Isolde was shaking, a subtle, repressed tremor that Claire only noticed by looking at the tongs in her hand.
“I know, I know. I’m only saying . . . I mean, how can you resist? How can you stop thinking about it? About us. About . . .” Her voice dropped. “About love.”
Claire turned from the window, saying nothing, but the mood of the view filled her eyes, the gray mountains falling away into whiteness, the cold precipitation of a million aimless specks.
“I just like to imagine,” Isolde whispered. “That’s all. I like to imagine it could be different.”
A clock stood on the bedside table, scuffed wood and spotted brass, a heavy relic of interwar craftsmanship. Isolde snatched it up with a gasp.
“What’s the matter?” Claire said.
“I just realized.”
“What? What did you just realize?” In Claire’s tone was an implied criticism. What can there possibly be, she wanted to ask, for us to realize? What can we discover that we don’t already know?
Isolde touched the clock face. “We’re in a time-shifted universe. The midnight chime comes earlier here. At sunset.”
They looked together at the window, where the sky had darkened to charcoal gray.
“We never said it,” Isolde whispered. “We forgot to say it, this time.” She lay beside Claire, a hand on her belly, saying in a shaking voice, “I want to see you again.”
The clock ticked. Snow tapped the window.
“I want to see you again,” Isolde repeated. “Claire? I want to see you again.”
The clock hands had made a line, pointing in opposite directions. How precise, Claire wondered, would the time shift be? Sometimes these things could be surprisingly inexact. Sometimes, even the designers made mistakes.
“Claire, please say it. I’m sorry I said all those things. We’re not really a match. I was only speculating. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Does anything matter? We don’t have to talk. We can go back to how it was. We can hang out, play games, have fun.”
In only a moment, a new evening would begin: new faces, new men and women, new possibilities. A whole new universe of beautiful people, like angels falling out of the sky.
“Claire, please say it. I want to see you again.”
“Maybe you will,” Claire said.
And at that moment, the chime sounded, tinkling and omnipresent, shivering three times across the mountain sky. And Isolde and her voice and her tears disappeared.
3
A dry period, then.
Dry? No, that word couldn’t begin to describe this life. It was desert, desolate, arid, barren, with a harsh wind that cut across the eyes, with sharp-edged stones that stung the feet.
Claire became one of those people. She was the woman who haunts the edges of dance floors, rebuffing with silence anyone who dares to approach. At house parties, she wandered out for impromptu walks, seeking the hyperbolic darkness between streetlights, the lonely shadows below leylandii. At dinner parties, she made jokes intended to kill conversation.
“Knock, knock,” Claire said, when young men leaned toward her.
“Who’s there?”
“Claire.”
“Claire who?”
“Exactly.”
“Here’s a good one,” Claire said, to a woman who approached one night on a balcony, the champagne sparkles of a European city bubbling under their feet. “A woman walks into a bar full of beautiful people.”
When the silence became uncomfortable, the woman prompted: “And?”
“And,” said Claire turning away, “who cares?”
She was bitter. But she didn’t care about her bitterness. Like all things, Claire assumed, this too would pass.
On an Amazonian cruise, Claire hit her low point. It was, most surely, a romantic night. Big insects sizzled against the lamps that swung, dusky gold, from the cabin house. The river gathered white ruffles along the hull. A banquet was laid out on deck, river fish on clay platters borne by shirtless deckhands. The dinner guests lounged in a crowd of cane chairs. When Claire came up from below, she found the party talking, as always, about the food.
“I’ve been here a hundred times.” The woman who spoke was white, brunette, beautiful. “I think I’m something of an expert on this universe. And what I always admire is the attention to local cuisine. Everything comes straight from the river. It’s so authentic.”
Claire, who’d entered unnoticed, startled them all with a loud, braying laugh.
“Excuse me?” said the woman. “What do you find so funny?”
The group stared, pushing back their chairs, eyes kindled with reflected lantern light.
