“Pining for sea-folk,” my gangly new apprentice said — loudly, to no one in particular — as I left the sawmill, bento box in hand. He was one of the mayor’s clan, a cousin twice removed or some such, which he frequently found call to mention. I ignored the jibe, however accurate, just as I overlooked all the other whispered workplace tales of my romantic escapades. Stacked against the host of troubles a shipwright faces these days — rotting lumber, scarce tar, machinery so old it has parts stamped “Made in USA” rusting inside it — the nattering of a silver-buttoned teenager with an oily mustache matters less than chicken feed.

The breeze coaxed me onward with scents recalling my distant youth. I skirted the remains of Old Mobile, not even glancing at the crumbling factories and the skeletal apartments. (As Lem once pointed out, back when he still liked to tease me, locals learn not to see the ravaged glories of the past.) About halfway between the mill and the shipyard a narrow footpath leaves the boardwalk and meanders down to an inlet scarcely bigger than a pond which nonetheless provides a panoramic view of the bay. Those who know the spot have dubbed it Rabi’s Cove; in deference, they allow me my privacy there at sun’s-height during workdays. I suppose they can do without my scowling for an hour, during which I can escape the clamor of saws and the pestering of novices.

The bay’s annual transformation still surprised me, even after forty-five springtimes. Fresh gulf air brushed crisply across my face. The seaside stretched in front of me, full of life: bullfrogs lurked in the cordgrass that lined the shore; newborn redfish snapped at midges on the placid waters; a lonely gator drifted by. Far in the distance bright red buoys danced over onetime islands, now sunken hazards in the risen gulf. Despite my disappointment in the momentary absence of sirenae, I couldn’t withhold a smile.

Settling in amid this cacophony, I sat and munched on a slaw made with wilted collard greens and spongy radishes. Lem’s mother must have packed my lunch; I always got the worst bits when the widow did kitchen duty. Usually Mondays were Lem’s turn, but he’d been up all night tending to the twins’ fever. I spit out a stem, and grimaced. Lem used to joke that she’d poison me one day and I’d never notice it. He used to joke a lot until last year, when little Siu drowned and the widow grew ten times colder.

But a flood of tears won’t wash away calamity, so I pushed those thoughts aside and, sipping from a canteen of weak sweet tea, looked out at the bay. For a stretch of heartbeats I forgot as well about the Texas Conflict that had us working overtime under orders from Colonel Jin. This quiet thought-free moment stretched on and on until, with a sudden flutter, a motley heron swooped into the cove. Cupping its wings at the last moment, it landed elegantly in the shallows but then let out a comic squawk. Their honk always put me in mind of a circus clown, that and its feathers — a riot of scarlet and indigo, lemon and lime. A far too showy relic of the Geneshift Days, the poor birds have nearly gone extinct just two hundred years later. To most folk around here, spotting one means good fortune: Ma had seen one the summer she met Pa, en paz descansen. To me, that day, it only kindled memories of one I’d seen a quarter century earlier.

Back then, I’d left the journeyers’ party just before midnight, when the revelry was beginning in earnest. A full dozen of us had been raised up from our apprenticeships, so the taverns were full of sweaty young laborers already drunk on cheap beer and cheaper moonshine. I’d gotten politely tipsy on toasts in our honor, smiled through long reminiscences by various greying adepts, nibbled on the cornbread and the sweet potato pie. Eventually a few of us stepped outside to share a spliff and speculate about the next seven years of service. Such a stretch seemed mighty long back then, and my thoughts turned to the futures I’d just lost, having signed on under that snarling one-armed tyrant, Yoshikawa-sencho. My mood turned sour, and when the rest of the crew returned inside, I simply wandered off homeward, back toward the apprentices’ dorms which, for a few hours, I would have all to myself.

The ballad of the Alabama night accompanied me as I meandered up the boardwalk — barking treefrogs and lowing bullfrogs, the whippoorwill mourning, the katydids bleating. That muffled the partiers’ chatter, gracias a Dios. But as the wild choir ran through its repertoire, a motley heron swept past not a meter in front of me, landing to snap up a mouse hiding in the brush. While the bird gobbled down its prey it eyed me placidly, and then with a bob of its head and a flutter of its wings strode off toward the shore.

Like a fool in a folktale I followed it. Not for three wishes, not for a path to paradise, not even for the prestige that nabbing one of its feathers would bring, though I suppose each of these crossed my mind, particularly the last. But mostly I stumbled after this omen that had plopped down in my path on graduation night because the splendid bird had flown across entire nations, while I’d never left this simple harbor. Envy, besides curiosity, drew me onward.

