“But maybe something else,” Malik continued. “You’re doing so much for me. I want to repay you, if I can.”
I dropped the apple core on the grass beside me and nudged some dirt over it with my boot. “Actually, there’s one thing,” I said. It was a small thing, a little silly. I had meant to do it alone the day before, but my nerve had failed. I want someone to be with me all the time now, I’ve realized. Everything had seemed so clear at first, that I was me and understood the world, but after what happened in the sanctuary’s visitation room, I don’t trust myself anymore. I want another human to explain the new things, to reassure me I’m right about the old ones—or even to just prove to me by their presence that I really do exist.
I wanted someone to be there for this, too. Someone who could tell me if I was doing it correctly, reassure me that what I can recall myself knowing how to do is real. Someone who is not you. Because even though you’re always the person I think of automatically in every situation, I’m not the one who you do.
“Anything,” Malik said.
I smiled. “Could you show me how to read a map? I want to make sure I really do remember how, before tomorrow.”
IT’S STRANGE NOT TO HAVE THE RECORDER ANYMORE.
I let you keep it, even though there’s nothing left on the empty, shadowless tapes. What remains of the little machine is yours. It was the least I could give you, Ory. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for you to sit across a table from a person who accompanied your wife on a journey for the last few months of her life and not be able to ask that woman a single question about what she was like toward the end, or how it finally happened, because she thought she was her.
You did tell me how you had known my name, though. Once the screaming had stopped.
Your hair has grown out was the first thing you’d said.
You said that when you first met me in Arlington, Virginia—when I was Ursula, not Max—it was short. Buzzed almost to the skull. Over the journey it must have grown longer and longer, and I had either not cared or not had time to cut it, and then forgot entirely. By the time I showed up in New Orleans, it was probably a soft downy mess, almost to my chin. Just different enough that Gajarajan might not have realized as he listened to Max’s garbled, faded audio logs that I was the woman with a shaved head who appeared in almost all of the entries—not the woman speaking.
The shadow had flickered then, on the wall beside us. He said he hadn’t realized I was not Max, but also confessed something else—that even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. He would have tried to give me her shadow anyway.
That was the end of the meeting. I didn’t see you again for days. And even then when I did, from across Carondelet Street just as dusk was falling, we didn’t speak. We didn’t speak for a long time.
AFTER GAJARAJAN LET ME LEAVE, I WENT AWAY FROM THE sanctuary, straight into the city. I got as lost as I could. I wanted to be far away from you and him. Somehow Davidia found me, and convinced me to let her get me a room to live in, and assign a shadowed survivor who could watch over me until I understood how life outside the second great hall worked. I didn’t want Gajarajan’s help, but I knew what he’d told the captain to do was right. I didn’t even know where to find food. I let her enlist a neighbor or two to help so it didn’t have to be the elephant, flashing up onto walls beside me to check in, reminding me what he’d done.
Weeks passed. I was free but purposeless. I had no job, knew no one, understood nothing about this new place. I spent every other afternoon in the neighborhood just beneath Gajarajan’s hill, among the half-finished houses that the retired soldiers from your army were busy renovating. We were always needing more and more room, they said.
It was clear that you still didn’t want to speak to me. I respected that. I understood, as painful and lonely as it was. I would never corner you on the street and beg to finish whatever we’d started in the visitor’s room of the sanctuary. But I also couldn’t just leave it completely. Each time I went to that neighborhood facing the bottom of Gajarajan’s hill, I waited behind the houses and watched. All I wanted was just to see you again.
I finally did. And I also saw someone else. A woman with golden skin and long black hair—standing in the middle of the road, as if also waiting for you to come down from Gajarajan’s altar. You’d been having so many meetings with him lately. About me? About something else? I didn’t know. You and she both stiffened when your eyes met, and I saw your body slow, but you continued to walk until you were just in front of her. You spoke in a way that was both fierce and gentle. You didn’t touch her or smile. But there was a familiarity there, in the way you mirrored each other, one shifting closer by just microns when the other exhaled, then repeating in the other direction. Like magnets—constant.
That must be Ahmadi, I realized.