, knew that Dora was receptive, and thenceforth, entirely, went about to make all of them mine. Aina was a dream companion to me, and I very happily took her into my immediate confidence. It was wonderful. I was a verbal factory almost from birth with nobody to talk to and here was a girl about my own age that really loved to be talked to. I used to make up these absurd stories for us. My fire was fed by Dora, who, very unlike her sister, is an absolute chat factory. So there I was, living with mammy and bro, daddy who can say, but he must have been some sort of genetic dynamo for me to have burst out. Dev and mom haven't been exemplars with words. Both tend to mumble at the level of the average person. I must have decided as a little pea pod person that there had to be something more.

So, my own magic introduction to the world of languages and ideation, which until my trio arrived had been limited to the occasional exposure by teachers and librarians, became a lexical smorgasborg in every way. A head-trippy bunch. Lazy, also, particularly Dora. I very quickly became Dora's personal fetcher. What an obedient cat I was with Dora. More like a dog, but in actuality, a cat such as myself is entirely happy to play obedient to a mistress that is as generous and loving as Dora has been toward me. Naturally, I purr. She gives me wonderful treats.

Dora is very beautiful. So was Aina. Then, there's me. In my cat-like way, I am the most beautiful of all. Very similar to one another in appearance, Aina was, and Dora remains frumpy and mousy when in a pout. Not me. My own features are entirely perfect, more like Noir. Dora and Aina drew their beauty from their mother, a very exotic creature; all with electrifying smiles, if mousy pouts. What clichés! We evelines all have this elf-like quality to our looks. We are entirely perfect creatures, and those with this quality in greatest measure, and here I talk about perfection, are often smarter creatures, as well. We send each other signals about this sort of thing all of the time.

I guess you don't know (about this sort of thing) unless you are a transceiver of this sort. Let me know if you are... And if you need to ask... -And Company-

The eyes have it. I knew that I had found my personal quarry in Dora's blue eyes. For so much as I have spent most of my life in the company of Aina, I have never been in love with her. But I knew in a moment that I wanted very much to be in a permanent state of love with Dora.

The potency of our love came mostly from our cognitive synergism. Imagine, if you will, the experience of my childhood, borne of a mother whose indifference to her own fecklessness made a perfect me out of her own swamp-biology, rendering me unto a world that truly offered nothing to the likes of me. Except the option to study my mother as a contrast to everything that held meaning to me. And, as a rather precocious five-year-old, language-proficient far beyond my years, it was only natural that I would thusly ignore the mass of unattractive fecundity that had been my incubator, little more, and grasp at the best candidate for my affections.

I don't recall those first words that Dora and I exchanged that cemented the thing. It was more than merely words, I suppose. It was the private sustenance that we entertained with each other. In moments of entire privacy when Dora would engage in what I will call the fringes. She only did this with me, and swore me to secrecy about it. But for as much as she gave to me, I always held something in reserve that I would pass on to Aina without telling Dora. Thus did Aina receive the occasional chocolate or other tasty treat. I never found Dora's stash; she has so many nooks and crannies, and incredibly secret guarded places. No question that somebody fetched the coco and it wasn't me. Must have been one of those trips that Noir made. Aina wasn't permitted chocolate, because it compounded her congestion, so the occasional slip was a treat and white chocolate was her favourite.

It was always genuine stuff, not the granulated sugar shit that passes for chocolate in some places. No candy bars, no nuts, no nougat, no air-filled pockets.

Noir missed nothing, or Aina could keep nothing from him. So he always knew about my little cache of chocolate. Aina would take a small piece and place it on her tongue. The very essence of the experience, all of the savouring of it, and its textures, was what she sought. These experiences were not bound by volume for her.

Sated with the memory of a more volumetric experience, I would watch as Aina partook in the luxury of the moment in tiny measure.

Don't try to breathe at the same time, I would tell her.

She would laugh, and give it all up with her eyes. Aina was always the easiest to engage in this way. After a slip, we would lie on the floor together, waiting to see if there was any immediate consequence to the action. There really wasn't, ever, although it did make me nervous. It was a procurement trip and had it gone badly, Noir would not have forgiven me. He never attempted to stop me from supplying Aina in this way, but I knew that too much of one thing might lead to something else, so...

