IN THE MIDDLE of Neptune’s central bus station, Grandma called me for the third time in a row. In a moment of weakness, I decided to answer, and within seconds a wrinkled and scowling six-foot-three hologram appeared before me. Before I could utter a single word and without any pleasantries to speak of, she got straight to the point. “What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you coming back to Earth?” she scolded me. The people around me turned their gazes toward the small holographic woman. I quickly turned down the volume.
“Honey, this is no laughing matter,” she proceeded. “It’s been a year and a half now that you’ve been traveling all over the solar system, without popping by to visit your old grandma even once. You know I won’t be around much longer.”
“I promise this is the last planet. A few weeks and I’ll be eating your matzo ball soup,” I replied. She snickered.
“A few weeks? What’s wrong with you? You’re starting college in ten days for heaven’s sake. Your friends are already into their third year and you don’t even have a schoolbag yet,” she said, and fell silent, knowing that one more sentence like that and I’d hang up.
“So how’s the weather?” she asked, trying to change tactics. I replied that all in all it was fine. Gas storms every now and then, but nothing serious.
“And tell me, have you decided what you’re going to study?”
“IR.”
“What’s that? Speak louder.”
“IR. Intergalactic relations.”
“Why would you choose that?”
“I met a few guys here who studied it. Sounds like an interesting field.”
“Hmm. Interesting, I’m sure,” she said. “That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?” I asked, immediately regretting it.
“That until they send an Israeli ambassador to the Andromeda galaxy, it’s a useless degree. Call your father, he’s a smart man. He says you should study psychological engineering. That’s where the world’s heading. Soon people will start paying a fortune to reengineer their traumas.”
“He never said that to me,” I claimed, and she jumped at the opportunity. “Of course he didn’t. He’s afraid you’ll think he’s trying to influence you,” she said, arms flailing. “Back in my day, parents still had a say in the matter, but today all I keep hearing is how they have to let you kids make your own mistakes. That it’s the only way to get life experience. But you know what happens then? You kids get lost. You make so many mistakes that you find yourself on the other side of the solar system, alone.”
I was quiet again, this time with a certain measure of guilt. Grandma leaned in, placing her virtual hands on my face, stroking it from billions of kilometers away. “What can I say, bubele, you can’t keep putting your life on hold like this, it just doesn’t work that way. You’re not the only person in the world who has questions, believe me. The problem is that no one has the guts to tell you you’re not going to find the answers. Not even on an abandoned asteroid.”
The loudspeaker announced the bus’s imminent departure, and I jumped at the opportunity and told her I had to get going. She folded her arms across her chest and gave me a worried look. I told her I’d call when I could and not to get worried if I didn’t answer, because there might not be a good signal there.
“What am I going to do with you, my dear boy?” she said. “Just make it back in one piece. And take sunglasses, would you? The sun’s awfully strong over there.” I smiled. Her figure faded and disappeared among the dozens of passengers boarding the public space shuttle. I picked up my bag and followed them.
I FOUND AN available seat in one of the back rows. A burly man with a Hawaiian shirt sat down beside me, taking up more than his share of seat room. Blue lights flickered on in the aisles of the space shuttle, which started cruising toward the center of the solar system. The driver turned on the radio to one of those nostalgic stations that liked starting every other program with Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” I closed my eyes, nodding on and off. I’m not sure how much time had passed, but when I woke up again I saw the dark side of Venus out the window, and realized it was too late for a change of heart. I leaned back, closed my eyes again, and tried to conjure the face of the girl I was on my way to see.
I’d met her three months earlier, in one of those tacky space parties on the Rings of Saturn. I always hated parties, let alone the kind with a space suit dress code, but the two Australians I used to hang with back then managed to drag me along with them. I didn’t even try dancing, just sat alone at the bar trying to sip their disgusting local beer through the straw attached to my helmet, getting more and more annoyed by the minute. I spotted her sitting two barstools away, flirting with the bartender, telling him she was from Israel. I mentioned that I was a fellow Israeli, and she said it was hard to miss. We got to talking about how even a 0.5 G-force turned the lamest dancer into a music video star. And how anyone who’s never visited Titan didn’t know what a crazy view meant, and how Israelis in space always insisted on walking around in sandals even when it was minus seven degrees outside.
