That’s why.
“‘My favorite sculptor couldn’t possibly rip off another,’ she said.”
“Sorry you had a bad time,” Aris says. “Give the app another chance. It might surprise you.”
After all, that was how she met Benja. Funny, it never matched them up before. Or maybe it did, and they just passed each other by. They get along great—that is, when they see each other. She has not heard from him since she helped him reveal the message on the crane. Maybe she should rethink the app.
“What are you doing tonight?” Thane asks.
She pretends to look at her watch. “Hmm . . . October twentieth. I’m going to Griselda.”
“You’re joking.”
She laughs. “Yeah, I am. I wish it were true though. That would have been hilarious. I’m meeting this guy later. He’s going to show me his sample of trinitite.”
“That’s what I call a hot date. How did he get it?”
“On a trek at the nature preserve near the southern border. He found it while digging a hole to do his business.”
“I read that atomic bomb testing was done in the Mojave Desert in the middle of the twentieth century. People used to sell the trinitite they found at test sites to tourists back then. Imagine that.”
Aris wonders if the world outside is one giant lump of trinitite. What would it have been like to witness the Last War? The Planner had seen it, and it sparked an ideology. It made him create a world where war is a thing of the distant past. Would going through a traumatic event change her?
“And how was your date at the park?” Thane asks.
“What date?”
“The writer?”
“Oh, Benja? That wasn’t a date. He’s a friend.”
“Really? He seemed awfully possessive for just a friend.”
“Nah. That’s just the way he is. He says whatever he wants. Not much of a filter, but I like that about him. You don’t have to wonder if he’s telling you the truth, you know?” She notices Thane studying her and remembers what Benja had said about him liking her. “Anyway, what’s your plan for the rest of the day?”
“Nothing urgent. Do you want to grab a drink before your date?”
“I actually have things to do in the Tomb.”
“That junk closet?”
Strewn around Aris are discarded old machines, left over from the previous cycles, some from even before the creation of the Four Cities. She has been devoting her spare time to fixing and studying them. To her, each is a puzzle and a history lesson.
On the worktable are computers she has arranged by size in a neat line. She runs her fingers over each as she passes. The smaller they are, the more power they hold. It’s a wonder how human minds come together to advance technology, and how helpless humanity has become without it.
Aris’s hand goes instinctively to her watch. Its hardness around her wrist was the first thing she felt after waking up from Tabula Rasa. In it is Lucy, her AI and constant companion. The access point to all her wants and needs. Her umbilical cord to the system.
She stops at the end of the table. Sitting on it is a copper helmet—her latest obsession. She picks it up and feels its substantial weight in her hands. The dull reddish-orange metal is covered in places by a green layer of verdigris. Attached to its top are colorful wires, like a plumed crest on a galea, the helmet Roman soldiers wore.
What it does is a mystery to her. It is the most complicated puzzle she has ever come across. It has been occupying her mind for the last few months.
She puts it on. Its heaviness presses down on the top of her skull. She finds a place on the floor against the wall and leans back. From this angle, she can see the entire room. Shelves line the walls, stacked next to each other like dominos. Each is filled with boxes—some labeled, and some not. Items too large for the shelves sit in crates in one corner of the room. Except for its content, the storage room is unremarkable.
The Tomb. A windowless room where things came to die and be forgotten. The first time she was here, it made her sad. Now she sees it as the best perk of working at the museum. A backstage pass to history. To the memory of time.
Aris closes her eyes. She thinks more clearly behind the darkness of her lids. What is the helmet for? She tells herself she should stop calling it a helmet because it implies its job is to protect.
Copper is a soft, malleable metal. It crushes easily, even with minor force. It is best as a conduit for heat and electricity. The wires on it make her think it transmits information. It reminds her of a neuroimaging machine used to map the structure of the brain. But she has a feeling it is more than that.
Under its surface is a network of complicated circuitry woven together like a spider’s web with material resembling thin golden silk threads. It is far more advanced than any machine she has ever seen in the Tomb. Why would anyone leave it here to fade into anonymity?
She decides to take it home. Thane won’t mind. He couldn’t care less about the past—what the broken things in this room represent. He will never understand her fascination.
An elaborate setup of glass bottles and tubes—a lab-grade distillation kit—sits on a large wooden table by the window. Next to it are scattered remnants of bell-shaped flowers, lemony green in color—hypnos, a hybrid designed for one purpose. They lay crushed and bruised, the oil having been extracted from the ovaries. This is the last batch of Absinthe he will ever make before handing over his responsibility to another and walking away. He watches as drops of liquid pool at the bottom of the receiving flask, his mind on the instructions given to him years ago.
“Once you have the distilled oil, you add it to a bottle of one-hundred-proof alcohol,” the Crone said. “Store the distillate in a dark and warm room to sit for a month.”
He wondered how he would get hold of one-hundred-proof anything.