The floor was the place to be at such a moment. We would collapse, send dust flying.

There is loving, too. In such simple pleasures as a fragment of chocolate.

***

When Dora moved into Charlotte, the first thing that she did was chop my hair off. Not immediately, mind, but within days. It was after a close survey that she decided I was lousy.

"Kyra's lousy," Aina would say to me, for ages afterwards. So, I guess the hair had to go. It suited Aina, who formed her closest identification to me as a boy, with my locks all gone. And I looked it too. Shave my head and I can very easily adopt the look of a tough. I acted the part, hair or not, but the visual cue must have been appealing to Aina, and I became her boy. I loved the attention.

Her "Bill," I would do combat for her in a cold minute and everybody understood this. By the time I was ten I was an expert in the art of scaring "you" shitless, so in my company, Aina was an out-of-bounds girl. When she became fragile, my hand would be there, at her waist, gently touching. At the ready to grab her and hold her should she grow faint.

And I sit here, at her table now, looking at photographs of Aina Marie.

I miss her. And as I look at these photographs, most particlularly the recent ones, I am reminded of how desperate I was, in those final months when the writing was on the wall for Aina. I see desperation also in the photographs of the two sisters. Here I see the tragic unfolding of our existence, manifest in Dora's eyes. She looks to be the epitome of health and youthfulness, standing next to her baby, Aina, who, so arrestingly beautiful, is also so very terminal. She has dark rings under her eyes, and a nose that runs non-stop from a histamine reaction that never ends. The girls are tearful, as am I on the occasion... Another photograph of Aina. Standing all alone, looking rather regal in a ball gown that the old ladies had carefully made out of a precious bolt, for her betrothal.

So beautiful a dress, so perfectly elegant. A brilliant yellow-gold. Pleated, with offsets sewn into which pearls were attached. She was transfixed by the moment. She looked at the photographer (Noir, doubtless, but possibly Dora) suggesting with her expression that she wasn't prepared to pose for more than a moment, "so take the picture!"

In most of the later photographs that I have of Aina, she looks to be acting out some sort of scene in a life that isn't hers. As if in this photograph, here, she is trying to look like a girl waiting for her man. In another, she looks at you from a distance of about a million miles away, arms folded, sunburnt on the rooftop terrace. Or another, taken down by the river, where she wears a cap, looking cool. Here, she is trying to pretend that she is the girl in a drawing that Noir made that hangs on the wall of his study. It looks very much like Aina caught the spirit of this moment, but where the girl in the drawing is forlorn, here Aina looks to be positively filled with anticipation. She was fifteen, when the photograph was made. How energetic she could be, back then.

How odd, as I think about how I just described Aina. So much in the past, it would seem, but it was just a short three years ago, that she last possessed a vitality that was her shape, her frame, her form. How precipitous her decline, now that I consider the matter. It began with the congestion, the repetitive efforts to clear her lungs. A slender, fragile girl, she never seemed to have the stamina to cough for long. She would succumb to a state of semi-consciousness, mouth open, breathing so audibly. An occasional cough. A sputter.

Noir tended to her, as did I, in those final days, weeks. Months. Years. However long. It was in those moments that I studied him. I watched as he grew fretful, as if certain about her fate. It wasn't exactly in his nature to fret, but there he was. Looking like a man who has lost once too often, who has no plans.

It was after a particularly trying occasion with Aina, that he began to explain things. He needn't have, for I had always guessed the pattern of things. I knew it as much as I wanted to be his biology. But it was with the words that I began to understand his nature and the depth of his own despair. Aina, a continuum girl, his chosen carrier. Not the first, and not the last. He told me about prior dimensions of what, in essence, was an attempt of his own, to steer his own fate away from what it obviously was, a dead end. He came close to success on his previous attempt to engage a reversal of fortune. On that occasion, he ran out of time, was too elaborate in his implementation, too directed in the effort.

"Watch as I grow more disheveled, as I age."

And I did. For a man that time stood still for, of indeterminate age, he declined in a substantial way with the passing of Aina. I saw her eyes illuminate within his own, after her passing, noted that his very nature changed in a subtle but specific way. He had occupied Charlotte, kept peace with Dora for Aina. He would soon be gone, off to find her somewhere else. I wanted to accompany him, I decided, and told him as much.

