by Lucia Ashta
So I waited, like the mad person the storm chasers were probably even then suggesting I was, talking amongst one another about the crazy “smoking hot girl,” with inscrutable motivations, that had continued up the trail (I’d walked in on them discussing me once before, so imagining their conversations didn’t require much effort.) I tipped my head against the rain that had picked up again and stared into the water’s tumultuous surface. Droplets dripped from my lashes, nose, and chin. The lake was no longer virginal, if it had been. The rainwater ran over me before depositing in the lake.
I wasn’t a believer in any of the unseen factors religious devotees’ claimed to exist and manipulate the course of our lives as certainly as a puppeteer that one could flick in the face. I still didn’t believe what they preached—A god that causes the suffering of its peons, only to care deeply about them later? Really? But I couldn’t make the same claims I had many times before and say there was no chance that they could be right. If what happened next taught me anything, it was that nothing was impossible.
As soon as the first of the droplets from my face fell to the lake, where I saw them break against its surface as if I were following a play in slow motion, the rains ceased. The wind calmed, and the clouds parted seconds later. Thunder quieted mid-rumble. Lightning that was meant to be never was.
The lake’s surface took the longest to still, but mini-waves eventually ceased completely. In an improbably short amount of time, the lake reflected the heavens as clearly as any looking glass, as perfectly as my eyes. I found my face there too, in the reflection. It was exactly as I remembered it, with those eyes that mirrored the heavens, and that my parents didn’t know what to make of. I wore contact lenses to conceal their irregularity. I had since I was a young child, since my parents found this solution to shield me from the curious stares and whispers.
Yet the water reflected what my eyes really looked like, beneath the contact lenses, not the cloudy blue with which I tried to fool others. Even though my irises would never look like everyone else’s, not even with the contact lenses that attempted to bring uniformity but only masked the array of colors that lay beneath them, no one other than my parents had ever learned that I was an inexplicable human. Most importantly, the zealous scientists, covert government agencies, and dangerous elite of the world didn’t know it.
But the water did. This lake up at the summit of a mountain renowned only for its ability to draw electric storms to its peak saw through my disguise. The mirror reflected everything about me and around me precisely, as it truly was.
The water knew what I didn’t. I wasn’t who I thought I was. I wasn’t even who I thought I wasn’t. I was someone I’d never even contemplated being. No wonder I’d always felt different, as if I didn’t fit in. In truth, I didn’t belong here. Not just in this general area. Not in this rural zone, or even, perhaps, on this mountain.
I didn’t belong on this planet. And I didn’t have to guess it. A face and a voice I felt as if I should recognize told me so.
FOUR
TANUS WAS HIS NAME, and he appeared incredulous that he should have to tell me it. It was time for him to bring me home, he said. I didn’t know where “home” might be, all I knew was that this, this land that I was laying on, had never felt like it. So I said “all right” to the man that appeared beside my face, on the surface of the lake, as if he were inside it, emerging from its depths.
“I’ll come get you as soon as I can,” the man named Tanus told me.
“Okay,” I said, bemused to be having a conversation with a specter in a lake, wondering if he could actually take me anywhere. Figments of the imagination weren’t corporeal, nor were phantasms. I couldn’t imagine that this image of a man within the water was anything other than these two things. So I indulged him, or myself, I wasn’t sure which. “Why not take me now?” I asked, surprise arriving as an afterthought that I should flirt with something so beyond my understanding that I could have chosen to fear it instead.
But then, nothing made sense, and nothing felt exactly right. I was desperate to discover precisely who I was and what I was meant to do with this lifetime. It was in this moment that I discovered that I had astonishingly little to lose. I gave myself completely to the power of change, with too little thought to defining the conditions and disclaimers in the otherwise mindless fine print of any choice.
“I can’t bring you back just yet.” Tanus’ words echoed through my mind. “I’ve been looking for you for years. Now that I finally know where you are, it should only be a few more days. I’m going to bring you back through my father’s facility, just as when you left O.”