When I caught up to it it was floating idly in the shallows of this same cove, occasionally swallowing up small fish that ventured incautiously near. Maybe I could pluck one feather for luck and remembrance? It paid me no mind as I stripped off my blue and white journeyer’s gown and slipped into the muck and the warm ripples of the bay. I waded slowly through submerged weeds that tangled my ankles and scratched at my legs, and though the heron haughtily pretended to ignore me, as I approached, it somehow receded. Soon the water was at my chest and doubts had begun to filter into my fuzzled brain, and at that moment I felt a gentle tug at my arm.

I pulled away with a shout. In the moonlight a cadaverous figure rose from the bay. Long black hair clung to a pale body about as old as my own, skin pocked with myriad tiny scars and adorned with luminous tattoos. Gill-like folds draped around an eellike neck, and after a moment’s shock I recognized it as a sireno, one of the sea-folk genetically altered  by the ancients to dwell in cities swallowed by the rising oceans. It smiled — he smiled — mouth full of sharp teeth, and in a croaking voice said, “Come.”

Some coast folk call the sirenae monstrous: misshapen caricatures of humanity that infest our waterways, raiding our aquafarms and scuppering our ships. We apprentices took more notice of a different sort of accusation, swapping jokes and lurid yarns about the sea-folks’ sexual depravities (which perhaps included a fair amount of invention on our part). Finally face-to-face, skin-to-skin with a sireno, I understood the allure of the grotesque. No man I’d ever touched had seemed so raw and otherworldly. My fingers tingled with an urge to stroke his earless skull and caress his mottled chest.

I knew the other stories, too: tales of children snatched from the shores, of bathers lured to the deep and ravaged, of sailors dragged overboard and drowned and eaten. Stories to frighten youngsters, yes, but I was not then old enough to entirely disbelieve them. I backed away but he followed, legs ungainly in the shallows, webbed hands extended. The stories say as well that the sea-folk exude a drug to pacify their prey, and perhaps that’s not balderdash, for as he neared me my fears dissolved, and I found myself entranced by his sparkling eyes, his muscular arms, his brawny, husky thighs. Whether behexed by his chemicals or by my own inebriated lust, I hesitated, my heart pounding, and then I took his hand.

As he led me out into the bay, I heard behind me the boom of fireworks and the cheering of partiers. Ships huddled against creaking docks, and among them a few startled curlews whistled their complaints about the nearby pandemonium. But the shore soon grew distant, and ahead past the mouth of the bay lay the vastness of the Gulf, and above it the deep star-dotted inky sky. The ships I helped build sailed in the one, and our ancestors (so the chronicles say) traveled in the other, while for me each breaststroke brought me the farthest I’d ever ventured from home. I followed dreamlike onward, feeling neither fear nor triumph.

The sireno swam easily into the deep, and when I struggled to keep pace, he had me cling to his back and carried us both out, out beyond sight of land, beyond even the lighthouse’s blinking. I clutched him tightly, felt his taut muscles pulling us through the mild surf and the salt spray. My last doubts vanished with the shoreline as we sped toward the horizon. We plowed on, on through the gentle waves, until after ten minutes or then again an hour I found we had stopped, and he was turning to face me as we treaded water.

His prickly hand swept across my cheek and neck. I grasped his scar-speckled shoulder, and we kissed. I tasted the ocean on his lips, felt the sea in his embrace. Buoyed by the water, my legs moved up against his chest, and slowly, gently, he entered me. I winced once yet never wavered from looking into his violet-flecked eyes. As we rocked together in the soft night tides, he suddenly took my forefinger and bit it, hard enough to draw a few drops of blood that trickled down his throat. I swore, but he had quickened his pace, and soon we were rushing together toward satisfaction. As he came he released my finger and howled gutturally at the sky.

An hour or a few minutes passed, and I was floating on my back — the cradling bay beneath me, the Triangle sparkling above — reaching out for the sireno, when he said, “Wait,” and vanished under the surface, down to the depths, the drowned past, as obscure to me as any distant shore, as far from my reach as Arcturus or Spica. I hung alone in the universe, neither down nor up nor far nor home. For a brief moment I attained what Lem tells me is sati: I and the breeze and the waves were one; I drifted unattached from my past, unlinked to my future; every ripple was the sea’s breath, every twinkling star was the night sky winking. I observed the feeling, and it slipped from my grasp.

How long since the sireno left? I shooed away that qualm and lolled in the water, hoping to regain transcendence. Out of habit I searched for the Little Bear, for Polaris low to the horizon. Every child who plays in the gulf learns to follow it home, that if you just head north you’ll reach the coast. But the coast is long, and I’d be alone, naked, unarmed, lost in the wilderness. Without much realizing it I moved to treading water, as if waving my arms could swat away my worries. My finger still bled, and I wondered what its taste might draw. A swarm of suspicions seized me, of plots by the sea-folk, lures and traps and dreadful appetites, vengeance against the unshifted who still could walk the land. My breath grew ragged and my swimming choppy.

