Ch. 1

2. Go Go/Don’t Go

She told him, “You don’t need to do this.” But how could he tell her he did?
She told him, “This isn’t fair.” And it wasn’t, he knew, but Schiff didn’t want to hear that he knew.
Schiff told him, too, “Go.” Then again, “Go." Then she added, "Don’t go.”
He stayed beside her on the warm freshly cut grass, inhaling the verdant early summer; their hands became slick and mossy, broken blades sticking to their fingers which didn’t dare touch across the space between them. When Joshua saw Schiff’s hands he sat forward, ceased leaning back on his own, crossed his legs, and picked at errant blades and weeds. In all likelihood this annoyed Schiff; she’d told him once, “You’re never still except when you are.”
But how could he sit still? How could he remain when there was still so much to be done? When Apex City was pulling him, sure and steady as she had her own magnetism, back home? But he had no good reason why. Not one he could illuminate to Schiff.
Instead, Joshua said, “Schiff.” Then, “Heidi.”
She flushed at the sound of her own name. He wishes he could tell her the symphony that sounds when she says his. Does she think this is easy?
“I thought you were a genius,” she laughs.
Wouldn’t it be easier if there were someone else, instead of somewhere else? Joshua has been loyal to Schiff, though, and he’s had offers. A Ph.D. many times over and a handsome and popular professor at the age of twenty-one? But ever since she found him at the museum, Schiff has been neatly folded into his life, as if that day he’d gone to lose himself among the water lilies and scenes of the Harbor, she’d been another equation introduced to consider and grasp, another mechanism, another field to study and embrace.
So this nice Jewish girl whose chestnut eyes bored into Joshua’s sternum so small was she, whose bantam hands explored as much as they instructed, who had charted and canvassed art and time as Joshua had probed quantum universes had tickled the heart of the future hero of Apex City. He breathed her in early mornings before leaving for his laboratory; he heard her life percolating in the periphery as his own fingers confidently banged at his typewriter, extrapolating upon the essays which had already brought him such acclaim. Now he had to break her heart. It was the most villainous act from a heart so dauntless.
And he would never forgive himself. Schiff would become his kryptonite, for having conquered the intellectual, the scientific fields, having created his body from the sickly scraps of childhood to be the engine of justice, the concluding frontier to his maturation was to experience the highs and lows of love. And, in the space of these months with Schiff, he has. His heart would sing when he’d touch her face, her hair, her hand. And now, on the grass Harvard Yard, in the warmth of the sun, his heart would break. Though not as much as hers. And that final fact made it all the worse.
“I’m needed elsewhere,” he told her.
“You’re needed here,” she responded.
“No,” he said. He didn’t believe it because he didn’t wish to. Schiff was strong of personality and intent. She did not need him to clear a swath to the future, he knew. She would find her way. No. She would make her way.
But need was not want, and though his designs both mechanical and theoretical were beyond those of most men, Joshua Valor still did not understand this fact of man.
“I don’t understand,” she said. There weren’t tears; Schiff was not emotional like the women Joshua knew from the lab. She was more like a man in this way, he thought; she could be calculating and clear-headed. She could be irrational, too, in her waning moments, but her irrationality was a blessing. It was a quark in the overwhelming wave of her overall goodness.
“I wish I could explain,” he told her. “But I need to go home. I’ve been away too long.”
“Why isn’t this your home?” she asked. “You’ve lived here longer than there, even.”
“It still isn’t home,” he said. “It still isn’t... This city, to me, is a laboratory. Consider it like that.”
“And I’ve been, what, an experiment?”
“No!” Then, “No... Schiff. You’ve been... I’d have left long ago were it not for you. You’ve been everything to me. You’ve made this... You’ve made it worthwhile, I think. You’ve given meaning to my endeavors. You’ve... You’ve given me purpose.”
She had. In her capacity as Impressionist Curator, Schiff had found opportunity to create practical significance to her studies and to the efforts of the Museum of Fine Arts. She’d inaugurated a program whereby underprivileged schoolchildren could visit the museum, could learn the history of the work and its substance in their own lives. She brought great art to life for those whom others thought would not need or appreciate it.
Joshua had happily and anonymously poured dollars and cents of his inheritance into Schiff’s design, and while there was no monetary nor public reward, the gratitude apparent in Schiff and the children, and the good-feeling brought on by good-acts was incendiary to young Valor. Something was ignited within him, and suddenly the purpose of his laser-based inventions and experiments was discovered.
But to fulfill what he now saw as the destiny his heart and stars had aligned, he had to leave.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me, Joshua,” Schiff said.
“To me either, I think.” He couldn’t explain it to her, either.
To speak his plan aloud would render it ridiculous. It was ridiculous. But it was also inevitable. Apex City needed a hero. He would be that hero.
Schiff looked at her watch. “I have to go,” she said. “I have a class.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her. They were little words, insufficient for the twisting pain he felt. He never wished to be the cause of her harm. He wanted to give her the opposite, to present her with the same feelings of elation and light with which she imbued him, and had since the day they’d met.
Now the tears. They slide across her eyes like a translucent wall, and all Joshua wishes to do it gather her small frame in his long arms and keep her there. But he has lost that liberty.
He will continue alone. Sitting beside her as the minutes on her watch stretched into infinitudes, watching her eyes well and tears silently sled down her blossomed cheek, Joshua knew he would traverse this road alone.
His heart broke too, then, but not a fraction of the breach that smiled open in the girl by his side.