I thought the conversation went well, because she laughed at least four times. I counted. I asked her when she was planning to return to Earth, and she said it wouldn’t be anytime soon. She told me she’d been living on a small planet by the sun that she bought for a song from some old man who had built an underground condo there just to find out he couldn’t live forty-nine million kilometers from the sun. She said she knew that sounded far, but it was actually as close as one could get. So she emptied her savings account and bought the planet off him. Also a private atmospheric system from the Space Depot, one of those advanced systems with a tropical weather feature; after three months of renovations she indeed lowered the temperature to 51°C, which isn’t ideal, but the place was still cheaper than a two-bedroom apartment in Petah Tikva. I asked her whether Hebrew was the official language on her planet, and she laughed, saying she had invented a special language only the inhabitants of the planet could understand. I don’t really remember the rest, because right after mentioning Petah Tikva, she tried to kiss me, our helmets bumping into each other.
She was heaving with laughter, said she probably had too much to drink, and put her head on my shoulder. I don’t know how long we sat there like that, but at some point another girl appeared, announcing their ride was about to leave. Before I could wrap my head around the situation she was already up on her feet, saying she had to get going. I asked for her number, but she didn’t own a holographic phone because there was no signal on her planet. She told me that if I ever happened to find myself in the area, I was more than welcome to pop by for coffee. It was only after she had already left that I realized I didn’t even get her name.
It wasn’t on the space shuttle’s route, but apparently the driver was in a good mood because he agreed to make a little detour. I took my bag and got off at a deserted stop. The first thing I felt was an onslaught of sun rays, like the incessant flash of a camera clicking away. I quickly took my sunglasses out of my pocket. It provided only partial relief. I looked up at the sky, painted a bright purple just like she had described to me at the party. I didn’t dare look directly at the sun, but a quick glance revealed it was much larger than it appeared from Earth. The bus pulled away, and I looked around me but there was no house in sight. There was nothing but blue sand dunes, and an indistinct smell reminiscent of caramel.
Before I could get my act together, I already felt the horrific heat on her planet. Sweat poured out of me, soaking my clothes. I started trudging along the small surface, no more than a few kilometers in diameter, so minuscule you could actually see the ground curving into itself. I continued on my wretched walk, quietly cursing myself for insisting on this visit. I lowered my backpack and took out a bottle of water. I was about to open the cap when I tripped on a large stone. The bottle fell and rolled into a crater.
“For fuck’s sake,” I hissed. It took me a moment to notice the staircase winding into the ground. I quickly descended the stairs. The heat abated with every step, until the temperature became almost bearable. At the bottom of the pit I found the bottle, and myself standing in front of a small dark door devoid of any sign. I was dripping onto the doormat and tried to wipe myself dry, without much success. I took a deep breath and knocked twice.
IT TOOK HER about two minutes to come to the door. Her black hair was pulled into a high ponytail speckled with blue sand. She was wearing a faded white tank top and brown shorts. A thick sleep mask pulled up to her forehead was covering half her left eye. She let out a gaping yawn.
“Say, aren’t you tired of trying?” she asked in English, her tone something between grumpy and desperate.
“What? No,” I replied in English. “I mean, I …”
“What’s that accent? You Israeli?” she asked in Hebrew.
“Yes.”
“So why are you speaking English, dummy?”
“Because you did.”
“You’re not the sharpest pencil, huh?” she said and sighed. “At least you didn’t come in a suit.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and couldn’t snap out of the shock. “Wait, let’s start over. Remember me?” I stuttered with a smile.
“Yes,” she answered, and I’m fairly certain I felt a fleeting surge of optimism. “But I’m not selling the planet,” she announced, and took a step toward me. “I’ve already told you and the others thirty times now, I’m not selling. Am I being clear?”
