And in Arcadia I (The A, A’ Remix)

1. Each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

One of the most vivid memories you have of him is of a boy standing at the edge of a beach, his pants rolled up to his knees and the sunshine long on his shoulders like hair. In your memory, he is always a boy of maybe eight or nine, but you are whatever inescapable age you are now. The sand is a live, conscious, moving creature under his feet and yours as well. The waves slap at his feet. He is slowly being buried, his feet going deeper and deeper into the wet depths of the beach, and as the waves cling to his ankles, the sand covers his toes. Earlier you two had made a sandcastle and pretended to be powerful with hands larger than the towers of the castle. The wet sand you had used to strengthen the walls dry bleached white in the sun, lies broken and gaping beside your feet in the sand, baking. Your mouth is dry. He is a silhouette against the sun, no more color, just black. You call out to him, “George, come back, come back,” because the waves are drawing him closer and closer to the edge of the sea until he’s knee deep in it, yet he still tells you, “I’m right here, Fred, I’m right here!” even as he’s going farther and farther away. He’s beautiful as he is drawn into the sea’s caresses, and eventually he’ll be gone. Some people are like that. You’re not one of them, but he is, and he is so beautiful in that moment it can eclipse all moments.

Thinking of the way he kisses, like he is always giving something up to you, and taking something else out in return. Like he’s trying to feed you his life, but that he’s going to feed off of yours, so softly and so real you almost don’t care. And when he looks at you, you get this unnatural feeling that he’s afraid of you, like that time (it was summer, you remember this because the sun wasn’t out and the ground was dry, and he had on a pair of shorts so that your hand kept brushing his bare skin and he would smile; it was summer, you remember this because that night you got up and thought yourself to be blind because you could feel the heat coming off of him in thick heavy surges but you couldn’t see anything) he had suddenly said, “Fred, I’m not like you at all. You made me into you.” You were his mother and his father and his brother, and you made him from a clump of your heart, your leg, your eyes, a bundle of hair and the skin of your teeth. You made him and then made him become you.

You had once read an encyclopedia for research in Muggle Studies, and there was something about the Earth scraping part of itself off to become the moon, a circling sentinel to watch over the Earth.

That’s what he is. The moon to orbit your Earth, and lest you forget, churning the waters beneath your skin, making you boil, making you rise and fall, rise and fall, until you forget the gravity that joins you two to each other. And when you died, you wanted to tell him this, tell him that you’re sorry you made him into another copy of you, without even meaning to. Tell him that the windows are still open in your room, and you’re waiting for the moment he’s sick of being just that clump of you. Tell him that there’s more to being just a carbon transfer of yourself in him, there’s so much beyond that, and you’re trying to fight the waves and the sand and the tides to get back to him, “Oh, fuck, George I—“

Nothing is original, after all. Least of all death.

2. Lost two thousand years in the past, master of a dead language and a dead empire

It’s spring, and Tom is dying.

Dying slowly, painfully slow, inches by inches of him at a time. The death spreads through his bones like a cancer, eating away at all the pieces and cracks in him until he’ll be nothing more but a paper frame of a boy. Soon he’ll be gone, turned to dust. A funny thing to think about, unless you have to sleep at night and hear the rustle of yourself slowly decaying, like Tom does. The fibers of his very body loosening, unraveling, splinters of himself being swallowed up by the night, and sometimes he just opens his mouth and screams silently. He never though it would hurt this bad, but it does, and when he rises in the morning he’s surprised his legs just don’t dissolve under him with the weight of his sheer life.

It’s spring, and Tom is dying.

He’s no longer the pen-and-paper boy that Ginny created, so long ago. He took something from her, and something from Fred, and something from each of the deaths, and lately, he’s taken something from Harry, even though Harry isn’t dead. He’s taken life as he touches. But some things are never enough. And some things are. It’ll be enough for Tom, when he’s dead, to be a pile of ashes kicked in the corner, but the tragedy of dying isn’t what’s left of death; it’s the excruciating progression from life to death that even Tom can feel. He won’t even have a grave. They’ll probably set fire to the scraps that are left of him, little fragments of Ginny’s handwriting, and Fred’s blood. It’ll be all ink and blood and paper. To exist, he borrowed some recess from time, but time is a harsh loaner, and slowly it is stealing back what properly belongs to it. Tom belongs to time. And when he once again fully embraces his carved notch in time and is dead, flowers will bloom; little white flowers from his grave, opening their white faces to the sun, will adorn his paper corpse the day after, the day after, and still more the day after. But he won’t care anymore.