“This,” Claire said, and snatched a clay platter out of the hands of the serving men. “I find this funny.” She dumped the fish on the floor, jammed the platter into her mouth. They all winced as her teeth clamped down, grinding on textured ceramic. “Mm, so authentic.”
“What in the world,” said the woman, “is the matter with you?”
“Nothing. I’m simply trying to eat this platter.”
“But why? ”
“Because why shouldn’t I?” Claire smashed the platter on the deck. “Why shouldn’t I be able to? What difference does it make? Why shouldn’t anything—any of this—be food?” She stomped around the deck, offering to take bites of the rails, the lamps, the life preservers. “Why shouldn’t I be able to perform the trick with anything I want? Why shouldn’t I be able to pick you up and send you into the ether with just a touch of my tongue?”
She grabbed at the arm of a nearby man, who pushed his chair back, winking. “Please do.”
Claire threw his hand down in disgust. “I should be able to pick up anything I see, and touch it to my lips, and make it disappear. And why can’t I? It works with fish. It works with fruit. It works with soup and fried shrimp and wedding cakes.”
Expecting protest, mockery, a violent reaction, she faced with dismay the rows of indifferent, idle faces.
“God, I’m so sick of this life,” Claire finished weakly. “I’m sick of always talking about things I can never have.”
“But are you sick of me?”
Claire turned and Byron was standing behind her, leaning on the rail beside the deckhouse, a beer bottle dangling from his hand.
“You?” Claire was stunned. She could hardly believe she recognized him, but she did.
Byron strolled forward and touched her hand. “You never said it.”
“Sorry?”
“Eight hundred and ninety-two nights ago. New Orleans. I said I wanted to see you again. You never answered.”
“I meant to.” Claire struggled for breath, aware of the watching crowd. “I wanted to. I ran out of time.”
He flung his beer bottle overboard. She waited without breathing for it to plunk in the distant water.
“We have time now,” he said.
Dismissing the party with a wave, Byron guided Claire into a lifeboat. With a push of a lever, a creak of pulleys, he lowered them to the water and cut the rope. They drifted loose in darkness, a lantern at their feet. The big boat moved away on a thump of diesel, the strings of lamps and the hundred candles merging into one gold blur. Byron set the oars in the locks, rowing with a grace that seemed derived from real strength: strength of body, of muscle and sinew, strength that belonged to the kinds of people they had both once been.
“Do you know why we can’t eat food?” Byron spoke at his ease, fitting sentences between the creak of the oarlocks. “Do you know why we have no taste, no smell, no digestion? Do you know why we can never eat, and only make food vanish by touching it to our lips?”
His voice sounded elemental, coming out of the darkness: the voice of the river, the jungle, the night.
“Appetite,” Byron said. “We were made without appetite. We were made to want only one thing. True love.”
He let the oars rest. They rocked on the water. The riverboat was gone now, its voices and music lost in buggy stridor.
“I don’t believe that.” Claire let her hand trail in the water, wondering if piranhas and snakes stocked the river, if the authenticity of the environment extended that far. “I don’t believe any of this was planned. Not to that extent. I think it’s all nothing more than a sick, elaborate accident.”
He considered her words, the oars resting, crossed, in his lap. “You must believe that some of this was designed. You must remember designing it. Or designing yourself, I mean: what you look like, how you think. I’ve forgotten quite a bit, but I do remember that.”
A fish nibbled Claire’s finger. She lifted her hand, shook off the drops.
“I don’t mean the world itself,” Claire said. “I mean about what’s happened to us. The way we live. Something’s gone wrong. I don’t think it was intentional.”
Byron nodded. “Apocalypse.”
“Plague. Asteroids. Nuclear holocaust.”
“Economic collapse. Political unrest.” He joined in her joking tone. “Or only a poorly managed bankruptcy. And somewhere out in the Nevada desert, sealed away in a solar-powered server farm, a rack of computers sits, grinding away at a futile simulation, on and on through the lonely centuries.”