“What are—”
“Yes or no,” she raised her voice. “Do you understand the sentence ‘I’m not selling the planet’?”
“Wait, but …” I tried to explain.
“Listen, you’re starting to get on my nerves. Do you understand or not?”
“No,” I said.
“Too bad,” she replied and slammed the door in my face. I knocked again, but she wouldn’t open. I found myself explaining to the door that I didn’t know who she thought I was, but my name was Golan. And that we had met at that lousy party six months earlier, on the Rings of Saturn. I heard her footsteps approaching.
“It’s just that you said if I happened to find myself in the neighborhood, I should stop by. And, well, I was in the neighborhood,” I lied. It took her a few more moments to open the door. “God, I can’t believe it,” she said, staring at me. Without a giggle to alleviate the tension, without an apology. I stood there, about to die of embarrassment.
“Okay,” she finally said. “If you were stupid enough to come all this way, at least have something to drink before you hit the road again.”
She waved me in, gesturing at a chair in her small kitchen, and started to fumble through her messy cabinets for glasses. The kitchen was open to the living room, or more accurately, a large couch by a hallway leading to the bedroom. The walls were made of blue rock and the living room ceiling was riddled with small holes, allowing the sun to filter through and light up the entire house. The bedroom was crammed with books and had only one hole in the ceiling. She explained reading was the only thing left to do on a planet with no signal. A large basket stood by the front door, filled to the rim with dozens of sunglasses and ski masks in different colors.
“Sorry,” she said, handing me a glass of tepid water filled less than halfway. “The homeowner association is very strict around here about water usage.”
I assumed that by homeowner association she meant herself, but I was afraid asking would bring on another insult. I downed the water in one gulp.
“Wouldn’t you rather drink something cold in this heat?” I asked.
“I would,” she said. “That’s why I keep the water in the fridge for myself.”
The rest of the conversation was nothing to write home about. Long stretches of silence and pointless questions that didn’t interest either of us. After half an hour and a stingy water refill, I picked up my bag and headed toward the door. A brief goodbye was accompanied by an official, rather ridiculous handshake.
“Where did you park?” she asked as we stood in the doorway. I told her I had come by public transport. “You’re joking, right?” She groaned, slapping her forehead. “Public space shuttles stop here twice a year.”
I smiled and told her not to worry. That I’d been traveling for so long, I was used to waiting a few hours in the sun. She looked at me and sighed again. “I wasn’t being funny. The next space shuttle will arrive in four months. And that’s best-case scenario.”
I hesitated and told her it wasn’t a problem, I’d just make a holographic call to one of my buddies to come pick me up.
She sat down on the chair, biting her hand nervously. “There’s no signal on this planet.”
I didn’t know whether to stay in the doorway or step outside. I started calculating how long I could live off the food and water in my backpack. A couple of days. Tops.
After a few minutes, she got up. “You can sleep here until we figure out a solution to this shitty situation,” she said, pointing at the couch. Then she went to her room and came back two minutes later with a pair of square-rimmed sunglasses and jeans. I was left alone in her house, trying to understand how I had gotten myself into this mess. I lowered my backpack, slipped off my shoes, and lay on the couch. I tried to fall asleep, but the heat permeating through the walls kept me wide awake. I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask her name.
THE FOLLOWING PERIOD was marked by dire attempts to leave her planet. I spent hours on the sprawling dunes near her house, searching for a signal so I could text someone to come rescue me. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending the next four months on her boiling planet. Four months of nothing but dodging the sun and her nervous glares.
We barely spoke. I slept on the couch and she’d slip in and out of her room with a grumpy pout, closing the bedroom door behind her and then storming back out. Every once in a while we’d sit together at her kitchen table, eating cans of peas and corn or crackers with jam, sometimes just an energy bar with too many raisins. We never ate anything nice. In each of these meals she’d put a single glass of water before me, advising me to drink slowly because that’s all she had to offer. I brushed my teeth without water. Showers were obviously out of the question.