“Sure. All right.” I was beginning to have fun with it. This couldn’t possibly be real. The storm remained eerily still, a voyeur of the insanity that rose from the water’s bottom to claim me.
“Once I’m ready, I’ll contact you again in this same way. So listen for me,” Tanus said.
“Do I need to return to this same spot?” I was crazy enough to do it if I had to, though a part of me already knew that even I, as reckless as others considered me, might not come back if he asked it. Time and reflection had a way of highlighting the dangerous and irrational.
Tanus shrugged. The movement of his shoulders didn’t cause so much as a ripple to disturb the clear water. “I don’t see why you would have to. You’ve always been able to hear me, no matter where you were or what you were doing.” He paused. “Has anything changed since you’ve been there?” There was apprehension in his voice, a tinge of worry that he held back, but I sensed just the same. “Have you been well?”
I didn’t know quite how to answer that. I chose the rote and the safe to navigate the bizarre and unreachable. “I’ve been well enough, thank you.” I hesitated. “And you?”
Tanus huffed and shook his head. I thought it might be incredulity that undulated across waves of brown hair. “How do you think I’ve been, for fuck’s sake? I’ve been nearly out of my mind worried for you, searching for you. You didn’t think I’d give up on you that easily, did you, Ilara?”
“No, I didn’t.” Somehow, it seemed like the right thing to say. I was glad that he hadn’t given up on me, even if I didn’t know who he was.
His voice softened to a whisper, yet it still reached me as crisply as anything else he said. “I’ve missed you.” Every one of those words was pregnant with truth, vibrating with emotion.
I felt a lump in my throat and heard myself saying, “I’ve missed you too, Tanus.” I spoke words I wanted to speak without understanding why I wanted to speak them. Were they lies if I felt them as truth? Should I have held back instincts just because they lacked sense, even when I knew they held meaning? Could I have?
“I love you,” he said and waited. I knew somewhere, sometime, I’d spoken those words to him also, even if it had only been in a dream. But I couldn’t bring myself to say them now. They weren’t words that came easily to me. I understood passion and the merging of bodies. But love? Love was a different beast, one that could kill you, or make you wish it had. Love was dangerous in a way that sex wasn’t.
“Ilara?” came the voice again. “Are you all right? You seem different. Has anything happened to you since you’ve been gone?”
The questions that arose in my mind to join his seemed pointless when I comprehended nothing of what he said: Gone from where? And for how long? What had happened to me? If I’d lost my mind, would I ever find it again?
“Ilara,” he said, bringing me back to him. I stared into his reflection, into bright green eyes that were inexplicably familiar. I didn’t say a word as he reached an arm out to me. He didn’t say anything else as his eyes implored me to return a touch that wasn’t of the skin—that couldn’t be of the skin.
In the water’s reflection, I watched myself release the stone rim of the crater and extend a hand toward his. He stretched his arm further toward me. I allowed my fingers to skim the water; what was so still as to be a looking glass rippled, defying the feeling that this was real, b
etraying the sensation for the illusion that it was.
“I can’t wait to touch your skin,” he said, and the yearning came to life in his eyes.
He reached for me, and I reached back. My hand dipped in the water. The water was crisp, and its cold, shocking. My hand pierced Tanus’ body. Still, he didn’t vanish, even as I definitively shattered the fantasy of him.
“I wish I could touch you,” I said, knowing that it was true. Never had I desired to touch a man as much as I did in that moment.
Tanus pulled his arm back and swung it toward me, as if he were about to fall from a precipice into a fathomless depth, and this was his last chance to hold on. He brought his arm back around with determination and curled his fingers over my wrist.
When he pulled on my arm, I felt it. Not like I felt everything else I had since I reached the peak of this mountain in the middle of nowhere in an electric storm. I really felt this.
My eyes widened, but not as wide as his.
