..........................*** Chapter 27 ***...........................
Esther closed her eyes and gripped Abuela's hand. Nicola's warm body pressed against her back, one arm around her stomach, the other woman's physical presence calming the part of her brain that would otherwise refuse this task.
When Abuela's onslaught came, it swept right over her, a hot wind lifting her light veils away, carrying her completely out of her body.
It had been easier every day. When she floated above Abuela's strange map of the world, she sensed a little more than yesterday.
Today Abuela held them still, centered above the node she understood to be Abuela and Esther. A single point for the two of them, and all their uncounted complexity inside. It was a compression, the type brains were so good at. Take a complicated object and abstract it, until it became a single idea. A single point. But all the detail was waiting within, should Abuela decide to examine it. Down to the atomic level, if Abuela had the skill Nicola did.
The map shimmered as one path or another momentarily sharpened or blurred. Abuela was listening, her subconscious traveling down the forking paths at tremendous speed. It was what she spent most of her time doing: collecting information with every ounce of her attention. Allowing her intuition and experience to filter and redirect her searching, following strands, mostly to dead ends. A chance alignment of branches allowed a sound to travel much further than usual. A chipmunk was scared by a distant car, and its call startled a flock of birds.
Countless bits of information, all of them meaningless on their own, but if selected with tremendous precision, they could add up to something far more. That was what the connections between nodes stood for, in Abuela's map: sets of circumstances relating one entity of interest to another. And even the entities represented by nodes were themselves constantly shifting. A room, a tree, a pebble, a person, a small region of air. It seemed impossible that any one mind could do this, and perhaps it was magic, or a miracle. Yet Abuela was doing it.
Esther felt a shudder at her back. Nicola found something about this experience unpleasant, but so far she'd been too stubborn to explain.
Finally Abuela ended the session, and Esther sagged back against Nicola, who took a ragged breath of her own. They had been nearly two hours in meditation.
"Describe what you experienced," Abuela demanded, and Esther began the recitation. She knew she'd made great improvements this week, but Abuela seemed unhappy.
"Too slow," she muttered. "I will have to think about this. Very well, my child, you may ask your questions now."
Nicola had learned her lesson to stay silent in this time. Abuela had grudgingly accepted how much easier her presence made the process for Esther, and by extension Abuela herself. But Abuela's entire focus was Esther now, and whatever it was that Esther felt would speed her understanding.
"When you are searching for butterflies, are you doing this one at a time or all at once?"
Abuela thought about that. "A combination, I suppose. There are far too many paths to search one at a time. And yet I must restrict my view drastically in order to hold all the necessary information in my mind. I suppose the restriction is the part that requires the most conscious attention, while my intuition and unconscious mind do the searching."
"Like an intuitive parallel processing," said Esther.
Abuela smiled and nodded. "There are many new ideas in the world, ones I wish had been available when I was groping my way to these skills. It is another advantage your young mind will have over mine.
* * *
After a snack, they walked slowly back to the cabin. Mark was outside chopping wood, his body as always a machine designed for the task. No wasted motion, every stroke perfect. Esther smiled at him, but he was intent on his task.
Once inside Esther flopped on her bed.
"I can't understand any of it," Nicola said softly. She lay back on her own bed, staring at the underside of the upper bunk.
"Any of what?" Esther asked.
"What it is you and Abuela see," she said. "Yes, I get swept away by Abuela as well. But everything is murky and chaotic. I can't make sense of a fucking thing. I thought I could learn, that Abuela misjudged me. But she didn't. I'm too stupid, Esther. My brain just can't follow where you go."
"You're one of the smartest people I know," Esther said. "Abuela is trying to teach me, not you. All of what she does is focused on how she thinks I'll best be able to see. There's no reason to think our minds should work the same way. I think mine just works more like Abuela's, so she has a better chance of teaching me."
Nicola faced her with a scowl. "Why do you have to be so fucking nice? I'm trying to feel sorry for myself here, and pissed off at you. The least you could be is an arrogant prick like me. Instead, I spend hours holding you, knowing that the best thing I can do is help you go places I'll never visit myself. It's killing me, Esther."
"You've been amazing support for me, Nicola. But I feel better every time. I think I could do it without you. There's no need to torture yourself."
"Don't you get it?" Nicola said. "Abuela's not giving me lessons anymore. She seems desperate to get you up to speed, and that can only mean one thing: she doesn't think she has much time left. This is my last chance to learn something from her, and all I'm getting is static. I'd rather at least do some good by helping you, and maybe my thick brain will eventually get something out of it."
The door opened, and Mark came in.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop. Is it really so desperate with Abuela?"
"I don't know," said Esther. "She doesn't seem any worse than recently. But Nicola's logic makes sense."
Mark sighed unhappily and sat on the bed with Nicola, absently putting his hand on her leg.
Nicola sat up and kissed him, hard, on the lips.
"Please," she murmured, running her hands down his back. "Let's just feel something good for a while."
Mark leaned into her kiss and closed his eyes. He always looked so much younger in these moments when he surrendered to Nicola. Nicola was trying to undo her clothes even as she kissed him, and Esther figured it was time to go.
"Stay," Nicola whispered. "If you like."
It would only be frustrating. But the truth was she liked watching them even in the dark. She'd never seen them in the light of day. If she went elsewhere she'd be thinking about them anyway, and the temptation would be even greater to spread out her senses in the way Abuela kept warning her was dangerous.
That what she told herself, anyway, as she sat down again on her bed.
Nicola took a quick break to pull her shirt off over her head, and Mark immediately unclasped her bra, moving down to kiss her shoulders and cup one of her beautiful breasts.
Nicola flashed Esther a surprisingly nervous smile, then pushed Mark down on her bed, unsnapping his jeans and pulling them right off with his underwear.
He was rock-hard, as he always was once they'd started. Esther suspected it was something else he had conscious control of. She wondered what that would be like. Could Nicola do some of that? Getting herself physically aroused just with her mind?
Nicola began to kiss him gently, tongue and lips working from the tip of his penis all the way down to the bottom of the shaft, and into the fur on one of testicles, and then back upwards. She was following the spiral pattern of spots, and Mark was obviously enjoying it.