When I wasn’t eating or sleeping, I spent my time outside. We had an unspoken agreement to avoid any interaction that would only exacerbate our frustration. I soon realized that unlike Earth, her planet didn’t rotate on its own axis. The sun never set, but remained fixed in the same spot in the sky, distorting everything I thought I knew about the concept of day and night. The only refuge I found was under a boulder located by one of the dunes, which provided me a rare meter of shade. I spent hours on end leaning against the boulder, counting minutes that gradually lost their meaning. Every movement, every action was insufferable. The raging sun allowed for nothing but thoughts, and even they were a struggle to produce, flitting in disjointed fragments. Mostly as fears. Of returning home, to the same spot, going back to the rat race I’d spent a year and a half trying to outrun. I stayed for hours, maybe even days by that boulder, nodding on and off for unknown periods of time. I started feeling as if the shuttle would never come. That I was going to stay there, in the same spot, forever.
One day, waking up abruptly, I found her lying beside me, sprawled out on the sand, this time with white sunglasses. She lay there silently, without a hint of shade or apology. I considered her for a moment, and then looked around me. The purple sky was painted green streaks, turning alternately blue and red, constantly changing colors.
“I think I might be losing my mind,” I said.
She laughed. “I felt the same way at first,” she admitted. She said she didn’t really know what caused the colors to appear in her sky, but thought it probably had to do with the solar flares. “A little like the northern lights,” she explained. “Only it isn’t cold here, and like a million times more beautiful.”
“It’s amazing,” I said, just to keep the momentum going. “I bet people would pay big bucks to see something like this. I mean, it could be one hell of a tourist attraction.”
She considered me for a moment, then turned her gaze back to the sky. She said that on such a hot planet, you couldn’t afford to waste words on chitchat. “Talking just makes you thirsty,” she said. Then she was quiet again for a while, and I, out of sheer awkwardness, tried to be even quieter. We stayed like that, side by side, for some time. At a certain point, she got up, shook off the sand from her clothes, and extended her hand.
“You coming?” she asked, and I stood up as quickly as possible, without daring to ask where we were going.
On our way to wherever she was taking me on her little planet, she started to drill me. About my trip. About the studies I was trying to avoid. About my parents who didn’t know what to make of me. She asked if I had a girlfriend. At first I said no, but then I told her about Sivan. Either because some part of me still missed my ex, or because I wanted her to know I wasn’t the giant loser she thought I was. I told her we met three years ago. That I was sure we were going to get married at some point, but we ended up splitting six months ago via holographic call. She called me just as I had finished climbing the Olympus Mons on Mars, saying she couldn’t take my roaming and roving anymore, that she was beginning to feel I wasn’t so much trying to find myself as I was running away from her. I tried to tell her that wasn’t it at all, but she didn’t seem interested.
“So basically, you were too chicken to dump her so you waited for her to do it for you?”
“What? I just explained that she was the one who left me,” I replied. “I didn’t want to break up.”
“So why didn’t you go back to Earth?” she asked.
“Because I’m not done here.”
“So you dumped her for a few more hikes?” she scoffed. “Because you haven’t yet found the answers you’re looking for?”
I didn’t reply.
“It’s okay, it’s not like you owe me any excuses.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her, making sure she caught the severe tone.
“No one’s willing to lose the girl he loves for a few shitty answers about life, it’s just not how it works,” she asserted. “It’s simply a matter of priorities. She probably didn’t mean enough to you.”
“How would you know? You don’t know me at all.”
“You’re right,” she replied. “But there’s one thing I do know. That you traveled all the way to the center of the solar system for some girl you met at a party, but haven’t bothered to visit your girlfriend even once.” Before I could reply, she quickly announced: “This is what I wanted to show you.”
We were standing in front of a cluster of large green cactuses. She said she hadn’t planned on growing them. What she had really wanted was mango or pineapple, but the trees couldn’t survive on her planet. Eventually she settled for eleven cactuses, by special order. Two had withered and died, but the rest managed to pull through. She couldn’t stand them at first, but she’d come to love them. A pair of worn-out gray gloves were lying next to one of the cactuses. She picked them up, put them on, and plucked a red prickly pear, splitting it open and offering me a piece.
