The body’s truth is not the only truth.
DAY: ∞; A BRIEF PAUSE, SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE
“You’re being selfish,” Maya said, taking a Marlboro from a pack bent into the shape of a boy’s back pants pocket.
“No I’m not,” I said, and then looked around. “Where are we?”
We sat on a long bent piece of driftwood, on a beach, barefoot, cold surf crashing around our feet, thick fog obscuring the distance in every direction.
“Is this Providence?”
Maya shrugged. “Sort of.”
“When did we—how did we . . .” I looked at my hands in frustration, inspected my clothes, found no clues. “I don’t remember coming here.”
“You don’t come here. You just . . . end up here.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering everything—running barefoot, starving, through the streets, waking Mom up, seeing the terror and worry in her eyes, riding to the hospital . . . “It’s a dream.”
Maya shrugged. “Probably. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“Of course it does,” I said, feeling sadness seize my throat and moisten my eyes. “I was so happy to be talking to you. To have you back with us. But you’re not my sister. You’re just a part of my subconscious.”
She made a face. “That’s rude.”
The face was so perfectly Maya that I faltered, wondered: What if this is her? Really her?
She stared at the horizon. She didn’t look at me. Her hair was loose and wind-tossed. She wore what she wore the night she went to meet Tariq. Thin olive cardigan. Butch patched jeans. The T-shirt she made that said Destroy All Monsters! and had a drawing of a punk rock Mothra. The waves were getting higher, soaking us up to our knees by now. “What would you say to me if I was your sister?” she asked.
“I would ask you what happened.”
“And if I said I didn’t want to tell you? Or that it doesn’t have anything to do with you? Or that I’m fine? What would you actually say to me?”
“I don’t know,” I said after a while.
“Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
I picked up a rock, threw it into the water. The rules of physics seemed to behave pretty well in this particular dream. “Okay. Tell me more about the problem.”
“What does it matter what I say? I’m just a part of your subconscious.”
A wave crested higher, soaked me to my belly, the water bitter and cold, salt scouring me.
“You’re trying to win someone else’s fight for them,” she said, and shivered and hugged her knees to her chest. “But you’ll never even truly understand how they feel, or the way they’re hurting, so how can you hope to succeed?”
“I have to try,” I said. “I have to do something.”
“You need to understand who you are,” she said, and turned to me, and don’t ask me how but somehow I looked into those eyes and knew it was her, really truly her, Maya, somehow, her spirit or her soul or her subconscious. She took a final drag on her cigarette, then flicked it into the sea. “Try to fight someone else’s war, and you will end up one of the casualties. Believe me. I should know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I asked it again, louder, screaming now, but a wave was coming in, higher than the rest, crashing down over both of us, dragging us down and away.