“Energy cannot be created or destroyed.” She tells me this like it’s clear what she means, like we’re sharing a secret together. “It’s a law of the universe.” We’re at a diner, and I wish she would lower her voice.
“Okay,” I answer. “And?”
“And? And?” Rhiannon is laughing at me now, like I’m the crazy one. “I tell you a law of the universe, and you want more? What, the never ending cosmos aren’t enough for you?”
When the waitress comes around to check on us, I clear my throat and will my friend to shut up with my eyes. When I look up at the waitress, I’m all smiles as I give her the nod that says she can pass right over us. I don’t say anything until she’s two, three booths away. It’s mid-day mid-week, and there aren’t many people here. The sound travels more this way, and I want to keep this conversation just between us. “I don’t think I get what it is you’re saying.” Rhiannon was different from how I remembered her from before, though I guess she might be thinking the same about me.
“Okay, okay.” She pushes her picked over plate of breakfast food (served all day) to the side to clear up room for her hands to talk. “Energy is neither created nor destroyed, right? Walk with me here.” We are two sugar packets she is moving like chess pieces across the universe or whatever. “Say I die.”
“You’re dead?”
“Don’t sound too happy.” She’s flashing her same old toothy grin, and I recognize her now in that abrupt laugh.
“Sorry.” I push my plate of food to the side as well as a gesture of my support.
“Say I’m dead.”
“You’re dead.”
She drops one sugar packet on the table. That one is her, and she’s gone limp. The one that’s me is still standing upright, poised almost indignantly in her hands. She has a ring on every finger. (The citrine on her pointer finger helps her find her voice, the tiger’s eye is to help combat the looming dread of all things, and the rose quartz is to get her laid.)
“Yes. I’m dead, but where does my energy go? Right?”
The waitress is circling again, moving like a vulture over roadkill. I smile again, more tight-lipped this time in the New England way I have of being cold and getting away with it. She must be bored, but that’s no reason to bother us now.
“Okay,” I answer her pause. “Where does it go?”
She shakes the packets so I can hear them. “It’s still there.” Ripping off the corner of her body, she pours her energy out onto the dirty table top. “My body,” she says as she holds up paper packet like a communion wafer. “Doesn’t matter.” Crumples it up in her fist.
“Okay.”
“You’re still with me?”
It’s been a little over a year since we last saw each other. She stuck around town in the way she always said she never would, but that’s not her fault. Some things are bigger than us, and she knows that.
“I’m still with you.”
Leaning her head down, she blows the sugar out in a flurry. Her energy is everywhere, coating the cold remains of my meal and me alike. I remember this part of her now, too. The messy part that sticks to you and lingers around long after, like a lost specter.
She is staring at me expectantly, her wide pupils like two black holes sucking up the space between us. I’m not sure what she’s getting at.
When I don’t speak, she does. “It’s all around us.”
I’m nodding now, making myself smile in both my mouth and my eyes again. When the waitress comes back around for the third time, I take the distraction as the chance to brush her energy off of me and onto the grimy floor below.
After, Rhiannon leans in close again. I lean in, too (again, to show my support). “Have you noticed it? The voice mails? The spam calls from nowhere?”
I nod in a way that says “go on” more than it does “I agree.”
“They’re tapping in.” She leans back against the pleather of the booth, to leave me sitting in the wake of her statement. “From the other side.”
“Oh?”
“No, really. Think about it. Haven’t you noticed more?”
“Phone calls?”
“Phone calls from nowhere.”
“Um.” I feel bad for her, and then I swallow this feeling down, doubled as guilt. “I do get more scams, if that’s what you mean. Like automated ones.”
She laughs like we’re sharing a joke.
When my phone does ring, the white of her eyes flash like an animal in the dark. The worst places the caller ID could show right now include: Hell, Michigan (population: 266); Paradise, California (population: 6,516); and, Transylvania, Louisiana (unincorporated community, population: 754). I think about letting it go to voice mail, and I think also about the way people can deep fry their brains on bad drugs or online. But, she’s watching.
The screen reads caller unknown, and she all but gasps at the synchronicity of it all. When I pick up the phone, she leans back again, now as if to give me privacy in this empty diner as if our words aren’t echoing on past us.
It’s a computer generated voice telling me my bank account information has been compromised and to repeat my PIN number after the tone.
Rhiannon is still holding me in the palm of her hand. It wasn’t lost on me that she ripped her body open to blow out her own rarefied sugar energy like so many brains instead of mine. As I watch her, she lifts me up and folds one pink paper corner over to wave back at myself. I’m holding the phone so close to my head that I feel its heat.
Clearing my throat, I call out. “Hello? This is she.”