“Isn’t it thorny?” I asked.
“Only on the outside.”
I warily accepted the piece. It was without a doubt the tastiest thing I had eaten in a long while. I said I was pretty sure it was the first time I’d had a prickly pear.
“Obviously,” she said, then told me they had stopped growing them on Earth a long time ago. They just didn’t have enough space over there. The only place you could get prickly pears was on the black market in China, and even there they grew them under the ground, which made them completely bland, because it’s the sun that gives them all their flavor. She said a few dozen prickly pears sets her up for a whole year. And people were willing to pay crazy money for them.
“Every once in a while some realtor shows up wanting to buy the planet,” she said and laughed. “Weird guys in suits. At first I thought you were one of them.” She told me she never actually listened to their pitch, but sometimes sold them a few prickly pears. Even gave them a discount if they promised to bring some to her family.
“Isn’t your family flipping out about you being here?” I asked.
“Flipping out? They’re the ones who encouraged me to move here,” she said.
“What do you mean? Why would they encourage you?”
She didn’t answer.
Once we were done she grabbed my hand and pulled us toward the nearest dune. I suggested we return to her apartment to get some rest, but she said that where there was no day and no night, time ceased to exist, so the concept of rest made little sense. Careful though I was, I still ended up with tiny thorns in my hands, but I didn’t say anything. We started walking up the closest sandy hill. It was no more than thirty meters high, but scaling it in the insane heat required some real effort. Once we reached the top I collapsed with exhaustion, sure I was about to pass out, but she nimbly sat down beside me, folding her legs to her chest and hugging them. “I see you’re quite the mountaineer,” she said, winking through her sunglasses. I tried coming up with a witty comeback, but I was too busy trying to catch my breath.
“Right here, this is the closest a person can get to the sun,” she announced. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her pants, fished one out, and held it up. The tip instantly lit up as it exited the atmosphere. She stubbed it out in the sand, saying she didn’t smoke, that it was just a game she liked to play.
I lay down on the sand and told her about an experiment I had read about in which people were left in a lit room for an entire week. Almost all of them went completely bonkers. That was what scared me most on this planet, and I didn’t get how it hadn’t happened to her yet.
“Who said it hasn’t?” she asked, and as if to prove her point, lowered her sunglasses and stared directly at the sun. Looked at it without even blinking.
“What, are you crazy?” I yelled at her and sat up, pressing my shoulder against hers. “You’ll go blind!”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she stated. “I’ve been doing this for three years and nothing’s ever happened to me.” She said it was only blinding for a moment, but then you could see perfectly fine. That only candy-ass scientists too scared to ever look up from their telescopes thought otherwise. “I honestly don’t understand how people can spend an entire lifetime under it without looking at it even once,” she said, and before I knew it, she had plucked the sunglasses off my face. “If you’ve ever wanted to find any meaning in life, this is a good place to start.”
I couldn’t stop blinking, could barely see a thing.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she asked. I craned my neck, trying to open my eyes, but the light wouldn’t let me. I barely blinked twice before fixing my gaze back on the slope. She sighed and lay down on the sand, still staring at the sun.
“Don’t worry, it’s okay. Most people don’t even have the guts to try,” she said, and closed her eyes. “You’ll get there eventually. That is, if you don’t pass out next time we climb the dune.”
I didn’t have anything witty to say, so I kissed her. She didn’t smile or anything, just said it was a punk move kissing a girl whose name I didn’t know.
HER NAME WAS Ayala.
HANDS REACHING OUT in the heavy heat. Gentle, tentative groping sticky with sweat and sand. The body operated differently in fifty degrees. Words dissolved, making way for long stretches of silence, inquisitive gazes, like children exploring their bodies for the first time.