He tugged. I tried to pull my hand from his, but he wouldn’t let go. With my other hand, I fumbled to grab onto anything that would stop my fall. There was nothing but slick rock, and I slid head first into the freezing water.
The cold shocked the breath from my lungs. It and the water were heavy weights that pressed against my chest, and I fought to come up for air. I kicked and struggled upward. But there was nothing to kick against. There was nothing to fight but a tumbling and disorienting sensation that left me questioning which was up and which was down, and what had happened to the cold water. All I could see were blurred lights and colors not of this world.
FIVE
THE SWIRLING of lights and the washing machine-like tumble ended abruptly, when whatever it was that had grabbed hold of me spit me out. I landed with a hard thud that knocked the air out of lungs that had only just been able to take their first desperate breath since that man—or whatever he was—dragged me into the water.
I rose from the asymmetrical arrangement of my body—too much of my weight fell on one elbow and pulled at my shoulder; my knees were spread too wide, tugging at my hip joints. I settled onto my hands and knees where I opened and closed my eyes repeatedly, ignoring everything they registered, trying only to still the movement within my head that hadn’t stopped just because my body had. No one way was better than the other. I couldn’t halt the swirling with my eyes opened or closed. In the end, I closed them. I couldn’t take on anything else, and this way I could shut out the blur of colors and shapes that suggested that the surface I’d landed on was actually a man that looked far too much like the specter in the lake.
Where was the lake, anyway? And the mountain and the rain and the wind? The thunder and lightning? Where had they all gone, those things that were so overwhelming as to force men to flee their fury? Water dripped from my downturned forehead, nose, chin, hair, and jacket hood. At least here was proof that I wasn’t crazy. I was wet as I should be if I’d just plunked into a lake. But the surface I knelt on now was dry, and I knew it without opening my eyes to confirm it. I shifted my hands from side to side. It felt like stone tile, perhaps slate.
I focused on the slow drip drip drip of droplets of water as they slid down my face before breaking free. I felt the splash of each drop as it broke against the stone even though I didn’t see it. I remained that way, my back heavy like a cow’s, until my knees began to ache against the hard floor. Until my breathing regulated and my lungs released the sudden fear of being surrounded on all sides by water before hurtling through space like a tumbleweed, abandoned to a desolate fate.
When the time arrived that I had to move, when my body ached from the not doing of it, I opened my eyes. Slowly. At first, I allowed my gaze only to look down. I was indeed on stone flooring much like slate. I could see ornately woven rugs in my periphery vision. Reds, oranges, ochres, understated colors of elegance. I’d left a puddle beneath me, in the gap between rugs.
I registered what had probably been there all along behind the ringing in my ears, waiting for me to land upon it: the heavy, startled breathing of another person. I didn’t really want to do it, but clearly I had to. I inched my head upward. So slowly that if I needed to deny what I saw there was still a chance of doing so.
First were the boots that edged away from my scrutiny but remained within sight. They were well worn and looked light as nothing. Then came the pants—or were they tights? Tensed muscles bulged beneath them. A tunic covered the groin area. Stomach. Arms. Shoulders. A part of me wanted to stop before I saw what I already suspected was coming. But my head continued its upward trajectory despite my fears.
An uncovered neck, tendons protruding at its sides. A strong jaw. Healthy red lips.
I paused before continuing. A long, deep breath to settle nerves that wouldn’t keep still, like animated, jumping jellybeans.
“Ilara.” He said my name with an incredulity that would soon match my own. “How can it be?” he whispered.
Then I raised my head all the way up to meet the same bright green eyes I’d already seen reflected in the lake. I stared straight into the face of an impossibility.
SIX
THE TENSION of imminent danger had passed, though it hadn’t transitioned into understanding. Still, I lay nearly useless, a limp form of a human being, sprawled across a settee. It had been ages since I’d lain awake but without moving for so long.