She waved away his glib improvisation, accidentally spraying his face with drops.
“I don’t think that’s what happened. Do you know what I think? I think we’ve simply been forgotten.”
He smiled, nodding in time with the rocking boat.
“That’s all,” Claire said. “They made us, they used us for a while, they lost interest. They kept their accounts, or their subscriptions, or whatever, but they stopped paying attention. They don’t care if we find love. They don’t care about anything we do.”
“And yet.” Byron resumed rowing. “If they knew . . .”
“What?” Claire was irritated at the portentous way he trailed off. “If they knew what?”
He glanced behind him, checking their direction. “Oh, you know. If they knew how wonderfully independent we’ve become. How clever and shy. How suave in the art of romance. How proficient at avoiding any kind of commitment.”
“In other words,” said Claire, “just like them.”
Byron rested a moment, the oars under his chin. “Meet with me again. Say the words.”
Claire looked away from him, down into the water, the black oblivion sliding by. “This can’t go anywhere. You know it can’t. It can’t become anything. We can’t become anything.”
“I don’t care. Say the words.”
“It can never be more than a casual thing.”
“All well and good. Say the words.”
“It can only make us unhappy. We can only go so far. We’ll reach a certain point, and we’ll realize we’re done. Finished. Forever incomplete. It will be like picking up a delicious piece of food and seeing it vanish on our tongues.”
“Brilliant analogy. Say the words.”
“I want to see you,” Claire said, tears in her eyes. “I want to see you, again and again.”
(And wondering, even while she said this, and not for the first time, why the people who built this terrible world had left so much out, had omitted taste, had excised smell, had eliminated pleas-ure, drunkenness, pain, death, injury, age, and appetite, but had left in these two strange and unpleasant details, had endowed every person with sweat and tears.)
We’re not like them, Claire thought, as Byron, letting the oars ride idle, leaned across the boat. We look like them—we have their habits, their interests, their hopes, even some of their memories. We think and feel like them, whether they know it or not. We can even, in some ways, make love like them. But we’re not like them, not really, and it all comes down to this: whatever we desire, whatever we do, we’ll never know the difference between a drink and a kiss.
When Byron’s lips met hers, a precise and dry contact, it surprised Claire, momentarily, that neither of them disappeared.
4
How many times did they meet? Claire didn’t bother to count. They saw each other in hunting lodges, English gardens, an undersea city, the surface of Mars, the gondola of a transatlantic blimp. To Claire, all locations were frames for Byron’s figure. More than his body, more than the frankness of his smile, she began to love the touch of his hand, the way it overlaid hers on the rails of ocean liners, felt for hers, casually, in the press of theater lobbies. He was a man who coveted contact: half-conscious, constant. She loved his need to know she was there.
And still, he was something much stranger than a lover. In this world, there was one sure pleasure, and this was the pleasure Byron offered. Talk.
“What was it?” she asked him, one night as they mingled, duded out in rodeo getups, with the square-dancing clientele of a cowboy bar. “In New Orleans, that night, you sought me out. What was it that made you notice me?”
Byron didn’t hesitate. “A question,” he said.
“And what question was that?”
He pointed at their knee-slapping environs: the mechanical bull, the rawhide trimmings, the Stetsons and string ties and silver piping. “Our lives are a joke. Anyone can see that, I guess I wondered why you weren’t laughing.”
She laughed then, making herself sad with the sound.
Other evenings they shouted over a buzz of airplane propellers, under the bump of disco, across the chill seats of a climbing chairlift. But always they talked, endlessly, oblivious to their surroundings, one conversation encompassing a thousand fragmented days.
“And you?” Byron spoke between sips of drinks that vanished like snow under his breath. “What did you see in me?”
Claire smiled, silent. She knew he knew the answer.