After an indeterminable period of time, another real estate agent arrived on her planet. He was wearing a dark jacket and black trousers, dripping sweat along the sand. He found me and Ayala sitting by one of the craters and asked if he might steal a few moments of our time. Despite her limited patience, Ayala eventually agreed to listen on the condition that he bought a bag of prickly pears. He paid her and launched into his pitch, telling us this planet was worth a good few million. That it could be sold to a large research facility or to armies that wanted to train their soldiers under extreme conditions. He proceeded to explain that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that she could take the money and live on an artificial island in Miami, which was exactly the same as here only twenty degrees cooler.
“So what do you say?” he finally asked, by now almost suffocating from the heat, barely breathing.
She lowered her sunglasses and gave him a quick once-over. “I’m not selling my planet to someone who’d wear that suit in this heat,” she announced, flicked down her sunglasses and would say no more. He started throwing figures at her, unfathomable amounts of money that kept increasing. Three. Four. Five million dollars. But Ayala didn’t even bother to answer. I looked at him with something of an apology. Eventually he gave up, picked up the bag, and started walking toward his Mercedes spacecraft.
“Wait,” she called out when he was already a few meters from his vehicle. The guy tossed the bag of prickly pears onto the sand and came running back, asking if she had changed her mind.
“No, but this one here needs a ride,” she said, pointing at me.
“Don’t listen to her,” I said. “She’s crazy.”
The man turned on his heels, and Ayala closed her eyes and smiled.
THE SANDSTORM BLEW in a few hours later, maybe even a few days, I’m not sure. All I remember is us sitting in front of each other in the narrow shade of a cactus while she explained her theory about the fourth person. “Think how lonely it is to talk in first person. To admit it over and over again.”
“Admit what?”
“That I’m alone.”
“Of course you’re alone. You’re the only one on this planet.”
“It’s the other way around. Here I have no one to talk to, so I barely think about it. But back on Earth it drove me crazy. I felt like the whole language thing was keeping me stuck inside myself,” she said, and started piling sand into a small mound.
“Come on, you’re overreacting. It’s just words. And besides, first-person plural pretty much solves your problem,” I said. “We eat. We sleep. We. See? Not so lonely anymore.”
“No, dummy. That’s the worst. First-person plural just lumps you in with everyone else, erases you completely. Like it makes no difference whether you’re a realtor or a Holocaust survivor. People get lost in that shit.”
“You’re the only one who gets lost.”
“Fine, then I’m the only one,” she snarled. “Then for me second- and third-person are even worse than worst. You say ‘you’ or ‘she’ and you completely take yourself out of the equation, as if you don’t even exist.”
“I don’t understand why you’re obsessing about it. It’s just semantics.”
“For you. For me it’s more than that,” she said. “That’s why we need fourth-person.”
“What’s that? How would you even use fourth-person?”
“How should I know? I’m not a linguist,” she protested. “I just know that when you use it you don’t feel completely alone or completely lost.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“You know, like when you mix yellow and blue and they still haven’t turned completely into green yet? That’s what I’m talking about.”
I told her the whole approach sounded a bit childish to me. That no disrespect, but I’m not sure first-person was the reason she felt lost or all alone in the world. That it was more complicated than that. A strong wind blew past us, crumbling the little mound she had built. Ayala got up and strapped on her ski goggles. At first I thought she was just having one of her moments. That I had somehow managed to offend her. But when I noticed she was gazing out at the horizon, I turned around. A wall of blue dust was sweeping up behind us. It was still a few hundred meters away, creeping toward us.
“What’s that?” I asked Ayala.
“Come,” she replied. “Now.” She started to bolt.
“Wait,” I yelled, but she wasn’t listening. When I saw she wouldn’t even look back, I realized she wasn’t fooling around. She started running, and I tried to follow her but couldn’t keep up.
“Hey, what’s going on? Wait a minute!” I shouted, but she still wouldn’t listen. Then the shade came. A large stain that gradually spread across the desert. The sandstorm bit into the sun, which instantly turned into a faded white dot in the sky. I ran as fast as I could, but all the dust made it hard to breathe. A wave of sand washed over me. I couldn’t see. I had no idea where to turn. She didn’t answer. I cursed myself for getting stuck there, in the middle of a goddamn sandstorm, when I could have been sitting in an air-conditioned college auditorium.