Tanus, the man I sensed I knew even though I didn’t, sat in the seat across from me. He’d tried to sit next to me, but I lifted a limp arm to point to the empty chair. Now he leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers unable to remain still, coming and going from a steeple. All the energy I lacked he seemed to possess. I was a puddle and he was the man ready to jump over it.
“I don’t understand how it’s possible, Ilara. But clearly it is. To think we had no idea we could transport this way, across planets!”
I didn’t say anything. Instead, I looked out of the large glass window to my right, the one that I could see through without even turning my head. The sky was yellow, and the sun a dark shade of orange. I’d never seen the sky or sun possess these shades before.
“I thought that all I was going to do was talk with you, if I was lucky. If you could hear me reaching out to you from Origins, so far away from Planet Sand. Never did I imagine that I’d be able to bring you back with me.” This handsome stranger, that I sensed wasn’t a stranger at all, laughed a warm laugh that wanted to fill me. “I can’t believe it was this easy. Now I don’t have to break into my father’s splicing lab again. I won’t have to deal with your father much either. He won’t be able to manipulate me as much as he has been, now that you’re here.”
Another laugh. “I can’t wait to tell Dolpheus about it. He’ll be shocked.” A shadow swept across his face but left quickly, the cloud that shaded the mountain drifting along in a stiff breeze.
He inched to the very edge of his seat. “Can I touch you now, Ilara? Are you feeling well enough? I’ve been aching to touch you for so long. To kiss you, to hold you.” Something came alive in his eyes then that I was all too familiar with: desire, passion, arousal.
I didn’t know what to think. I was all out of theories. I had no idea what had transpired. I would need to get some answers, even if I didn’t feel like asking the questions, knowing I wouldn’t be able to forget his answers once I heard them. I ignored what he’d said to ask, “Where am I?”
He seemed surprised by my question. “In my quarters, of course, where you’ve been at least a thousand times.”
When I didn’t react, he continued, “On Planet Origins.”
“And where was I?”
“On Planet Sand.” He paused and rolled deliberation around on his tongue. “Don’t you remember it? The transfer off planet?”
“No.” Of course I didn’t remember it. Off-planet transfer? That wasn’t possible. Only astronauts went off planet, and they did so in space suits and space shuttles, with fancy machinery that maintained pressure and air quality and ot
her stuff I had no idea about.
“Do you remember arriving at the palace after spending the night with me and finding out that assassins had broken through the palace’s security?”
As if in a dream, I shook my head. Wet strands of hair, clumped together, slid and fell across my forehead. I hadn’t even taken off my rain slicker, unwilling to bare anything more of myself in this strange place.
“Do you not remember about your mother then?”
Another shake. Another memory I thought might be mine, yet wasn’t.
A darkness like a storm descended upon the pleasant features I stared at. “Ilara, do you remember… me?”
My breath caught in my chest at the pain already spreading across his face, like butter on hot-from-the-oven bread. “I’m sorry, but no.”
The hurt in his eyes was so terrible that I scrambled to fix it, even though I’d spoken truth. “I mean, I feel as if I should, as if I know you. But in the end, I don’t. I didn’t know your name before you told me it. Once you said it, I felt like I’d known it all along. But I couldn’t have told you it on my own.”
He attempted to shield his pain from me. He turned his eyes anywhere but on mine. He fidgeted worse than before until he finally stood and moved to pace, as far away from me as he could without leaving the room.
I watched him in silence. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t remember him, so I shouldn’t feel guilty for being the cause of his suffering. Yet I did, and I struggled with it. I didn’t think I should feel the way I was feeling.
Eventually, he settled in front of the window, his back to me. I studied him while he stared at the landscape. His shoulders were more relaxed, sad, perhaps defeated, perhaps something else.
“Tanus?” I used his name because I didn’t want to lose the familiarity he expressed toward me, even if I didn’t understand why. “This is real? Not some bad idea of a joke?”
“It does seem like a cruel joke. I searched for you for so long. When I finally find you and bring you back, you don’t even remember me.” His breath fogged the window in front of him, but he didn’t move.