Reset

by Sarina Dahlan

  The wind blows. She crosses her arms close to her chest.

  He takes off his coat and gives it to her. “Here.”

  “But you’ll be cold.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She scoots closer to him and drapes his coat over them both. “It feels like it just came out of the dryer.”

  “I run warm. So I’ve been told.”

  She takes in a deep breath and lets it out.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “Not returning your reaches.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It wasn’t you. It’s me.”

  “I know,” he says.

  She can hear a smile in his voice. It makes her feel better. A thought comes to her.

  “So, if you’re not upset with me, can I ask a favor?” she asks.

  “Anything,” he whispers.

  “I need a friend tomorrow.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  She hears water lapping against sand. A salty scent is in the air. Cool wind blows in, fluttering the white curtain. A balmy hand traces the outline of her face. Her neck. The curve of her breast. The hand rests on the valley of her waist. Her skin is on fire.

  “Wake up sleepyhead,” a voice says.

  His strong hand turns her body. She feels the suppleness of his lips on hers. His hand travels to her hair, winding around its strands. She opens her eyes and blinks at the brightness.

  Aris wakes to the sharp feel of the couch digging into her back. She had fallen asleep on it last night. Sweat drips down her temples. She wipes it. The memory of the dream rises. It is replaying in her mind in slow motion. The feel of the heat. The soft touch. The bright light. The sound of the ocean. The dream is becoming too much to bear.

  “Lucy, what time is it?”

  “It is eleven fifty a.m. on Saturday, February fourteenth.”

  Half the day is gone, but she still has a little time left. She turns over, delaying getting up. But she must. Today is the Ceremony of the Dead. She will be there for Benja.

  A dust storm is blowing inside the hole in her chest, covering it with dry sand. Cycle and recycle—the only states as true as time, she reminds herself and gets up. She opens the curtains. The sky is gray. The clouds look like a wool blanket.

  “Lucy, what’s the weather like today?”

  “It is scheduled to snow by nightfall.”

  She stares out into the cityscape of concrete and glass buildings and begins piecing herself together. She is Aris. A citizen of Callisto. A scientist.

  She sniffs herself and decides she needs a shower. How many days has she been without one? She cannot recall. She turns away from the view and walks to the bathroom.

  Once there she strips off her clothes. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. There is a touch of purple on the thin skin below her eyes. The worry line between her brows looks deeper. Her hair is a mess. She looks away and sighs.

  She gets into the shower and pushes a button. Five minutes. A stream of hot water falls on her skin and hair. She lathers herself with soap from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She breaths in the steam and fills her lungs with its warmth.

  The water stops. She gets out, dries herself, and dresses. Black shirt. Black pants. A pair of hiking boots. She pulls a jacket off its hanger and puts it on. She looks like she is ready for one of her hiking expeditions.

  “Your coffee is ready,” Lucy says.

  Aris is thankful for her. She’s the only being in this cycle who is a constant in her life. She wonders if Lucy will be hers again in the next cycle.

  The coffee is bitter. She forces herself to swallow it down. After two more sips she begins to taste its subtle nutty flavor. Once the cup is empty, she feels more like herself.

  A knock on the door. She opens it. Metis stands before her, radiant and handsome. She wants so much to kiss him. If only she were not so sad.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hello.” His smile is as gentle as spring.

  Aris begins to feel like she is going to be fine.

  At the train station to Elara, she waits with Metis and those heading to the ceremony. The platform is filled—unusual except on ceremony days.

  The train arrives and they enter. They go to their seats and settle in. Aris looks around. In the whole train car, there is only one man who looks like an Elaran. He’s sitting by himself at the other end. The residents of Elara are a reclusive bunch. They are craftsmen. They work with their hands, making beautiful things like pottery, jewelry, wood furniture, and musical instruments—anything not made by the machines. She sees them occasionally at the gift market. Maybe they were searching for things that once belonged to them—just like the redheaded woman.

  She roots around in her pocket and pulls out the crisp object. She stares at the blue origami crane in her hand. The thought of parting with one of Benja’s birds makes her feel ill. But she has to say goodbye.

  Benja is the first loss she has known. Or remembers. The pain of missing him feels as if it will never end. She wonders how many people she has lost in the past. She cannot decide whether it is better to remember or to forget.

  “What’s that?” Metis asks.

  “A gift from my friend.”

  “You haven’t said much about him.”

  Aris wonders what she can say about Benja that would do him justice. No matter what she says, she feels she could never fully explain him and the complexity of her feelings for him.

  She tries. “His name was Benja. He was a writer. He was writing a book about a man searching for his way home, but he never finished it. His writing was beautiful. Dreamy. Surreal. Different from the way he talked.”

  “How did he talk?”

  “Straight forward. Laced with sarcasm and wit. He cursed a lot. He felt it added oomph to a sentence.”

  “Sounds like an interesting man.”

  “You have no idea. He was not afraid of anything. He did what he wanted without caring about the consequences. He lived life with no boundaries.”

