by Lavie Tidhar
Was he real?
Was I?
But seven months into my stay in the city, we lay high in a room overlooking the water. A storm raged on the horizon in purple swirls, and lightning flashed, illuminating a tentacled monster rising, for just a moment, out of the toxic river. It was warm and humid inside the room. We made love and, when we were replete, I felt something change in me, then, traveling up the pipe from I-we to I, and I sighed…
“What is it?” he said.
“I don’t know. I guess I’m just happy.”
He stroked my face. “You will go soon.”
“No,” I said. “No, I won’t leave you.”
“But you will,” he said. And, “It’s all right.”
“How can it be all right? Kay… do you ever miss it? What was before? Don’t you ever want to fix the world?”
“I like it here,” he said. “This is my world. And I am me, not someone else’s ghost.”
“Don’t you worry the world might be decaying? That it will… stop working, one day?”
“Don’t all worlds do that?” he said. “And, Mai, didn’t endlessly trying to fix everything just get us here in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, anymore.”
“Come here,” he said, and he held me in his arms, and sang as we watched the storm chase dark birds across the sky. At least I thought they were birds. His song was soft and sad, and I didn’t know the words. After a time I fell asleep and, in the morning, he was gone.
I went looking for him and found him by the river. He had waded into the water and was sifting through the nets half-buried in the mud. I called to him, but the winds snatched away the sound. I felt terribly sad then, and I didn’t know why. He looked so perfect, standing there. His back was to me, but I thought he was happy. This was his world.
The wave came out of nowhere. Perhaps it was a product of a delayed tsunami effect from a quake, or perhaps it was the world-system itself. It rose over so that it almost looked still, a Hokusai wave. Then it crashed on him and he vanished.
“Kay! Kay!”
I started to run to him. The chill of the water bit me. The wind tore at my face. I felt people watch me, silently, from the tenements. I was mad with shock, with grief. I pulled on my lifeline, and the world froze. I tore the clouds open. For the first time in centuries the sun shone down on the city of London.
“I will rip you apart, piece by piece, until you give him back to me!”
Nothing answered my call. The world was still. It was indifferent to what I wanted. You cannot take on a world, and win. I saw the Thiels stand on the embankment. They watched the hole I had punched through their world. Then, one by one, they, too, turned their backs on me and walked away. I guess they’d finally realized they’d find nothing on the other side.
My lifeline pulled. The world rushed back into being. The clouds closed over the sun. The river calmed. I felt myself yanked like a doll on a string. The world lost definition. It tasted cobalt blue and I heard cinnamon cry.
I fell, up.
They pulled me out of the immersion tank. I was weak from the long period of submersion. My legs would not support me and I threw up all over the floor. Mowgai was there, holding me up. I tasted rust and yellow, which tastes like fresh mulberry leaves.
Inside me, something kicked.
And that’s really all there is to it. I received a message from the New Atlantis, and I went there, and I saw the sights. I visited the past, for a little while…
I fell in love.
I suppose the sort of love I’d had with Kay was one that we both knew was fleeting. Passion burns strongest when it is doomed. I loved, I lost…
But something of him remained. Some sort of entanglement I can’t explain, and never sought to. I was sick each morning, and then it passed. Mowgai would look at me sideways, but say nothing. We dwelt on Shooters Hill, all throughout that long summer, as my belly swelled and I felt myself engulfed in sunlight. The seagulls called across the shores of New Atlantis… I wrote the chronicle of old London, the one preserved still in the amber of the time vault deep under the waves.
When my daughter was born the pain was almost unbearable, but when I held her to my chest for the first time and felt her warmth, I knew this was heaven, or as close to it as we can get, on Earth.
Then I went back.
Epilogue
Night has fallen, and the children run, shrieking and laughing, outside, between the homes. I look out of my window and see the paper lanterns rise into the sky like fireflies. Their lights do not dispel the dark but complement it. The nightjars call, and I smell jasmine, wild thyme, and roses.
My name is Mai. I have lived on this Land for eighty-four years and I love it, deeply.
My daughter calls. My grandchildren burst into the room and run to me, climbing on my knees. I love them, too, with a love that almost hurts. I think I am fortunate. And when I go into the dark, my atoms will remain, to feed the fields and flowers. I’ve known rain and I’ve known sun, and once I saw the Isles of the Nesoi, and once I visited the New Atlantis…
I experienced loss, and I found love.
Then I went back.
Everything in between, as the old poet said, is just details.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. His latest novels are Unholy Land and debut children’s novel Candy. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.
ALSO BY LAVIE TIDHAR
NOVELS
The Tel Aviv Dossier*
Osama*
The Violent Century
A Man Lies Dreaming*
Unholy Land
THE BOOKMAN HISTORIES
The Bookman
Camera Obscura
The Great Game
also available in omnibus form as The Bookman Histories
NOVELLAS
The Vanishing Kind*
Cloud Permutations*
Jesus & the Eightfold Path*
Gorel & the Pot-Bellied God*
COLLECTIONS
Black Gods Kiss*
HebrewPunk
The Apex Book of World SF (as editor)
The Apex Book of World SF 2 (as editor)
The Apex Book of World SF 3 (as editor)
*available as a JABberwocky ebook
THANK YOU FOR READING
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