Age of Aquarius

AGE OF AQUARIUS

by Kivel Carson

edited by Kelley Tai

When I met Kari, she was in the middle of a crowded dive bar dancing to the ragings of a Black lesbian punk band in high top red Docs. She had an exuberant smile, and energy flowed out of her pores with her sweat. Tattoos spiralled down both arms, and I could see two more above her knee peeking out from her cutoff shorts. It could’ve been the creative lighting or my instant infatuation with her, but I swore I saw an aura of purple light around her, humming as she moved. There was something otherworldly about her. I wondered how many admirer’s bones she had picked clean for staring into her squinty but bright eyes and saying, “you’re not like other girls.” I wouldn’t be so dull. 

I watched her through the song, inconspicuously I thought, and ignored the words one of my friends tried forcing in my ear over the blaring sound system. My curious eyes must not have been inconspicuous at all. After the song, she walked in a straight line directly to me and I blushed through my brown cheeks. 

“What’s your sign, beautiful?”

Her question caught me off guard. Not because it was unusual for small talk in a queer place like this, but because it was the first question.

“Leo,” I said with a smile.

“Ah, I should’ve known. That confidence in your eye pulled me over here, and your pride in announcing it.”

I smiled a little harder at her looking right through me. She had a slight accent that let me know she was from somewhere before here, or her family was. She spoke low and smoothly, but I could hear every word clearly through the noise of the bar like she was leaning into me and not a foot away. 

“What about you?” I moved a little closer so we were tightly in each other’s invisible bubbles.

“Aquarius,” she said.

“Ah, an alien girl,” I said. 

“That’s what they say,” she said, and looked me over again. “We’ve met before.”

“No, I definitely would’ve remembered.”

“Remember this time, ok?” she said with a playful smirk.

I was with her for the next three days. We hopped from bar to bar that night, ended up at her friend’s show, ate greasy diner food, hotboxed my car by the glow of a quarter moon, and fell asleep on my patio underneath a lavender sky, just before it turned to its dawn blue. We spent the two days after reading to each other from books on my shelf, cooking, trading playlists, describing the shapes and colours we were seeing splashed on the walls, ceilings, and our eyelids. Before she left for work in my favourite shirt and an old pair of jeans that Monday morning, she leaned over my bed and kissed my temple. 

“To be so known, and to get to know you—” Kari tugged lightly on my gold chain, bringing me closer to her, and my brain hummed at her touch. She finished the sentence with a second kiss on top of my head before walking away. She had plucked the words right out of my brain. 

By the time she invited me to drive to the mountains to see her family several months later, we were practically living together. She knew what toaster setting I liked my bread on, fed my dog when I was running late getting out the door, left snacks outside my darkroom when I stayed up late developing prints, and knew my secret superstitions, like my lucky necklace. The instant she asked me to go, I realized we had connected so deeply and intertwined our lives like our fingers when we walked, but I didn’t know where she was from, her parents’ names, or if she had one sister or two. I didn’t know a lot. She did talk about them, but kind of like she talked about the rest of her life—in parables—where the colourful storytelling itself was the point, not the details. I had stitched her tightly into so many pockets of my life, but was maybe just another thread in hers that would be an old story one day. She was easy to love, and hard to know. We had never talked about what we were doing, just existed in this false early bliss. Our lives were actually very different, and maybe I didn’t fit at all. What were all the things I didn’t know that made her who she was? 

I was nervous for the trip, but I would never let that slip through my carefree smile. She saw anyway. My exterior was a thin curtain to her, or a bare window pane. We loaded up the car with snacks and pre-rolled papers spliffed with roses. She DJed and navigated the first half while I drove, and as we crept further up the mountain, closer to the narrow roads she knew, we switched. It was getting dark, and she said the mountain plays tricks on you if you’re unfamiliar.

If I cared about anything as much as being happy and with her, it was being impressive to her family. I wanted them to fawn over me, and love me like she did. Tell me all her old stories and ways. Comment how they’ve never seen her like this with anyone, how I’m so unlike the others they’ve met, or they’ve never met another serious love interest at all. I wanted to be special to her in that way. I worked to calm my ego before we got there so it didn’t introduce me before I could introduce myself. Dru Hill came up on the queue, I turned it loud, and started singing to her dramatically with a huge cheesy grin on my face. She returned my energy and started crooning all the ad libs in a syrupy, begging R&B voice, with her eyes darting between the empty road ahead and my eyes. I knew then just how in love with her I really was, and the rest melted away.