“Next is a very important process. The preparation of the tincture. You can’t rush this,” she said. “The distillate will be very potent and toxic, so you must make a second batch of one-hundred-proof alcohol mixed with whole hypnos flowers. This batch must steep for a week and must not be distilled. This is what will give Absinthe its green color. To make Absinthe, you mix in equal thirds the distillate, the tincture, and water. Not the water that you drink or bathe with.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“It has a trace of salt. Your water travels from the ocean in pipes before it goes into the desalination plants. There’s a little bit of saline in it, but it’s what you’ve come to associate with the taste of water because you’ve been drinking it your entire life. Pure water doesn’t have any taste.”
“So where do I get the water?” he asked.
“Melted snow from the mountains. In the spring when the snow melts, the water travels into the ravines in the nature preserves.”
“What?” he asked, his voice high.
“All the Sandmen before you had to do this. It’s the only way.”
The first time he went on what he came to call “the water pilgrimage,” he brought a large drum that he carried on his back. He chose the nature preserve in Elara, the quietest and the least populous of the cities, to keep away from prying eyes. Elara is different from the three other cities. It’s raw and natural—the way a California desert is meant to look. He had trekked through rough paths of boulders and scraggly cacti in search of a riverbed and found it near an area where two large oak trees stood.
The last time he was there was in the spring, when an explosion of wildflowers painted the valley in shades of pink and yellow. The next time he sees it—if he ever sees it again—he will not remember having seen it. Next spring will be Tabula Rasa.
The verdant liquid colors his vision, tossing and catching possibilities like balls. The Crone had forbidden him from forcing Absinthe on Aris. The Crone believes in choice and consent, something that was denied her. But why could
he not offer Aris Absinthe as a choice? The temptation—a shortcut, a way to bypass the time required to reacquaint her to him—pulls like a magnet.
You must go to her only as Metis, the Crone’s voice echoes in his ears.
Aris looks at her watch. The pending arrival of the scheduled rain has emptied the pathway to her building of people. Darkness drips down like black ink around her, making her feel apprehensive. She does not like the dark. It’s an irrational fear, she knows. From the corner of her eye, she sees a flash of shadow darker than the surrounding night. It’s probably trees swaying in the wind, she tells herself.
Her footsteps echo against the concrete path. Wind rustles trees and sends chills through the gaps in her coat. She hugs her jacket tight against her body and quickens her steps.
She had spent more time than she wanted with the trinitite man. Aside from having the sample, there was nothing about him that struck her as interesting. She only stayed because of the little piece of earth in his possession.
Holding the trinitite in her hand was at once awe-inspiring and terrifying. It reminded her of fossils but with a glassy sheen. Its surface had a thin sprinkle of fine sand with little bubbles inside. Sandstone, quartz, and feldspar melted together under the extreme heat of the atomic blast. The same blast that pockmarked the face of the world during the Last War.
She can only guess at the temperature that once coursed through its atoms, disfiguring it into its current form. The minimum for sand to form glass is 1,470 degrees Celsius. The passage of time has allowed her to touch it.
Sprinkles of rain land on her cheeks. She wipes them away and looks up at the sky. More drop on her face. She does not remember the last time she felt rain. She stops, mesmerized by the strange, cold wetness on her skin and hair.
Suddenly rain begins to lash down in sheets, drenching her. Her wet clothes stick to her body, replacing heat with a veil of ice. Her muscles contract and her teeth begin to chatter. She looks for the lights of her building and runs toward it.
She hears footsteps apart from her own. Or is it the clapping of branches on trees? The thought of company should make her feel safer, but it does not. It is almost an instinct—the distrust of another human in the cloak of night. She speeds up. The whipping wind and rain make it hard for her to see where she is going. She only knows she is going forward.
Her body hits against something firm. She bounces off, losing her balance. She’s falling backward. The sound of her scream is lost in the howling wind. Vice-like hands grab hold of her upper arms. They yank her forward, smothering her against a wall of warmth. She struggles to release herself.
“Let go!” she yells.
She feels the heat lifting off her. Cold air floods in. One of the hands is still on her arm, sending warmth through the jacket to her skin. She wipes the rain off her face, sees his, and remembers. She steps away from him, freeing herself from his grip.
“Are you hurt?” he asks, his hand reaching forward toward her face.
“You’re Metis.” As soon as the words leave her, she realizes they were an inappropriate response to his question.
His hand drops. She sees something flash in his eyes. Is it pain? Did she run into him that hard? In an instant, it is gone.
He clears his throat. “I am. Wish we’d met under better circumstances.”
He squints at the sky and wipes his face. When he looks back at her, he stares with an intensity that leaves her feeling invaded. She wraps her arms around her soaked body. The shame she felt at his concert resurfaces. She should leave before he remembers her as the girl who interrupted his performance.
“I should go,” she says quickly.
“Let me walk you.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I’m not that far away. Thank you though.”
He is rooted in spot, making no move to let her through. The expression on his face makes her feel uneasy, the same way she feels when looking over the railing to the street forty stories below. She walks around him. As she does, her side grazes his. She feels heat emanating from his body. Once a safe distance away, she takes off running without looking back.
