Fill should have been miserable. He should have felt ashamed, guilty; he should have been taking concrete action to ameliorate the consequences of his irresponsible actions.
But he didn’t. He wasn’t.
When had he become such a monster? Knowing he had a fatal sexually transmitted disease, he’d had unprotected sex with someone. He hadn’t warned them. He hadn’t even told them after. And instead of being eaten up with remorse—instead of feeling bad about what he’d done, here he stood, leaning against the guardrail, watching the sunset, admiring the fractal rainbow arcing slowly down the side of the windscreen.
What was he becoming?
Part of it was, he didn’t truly blame himself. The circumstances had been so strange. While he’d been incredibly turned on by the danger of it, a part of him had also been offended. Angry, even, with this criminal. An intruder, after all. In his grandfather’s secret apartment. A gorgeous, prickly, impoverished creature who turned his whole idea of gender on its head. It had felt like pornography, like a dream, like a horror story.
But still. They were real; it had really happened. The breaks were probably already manifesting themselves in Soq.
So, what? Why did he feel so strangely fine?
Tomorrow night I’ll have my answer, he told himself. My grandfather will say yes or no to the absurd amount of money I’m asking him for.
He’d wanted to just message Grandfather the request, but Barron said that seemed unceremonious. Too easy, unworthy of the momentous event those funds would facilitate. So instead he’d asked Fill to arrange a meeting, for himself and his grandfather and Barron, so they could make their pitch together.
A delay tactic, most likely. Barron was as scared as he was, probably, to get to the bottom of what Choek could or couldn’t do for them. They were both terrified that the trail could be cold, might not lead them anywhere, or—worse—that Choek could indeed lead them to the origin of City Without a Map.
The sun was down. The sky was still bright. His heart danced with the water, with the rippling light. It’s the breaks, he thought. I feel them trembling through me. Cracking open all my defenses, breaking down the walls I built between me and the world. Shaking me loose from my self, from my ego, from this tiny isolated flickering flame, so I can see how I am the sun. We are the sun.
So sad, to think that it took this, this, to make me see how beautiful our world is.
She came to him more and more as the sickness progressed. In dreams, in crowds, in memories that didn’t belong to him. The ghost woman: a guide, but a guide to what? She took him places, told him stories without words. He could feel her in him. Most of the time she was peace, profound and terrifying, a radical reconciliation more divine than anything Christ could have managed, something that could only have come from unspeakable suffering. Sometimes she slipped, cracked, refracted, and he gasped at the river of rage that roared beneath her surface. The things she had suffered. Not repressed, not forgotten, but no longer present.
What had happened to her?
In his mind, she was the Author. The mastermind behind City Without a Map. He was aware that this was irrational, idiotic, probably incorrect. He felt it so strongly that it couldn’t possibly be true. She was a construct, a figment of his damaged imagination, his diseased brain assembling complex narratives and characters out of the chaos of information he was drowning in.
She had to be.
Bald. Fifty-something. Just like the Author described herself.
He let go of the railing and then did something that shocked him. He sat. He reached down, dipped two fingers into the frigid waters. He touched them to his lips.
We live our whole lives suspended above the sea, he thought, but we forget the true taste of salt. Not the purified stuff we find in kitchen cabinets and restaurant counters. The bitter, foul, sea-muck stuff we crawled out of, and live beside, and one day will return to.
Soon I’ll break free of this body and be one with the sea, with the sky, with the infinite. That is the gift I was given, that I in turn gave to someone else. A bitter gift, but the best ones are.