Her family was almost like mine, what it used to be like when we were all together. They were Black mountain folks— insular, hardworking, rightfully skeptical, and a special kind of free. Her dad was funny, expressive, and political. I could see where she got it from. Her mom was warm and quiet, until she wasn’t, and then she was funnier and smarter than her dad. Kari and her younger sister Dinah couldn’t be more different on the surface, but they spoke a secret language with their eyes, faces, and slight sounds you could only hear if you were paying attention. Her mom grilled lamb while we sat outside and talked, and her dad and sister helped with sides in the house. He emerged after a while with a thick blunt rolled in a philly wrap and laughed at the pleasant surprise I couldn’t hide on my face. 

“Kari didn’t tell you we were cool?” he asked with a deep chuckle. “I smelled y’all when you came in the door. I was saving this for you.”

I glanced at her to read her face, then smiled at her parents, “I guess she wanted me to find out for myself.” 

After dinner, we were several smokes and rounds of drinks in and everyone had come alive. We played spades, King’s Cup, a few other party games, and then Kari had one— two truths and a lie. 

“Why don’t you let the guest go first,” her sister said.

I thought for a second. “I was a model. I played D1 sports. And I was a drummer in a band.”

“Just a walking stereotype,” Kari teased.

“I’m gonna guess drumming is the lie, you look like a guitarist,” her mom said.

“These could all be true,” her sister said. “But I’m guessing D1 sports.”

“I’m guessing model,” her dad said. “But not ‘cause you’re not pretty.”

We all chuckled. 

“Dinah’s right. I never played college sports.”

“You were a model?” Kari asked.

“Actually, I was one of those brand babies they put on diapers and commercials randomly. My aunt impulsively entered me in this cutest baby talent search thing they were doing at the mall. She lied, apparently, and said I was her kid to fill out the forms. They took my pictures, I actually ended up getting chosen, and my aunt had to tell my mom before she started seeing my face on boxes at the store.”

“Oh my goodness, a literal Gerber Baby!” her mom said with a cooing voice people use for toddlers. “What did your mother say?”

“Actually, some off-brand, and they only used my box in the ‘urban markets,’” I said laughing. “My mom was furious at first, but the prize was enough to take us on a trip to Disney, and it was something to tell all her friends, so she got over it pretty quick.”

“My girlfriend’s truth is she’s literally been gorgeous since infancy, love that for me,” Kari said. I told her to go next.

“I’ve been to Bonnaroo. I was almost kidnapped. I have a blue rose tattooed somewhere on my body.”

Her sister shot her dad a look I didn’t understand.

“I know Bonnaroo smelled wild,” I said. “All the dancing in the forest, sweating out drugs, and camping for three days.”

Kari raised her eyebrows with a smirk. 

“Wait, you were almost kidnapped?” I blurted out. I had seen the blue rose many times.

“Well, it’s a little funny since I wasn’t,” she said. “But yeah.”

“Oh god, what happened?”

I looked over at her mom, who was forcing an odd smile. I figured everyone else knew the story.

“I was a really adventurous and hard-headed kid,” she said. “Hard to imagine, right?”

“Not for me,” I said. “I live with you.”

“I was riding my bike and went like half a mile further than I was allowed, and it was getting to be dusk. But there was a little store at the bottom of the hill and I was hungry or bored.”

Everyone shifted in their seats uncomfortably with nervous smiles and glances Kari didn't seem to notice. She was engrossed in her tale and sharing it with all the imagery, dramatics, and unique voices that always filled her stories. 

“—And then this strange looking man with a narrow head stopped his old grey van right by my bike and started telling me this wild story about how he lost his puppy and needed help finding it and thought he could hear it barking in the woods behind the store. He said he would buy me snacks if I helped find it.”

I was still watching her family’s faces tighten behind fake smiles. Her dad was holding her mother’s hand tighter than he had been in his lap, with his other hand clasped on top of it. I wondered, or worried, where the story could possibly be going. 

“—I was like six or seven—”

“You were five,” her mother cut in with a distant voice.

“Yeah, five or whatever,” Kari picked up. “But I knew about stranger danger and realized he was trying to kidnap me!”

“Oh my god!” I said.

“Babe, it’s fine,” she said. 

I could see on everyone else’s faces that something wasn’t fine.

