Spirit Adrift: Part I

Night came swiftly, settling its dark roots deep into the foundation of the sky, one of the few reliable patterns that marked an otherwise temperamental winter in its infancy. The solstice was a few days behind, and tonight, Lyel found himself strewn across a pile of mauve cushions neatly arranged around the mini space heater on the private terrace of his Brooklyn apartment. His skyward eyes tracked the movement of an orderly band of clouds in their procession north, their moonlight bath casting shadows on the city below.

Nights like these were especially prized. Today's therapy session had been less of a roller coaster than usual, and what residual tension Lyel had not diffused there was released entirely into his newest regular, whose sandalwood scent had bonded to the telling beads of sweat still clinging to Lyel’s furry chest. He had left unprompted, much to Lyel’s delight, and in the moments since, Lyel had rolled himself the perfect joint, from which he now drew a fulsome inhale, relaxing into the embrace of a gentle wind that traversed the length of his sweat riddled body through the open folds of his robe. He closed his eyes and sighed in pleasure, releasing a plume of smoke into the night sky and soothing himself with the promise of the impending munchies. These few moments of bliss were interrupted by the gentlest of whispers in a fondly familiar voice.

“L,” the voice above him beckoned. Lyel slowly blinked his eyes open and watched in annoyance as the amorphous plume of smoke above him contoured itself into the face of a woman he could hardly forget, not that he wanted to entirely, but he did in that moment.

“Xhioma,” he managed, his voice barely a whisper. “I have two questions: Am I high or are you here? And what are you doing here, if so?”

“That’s technically three questions, but yes, I am here. Well, not quite here, but you know what I mean. Why are you naked? And so sweaty at that! You know what? Never mind. Don’t answer that.”

Lyel pulled his robe closed but otherwise remained unmoved, his eyes focused on the talking figure suspended in smoke above him. His newfound ease slowly began to dissipate as tension reclaimed his body and a thousand questions swarmed the nest of his freshly agitated mind.

“You still haven’t said why you’re here, Xhioma.” A hint of thinly veiled exasperation edged into his voice. “My phone still works, you know. Would a call not have sufficed?”

“Well, as scarcely as you call me, you cannot fault me for assuming it doesn’t. I’ll tell you why I’m here in a second, but for now hit me with another puff, please? I need some more matter to sharpen my visage so we can talk properly.”

A pang of guilt washed over him as he sat up and rearranged the cushions to support his back against the brick wall. She was right. They hadn’t spoken in months, and not for lack of trying on her part, but she would not get that confession from him. At least not right away.

“Leave it to you to show up randomly after six months only to start bossing me around. You know, sometimes I think you routinely forget that I’m older than you.” The guilt had leached away the latent bile from his voice and replaced it with a more playful lilt, which she mirrored back to him.

“Will you just shut up and give me the smoke?! Sometimes I think you are worse than Daddy when it comes to running your mouth.” They both chuckled.

Lyel inhaled deeply, exhaling a hearty burst of smoke into the void between them, and watching intently as Xhioma’s blurred eyes fluttered open and closed, fanning the particles of smoke into their appointed position on her face, sharpening her image before his eyes.

“There you are,” Lyel said, his eyes brightening at the cloudy image of his sister before him. “I would say you haven’t aged a day, but I can’t say for sure; I know you like to enhance your appearance when projecting like this.”

Xhioma rolled her eyes playfully, feigning offense as she responded, “My beauty is its own magic, dear brother. It needs no other.”

“Touché, little sister.” Lyel paused, suddenly engulfed by a cascade of emotions. Their interactions now as adults always teemed with such ease, something that had been lost to them as children, pitted against each other as rivals by parents who should have known better, but didn’t, and Xhioma defiant of living in her brother’s outsize shadow. The years and the distance had been kind to their relationship, allowing each of them to forge their own path away from the other, and to learn in their own way that they were never really in competition, because neither of them could walk the other’s path. A mutual respect had bloomed between them on this knowledge, on which they were still awkwardly building the loving relationship they had been deprived of in their childhood.

“Sometimes I forget how much I’ve missed you. We don’t have to get into it now about why I have been so distant. Just know that I am sorry I haven’t been as great about staying in touch.” He let his head fall as he finished these words, his voice barely audible at the end.

“If I knew you would be so welcoming, I would have put down my phone and projected sooner,” Xhioma replied with a giggle. “But that’s neither here nor there now. I’ve tried not to take your distance too personal, and as much as it might surprise you to hear this: I’ve missed you too.”

“Well, it's obvious to me that the smoke has clearly gone to your head in more ways than one; that’s the only way to explain this awfully pleasant disposition of yours. That said, I assume you haven’t projected all the way here just because I haven’t returned a few phone calls. I didn’t even know you still held mastery over matter manipulation over such distances. We haven't spoken in this form since...” His words fell away abruptly, and a brief silence redolent of shared but unspoken trauma perforated the space between Lyel unwinding his foot from his mouth and Xhioma responding. The orb of smoke holding Xhioma’s head flitted gently away from him, in what he perceived as a subdued recoil to his words. When she spoke again, her voice was more somber.

“My presence here is not without much effort, but it has become necessary. The others and I have resumed training at Ilchanos in preparation for a critical extraction mission. A Class V spirit-SAR. I don’t know how much time we have, but more than my powers, we will need yours. That is why I have come.”

The cushions behind his back fell away to the terrace floor as Lyel stood in reflex at the gravity of her words, Xhioma’s form rising to meet his gaze. He shook his head wearily and paced the length of the terrace in the throes of a losing battle against the nerves that now threatened to overtake him. Xhioma held her silence, uncertain as to whether more information would help her cause, watching closely as her brother took a long draw of the dwindling joint.

“Xhioma, you would ask this of me? You, of all people, know how much of myself I have lost to search and rescue operations not even remotely close to the scale you are proposing. And yet you would ask this of me?” His voice was even, but his eyes betrayed the anguish he was currently reliving behind them. Suddenly conscious of this, he turned his back to her. Xhioma averted her gaze for good measure. She had seen enough of her brother’s pain to allow him this privacy. Casting her eyes out onto the city landscape, she became painfully aware that she had robbed him, not for the first time, of the peace of a truly beautiful night.

When the silence between them became too unbearable, Xhioma spoke again: “L, I will not deny you your losses, but you well know that I am no exception to them either. If you trust how intimately familiar I am with your pain, then you must also trust that I would not ask this of you if I didn’t believe it was absolutely necessary. ”

Lyel turned to meet her eyes, searching them through the wisps of smoke sculpted by her magic into the almost lifelike replica of her. Where he had hoped to find some vestige of deception, some muted sign of the pranks they played on each other as teenagers, he was met only with desperation. He sighed in disappointment and then asked, “Whose spirit are we to retrieve?”

Her response jarred the last bit of the joint from his trembling fingers, all of which now covered his mouth as tears pooled behind the depths of his widening eyes.

“Mother’s.”