Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Parts 4-5

Part 6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Navigating and Accepting Mental Illness

Both Regan and Aldo wrestle with mental health and with accepting that their neurological differences will be with them for their entire lives. The novel doesn’t name either Aldo or Regan’s condition, which adds relatability to what they experience and doesn’t box them into a label or particular prejudgment. The court ordered Regan to see a psychiatrist after she was caught counterfeiting money despite having no need for it or any other real reason for doing so. She takes lithium to stabilize her moods but feels like it makes her numb and takes away part of her personality: “Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?” (116). Regan’s life is disorganized and somewhat chaotic; she’s “rarely the same version twice” (149) and is unpredictable even to Aldo, who can calculate almost anything. As the story begins, she’s in an unhealthy relationship with Marc, who often accuses her of being stuck in a pattern of behavior. Regan despises the idea of boredom or nothingness, and she tries to fill every moment with intensity and meaning. Regan’s relationship with her family is dysfunctional, and she usually avoids them, largely because they’re highly critical of her and don’t offer her the empathy and emotional support she needs. In addition, Regan is impulsive, deciding to meet up with Aldo despite having a boyfriend, calling him at four o’clock in the morning, and announcing that she’s going to cut his hair. She quickly develops a bond with Aldo, and her thoughts are consumed by him and his ideas.

Aldo, too, has mental health challenges. A substance use problem led to an overdose that nearly killed him. His father’s concern for his well-being led him to quit, but he still uses cannabis to numb himself and slow his racing thoughts, which he can’t shake. In addition, he relies heavily on routine, lists, and the mental calculations he performs to get through each day. He often thinks about “the void” (132) and what it would be like to disappear within it. Finding Regan makes him feel like he has something meaningful to live for, rather than just being an object that occupies space. He takes it upon himself to help her experience a healthier emotional state and in doing so begins to manage his own: “There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. […] He would translate it for her later […] She would watch it take shape and he would know he’d said it in a way she could understand” (152).

Regan and Aldo’s relationship is fast, intense, and at times tumultuous as he tries to keep up with her way of being. Regan starts to wonder if Aldo will grow tired of her or see through her to a person that he doesn’t like. She intentionally challenges him to test whether he’s truly invested in her: “Oh, you love my brain? […] Do you love it when it means I’m lifeless on the floor, curling my tongue around a pill or a stranger’s dick? Can you love my brain even when it […] doesn’t love me?” (211). As a result, a push-pull effect occurs, and Aldo is at times simply along for the ride. In the story’s conclusion, the narrator notes that “‘healthy’ for them will always be a relative term” (316), because it isn’t a story about overcoming or being cured of mental illness. Instead, it’s a story about accepting one’s illness by finding someone who sees it as a strength rather than a weakness.

The Passage and Consequences of Time

The nature of time itself is a concept that the novel analyzes through the lens of its protagonists, Aldo and Regan. Aldo in particular is absorbed in the concept of time and how it works and progresses, and until he meets Regan he deems this his problem to solve, regardless of whether he ever actually solves it. Regan begins wondering about time only after meeting Aldo, but looking back at their relationship, she wonders what chain of events, whether in the recent past or long before they were even born, led them to meet that day in the armory. That meeting, though it seemed inconsequential at first, led to finding love that neither of them knew they needed. Regan wonders if it was fate or some inner need in them both that slowly drew their life paths toward one another. Either way, she’s certain it would have happened no matter what: “It was always a matter of time in the end, just as it had been in the beginning” (5).

Aldo is fascinated by bees and the hexagonal patterns found in nature because he believes that time likely follows the same pattern. He sees hexagons as “the most significant form in nature” (10) and believes that time travel is theoretically possible by traveling “along hexagonal paths” (11). Aldo’s theory is inspired by the work of Kurt Gödel, who proposed that time progressed in the shape of light cones. In addition, Aldo considers the concept of the multiverse and whether he might be living infinite possibilities all at once. Proposing this leads Regan to wonder the same, and consider what different versions of herself might exist or whether it’s possible to go back in time and reset mistakes. Aldo feels constricted by the Babylonian concept of time, which divides time into units of 60, and he knows that it’s one of potentially infinite ways to view time. He thus muses about what time truly is, if it can take so many different shapes; from this, Regan concludes that “time was what gave shapes to things” (303) rather than being shaped by them.

Until Aldo meets Regan, he has no real way of knowing that time is passing because every day is the same. Reflecting on this, he thinks habits are “the antithesis of time” (259), causing one to live the same day and same moments over and over, giving no anchors or landmarks to the passage of time. Regan lives each day differently and with a new outlook, and her spontaneity and emotional intensity create markers in Aldo’s life. The novel’s title, Alone with You in the Ether, refers to old ideas of ether, which Aldo also explains to Regan. The concept of the ether as the substance that composed the universe and through which light passed relates to Aldo’s concepts of time travel. Thinking of the universe as being filled with “a shining, fluid substance” (258) is both a romantic notion and one that sheds light on the human condition of feeling alone in a vast space, unable to travel through it but certain there must be a way.

Love as a Composite of Contradictions and Opposites

Aldo and Regan’s love stems from their positions as opposites on a spectrum of emotion and outlooks on the world. Even before they meet, they’re presented as people who live opposing lives but are simultaneously mirrors of each other, foreshadowing the initial contradiction. Regan seeks chaos and intense emotional experiences, while Aldo prefers order, predictability, and solitude. Regan is deeply sexual and social, while Aldo must be reminded of the world outside before he even thinks of sex. At the same time, both have had a conflicted relationship with substances, both love pasta, and both spend much of their time lost deep in thought. While Aldo has long accepted that life itself is largely composed of a void or empty space, Regan has yet to come to terms with this fact: “Emptiness repulsed Regan, filling her with abject terror, but the concept of zero was something that Aldo had come to accept” (39). In the narration itself, contradictions describe Regan’s thoughts and the way that she encompasses all sides of a story in one, like the infinitely complex puzzle that Aldo sees in her: “She’s contradictory—honest even when she lies, and rarely the same version twice. She’s confounding, really intricate. Infinite […] She’d have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do” (149).

Since Regan and Aldo are opposites yet the same, they’re drawn to one another. Both feel misunderstood and in a sense forgotten by the world, and seek the attention and love that they long for in one another. At first, Aldo attempts to bend to Regan’s needs and whims, and to the power of her presence. While Regan makes each space her own, Aldo conforms to what’s expected of him: “She made her surroundings part of her dominion, her atmosphere bending to the strike of her stride. Aldo, on the other hand, was typically subjected to the laws and customs of the room” (118). Being with Regan fills a need in Aldo that he didn’t know he had: a need for excitement, wonder, and a different sort of problem to consider. Regan has challenges that many people shy away from, but to Aldo, it’s just part of his personality to approach difficult problems and not give up: “She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems” (216). Regan’s highs and lows are balanced by Aldo’s even-keeled nature and vice versa, and over time, they begin to better one another. Aldo fully believes in Regan’s potential as an artist, which makes her start to see it in herself. Their love for one another grows stronger even after their breakup, and they come back together with the understanding that even if they turn opposite ways around the hexagonal path of time, they’ll eventually find each other along it again (and again, repeatedly).