A rogue wave splashed my face. I spluttered, coughing up the ounce of water I’d almost swallowed. I had begun to panic, and with the mouthful of brine I was five again, my father at my side, teaching me to swim the year before he went off to die in the last war with Texas. I’d been terrified then, but he’d put his hand on my back, and I heard his baritone voice chanting the old rhyme:

Arms down, won’t drown.

Breathe slow, fears go.

over and over till I floated safely in the shallows and he grinned with pride.

I clutched at that memory, one of the few clear recollections I have of him. I seized it  and lay still in the sea, occasionally raising my head to breathe, imagining my father beside me, letting the fear dissolve.

After a few minutes I regained my composure and sought out the North Star again. Easy enough, but now beneath it I saw the fin of a sharpnose circling me at a distance. Small and not particularly hostile, it didn’t pose much of a threat, except that it might draw the attention of larger sharks — bulls or tigers — which would be troublesome. Apprehension and exhaustion made my decision simple, spurring me toward the coast.

I’d only swum a few meters when I felt the pull on my ankle, not teeth, but a hand. I turned to the sireno full of anger and relief, both of which he seemed oblivious to. I wanted to shout at him, but could summon neither the energy nor the right words. Ignoring my distress, he took my hand and placed on one of my fingers a ring, a glistening gold band that he must have fetched from some trove he’d hidden in the deep. Words fell even further away from me, but he had one: “Wait,” he said again.

He seemed to expect a response, so I nodded as if I’d understood his meaning. At that he grinned, baring his long sharp teeth, and turned so that I could climb onto his back. Exhausted, confused, I lay atop him and let him swim us back to shore, returning to the cove in which we’d met. He dropped me there in the shallows, kissed me once, long and thirstily, and then was gone, vanishing into the dark waters of the bay. I stared out after him wondering what, exactly, had just transpired.

“Wait,” he’d said, and so I had. Days, weeks, a quarter century had passed, twenty-five years of absence in which my life had gone on. I’d worked my way up from journeyer to maestro, and then two years ago, after Yoshikawa-sencho retired, had become head shipwright of the bay. Ma had long since succumbed to the fever, and I’d met Lem when drought forced his own family in from the farmlands. We’d gotten bonded (despite his mother’s pride) and taken in young ones to raise. And then, in a moment of inattention at the riverbank, Siu was gone.

Now I finished my tea as I watched the heron hunt in the shallows. How often had I sat in this cove and gazed at birds who traveled farther in a single day than I’d voyaged my entire life? “For a Mobile man,” Lem once said, “you’re awfully stationary,” and I’d smiled to hide how deeply the old joke stung. Every time one of my boats left the harbor I’d imagine myself aboard it, face to the fore, but every night I’d end up back in the house I was born in. I spat out a stray tea leaf, and the heron cocked its head at me, then snatched up a tiny fish and waded on.

I suppose I could have stalked it for its feathers, as I had on that earlier night, but such pastimes are for kids who still believe the promises of fairy tales. Instead I wadded up the last of my stale vegetables and hocked the ball at the gene-shifted bird. It ignored the splash. I sighed and started repacking my bento box, rehearsing my schedule for the afternoon.

The first figure surfaced with nary a ripple. I’d sighted sea-folk in the cove before, more often in the harbor proper, but rarely so shore-close in full daylight. Not wanting to startle the visitor, I froze; but it stood, brushed back its long, dripping locks, and stared directly at me. The face was weathered and bearded, the chest and arms covered in a multitude of scars, the whole scarcely recognizable until, catching my gaze, he smiled.

“You’re here,” he called, much more eloquent now, but his voice still just as gravelly. He waded toward me through the cordgrass, wet skin sparkling in the midday sun. I stood but neither approached him nor stepped away, opened my mouth but found no words came out. At this he laughed a seal’s bark, harsh and happy.

A year before, the Kukulkan limped back into harbor, sails tattered and masts splintered, a decade after we’d all presumed it sunk. My emotions now mirrored those I saw in the crowd that day: not just the sulky teen who greeted her resurrected mother with unrestrained cries of joy, but also the sudden un-widow who stood in mute anguish beside her second husband, their babe bawling at her breast. Half a lifetime of idle daydreams hadn’t, in the end, prepared me for this at all.

Pure foolishness, pining for sea-folk, so all the folktales say; but those who write the stories are those who stayed behind. What do they know of dwelling among the restless tides, or penetrating the lightless deep? And besides, fond as I am of the nomads, truly I yearned for only this one, the apparition I met long ago. Now here he stood, beaming as I trembled.