  “You admire him,” Metis says.

  “He was what I could never be. Brave. Fearless. Honest.”

  “You’re not any of those?”

  She shakes her head and settles into silence. She feels Metis’s hand on hers and lets it stay there. Its warmth travels up her arm and settles in the middle of her chest. With him, words seem not to matter. She feels—no, knows—he understands her even when she says nothing at all.

  Aris leans on his shoulder and stares at the gray subway wall, blurry from her perspective inside the fast-moving train. The gray wall is not moving. It is constant and fixed. It is she who is moving. It is she who is blurry.

  With so little time left, she should not be forging a new connection. It will only make leaving him worse. They will be like Princess Orihime and her lover—only meeting on the seventh night of the seventh moon. Her gut is hollowing. But she does not want to let go.

  An image flashes by. Red. A flower. Her hand twitches, reminding her of a pain so primal and instinctual. She pulls back her hand.

  “It’s everywhere,” she says.

  “What?” His voice is hoarse.

  “The red design. I keep seeing it on the sides of the tunnel.”

  The train stops, and the station looks just like any other—white, clean, with circles on the floor. They get off the train and make their way to the glass elevators. A sea of strangers surrounds them. They float along slowly with its tide.

  She steals a look at Metis. There is a stillness in him that captivates. He has the air of someone used to being solitary. But instead of coldness, she finds warmth.

  His face is more striking than she recalls. His eyes are medium brown—the color of tea—and his skin a pale golden tone. The longer she is with him, the more he
r body wants his. She looks away.

  They step inside a glass elevator. The black pit of darkness is under her feet. She looks up and sees a glowing square above. The outside.

  The elevator shoots up, and the warmth of the late afternoon sun kisses the skin on her face. It’s brighter here than in her city. She squints as her eyes adjust to its glare.

  The modern steel-and-glass train station is separated from the desert outside by expansive windows and a flat roof. The sun beats down through the glass walls, bathing the place in light.

  They follow the throng of people down a sandy path. The afternoon sun casts an orange glow on the landscape. The arid air blows through her hair, carrying with it a scent of dry sage. A gray lizard pokes its head out of a hole. It slips back in as they pass.

  Aris scans the expanse of the barren land. Yellow sand. Bulbous rocks stacked on top of each other like toys for giants. Brittle shrubs that look like they would crumble in her hands. Tall Joshua trees scattered throughout the terrain. The giant forty-foot trees have branches that shoot off like snakes on a Gorgon’s head. It is these trees that set this place apart from the nature preserve she has often visited on the edge of Callisto.

  Aris breathes in the clear, cool air. “I can see myself living here.”

  “Really?”

  “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

  He chuckles. “You just seem like the metropolitan type.”

  “Because I live in Callisto?”

  The Dwelling Council has all the data to determine someone’s preferences. Still, they overlooked the part of her that enjoys the solitude this place offers. She could go for days without seeing another soul if she so chooses. The sky is big here, unlike in her city, where skyscrapers crowd it out.

  “I’ve always thought we’re meant to be where we are,” he says.

  “You mean like predestination?” she says.

  “You don’t think so?”

  A romantic. She misses Benja.

  “I think it’s a result of data analysis, combining my proclivities and preferences with my career choice,” Aris says.

  “But it all started with you. And you were predestined to be who you are.”

  “So I don’t have a choice in this at all?”

  “Not at all,” he says with a smile and takes her hand.

  Their walk ends at a cliff off a mesa. Beyond the edge is a panoramic view of mountains with ridges like the backs of sleeping dragons. The barren land is painted red by the sun.

  “It’s beautiful,” Aris says and immediately feels the words cheapening her experience, so she says nothing else.

  The crowd stands solemnly, shoulder to shoulder, facing the expanse of the desert. A layer of haze moves in, bleaching the valley below pale yellow. Metis is silent.

  He lets go of her hand and passes her a small white box. Then another. And another. She sends them down the line until everyone on her left has one. She keeps one box in her hand. It feels light. All that is left of somebody’s life contained in a tiny carton.

  An amplified voice speaks. It is a poem by Henry Scott Holland—the same poem read at every Ceremony of the Dead.

  “Death is nothing at all . . .”

  Tears run down Aris’s face. She wipes it. She will only remember Benja until the next Tabula Rasa. Then it will be as if they had never met.

  “. . . Life means all that it ever meant . . .”

  She reaches for Metis’s hand. He holds it with the gentleness of someone cradling an injured bird.

  “. . . All is well.”

  The last word hangs in the air. She takes her hand back from Metis, opens her container, and sends the gray dust flying down the cliff into the world below. It joins the cloud of ashes from each of the other’s little boxes.

  The dust dissipates, becoming one with the sky. Aris turns to Metis and sees that he is already looking at her. No words are exchanged between them, but she finds that she understands him too. She reaches up and kisses him.

  The smell of sage permeates the air. They are walking on another sandy path, different from the one they took to the ceremony. Metis is unsure where they are going, but Aris knows.