That wasn't possible, he told me. But as he said it, I knew that it wasn't true. I told him that I was prepared to die trying, and that I had his mind. I knew that it was my eveline, also, that was a part of the sequence that led him to Charlotte. I was not a replacement part, that was clear, but there was no question in my mind that I was an integrative factor.

So, I turned to Dora. I wasn't surprised to find within her person a detailed understanding of what can only be described as Noir's obscure aspect. Everything about his game was obscure, but Dora had been attentive. She filled in the details and I came to understand the story. It was in the clarification of Dora's details that I came to terms with the occurence of his departure.

"He has already departed us. His existence here is simply a residual." She brought her eyes into mine, and for the first time, was able to hold my own in an unusual way. "It's not so bad, actually." Then she looked away momentarily. Off into the vastness. When our eyes met after an eternity, I knew that I was losing Dora, also. My trio a duo, diminished by a third, but entirely destroyed. There would be no continuation. It was over. She doubted that Noir would continue to try. With each foray, the fabric of organization a bit less integrated. Noir walked a path that was a template of the demise of the greater whole. He grew older, less capable with each venture, and the substance of the world that was the template of the girl, in this iteration, Aina, was, like nature herself, less viable.

In his last attempt, it was Blanche, before it was Blanche, it was Carol. "And you, Kyra. And me. We all came together into this existence. I expect this one is the finale. I have this feeling that it is. He will wander off to the east, choose a boat and seek his own point of origin, I expect, to discover whatever disintegration awaits. He knows where to find the next girl. I know you want it. Sorry, lovely one, it couldn't possibly be you."

With those words, almost on cue, he appeared at the threshold of the doorway. Dora motioned for me to come to sit beside her. Noir, unmoving at the doorway. "Take a look at him." She smiled. "What music are you playing, Emm?" Beyond vacancy, a grin. "I'm suffering with the Prokofiev Symphonies." "Careful with the Seventh." "I wish it were possible." I made to get up, but Dora held me. Not that she could possibly do so if I didn't want her to. Moments later, Noir came to sit down on the other side of me. I could hear the music. "It's the First..." "He was hopeful when he composed it, borrowed from it when he needed ideas for Romeo and Juliet, and otherwise..."

It didn't matter to me. The finality of the thing was obvious. So I sat between the two of them, knowing full well that there was no pattern at all, any more.

"Now, you understand."

Yeah, I tuig. I get it. We might have stayed there, deposited upon an ancient sofa together, save for the arrival of the dinner hour. "Do we need to?" "You don't propose to starve, do you?" In that moment it made little difference. "I will eat, but only so far as he makes the effort to feed me." And thus did we begin to transform our own minutae. There was no longer a purpose, so it didn't matter. I ate as mechanically as I had ever done, indifferent to decencies. "I follow, without measure, catch?" He did. "I will feed you, Kyra. There is love." I needed more. I knew it. I looked at the plate in front of me, and from it to his plate.

He smiled, almost condescendingly, and gently placed his arm about my shoulder, holding me fast. With his free hand, he took up my fork and speared some of the stuff. "Calorific, dear Kyra." Up it went, and I opened my mouth, as captive as I wanted to be. I ate mechanically, and swallowed. There was borne a repetition until the two decided that I had taken in enough. "We won't let you." "Why do you care?" For so much as the two had crowded me on the sofa, they crowded me at the table. "Stretch it fine, Kyra. Let go of the end. It's not so bad." I hated the patronism, I decided. But it made no difference, for I was in a decidedly weakened state.

"You are ready for the Fifth?" "Prokofiev?"

Perfect somnolence.

***

Soon afterward, Noir removed the rings that I wore. "You don't trust me to wear them." "You don't need to, any more." He discharged all of the stings into his forearm. I watched as the skin in each place darkened, and became thereafter sallow. Then, the residue dissipated, the skin returned to its normal colour. He did not die, and seemed entirely unaffected by the poison. "My time is not my own, and neither is yours."

"What happens... next?"

"Nothing at all, in actuality." It was Dora that spoke. "You know it."