I tugged at my beard. Lunchtime was over. Back in town my timber supplier awaited my return, no doubt bearing more bad news about the pine borer infestation; and Colonel Jin would probably storm in again today to demand another warship we hadn’t the material for. The Texans threatened new blockades and the summer forecast promised drought. And I’d told Lem I’d stop in at the florist to order lilies to lay on Siu’s grave next week. My schedule didn’t allow for mid-day dalliances.

Yet I discovered I was undressing. Discarding my checked shirt and overalls in the brush, I schlurped through the muck into the chilly bay. The weeds fondled my thighs and the skitterbugs darted in my wake. The clanging alarm of a distant fire-wagon echoed through the woods — the brigade wasn’t headed toward the mill, surely? I briefly turned back toward the city, but then the sireno took my hand in his and tugged me close. He kissed me, and the commotion faded away.

When I drew apart a minute later, I saw that company had joined us in the bay: behind him emerged a stout, jewel-braided sirena with skin even darker than mine; a beardless, swaggering adolescent who clutched a mid-size fishing spear by its freshly-hewn shaft; and an older, one-armed sireno riding herd over two shy toddlers who poked their heads above the surface, eyes goggling at my appearance. “My kin,” he said, his arm wrapped around me. “A few of them. Come, mix your blood with ours.” And he escorted me out to meet them.

The teen took two fierce steps through the water toward me, but the sirena caught the child by the shoulder and gave a shake of her head and a half-smile. Cross, the teen relented. The sirena untangled the youngster’s hair for a moment until the child remembered its petulance and swam apart. At my approach the two little ones dove behind their guardian, reminding me so much of how our twins greeted strangers that I halted abruptly, slipping a bit in the breast-deep water.

The twins! I was supposed to pick up some calamine lotion, now they’d made it through the worst of the fever and just had the rashes. A few nights last week had been particularly worrisome. Siu’s death had struck us hard, but to have lost all three children would have broken Lem for certain. Yet here I was, on the verge of abandoning them all. I yanked myself from the sireno’s grasp. He looked at me, perplexed and hurt.

The bay was quiet then. I heard no gulls call nor a single sandpiper wheet, just the tide lightly lapping. The speck of a freighter bound for Yucatán disappeared south across the horizon, and I recalled being told that sea-folk spend their winters there, carousing in the bahías turquesas and lolling on the white sand beaches. Back at the mill the afternoon whistle blew, shrill but distant, no louder than a piping plover. Still, it roused the heron, who took to the air with a raucous squawk.

The sireno echoed it with his laugh. “Garza knows to flee the song of dirt-folk,” he said as the gaudy bird circled us twice and headed out to sea. “That melody holds you fast and grinds you to dust.” The sireno held out his hand again, smiling that toothy grin, beckoning. The rest of his pack had closed rank behind him, the little ones bobbing and darting between the others. “I scouted your shores while I gathered my tribe. I saw how your cities drain your people of joy. I even spotted you, now and then, sitting seaside, dreaming of escape. Break free of your net, mud-strider, and come with us.”

The sirena, hands full with one of the little ones, exchanged whispers with the graybeard as they sized me up and smiled at some private joke. Then, graciously, she nodded. Meanwhile the teen peered over my shoulder at the woods and the land beyond, eyes blazing with the pull of adventure thoroughly mixed with doubt and fear. Despite our differences, I felt the comfort of this pack and reached out for the sireno’s hand.

His toxins had sedated me. His familia had charmed me. But I found there was a vast gulf between the midnight passions of a young man and the daytime responsibilities of a middle-aged shipwright. Squeezing the sireno’s hand once, I pressed the gold ring into it, then turned my back and waded resolutely back toward shore. I heard a brief burst of furious, incomprehensible chatter behind me, but I refused to turn around. My eyes were wet, though not with mist.

I felt a tug on my ankle, and I hesitated. What opportunities, what adventures lay just behind me, waiting only for my assent? But then I realized it was only weeds in the shallows that held me, and I clambered onto land, shaking the seawater from my brown arms and hairy chest.

There was a rustle of branches at the edge of the cove, enough noise to spook a dozen terns to flight, and the new apprentice broke through, muttering uninspired curses. “Rabi-sencho,” he called at last. “You’re late for the meeting.” He peered down his nose at me as I sloshed through the muck, then looked over my shoulder at the bay. “Enjoy your dip?”

I turned. Not only the terns had fled. The sireno and his kin had vanished, traceless in the sea. As the bullfrogs found their voices again and croaked farewells, I pulled on my clothes — judging by his grimaces, much too slowly for the mayor’s cousin’s taste. Once I had dressed, he all but dragged me to the boardwalk, imperious and impertinent as he marched me back into captivity.