It’s spring, and Tom is dying.

Soon there’ll be nothing left of him but the memories, and time will take that away too. At night, through his clenched teeth and the pain that snaps his back rigid, he traces his name in the air. When he became famous he lost his obsession with his name. He could have been anything to himself. He took power as his name and adopted the family of lords to keep counsel in the night. Now he wants his name back; now he would give anything to have his name back. At night what is left of his name and identity, that identity without the paper, without the power, without the plunder, without the premises, comforts him silently. And still that is not enough.

It’s spring, and Tom—

Tom is dying.

3. Memory knows him/ in all his repetitions, image on image

Death is not at all what you expected it to be. It changes something about the way you perceive things, that’s all. It’s actually a very simple process, once you think it through. You dump all your memories out into a little sealed container, and that’s what’s really buried in the ground, the little container with all you ever remember of your life. Instead, you put into your head all the fractured bits of dreams, all the suspicions, the paranoia, the neurosis of an imperfect mind, the haunting burned images of the first time you saw light (the brightness, the floodlights, and that’s what you saw when you died, wasn’t it, that light, that face, always that face). Put that all in, take everything solid out. And then you put in a swiveled and imprecise version of your eyes.

And these eyes, they see everything about him, and they never leave him, so that if you still had eyelids to close, you would still see him moving against the surface, in and out, the light of his face, the dark of his back. His silhouette. The pattern of his fingers against flat surfaces, and the swirls in his hair that match the swirls in your hair. You can spend eternity in those designs, the careless whisper of the wind that changes his complexion. When he sleeps you draw your eyes across the line of his throat and hope that the open gaping wound will create words. You miss his voice. He was once a poet, in his own right.

But with you, you stole his voice and his eyes and his memories when you died. You took it all into the grave with you, and you wrapped his memories in a linen cloth and buried it with your little container too. His memories were your memories. He has no memories that precede yours. He has never taken a breath without tasting you. “You made me into you, Fred,” he had once said, and now you have an eternity to wonder if that was what you should have used all of your ill-fated love to keep from doing.

4. Someone who had wolves as pets and lions for night companions

Tom soon realizes, too late, perhaps, that it’s the little things that make up a life too grand for words and too wasted for sentences. He wants to be remembered, and he’ll have to settle for being just another three-letter name on the list of villains, every one of them fit to have a firefly’s glory and nothing more. He’ll have to settle for the old cliché. He had once promised himself to never be a mirror, something that just takes what you’ve done before and throw it back at you. He’s a mirror now, and if villains are allowed to regret, that’s the only one he has.

Maybe not the only one. But it’s the only one he’ll give voice to. He’ll just store the other ones in his chest and wait until a cold-eyed shivering boy who knows his own name (Harry Harry Harry Harry Harry Harry—) takes a sword and plunges it threw the splintered cavern of unlucky fortunes that Tom calls his heart. Harry will draw out the sword and there at the end of it, spitted and ready to roast over an open fire, will be the heart. Often Tom wonders if it will be red, or blue, or black will all that backed-up ink waiting to burst open and expel the secrets lodged so finely in the wires that they were lost to even Tom. He wonders if it will make him blind to see this palindrome of himself. Backwards and forwards, a heart is the same thing it will always be, and Tom’s heart will always be, and Harry’s heart will always be, and everyone that Tom has ever known or touched or heard: their hearts will always be the same as hearts have always been.

Harry steps into the chamber and calls Tom out of the dark, “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy…” Something borrowed, thinks Tom, and looks at the glint in Harry’s eyes, borrowed from the glint of steel sunlight, bloody swords, or Tom’s own relentless, unasked for ambition. Something blue would be the light that Tom holds in his hand, the blue of his lips as he slowly dies, and the blue of Tom’s eyes when it is dusk going on into evening. Something old would be Tom, Tom dying, Tom the preserved perverse memories of a hungry boy yearning for something—new. Harry. Something new. Something with a stalwart tongue that speaks riddles to Tom and created little boy memories for Tom’s name. Something to add and to subtract and to be all the places Tom can never touch. Something to be and exist long after Tom does not.