Her hand emerged from within the dust, pulling me toward her. I followed her, grabbing on for dear life.
“Careful,” she said as I took another step and almost slipped down the staircase. She slowed down, leading me one stair at a time. “Slowly,” she instructed, and I listened. I heard the door opening and she pushed me in. The door slammed shut behind me, and I kept my eyes closed.
“It’s okay, hon, you can open your eyes,” she said.
I waited a few more moments before opening them. The room was awash with a pale light, like the glow of a sunset. Sand was trickling in through the holes in the ceiling, forming small mounds on the floor. Ayala emerged from the bedroom with a few buckets. “Snap out of it already, it happens. Don’t take it so hard.” She handed me a bucket and told me to put it in the middle of the living room.
“Believe me, you were lucky I brought my ski goggles,” she announced.
When we were done, I slumped down on the couch. The storm had made the apartment even hotter. There were three large holes in the ceiling above the couch, and the sand pouring through them was piling on top of me. I tried falling asleep but couldn’t.
“You can come in here,” she shouted from the bedroom. “And bring a glass of cold water.” I quickly followed her orders, pouring water into a glass and placing it on her bedside table. Then I brought another glass for myself and lay down beside her. We stared at the ceiling in silence.
THERE WAS ONLY one hole in the bedroom ceiling, which made it the only room in the house that wasn’t sheeted with a thick layer of sand. While Ayala wouldn’t come out of the room at all, I sometimes snuck into the living room for a change of scenery. I’d shift the buckets around, grab a bite to eat, but that’s pretty much it. We spent most of our time in bed, side by side. The air got thicker, the room darker, leaving me and Ayala no choice but to get closer to each other. To burrow into one another until our sweat mingled. I told her I sometimes imagined our bodies as blocks of ice cooling each other off.
“That’s a lovely way of thinking about it, but the reality of it is still super gross,” she said and laughed. And she was right.
The crampedness edged out the romance, and neither of us was able to hide the particularities of the body. Wrinkles on her chin and hairs on my cheeks, calluses on the bottoms of her feet, a swollen scar on my back.
“Well, are you hopping on the next bus?” she’d ask every now and then, and I’d tell her I didn’t know and hugged her tightly, hoping she wouldn’t notice how tired I was getting of living in such a confined space. Of the heat and the sand. But she did.
One night, waking up drenched in sweat, I saw her reading The Catcher in the Rye. I told her I had read it in high school and kind of liked it. She stopped reading and looked at me suspiciously.
“Then what’s the name of the girl who kept all her kings in the back row?” she asked. I had no idea what she was talking about. I told her I couldn’t remember, that I had read it a long time ago. She sighed irritably and said I was just trying to sound smart.
I told her everything I remembered about Holden, about his journey through New York. She wasn’t the least bit impressed. She snorted, said I probably hadn’t even given any thought to what happened to Holden after the story ended.
“How am I supposed to know what happened to him?” I mumbled, and before I could say anything else, she cut me off. “He commits suicide,” she said decisively.
“I don’t think that was in the book,” I replied hesitantly.
“Of course it wasn’t.” She said that because the author didn’t have the heart to kill him off or admit him to some loony bin for the rest of his life, she was pretty sure that’s what happened. “Someone like Holden doesn’t grow up to be a psychological engineer or something like that,” she teased.
I told her she could think whatever she liked, but it didn’t make sense to get angry at every person who decided to grow up.
“It isn’t growing up, it’s giving up on your dreams. It’s becoming a lame first-person plural, like everyone else.”
“Oh come on, then what’s the alternative?” I barked, sick of her patronizing me. The heat was driving me crazy. “What should I do instead?”
She fell silent.
“What, just quit? Go off the radar like you? That’s the solution? Everyone should just find a hole to crawl into?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you live here for three years and not know?”
A slight tremor passed over her lips. She considered me for a few moments before turning her back to me, lying on her side and gazing silently at the wall.