That spring night, as I sat on the back porch watching the twins playing outside for the first time in a week, Lem took my hand in his and gently rubbed the emptiness that the sireno’s ring had left. The evening breeze slipped between us. He pecked me on the cheek as the children squealed and the fireflies glimmered, and in that moment the gulf felt very far away.

This one is no different. And it’s all true. And it’s not happy.

Not mostly, anyway.

It has its moments.

Early one morning, at my restaurant in Denver, a metal box arrived in a metal truck, escorted by guards. They carried assault rifles, like they thought they might have to defend themselves against the bell peppers we kept in the fridge. Or the turmeric.

They checked the kitchen out to make sure it was secure. They checked the empty dining room.

Someone gave a signal. Unarmed men in grey jumpsuits brought the box inside.

It was big. We gave them space. They had rigged the box with antigravity clamps, which they took with them when they left, which meant I had to hire someone else to lug it out of there later.

I signed my name on a tablet, and on their way out one of the guards, under her breath, called me a fairy.

I grinned at her and winked. Life is short.

And when they were gone it was me, the box, Antoine, and Zaid, my chef de cuisine in Denver. He didn’t know what was going on, because I hadn’t told him anything, except that he should close the joint for a day so we could have a meeting.

When the army departed, the three of us stood back and watched the box for a minute.

“Does anyone have a crowbar?” Antoine asked, sipping a glass of beer.

Zaid laughed. We couldn’t have opened that box with a crowbar. We couldn’t have sprung it with a Howitzer.

The box was advanced. State-of-the-art. It had traveled hundreds of light-years to get there, and they’d made the box so that none of the contents would get knocked around when the speed they were moving scrambled the atoms of everything onboard the spacecraft that carried it.

I don’t know what the box was made of—some kind of compound. Steel and titanium plus nine things I never heard of.

We didn’t know how to open it. They had left no instructions.

Antoine stood back and watched as Zaid and I pawed the thing over, looking for a way to get it open.

Zaid found a button and pressed it.

The box whirred. It whooshed. I felt air come out of a vent on one side. The top detached, and it took all three of us to lift it away.

Mist poured out. When it cleared enough so we could see, we found the box was lined with some kind of foam, containers pressed into it to keep them safe.

With a gloved hand Antoine reached in through the mist and pulled out a glass jar of what looked, from where I stood, like rocks.

“What is that?” asked Zaid. “It looks like gravel.”

“It’s not gravel,” Antoine said. “The label says it’s gnorsalt.”

He set the jar on a steel table.

“How much do you know about this stuff?” Zaid asked.

“Not much,” I said. “I’m not supposed to even have it.”

Antoine removed his glove and found the jar was okay to touch.

I said, “I only have this stuff because I know a guy.”

“What guy?”

“He’s a higher-up with the Expeditionary Corps. The Interstellar Expeditionary Corps.”

“I thought all they did was strip gold off asteroids.”

Antoine unscrewed the jar’s lid like it was a bomb that might go off.

“That is what they do,” I said. “But they reached the Sariel system last year. You heard about that, right?”

“No.”

“It was all over the news, Zaid.”

“I don’t watch the news. I work, I sleep, and I come back to work. I don’t have time for news.”

“You should start making time for it. The Corps found the stuff in this box on Sariel III. There are eighteen freighters full of it headed our way. They’re burning out their hyperdrives, to get here as fast as they can. And they’ll go back for more, and a lot of people are going to make a fortune off of it.”

“Off of gravel?”

“It’s not gravel, Zaid. It’s food.”

“It’s an ingredient,” said Antoine. “One that no one on Earth has had before. One that came from another planet, far away.”

I said, “The guy who got me this box says the stuff in it is going to change the way we eat. Totally and irreversibly. And I paid a lot of money so we could get this box early.”

“Before the freighters get here?”

“That’s right.”

“Why not wait for the freighters?”

“Because, my friend, if we get a little of it in advance, we can learn what it is. What it’s about. We can experiment.”

“And that means,” added Antoine, who reached into the jar with tongs, “we can learn to make a whole range of dishes out of what’s in this box before anyone else gets their hands on it.”

I said, “In three months, those freighters will reenter Earth’s orbit. And Hampton Sherlock, and Sally Conroy, and Dallas fucking Everhart will be in their billion-dollar test kitchens, scrambling to fuse whatever’s on the freighters with the food we’ve always had on Earth.

“They’ll do exactly what we’re doing right now. But it will be too late.

“They won’t know it, but by the time they’ve figured out what the rocks in that jar can do, we’ll be rolling out a line of prepared meals and exclusive dishes at my restaurants.

“And when we start making money off of that, I’ll open more restaurants. It’ll be beautiful. We’ll be rich.”