In the private bedrooms of an endlessly itinerant courtship, they never stripped off their clothes, never attempted the clumsy gyrations that passed for sex. They lounged in lazy proximity, fully clothed. Claire felt no reserve. With Byron, there was no question of making a match. His worn, mature face, sadly humorous, told her he’d put all such questions behind him.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” He often held her hand, rubbing her thumb with his. “You say we’ve been forgotten. Some people say we’ve been abandoned. But what would it change, if we knew the truth? Things would be the same whatever happened in—well, in what I suppose we have to call ‘the real world.’ ”
“Would they?” Claire focused on the confidence with which he spoke, the weary conviction of his old, wise voice.
Byron narrowed his eyes. “That’s what I believe. We were made to live this way. We were never meant to find a match.” He lifted himself on an elbow, gazing across the folds and drapes of the bedroom, the swaddling silk abundance of an ancient four-poster bed. “Look, the idea is we’re proxies, right? Our originals, they got tired of looking for love. The uncertainty, the effort. So they made us. Poured in their memories and hopes, built this playground, so we could do what they didn’t want to do, keep mixing and mingling and trying and failing. And one day we would find a match, and that would be it, our work would be done, and we would be canceled, deleted, for them to take over.”
Claire lay still, withholding comment. There was a real thrill, she thought, in hearing things put so plainly, the cynical logic of their lives.
“But what if,” Byron said, “that wasn’t ever their real goal? What if they never wanted love at all? What if they only wanted to want it—wanted, in some way, to be able to want it? You remember how things were. We all remember at least some of that world. Was it ever such a loving place? The overcrowding. The overwork. It was so much better to be alone. What if this place only exists . . . what if we only exist to . . . to stand in for something, represent something, some kind of half-remembered dream? A dream our originals had mostly given up, but still felt, in some way, they ought to be dreaming?”
“Oh, God,” Claire sighed.
“I’m sorry.” Byron touched the backs of the hands she held over her face. “I shouldn’t be talking like this.”
“It’s not that.” She drop
ped her hands. “It’s that it’s all so wrong. You make it sound even more hopeless than it is.”
“I don’t believe it’s hopeless.”
“But if we’re only here to go on some futile, empty search . . . I mean, why?” She sat up, holding fistfuls of sheet. “We’re a joke twice over. A fake of a fake. Even if they didn’t know we woul. . . .” She was garbling her remonstrations, caught, as usual, between religion and philosophy. “I mean, why would anyone put us through this?”
He lay back, staring, pale as an empty screen. “Claire, what if I told you we could make a match?”
She held a pillow to her breast, suddenly cold, wondering if it was the kind of cold a real human being would feel. “Don’t say that.”
“I mean it.”
“Don’t say it. You know what will happen. I hate this world. I hate the people who made it. I hate myself, whatever I am, and I hate the woman I used to be. But I’m not ready to—”
“I’m not saying you have to.”
She watched him with bared teeth, projecting all her fear onto his alarmingly calm face.
“I’m saying we can do it.” Byron’s eyes were like red wine, dark and flickering. “We can do it without giving anything up. We can commit to each other, forever, without being deleted or vanishing. We can declare our love, and no one will ever know, or interfere, or steal it away from us.”
“That’s impossible.” She bit her tongue until she could almost remember what it felt like to feel pain.
“It’s entirely possible.”
“That’s not how things work.”
“You forget. I told you once, long ago, I have an interest in virtual environments. Or anyway, I used to. I know exactly how this world works.”
She sat up, seeing excitement shining from him via those two bright giveaways, perspiration and tears.
“Do you remember, Claire? New Orleans?” He sat up, reaching for her hands. “There’s a dock there that runs far out into the river. A ferry sets out from it, every night, toward the far shore. Each night, it leaves a second earlier; each time, it travels a second farther. One time out of a thousand, it reaches the far bank. If we’re on that ferry when it touches land, we’ll be on a border, a threshold, a place where the rules no longer apply. When the scenario resets, we’ll be left behind. We can live there forever, or however long the world lasts.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 19