"How long does it last? The nothing?"

"I would say that the Sixth and Seventh are a write-off." "Then why force me to listen to them?" I didn't want to. The Fifth had seemed an ordeal of tedious minutae. "Then, lead." So I did. I reached out for both of their hands and drew them both into one of my own constructions. This proved to be a mistake. I found myself unable to sustain the level of concentration required to transmit, and was soon overcome by the variations that they supplied. Evenually, it had its desired effect, and I slipped from reverie to near-sleep. Noir gathered me into his arms and carried me, slowly and with care, the distance from Dora's chambers to my own bed. Drifting, but not unconscious, I opened my eyes to see his own, tearful. I saw her, Aina, so very clearly in those eyes, and let go those final semblances of distance. I regressed, and in those final moments of consciousness, enjoyed the moment for what it was.

For the first time in my own memory, I had a total, complete sleep.

And on the following day, I awoke refreshed, and felt alight with a deeper love than I had enjoyed heretofore. I was entirely prepared to exist for the moment, for a while at least. But in its stead, and to occupy me, I wanted to have what Aina had possessed of him, so easily. I had been a protector for most of my short span, now I wanted to have the experience of being held and protected. I sought a state of vulnerability, needed the regression, and was quite content to find it in the shadow of the man that I had known for such a long time as an extension of Aina's own framework.

But what of the man himself? How was I to understand the nature of a man so removed from the existence of the ordinary? How was I to come to understand that I was a representation, an icon of some fragment of Noir's own dimension, eleven segments removed. I had at best a fragment of an understanding of my own place within the continuum, and as I made my way down the stairwell to the floor that Dora occupied, I was filled with a desire to have more details concerning the time when I was the eveline. I wished to understand, above all, how it had come to be that in my own continuum, things had gone wrong.

Noir was unavailing, but since I was energized, I would not accept that he could not tell me what I wanted to know. So, again, I sought Dora, only to discover that she was aware of her own continuum (which supported the notion of mine that such details, ultimately were available to me about my own), but she knew nothing about mine, or anybody elses, save for the details concerning Blanche. About Blanche, Dora knew much.

"He almost succeeded with her. Blanche made the progression, and in the company of another aspect of Noir, they did reach the end of the cycle. It was 2070, on the calendar, when the inversion took place. It would have come sooner, but for her efforts. In the end, Blanche was confined to a bed, paralysed by a neuro-degenerative disease that left her less than alive in her own dimension. The part of her that did make the transit continued, but to no avail.

"Aina never had the chance to begin. And I expect that if Noir does venture forth, beyond Alpha, all that he will find is a host so marked by the consequences of her experience of life that she would not be able to sustain any form outside of herself for a few moments. So, it is over, Kyra, and you can see this for yourself if you care to look."

"Nothing is over."

"It was over before it began. Don't fight it. Besides, once you come to understand that this is merely a passing parade, that nothing in this world is real, then you begin to access that dimension which is real."

"What on earth are you saying?"

"Pay attention, Kyra. I do this once."

***

And so, she did begin her tale. All that she knew about Bartholemew Noir, and all of those other primordial carriers. About the adam-line, those descendants from a primitive hunter-gatherer society that existed and flourished through a preceding ice age in a place that supplied shelter and fresh water in a time when the majority of the planet was taken up by ice and desert places. How other lines, also extant, had found survival in other places, mostly in valleys surrounded by great mountain ranges. How some people had survived through the many stages of the planet's life-cycle by receding to isolated mountain places, or had managed to succeed in barren, cold places, because they had always done so.

Eveline descendants were those people that would be found, during a colossus, in the mountain ranges that divide the continents of Europe and Eurasia. There had existed a great and advanced civilization that was the extension of the eve-line. Those that had been able to do so, found escape to other places, beyond terra, and it was among these number that did escape the decline of ages some ten thousand years ago that Noir did come from. He returned to terra some measure of thousands of years ago, to watch and also, to attempt to divert and channel the emerging civilization from its own ultimate demise. It was this demise that we occupied at the moment, and on each occasion, Noir had removed himself from time, to return in a different place, a different space, to attempt once more a diversion. On each occasion, he had met with failure, and on each subsequent occasion the task of diversion had grown in complexity. Blanche's time was the most elaborate, most detailed integration of the mechanisms that Noir had available to him. When Blanche failed, Noir returned to seek Aina, knowing full well that, such as the name suggested, it would be a most difficult delivery.