Zaid looked stunned.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“ I thought you were going to fire me.”

“What?”

“When you told me to close the restaurant.”

“Oh.” I shook my head. “No, Zaid, this is not about you. Jesus, not everything is about you!”

“I didn’t say everything was about me. How often do we close for no reason? And you tell me to come in anyway? I was sure I was getting shitcanned. I spent last night updating my resume.”

“Zaid.” I rubbed my eyes. “Come on.”

“You guys,” said Antoine. “Look.”

We looked.

He held the gnorsalt up to the light. It was crystalline, like quartz. And when we looked closely, we could see colors swirling through it like oil on a puddle.

“What is that about?” asked Zaid.

“No idea,” said Antoine. “I wonder what it tastes like.”

He dropped the gnorsalt from the tongs into his hand.

He took the rock in his other hand, and licked his palm where the rock had been.

“It tastes like salt.”

I said, “Is that what it is? Big salt?”

Zaid said, “I can’t believe you tasted that. It’s from outer space.”

I went to the jar, pulled out a rock with my bare fingers, licked it.

“Fucking hell,” I said. “It is salt.”

“It isn’t salt,” said Antoine. “Salt doesn’t have this coloration.”

“It’s rainbow salt.”

Antoine lay the gnorsalt rock on a cutting board and banged it with a mallet. It broke.

Now we had a big piece of rainbow salt that was broken into smaller bits. Like regular salt, only colorful.

“So far,” Zaid said, “this is underwhelming.”

“Thank you, Zaid,” said Antoine. “Let us not draw conclusions yet.”

He got a pan from the rack above his head, put a burner under it, and swept that broken gnorsalt into the pan.

It melted as soon as it was warm. It turned to a viscous, cloudy liquid.

I said, “That was quick.”

It started to steam, and when it did it filled the room with a smell like nothing I’d smelled before.

Antoine tasted the liquid, now, and said, “It doesn’t taste like it did.”

I tried it myself. “It sure doesn’t.”

“What’s it taste like?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was like the first time I had a glass of wine. I couldn’t have described it, not until I’d had more, and I had to have a lot more before I knew if I liked it or not.

I said, “I’m not sure I’ll be recouping my investment.”

Antoine was writing in one of the black notebooks he kept in his pocket at all times. “It’s too soon to say such things,” he said. “We have time to experiment.”

“What else is in the box?” asked Zaid.

“Freigenberries,” Antoine said, pulling out another jar.

“Do you think,” Zaid said, “they tested these things? Are they totally safe?”

I said, “My guy said they are.”

“You trust him?”

“As much as I trust anybody. Present company excluded.”

“Well,” Zaid said. “It’s the military, right? Who are handling this? They’re in charge of it?”

“Sure, it’s the military.” I took a bite of the plump freigenberry Antoine sliced open, so that its smell, like edible asphalt, filled the kitchen. “That’s a weird berry. But you know how it is. It’s not just the military, it’s the military in service of capital. Like it says in the New Constitution.”

“And what does it say there?”

“I don’t have a copy right here. This thing tastes nothing like it smells.”

“Good for salads,” said Antoine, munching his half of the berry. “Toss it with arugula?”

“Maybe. Not the most versatile thing.”

“You’re so negative.”

“I’m only saying,” Zaid said, “that even if you include capital among the forces that have brought these new things to us, they don’t exactly have a record of keeping the best interests of ordinary citizens in mind.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked, holding up a freigenberry. “You think it’s going to bite you?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have a bad feeling about it.”

“How about you, Antoine?”

He didn’t answer. He was focused. He was looking in the box for the next new thing.

I could have fired a gun in the air, and I doubt he would have heard it.

He pulled a jar of black liquid from the space box. It was full of Zösch.

Everyone remembers the first time they saw Zösch. And we were some of the first human beings ever to see that black slime that ran like molasses and tasted nothing like molasses.

I was hoping it would taste good. Because so far none of the things in that box were worth the price I’d paid.

“You want to do the honors this time?” asked Antoine, tilting the jar so the Zösch sloughed to one side.

I took a long spoon, said, “What the hell, right?” dipped the spoon in the Zösch, and tried it for myself.

And I ran to the sink and spat it right back out.

I had not tasted anything so bitter in my life. And the consistency! It was thick, but it was grainy, and something about it made me think of butter.

Antoine tried it for himself.

He was utterly unfazed.

He said later my reaction made him think it would be worse than it was, so he was prepared—but really I think the guy was a mutant. I think nothing fazed him because it was like he wasn’t really living in his body. It was like he controlled it from someplace far away.

Zaid watched the Zösch jar like it might leap up and bite him, which we weren’t sure it wasn’t going to do.