“So anyway, he’s going on about this puppy, and if there were two things I loved at the time it was puppies and candy, so he almost had me. But I knew the mountain better than him and I knew I just had to play nice until I had an opening to cut away on my bike. I used to fly on that thing. So I told him, ‘I can’t leave my bike, but I’ll follow you. I love dogs!’ and put on like this huge smile. So he’s like ‘okay, great,’ and rounds the corner into the gravel forest road real slow, and I hopped on my bike behind him. As soon as the big van was too far in to turn around, I cut my wheel and raced for this dirt trail that led to my house and cars couldn’t fit down. I pedaled faster than I ever had in my life and didn’t look back.

“I collapsed on the couch when I got home, and I don’t think I told my parents about it until I saw some story on the news later about a serial killer in a grey van they were looking for. I didn’t really understand what it meant. But my friends down the road and I made up a game where one person is it and yells, ‘man in the grey van’ and you have to race back to base on your bike. Last one there is out, like musical chairs. Fucked up kids,” she finished with a laugh. 

I looked around. Everyone’s faces had returned to normal but the smiles still seemed forced. The nagging ick of something unsaid sucked the air out of the room, and made me want to disappear with it. But I knew how to be good at not talking about things, making things seem ok. 

“Your interesting fact is you almost got kidnapped sneaking to the store to buy hot chips?” I asked before too much silence could set in. “That’s actually so on-brand. And a little dark.”

“Very,” she said. “But it was the 90s, everyone has a near kidnapping story.”

Her mom stood up quickly. “Why don’t I bring out some cobbler from the kitchen?”

“I’ll help,” her sister said.

“Y’all want to roll another one?” Kari’s dad asked.

“Sure,” I said and reached for my bag.

“No, sit tight,” he said. “I’ll grab one.”

And they all disappeared in the house. I had a weird feeling and Kari was uncharacteristically unaware.

I wondered if this was one of those strange family powder kegs that erupts into shouting and blame twenty years later. Who was supposed to be watching her? Why weren’t you home? You always worked too much back then. It would’ve never happened if… Maybe they didn’t like to fight about it in front of her and she had no clue. I braced myself for tension over dessert.

The rounds of drinks were wearing on my bladder and I reluctantly went inside to find the bathroom. Kari stayed outside, switching to a new playlist. I didn’t hear yelling, even muffled, a good sign. I was an unfortunate expert at picking up on quiet arguing through drywall since childhood. I spotted the bathroom door and made my way down the hall. As I passed the kitchen I saw her mother crying quietly over the sink with the water running. Her sister was sitting on the countertop staring at the floor, and her dad was pouring her mom a glass of water from the fridge.

Oh shit, I thought. The powder keg.

Her sister spotted me before I could rush past.

“Hey,” she called.

“I’m so sorry, I was just going to the bathroom. I didn’t mean to—”

“No, it’s alright, come in,” her dad said. He turned to her sister. “Take these plates out.”

She got up and walked out quietly.

“I hate when she tells that fucking story,” her mom sobbed. The kitchen sink wouldn’t have muffled that, but Kari was still outside. And I was trapped here, wide-eyed and confused. 

“Kari doesn’t remember—” her dad started.

Her mom cut him off. “What are you telling her for? She’s gonna call us all delusional.”

I might,  I thought to myself. 

“Well what do you want me to do, Mel? She already saw you bawling in the kitchen,” he said. 

I was certain he was going to tell me they were actually the people in the grey van and she doesn’t remember her life before them, then promptly murder me and bury me in the meticulously cared for vegetable garden he grew behind the house. 

“I- I was just going to the bathroom,” I managed to spill out. “I didn’t mean to impose.”

“Sit down,” her dad said. “It’s alright. Dinah will keep her occupied. And I don’t want to leave it weird like this. She talks about you like you’ll be here a while.”  

Here a while. Exactly what I wanted a few hours ago, now I braced myself for a cult sanctuary in the basement or something, and being sacrificed or inducted. There was an eerie feeling I couldn’t shake now, seeing behind the smiles of a happy family. 

“Kari doesn’t remember she never came home that day,” her dad finally said with a sigh. 

My heart dropped to my stomach. 

“She was gone a week,” he continued. “A farmer found her on top of his grain silo. There’s no way she could’ve gotten up there. And—”

My eyes started stinging and I didn’t know why. I missed five minutes ago when I thought the family was in a secret cult.

“She was completely unharmed as far as anyone could tell, but she was different. Her head was shaved. She was wearing different clothes—not even clothes—more like a smock. There were faint lines you could barely see beneath her skin. You could feel them, like the lines of a tattoo, but no ink. And when they put her in the MRI at the hospital to check her out, the lines burned a bright purple all over her body head to toe. Intricate drawings, designs, a map—we don’t know—on fire all over her. The MRI shorted out and crashed before it could scan her. But she wasn’t hurt. She didn’t scream. She didn’t even talk. She just looked around like she was in a daydream.”