I started to understand how hard it was for her without the sun. Sometimes Ayala would slink into the living room and sit beneath one of the large holes, trying to catch the few rays that had managed to filter through the layers of dust, only to creep back into the bedroom even more frustrated.
“Fuck this. When will it end? It has to end already,” she’d grumble to herself, stomping her feet on the floor. She’d get annoyed with me as well. All I had to do was snore or open a bag of crackers and she’d start yelling that I was unbearable, that I wouldn’t let her breathe. She paced the room for hours, spitting out incoherent sentences.
Eventually the storm died down and the sun lit up the planet and house once more. It took us a good few hours to clear out all the sand. Once we were done cleaning in silence, we both knew we had to restore the previous order. I went back to the couch and Ayala went outside, leaving the door open.
I CAN’T SAY exactly when I stumbled upon the pond, but it was without a doubt the most special spot on her planet. I marched all the way back to the house just to let her have it.
“How could you not tell me about the pond?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she replied, barely looking at me. At first I thought she was joking, but soon came to realize she truly didn’t know. Eventually I persuaded her to come see. After walking a kilometer and a half in utter silence, we arrived at the shaded area, to a spot the sun couldn’t reach. “I’ve never been here before,” she said. The air was cool. The pond was hiding in the darkest spot—a reservoir of clear turquoise water that had pooled into a small crater, a few meters below the surface. We sat on the rim of the crater and gazed down at the water.
“It makes no sense,” she said, studying her reflection in the water. I admitted I didn’t understand it either. That maybe some frozen asteroid had once struck the planet. “And somehow, because of the atmosphere, the water …”
Before I could finish my sentence, she pushed me in.
My fear of crashing into the rocks was overtaken by the warm lull of the water. I held my breath for as long as possible before coming up for air, then sat on a large rock in the middle of the pond, my lower body still submerged. My clothes were completely drenched.
“I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t toxic,” she said, and smiled.
“Isn’t this when you’re supposed to dive in?” I asked her.
“You’ve seen too many movies, hon,” she said, dipping her toes in the water. We were silent again, but it was a different kind of silence. Like when we had first met, and we each withdrew into ourselves. I tried guessing how much I’d already missed of my first year of studies, wondering whether there was even a chance of catching the tail end of the first semester.
“That’s what I don’t get about you,” she said and paused as if contemplating her words. “You live your life as if you have no choice in the matter.”
“But you’re exactly the same,” I replied.
She glanced at me before turning back to the water, brushing a hesitant hand through her hair. Then she got up and slowly made her way up the rocks, slipping back into the kingdom of the sun. I stayed in the pond for a while before climbing out of the crater, lying in the shade, and gazing at the purple sky.
On my way back to the apartment I saw her sitting on her favorite dune, staring at the sun with unshielded eyes. I stood beside her. She kept staring.
“So you were actually sent here?”
She nodded, then admitted that for the longest time she had tried getting her act together, but nothing worked. Tried all kinds of treatments that didn’t help. “The only thing that helped a little was being in the sun.” She said that whenever she called her parents on the phone, she could hear in their trembling voices how they were still hoping she’d tell them everything had worked out. “That all this craziness, it was just a phase,” she said. “Like it is for you.”
And then it dawned on me. “Wait, what phone?”
THE ORANGE PAY phone was nestled not far from the cactuses. She had installed it there the very first day she arrived on the planet. I didn’t ask why she hadn’t told me about it. I don’t think she would have answered anyway. I went there and called my parents, explaining that I had gotten stuck on the planet closest to the sun. They didn’t sound especially concerned, said it had only been three weeks since I had last called. That school had started only a day ago.
Three days later they landed next to the bus stop, informing me there was one angry grandma waiting for me at home. I wanted to say goodbye to Ayala, but when I went back to the apartment to get my things, she wasn’t there.
As we whizzed past Venus, I told my parents I was going to study psychological engineering. That I was going to make shitloads of money and finally start living. My mom said it was a terrific idea. Then she turned on the radio, saying there was a program about healthy cooking that she loved. I leaned my head against the window and tried to fall asleep, ignoring Ayala’s voice telling me to stop kidding myself.