“This is not good,” I said.

“It’s not bad,” said Antoine.

“The fuck it’s not. This is a disaster.”

He said, “Look.” And he got to work.

He tore another skillet off the rack above his head, laid it on the stove, poured avocado oil, diced a red onion in seconds flat, and tossed it in.

We had the best red onions in the world at that place. A guy was growing them upstate and they were unreal.

I was the one who discovered him. I don’t know where he is now. Counting his money full-time, I bet.

Into the pan went some minced garlic and roughly chopped chanterelles.

I watched Antoine with my arms folded. Zaid kept eyeing that jar of Zösch.

Half a minute ticked by. Antoine pulled a spoonful of Zösch from the jar and poured it over what was in the pan.

I’d never seen anything quite like what happened then: the Zösch melted into the mushrooms, like it was set to attack. Like its mission was to coat the mushrooms. A liquid mushroom blanket.

“What did that stuff just do?” asked Zaid.

“I don’t know,” laughed Antoine.

He could laugh. It wasn’t his money that had been thrown after this disaster.

Antoine plated on three plates whatever it was he’d made.

All at once, the three of us took a bite.

And there are things I have no words for, things that language can’t describe, at least not when I’m the one wielding it. Like the first time I ever had a kalamata olive. And the last time I ate pork loin, at a time when such a thing was scarce, when pigs were on the edge of being extinct. I paid $10,000 for that pork loin.

Zösch on its own was an abomination. But if you put it with something else, or a couple of other things, they combined to make something altogether new, unlike anything we’d had before. It would taste something like what you mixed it with, but there was a new element, too, that you couldn’t taste in Zösch on its own. It seemed to come from nowhere.

After a few more experiments, we learned you couldn’t predict what anything with Zösch in it would taste like.

It was fascinating. Unprecedented. Otherworldly—literally. And while I was hung up on how much money I’d spent acquiring the stuff, Antoine was fully absorbed. He took many pages of notes in his black notebook.

We tried cooking Zösch with potatoes, with seitan, with tofu, with rice. We baked Zösch cornbread, and drizzled Zösch over broccoli.

What we made tasted like those things, but it tasted like nothing else, too.

Now on his fourth glass of wine, Zaid said, “This isn’t right.”

I said, “What’s not right?”

“It’s too good. Nothing should taste this good.”

I laughed. Antoine laughed.

But Zaid was serious. He said again, “It isn’t right.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s right,” I said. “This is it, there’s no going back. And I think maybe we’re going to be rich.”

Antoine suggested we mix Zösch with some bourbon.

I never would have thought bourbon could get better than it was already. I mean, who the hell wants to try and fix bourbon?

Zösch does. That’s who.

And within a half-second of coming into contact with bourbon, Zösch did it. It fixed it. And it was never even broken in the first place.

We spent the next month perfecting the dishes that used the new foods.

We were in no hurry. We weren’t yet allowed to serve the Sariel-infused dishes to anyone.

We would be, soon. Maybe if the new foods had arrived in, I don’t know, 2071, when bureaucrats ruled the land, it would have taken longer to cut through the red tape. They’d have run endless tests and made sure only the biggest players in the game had access to the new ingredients. No advance shipments for the enterprising, well-connected few; no box of Zösch and a dozen other things.

We spent that month in the kitchen in Denver, after hours. Antoine and I stayed in our Denver loft, blasting the AC. It was the middle of spring, and it was hot.

But that kitchen was the perfect place to fool around with the Sariel foods. And when we were done, we had created a new cuisine: interplanetary fusion.

We were ambitious. A little corny, too.

We represented every Earth cuisine we could do justice to with what we had. We made black bean and yakkon tacos, and the world’s first slipwort gnocchi. We invented ragapepper hummus, gnaxxji salads, and cocktails garnished with porp zest.

But the finest dishes we created were those that used Zösch. Stuffed peppers with Zösch. Scrambled tofu with Zösch. Zösch crepes, Chile Con Zösch, Petit Pois with Zösch.

Zösch, we found, adapted to what it was served with. It was the first edible thing we’d encountered that could change what it tasted like, altering its own flavor somehow. Pour it on a sundae and it was better than chocolate syrup. Dump it onto mashed potatoes and it was better than gravy, in ways it would take you a year to put into words.

It’s true. Food critics lost their minds when we rolled these things out.

We stayed up all night, some nights, getting things right. By the time we could legally serve all the young foods, a time when every restaurant but ours was getting their first taste of them, we had it figured out. We had engineered a new way of preparing and serving meals.

We were the only ones who had this head start. We couldn’t fail. We couldn’t lose.

And of course I know now that I should have listened, the night Antoine came in with his notebook open and said he had something to show me.