Metis watches Aris over his shoulder until she enters her building. It took him too long to find her—the woman whose face has been haunting his dreams.
He began his search for her soon after the concert. He combed through the list of those who had purchased the tickets for his show and found her name among twenty others who sat in her row. He looked for addresses to go with the names and scouted each. Hers was in the middle of the list.
He did not approach her right away. Instead, he watched and waited. For someone who prefers to think of himself as brave, he feels like a coward. Time is ticking toward Tabula Rasa, and yet he is paralyzed by fear.
He was afraid she would only see him as a stranger. And he was right to be. The only recognition on her face when she saw him tonight was from this cycle—of Metis, the pianist.
He thought he had prepared himself for the pain of being forgotten by someone he loves. But it struck him like a branding iron, sending him down a spiral of doubt. She shrugged him off as she would any random person she met on the street. The Crone was right.
What if she is not the same woman from his dreams? She looks like her. She sounds like her. Her tiny frame fits into his embrace just as before. But are those qualities enough to make her the same person?
He continues walking toward the subway. It seems his life this cycle has been spent in train stations. Always coming or going. Never settled. He longs for the past. Of nights spent in the cocoon of his bed, in the arms of his lover.
He stops and turns around. Up in the clouds is a lighted window—the one he knows belongs to her. Is she sleeping in the arms of a lover tonight? He has seen her with a man and witnessed their closeness. Is she making new memories, slowly replacing the ones with him? Perhaps there are no memories of him inside her—not even in the deepest part of her brain. Maybe Tabula Rasa got them all.
He gazes at the silver bands on his fingers—reminders of a promise. He found them in the seat cushion of his favorite chair and instinctively knew what they were. They feel constricting. The burden of their pasts rests on him. They had made that decision together, and he would honor it. He takes another long look at the window and turns away.
Aris stares at the stream of hot water pouring from the faucet into the tub. She lets it carry her mind along its continuous flow like a raft on a river. The sound muffles all the other noise in her head. The steam rises, painting the air with thick, white fog. She pours lavender oil into the bath. Its sweet, herbal scent has an immediate tranquilizing effect.
She eases her freezing body into the filled tub. The heat wraps around her skin, seeping into her pores and unfurling her like a new leaf. She scoops a handful and washes her face. The saltiness stings her lips. The one bath a week they are allotted uses unfiltered water from the sea. Less wasteful. At least it’s warm.
Metis enters a gap in her mind. What was he doing here? Entertainers of his caliber usually live in Lysithea, a city on a hill. What was he doing in her city after dark in the rain when he should be hunkered down like everyone else in the warmth of his home?
Maybe he’s seeing someone here.
She wonders what type of person the pianist would be attracted to enough for him to brave the weather to see. She had once dated a musician, a jazz guitarist whose name she does not remember.
Aris sinks farther into the tub, leaving only her head above water. The silence of the bath reminds her that she has not listened to Luce since the concert. The humiliation she experienced there had left a bitter taste in her mouth. Each time the memory of it threatened to invade her mind, she swatted it away like a fly. But she misses the song.
“Lucy.”
“Yes?”
“Can you please play Luce?”
“Of course.”
&nb
sp; The tinkling of piano music fills the bathroom. She closes her eyes. In darkness, her awareness becomes acute. The soft wave of warm water undulates across her skin, caressing it like a lover, sucking her life force and turning her fingers to prunes.
Does this song affect other people the same way it does her? It is a question that can never be answered. An experience is subjective.
But is it? An experience is only perceived to be subjective to the person who experiences it subjectively. How would one know another is feeling the exact same thing in the exact same moment?
What if her consciousness is not even her own? Could there be a collective consciousness that is borrowed as opposed to owned? What if, at a quantum level, consciousness is suspended inside spheres like molecules—like the air that one breathes? She imagines herself a bee collecting consciousness like pollen on flowers.
Maybe that is why the longer you know someone, the more their mind becomes familiar to you. It could explain how sometimes people who have never met come up with the same ideas. Or how some people can predict the future actions of another—like knowing someone would contact you before they do. Or feeling the death of a loved one miles away as it unfolds without knowing.
Shared consciousness. Perhaps people are not so different from each other after all. Perhaps uniqueness is but an illusion masked by perceived subjectivity. Perhaps the thing that inspired Metis to create a song so heartrending and beautiful is the same one that has inspired many others throughout time.
His face comes to her. Up close, it has the stillness and refined quality of a marble statue. It is thin with cheekbones that roll down like hills and a straight nose like the ridge of a mountain. He reminds her of the desert. Alluring and desolate.
His eyes unsettled her. She remembers wanting to and at the same time not wanting to look into the black pools. No. A voice inside warned her of danger. Like the desert, she could get lost in them.
Sadness dribbles down like drifts of snow. She shivers despite the warm bath. The hole in her chest cavity gapes open. The emptiness. Will it trail her for the rest of her life?
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