  The sound of sand and gravel crunches beneath his feet. He kicks a rock and it bounces off the path and into a scraggly bush. Something fast dashes away.

  The rough, scratchy ruckus of bird calls comes from the top of a tree. A curious one swoops in front of them and lands on a yucca on the other side of the trail. It has the striking spots and stripes of a cactus wren. He wonders where its mate is. The cactus wren is a species that forms a permanent pair-bond.

  Down the path, he can see the flat roof of a building. A small sign, “Hotel of the Desert,” points in its direction. The glass structure crouches low on the horizontal line of the land as if apologizing for its existence amid Mother Nature.

  Elara stands apart because it was completed after the Last War. Unlike Callisto, Lysithea, and Europa, this city was built with a lot of respect for the natural habitat of the desert. Buildings were put in with minimal disturbance and intrusion on the landscape. Plants and wildlife here are not genetically modified. Seasons follow their own natural courses. The wind that blows and the sky above are the same he would have experienced had the Last War not happened. It was built as if the Planner regretted humanity.

  The sun hangs near the horizon, painting the sky in stripes of pale yellow, orange, and pink. Another bird flies from the top of a Joshua tree and lands on a leafless bush, shaking it. Metis breaths in the clear, cool air, filling his lungs until it hurts. It is a rare moment for him to be exactly where he wants to be.

  “Will it ever get better?” she asks in a small voice.

  He squeezes her hand, the one he has been holding.

  “Yes. I promise.”

  But in his mind, he is unsure. Where will they go from here?

  Only a month left.

  He pushes the thought away and instead focuses on the woman next to him. He knows little about who she has become this cycle. Is there still a part of her that has the propensity to love who he is?

  Her beauty is just as he remembers. Her skin, warm honey and scented with lavender. Large almond-shaped eyes—brown with an amber center. Her long hair grazes the middle of her back. He yearns for the feel of its silkiness draping his skin. Somewhere in the distance a bird of prey screeches, bringing his attention back.

  “We’re almost there,” she says and points to a spot ahead.

  The gathering place is a large open space near the riverbed. It is under the shade of two old oak trees, the place he had come many times to get fresh water for Absinthe. The giant trees are a wonder among the stubby scrub oaks of the arid desert. Their survival reflects their perfect location near a river where water runs after storms or snowcap melts.

  A crowd has already gathered. Metis looks around and sees faces touched by grief. Everyone here has lost someone who mattered to them. No one speaks, their minds wrapped inside their own sadness.

  He looks over to Aris. She has been quiet. They said little to each other the entire walk here. Her tendency to disappear inside her head is still there. It does not bother him. Instead, he’s glad there is a part of her that has not changed.

  In her hand is the blue origami crane. Metis remembers the day he saw the blue-dyed paper scattered across every surface in Benja’s apartment. It reminded him of his own house before each Release.

  The cranes were his idea. He had read somewhere that blue birds represented happiness across centuries and many cultures in the Old World. To him, they carry a message of hope—for the memory of being loved. He looks over at Aris and wonders how she would feel if she finds out he is—was—the Sandman.

  The sun is slowly sinking to the horizon. Around them darkness begins to descend. There is an orange glow in the distance. Its light brightens as
the sun loses its battle against the night.

  The people around him begin to move toward the glowing blaze like moths. Metis realizes they are in a funeral procession. Aris follows them. So he does too.

  The sky is completely dark now. The blaze ahead is their beacon. Dots of lanterns surround them, guiding them to their destination. The sound of feet shuffling on rough sand fills the air. No one is speaking. It is as if they have come to an agreement that the event is, in its own way, sacred.

  The bonfire looms large. The orange flames lick the pitch-black sky—a gate to the netherworld. Metis feels heat emanating from it, warming one side of him but leaving the other in the cold.

  Layers of loose circles form around the bonfire. He looks around. Everyone is staring into the fire. Their glazed eyes watch as shadows dance on their faces to the beat of silent music. What’s on their minds? Sweet memories? Bitter regrets?

  It is part of the human condition to be remorseful about what we never did. If only we had more time, we tell ourselves. Time to go back and redo some of our actions. Time to enjoy the people we miss. Time to be who we never were.

  He has many regrets. Most he remembers only vaguely. Tabula Rasa took his ability to properly mourn his shortcomings. Or correct them. He wonders what Aris’s regrets are. Maybe her entire past life. Perhaps that is why she has no memory of him.

  They find a spot somewhere in the middle. He glances at her from the corner of his eye. She stares at the flame, entranced like the others.

  Shadows and lights dance on her delicate features. Her hand is playing with a corner of the blue origami bird—her long, slender fingers mesmerizing. They move as if they are trying to communicate, sending words he cannot understand.

  She wraps her arms around her thin frame. Her breath sends white puffs into the crisp night. He pulls her close and kisses the top of her head. It is a gesture he did a hundred times before, but in this moment, he feels as if it were his first.