I stared ahead trying to process what he was saying, trying to decide if it was true, or if he believed it himself. 

“And there was something else,” he continued. “She was only gone the week, but when she came back, she was inches taller and her baby teeth were gone. The permanents had grown in perfectly. She looked older than Dinah. But there’s no way. There’s no way.”

I looked at Kari’s mom and tried to read her face. This felt like the kind of story families tell themselves to avoid a horrific truth, over and over again until it feels true. 

“We weren’t sure what came back was even Kari,” he said.

“Don’t say that!” her mother yelled, and broke down crying again. 

She calmed herself and shook her head.

“It was Kari,” she said. “I would know my baby anywhere in spite of anything. I looked her over and counted her fingers and toes the same way I did the day she was born. She was perfect, down to her birthmark. They took her. Took her off somewhere, and experimented on her or something, we don’t know why. But she returned. God returned her.”

“She doesn’t remember a thing,” her dad added. “She snapped out of the daze she was in one day, ate everything in the fridge, and fell asleep on the kitchen floor. I walked in and she was talking in some other language in her sleep, and her skin was red hot, but not glowing like in the MRI. She opened her eyes and looked at me and said, ‘Hi, Daddy.’ And that was it. She saw the ‘man in the grey van’ thing on the news and came up with that story. We know she believes it. I think the mind does strange things to protect us from ourselves, and things we can’t understand.”

I sat staring at both of them with glassy eyes, looking from one to the other, and tried to manage an empathetic smile without letting a tear drop. But not a smile. Just that weird look you give people at funerals to try to comfort them, where the corners of your mouth are turned up but you’re not smiling at all. 

“Our Kari is special,” her mom said. “She sees things and knows things others can’t. Things she gets from somewhere else.”

I thought of all the times she seemed to know what I was feeling, finished a thought I had in my head out loud, or touched me and made me feel something unknown in the pit of my chest. 

I heard the backdoor creak open. Her dad grabbed an old photo album off a shelf in the hallway and threw it on the table quickly. He opened to the middle just as she rounded the corner.

“And this one is from her eighth grade formal,” he said with a big grin, looking up as she walked in.

“Oh god, Dad, the photo album?” she asked, turning reddish. “This is what y’all in here doing? What a cliche.”

She smiled and moved closer to look at the photos over my shoulder and rested her hand on me.

We talked a little about her family on the drive home, but I didn’t tell Kari anything her parents told me. I got lost staring at the stars, and wondering about the secrets and lies in my own family, that I guess all families have. The things we say and don’t, sometimes out of love. I tried subtly to feel the lines in her skin with my fingertips one night, but I couldn’t be sure through all the tattoos. When I slid my finger along my own arm to compare them, they felt the same. I pushed it out of my mind.

A few months later I was in my darkroom, a little walk-in closet in the attic I had converted to process my own medium frame prints. She knocked, and I let her know when it was safe to slip in with the sliver of white light that would follow. I hadn’t been up there in a while, and she was curious, as always, to see something new. Under the red safelights, I saw her fully for the first time. It was faint at first, but brighter as she moved toward me. Her body lit up with intricate, laser-etched designs and fractals from her scalp where her hair was cut low, to the tops of her bare feet. She didn’t seem surprised at all. My eyes were wide and my breath caught in my chest.

“You—know who you are?” I asked slowly.

“I’ve always known who I am,” she said, and began removing more of her clothes to show the pattern. “I know you too. That’s why I found you.” 

She cradled my face in her hands and I stood up to meet her eyes. I felt an electric current flowing from inside my body, out through the palms of my hands, and spreading across the surface of my skin. 

“Do you know who you are?” she asked. 

I stared back wordlessly. She looked me over, waiting for something, then settled her eyes on my neck and wrinkled her nose. 

“This necklace you always wear,” she said, and picked up the pendant between her fingertips. “Someone gave it to you when you were young?” 

“Yeah, my mom,” I said. “But I don’t remember. I’ve always had it.”

“You will.”

She lifted the chain over my head before I could move and instantly my whole body glowed in a soft red light, covered in its own fractals and lines almost mirroring hers.

“Do you know who you are?” she asked again.

“Tell me.”

She leaned forward and kissed me. I felt a small pop in the middle of my brain, and I remembered everything.