"You know that..." Dora began to do what I had noticed her doing to me in growing measure during the weeks following Aina's departure. Her eyes held a power that exceeded my own, and I knew that she had always been so easy for me to penetrate because she made it so. As she beheld me, I felt my own ablilities slide into the base of my spine, and from there, for the first time, felt the true release of my own maturity as a person outside of physical boundaries. "You have always held this power." "You also hold, for so much as you knew that you possessed the mind of an adult from your youngest days. Now it is your time to accept your own place in all of this, Kyra. Listen."

Dora chose Noir, knowing him in a way that he did not know himself. For he was blinded, partially, or simply chose not to see, to allow Dora to direct him. She had not known the manifestations, but held the memory of her own time, at a primordial level that she managed to access. Since she was certain of Noir, she was able to proceed to extract from him, those elements of her own identification that eluded her.

"When I saw you, Kyra, for the first time, I knew all about you, consciously. I saw the pattern even when Noir did not. Although it had been Aina's time, I knew entirely that you, Kyra, were an integral part of things. You, the terrifying little girl with the cool stare. How closely you resembled Eve, for so much as Aina and I have always resembled Maria.

"We are extra to terra. You know? But you, Kyra, are as extra as Noir can be said to be. Borne of a mother, from genes that were introduced by a skilful husbandry. So you also became. Your own mother was little more than your carrier. An almost happenstance, a biological engineering. You are made unique by it, and are not the produce of your mother's biology. Now, you understand."

***

If her words were intended to stop me from the intentions that I held within myself, they did not have the desired effect. Rather, I decided that by any means, I would be persistent. For so much as I had been created with an adult mind, my own biology was entirely driven by the logic of a girl that felt the forces of fecundity, and was drawn toward the best available specimen, extra, or intra. I didn't care.

As if she could pull the thoughts from my own head as easily as if I had spoken the words, Dora informed me that I could want without having, that no seduction would find success. Noir was simply unavailable to me and was beyond seduction. "Exist outside of your own sexuality, for a moment, Kyra. We don't trade in that currency. It serves no purpose except for a primordial pleasure and we do not exist for the sake of it. We have no need for it, outside of touch, which we do need. So here, feel my touch. You may have this at any time, any day. Any night. If you cannot cope, the simple contact will help assuage you your tensions. But, nothing else. We are all intimates, after all. And you, Kyra, though different in some ways, and we all do differ in some ways, from each other, you are entirely too close to him in the most biological of ways to be his lover. Now... do you understand?"

And, again. No expression would divert me. Dora could see this. "Stop this, Kyra. Do not proceed with what I know to be your intention. Besides, what remote chance do you think that you have? In all of this, there is no continuation. And, no. Where he goes, we do not follow. Don't think that I haven't tried. He found completion with Aina, in this dimension. I knew it from the moment that I cast eyes upon him, and in that moment I knew that it was Aina, not I, that was the fulcrum in this here and now. So too, did Aina understand this, although she never had a perfect understanding of all this, until her final moments. You know that she is there. Right there. That he carries her, now, for so much as she was to carry him."

In time I came to understand what Dora meant. The shadow of a man was the shadow of a shadow. Once removed and now it would seem, entirely removed. How interesting it was to learn about his former guise. For he had been a power in his prior iteration. In my own time he had been, by contrast, almost nothing. A poor man in a poor world with no knowledge that he could use. Not that there was any use... In the time of Blanche he had introduced two devices that were designed to save the world. But for all of the resources that he had available to him during the Blanche foray, it was not enough. The subsequent iteration saw no introduction, for there was nothing to do. It was a failed journey, compounded by Aina's precipitous decline.

So here I find myself. Connected with a larger reality, disconnected from my own. Robbed of the sting, I have no purpose. In the absence of Aina, my days seem long and rather empty of meaning. I don't know what to do with myself. Existence itself seems empty and the disheveled bodies that occupy space in every corner are simply a reminder of the pointlessness of it all.