Free Aerogrammes by Tania James Page B

she was talking to someone, Kirk came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder, and she rested her hand over his without turning around to see who it was. I don’t know why, but that small gesture made me feel something other than hatred or envy—maybe warmth, and a little sadness.
    I excused myself from Kirk’s mother and descended the stairs to the lake. I stood at the end of the little pier where a paddleboat was bobbing on the water. Before me the lake seemed to widen in a gray-black haze, and all at once uncertainty swept over me, as it still does sometimes, because I seem to find comfort only in fragments, because there is something impossible about shoring them into something larger, just as there was something futile and frightening about the borderless world beyond that lake,how the sky exhaled and expanded with no outer limit, the stars slipping farther and farther away, like everyone I loved.
    I took out the first notecard and mumbled my way through my introduction:
Kirk, I know we haven’t gotten along in the past … come to an understanding … scriptology is central to my life … my father … a few samples from his persona-file … my father …
    “Vijay, time for cake cutting!”
    I turned to find my mom easing her way down the last few steps in her heels. She stopped short of joining me on the pier and gave a winning smile, her teeth lacquered with wine. “What are you doing down here, Viju? Practicing your toast?”
    “What toast? You didn’t say I’d have to give a toast.”
    “You weren’t going to say something?” She looked slightly crestfallen. I joined her on the bank. “Then what’s that card you were reading?”
    I tried to shrug my mom away, which only heightened her interest; she snatched the notecard from my hand. It seemed childish to grasp for it back so I stood there as she read it, watching her face cloud over.
    “You won’t understand without the visual aid,” I said, pulling out the koala postcard and handing it to her.
    She looked at the card in her left hand and the card in her right, as if they had materialized out of nowhere. “This is what you were planning to say?”
    “Just to Kirk. It won’t take long, I promise. I just wanted to show him this thing, see …” I pointed out the initial between
Prateep
and
Pachikara
, but as I tried to gather myself beneath my mom’s simmering glare, all my thoughts split apart like kaleidoscopic shards and re-fused into bright new patterns: suddenly the
J
seemed a mysterious glyph of some kind, its two loops freighted with greater meaning. I remembered first learning of lemniscates from high school math; it struck me asmiraculous and maddening at the time, the idea of an upper limit always approaching a number, nearing ever closer but never quite attaining it.
    It was some time before I noticed that my mom was watching me, stricken. “You can’t give me a day, Viju? Not one day?”
    “Look at this one.” I tapped on the koala postcard, still in her hand. “See how steeply slanted those letters are, which is directly proportional to low self-esteem …” She turned the postcard over in her hands, staring blankly at the koala, and walked past me, stopping at the end of the pier. “And if you’d read Volume VI, you’d know that the concave, counterclockwise outer loop indicates an urgent regret, plus the gap—the
chasm
, really—between the
P
and the
a—
”
    She turned to me, and I stopped. I’d never seen her shoulders slump like that. Even after my dad’s funeral, she’d held herself straight and worn her grief like a veil that merely dimmed her view of the world. “Viju, when did you stop taking the pills?”
    This I didn’t see coming, but I tried to sound casual. “Oh, the Anafranil? Long time ago.”
    “Why?”
    “It really messed with my head.”
    “Your head is already a mess!” she cried. I must have looked scared for a second because she lowered her voice. “If you don’t want