“Tommy. Tommy. Tommy.” The glint of the metal sword is waiting. That in itself is borrowed, blue, old, and new. In the dark, fast approaching the light, Tom, dying (it’s still spring), walks forward, and keeps his eyes aloft. Some hells you don’t have to bargain for. Some hells just exist as you create them. Other hells, they become you. And still more hells wander into your airspace hoping for a chance to steal your kisses, your breath, and your predilections. Not to mention your life.

5. He’s nineteen and there’s nothing left for him.

He can see you somehow, even though you’re not there anymore, you’re just an echo of all the things you once were and once thought about being. When you’re watching him, a half-dead half-alive suicide wish among the living, when he’s a plague on every word anyone says to him, he can see you, and he doesn’t smile or say anything, just looks at you through the flat, unyielding panes of his eyes, and you can see him asking questions you can’t hear. Ginny’s here too, but she doesn’t see you like George sees you. She doesn’t see you at all, really; she just thinks of you over and over and over again until you’re real to her. You watch her too, expect sometimes you can’t see her all that well. The purpose of your nonexistence is to watch him forever, and even when you want to turn your eyes away, you can’t. He’s always there. A brand. A recurring dream. A monomania.

A silhouette burned into your eyes against the backdrop of a majestic ocean, the sunrise grand, beautiful, alluring.

You watch him on a night not unlike summer, a fringe of the distant light heralding the death and rebirth of day. He, a cracked receptacle for his own overflowing pain with his knuckles immersed in the depths of a broken mirror, looks into the space where the remains of your breath disperses, and says, cold and quiet, the dampness of a overcast morning, “Bang. You’re dead.” His lips blue, him looking like he has never seen warm water and only the cold unmoving depths of drowning. Drowning is a relative thing, though, as strange as it sounds; it is the equitable variables of air, water, and motion.

Freedom is a hard and fickle thing to understand. For some, it takes a lifetime to grab hold of, others less than the time it takes to crush a fly between the table surface and a sheet of paper. But for him, and even for you, although you less so than him, it takes the speed of flying glass. For him, it takes a girl with red hair, who breathed in a pattern not wholly unfamiliar, with a hand that was a weak shadow of someone else, because all that parents ever are is the light and the walls and the obstruction to cause a series of disorderly shapes.

You and him were lights at the opposite ends of a tunnel, the two circles so similar that direction becomes nothing more than a self-imposed ladder climbing into obscurity. She is the pathway in between. The mirror fragments a bit of her eyes, pieces of you embedded in the palms of her hands where she used to wrestle with you on the floor, and the air between you two like the similarities of sheets (white linen rough clean the smell of soap and outdoors). A memory: Flying on old rickety brooms. In a dream you told him let’s fly away forever. Says he, “Away. Forever.”

And behind you, the patter of bare feet.

6. “I love you. Good-by—because I love you.”

Meanwhile, Tom is indulging in the belief that some things last forever. Not everything, just some things he will crawl into his grave with and never let go until fresh air hits his corpse once again and makes it decay. The worms will eat away at his memory. The flash of thunder will steal away the glimmer of his eyes or the brilliance of his language, but these things, these things last forever. Rain will soak through the matting ceiling of leaves and grass and dirt. He’ll be wet. Some summer, Tom will be dead. But some things, some things last forever.

Harry, not dead, will not be dead, will not be dead come summer, is not dying, closes the door behind him. “I’m tired. Come sleep with me,” Tom says, part of the atmospheric dark and waiting, always waiting. “Lie down with me.” The floor is hard beneath his feet as if to assure him that he is still alive. Deep, somewhere deep, his blood stirs, falters, and dies. Last time he asked with question marks reliving the terror of oblivion. Now he demands and receives. It occurs to him that the hiss of metal against stone as Harry walks is much like music. It’s much like a lullaby. Tommy. Tommy. Tommy.

Some things last forever. Tom does not care anymore if this sleep will be one of them. Tom cannot remember how many times he has dreamed of touching his fingers to a steaming, newly fixed mark on someone’s arm. Cannot remember how many times he has woken up to the sights of his nails bloody and his arm decorated with red slashes and the smell of iron. Does not care. There comes a time when the unmarred perfection of skin is many more times more frightening than the silence preceding death or the scars from some errant nightmare; times like these, Tom assures himself with the infallibility of forever.

7. Whereof we cannot know, thereof must we be silent.

Tom is dying; Fred is dead; George will die one day; and Ginny will die one day; the mirrors will still be as bright, the flowers on the grave as white. But for now, a moment is a moment and eternity is just the culmination of all moments, dying one by one.