Drew Zeiba

Primavera

If you’re someone who believes human lives are special, you might believe in a charitable multiverse, a polyphony of existences where in each dimension alter-iterations of our lives unfold from the split paths one takes, has taken, or will take. There are a few obvious problems with this theory. Here are some spurious beliefs: one, that every prior choice or incident would still have somehow led to “you.” Two, that decisions—choices—matter. Three, that forms matter, that the mapping of particles into orderly, discrete objects isn’t one of humanity’s most successful fictions.

A fictional character: A Zephyr who knew how to do chest compressions, who dumped the brown powder into the toilet, who stayed all night by the hospital bed, by which he woke, fell asleep, awoke again to the alarm of her gasping.

I can’t imagine there is another Zephyr Fringuello, at least in the literal sense of sharing that name. There’s my middle name: Robert, and there are, or were, at least two Robert Fringuellos of whom I am aware: R. Frederick and R. Michael. One my grandfather, the other his son, neither of whose lives I have lived. I can imagine the shape of their lives only through the unreliable tales of others, or the even more unreliable tales of the memories I hold or don’t.

Cognitive scientists claim that one of the most critical faculties of the human mind is forgetting: pruning, they call it. Can I imagine myself as the gardener, shears in gloved hands, turning inward to trim branches in hope of new growth?

Another Zephyr I might imagine is that one I’m leaving behind here: the fiction of this page, the desolate, generous inadequacy of language, its wonder leaving wondering who a name might hold. Is a name a thing or an address? That is, does it “be” or “point”? I would say that I could point to anyone else and call them Zephyr and then that could be true too.

I can imagine there is another Zephyr, in fact that is the sole sense in which another exists, as something or someone imagined.

That other Zephyr Fringuello would be psychic. He would anticipate his life in advance by making it possible. He wouldn’t be where I am today: writing the story of my life, which, as do all stories, shows that there is but one kind of identity, the mistaken kind.

It was probably a mistake to name a child Zephyr, unpronounceable and strange, the pile up of letters—p, h, y—doing what they shouldn’t. Children hated it, other children, when I was one too, and my last name was worse—fingerfuckjello, no joke.

If I were to name myself? Imagine David, lithe, spiriting through the world—his hair mangy, long. Not apathetic but indifferent, or unaware, except about the gym, maybe, where he’d actually go.

Google image search Zephyr and you get nothing that looks like me: avian video game characters, 1939 automobiles swooping and dramatic, a zeppelin. I count myself lucky to be in appearance not so discoverable.

If I were to name myself? Imagine Reginald, intimate, more intimate, with the neuroses of success, with the importance of not taking risks.

A name, a name, by any other name; Shakespeare got one thing right: I do not to set my life at a pin's fee. I’m busy living through anybody else’s.

The psychic me would’ve had the good sense to have put a stop to it. Psychic, like Zephyr, is a word that bends English orthography—already disorderly—back on itself. Laws figure space for lawlessness.

The fingerfuckthing was invented for Vanessa, whose name misspelled its way from Phanessa, a mistaken transliteration of Phanes, Orphic deity of new life. She never denied the charges, just told everyone to fuck off with her middle finger. She was older than I am by thirteen minutes and so she always looked out for both herself and me.

If I could birth myself into another family I would crawl from an originless egg, Vanessa a serpent cradling me—two self-existent characters with less a mother or father than we had ever already. Then, maybe, we’d have the will to see life through: a story fresh to tell.

Once, when we were sharing cigarettes outside her ex-boyfriend’s house, Vanessa told me that the then-boyfriend demanded she stop smoking—gave her two weeks—or he was leaving. What are you gonna do? I asked between mentholated puffs. She lit another cigarette so she had one in each hand and yelled through the ex-boyfriend’s window, I quit!

Vanessa, Phanes, genera of butterflies, of all beings: welcome to her rebirth, or, I mean, living death. Nabokov: But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly. The cruelty of endurance for him, as for me, was the text.

Vanessa said never to write about smoking in stories or people wouldn’t take you seriously. Unfortunately some things happen, or you remember them happening, you have to tell people. For the rest of that night she kept two cigarettes lit and we did our best to make sure they burnt out at the same time, I helping her when need be. Five months later, I’d be staring at Vanessa unbreathing. I’d be fine. The nurse said, Zephyr, like the wind. The man on the gurney next to us blew me a kiss.

In another universe maybe neither Vanessa nor I started smoking. In yet another universe maybe Vanessa and I died thirteen minutes apart of lung cancer after several lovely decades smoking side by side.

I hope to impress onto you an image of her moony face the same mint-ice-cream shade as the hospital sheets. I was reminded of a history teacher taken with my name who told me, furthering my negative associations, of Zephyrus’s abduction of Chloris, spring nymph of the Elysian Fields, her name from chlōrós, meaning pale-green like scrubs or sick room gowns, meaning pale and pallid like Vanessa’s cracked lips, meaning greenish-yellow like our father’s nightly bile, meaning fresh, not like a wound. As she talks, her lips breathe spring roses, Ovid wrote, and for four years now I’ve lain flowers, a wreath upon her head.

In another universe maybe Vanessa abducted me, cannibalized me in the womb like a snake eating its unborn young and was weaker or stronger for it. All strength, I think, is stolen, though from the fictions of the self rather than those of others.

The important thing to remember, Vanessa said, was that characters in fiction tend to serve the fiction of the self, so it’s best to use them wisely, if at all. She wrote poetry; I didn’t have the head for poems. We discussed literature dosed on Dad’s morphine pills, only pilfering so many of that he’d never suffer lucidity enough to notice the thefts. They eventually couldn’t ballast his will and with him went our prescription.

The betrayal of finding her hemming breathlessness—I thought inviting death was something we did together.

The night before she died she had been texting me about Ice, a book I’d never read. After, when I was going through her things, I tried to read it, without much success. Somehow Anna Kavan’s words were inaccessible to me, the pages gestures swarming without any seeming patterns, as if I needed the knowledge of Vanessa’s present eyes to see it through, her living vision to decipher it.

I managed to read the last paragraph though, over and over, trying to make sense of how it might have led to Vanessa’s own end, if she’d even gotten to it: I drove at great speed, as if escaping, pretending we could escape. Although I knew there was no escape from the ice, from the ever-diminishing remnant of time that encapsulated us. I made the most of the minutes. The miles and the minutes flew past. The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring.

Order escaped me. I couldn’t get the words to fit among each other—diminishing minutes, escaping at speed, sure, but a gun, what room was there for a gun, the weight of a minute, the reassuring escape of minutes diminishing, the the the the ice encapsulated us in those ever-diminishing minutes, yes, diminishing cold-lipped minutes pretending—pretending what? That this paragraph, that any paragraph could hint at the shape of her life?

The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring. The last line of my story—this story—shouldn’t be any of these either.

But this will suffice as the last line of hers.

And Kavan’s, as it happens, as the last of mine.