“I’ve been experimenting with Zösch,” he said.

“Experimenting? What kind of experimenting?”

“Nothing dramatic. I’m not Victor Frankenstein.”

“It must be pretty serious, if you’re coming to me with that look on your face.”

He sat beside me on the couch, where I was drinking a scotch and Zösch on the rocks and watching the news. He held out his notebook for me to see.

“Antoine,” I said. “I can’t read your handwriting. Just tell me what’s up.”

“Okay.” He leafed through his notes.

I rolled my eyes. I took a drink.

“You were with me,” he said, “when we learned that Zösch replicates itself.”

“I was. I remember.”

“When you leave it in the dark, it increases in quantity without outside influence.”

“Yes,” I said into my glass. “I did not forget.”

“I may have been wrong, when I determined why it was doing that. And I think the scientists who’ve studied Zösch are wrong about what it is.”

“You think you know better? How can that many people be wrong?”

“The same reason they could be wrong about all of the things they were wrong about for so long. The same reason it took so many centuries to develop the theory of evolution. Based on the evidence I have gathered the last few days, I have reason to believe Zösch is alive.”

“Have you lost your mind? I’ve looked at that shit under a microscope. It’s not alive.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s alive, because it doesn’t look like any living thing we’ve seen before.”

“It’s crystals. That’s all it is. How could it be alive?”

I think it’s a form of life that’s new to us. Of another nature. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t eat, it doesn’t meet our preconceptions of what life must be. All it has in common with us is that it reproduces. And we didn’t recognize it as reproduction because it doesn’t look like reproduction. Not as we have known it.”

“Antoine, don’t you think someone else would have noticed this aside from you? I mean, a lot of people have studied this already. They’re really smart.”

“I doubt I’m the only one to make this discovery. Others must have learned of it as well.”

“What, then? They’re keeping quiet about it?”

He shrugged. He nodded.

“Bullshit.”

“Think about it. No one wants to eat complex organisms anymore. Since all the livestock died off, and we have no meat we can eat, people have no appetite for creatures that can feel pain. They’ve lost the stomach for it.”

“And you think Zösch is alive and that it can feel?”

“I can walk you through my findings.”

“Please don’t call them that.”

“We have to pause production on everything that has Zösch in it until we learn more.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I’m telling you.” He put his hand on my arm. “This is serious.”

“You know what? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the most serious thing in the history of serious things. But maybe I’m not a serious enough guy to halt production of all the prepared foods that are about to hit the market, and to not serve the stuff at my restaurants, which I’ve been planning for months. Maybe I’m not serious enough to lose millions of dollars.”

Antoine looked at me with sad eyes.

I hated his sad eyes.

“It’s too late for this,” I said. “You should have come to me sooner.”

“I tried to come to you with this. Three times.”

“You didn’t try hard enough. And if Zösch is alive, and can think and feel—which I assure you is not the case—then why don’t you work on a way I can talk to it? Because I want to thank it for being so goddamn delicious.”

I downed the rest of my scotch and Zösch.

Business boomed. I opened more restaurants. I sold frozen dinners at supermarkets with the Sariel ingredients inside.

A lot of people hesitated, at first, when it came to trying the new foods. But when they heard how good they were they got over it. We spent a fortune on advertising, to make sure everyone heard about it.

We sold literal tons of Zösch syrup. I don’t know how many tons. It was our bestselling product: Zösch, vinegar, salt, aminos, and I won’t say what else we put in it. Trade secret.

I was busier than ever, traveling to one city then another, opening a new restaurant, meeting with a food distributor, getting Zösch syrup served in the schools alongside ketchup and mustard, proving to the right people it had all the nutrition you could ask for.

At my restaurant in Washington, DC, we served the king of Saudi Arabia himself. When he had his first taste of bread dipped in olive oil, with pepper, gnorsalt, and a dash of Zösch, he said he’d never had anything like it before in his life.

I stood before him in my spotless, white apron, and fought back tears.

The next time Antoine called, his voice didn’t sound right.

I hadn’t heard from him in weeks, hadn’t seen him in months.

He said, “You need to come home.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m busy.”

“I’ve been busy, too.”

“Doing what?”

“Come home and see.”

“Antoine.”

“Now. You need to come home right now.”

He hung up.

Sure I’d go home. But I wasn’t in a hurry to get there. I had another day of helping to set things up at our new place in St. Louis. Someone else could have handled it, sure, but if my name’s about to be put on something I want to make sure it’s right. It’s called quality control.

When I went back to the hotel that night, I undressed and lit a joint, and Zaid called. He said there was a problem in Denver.

“What kind of problem? Why aren’t you handling it?”

“It’s a customer.”

He switched on the hologram and appeared in my bedroom. I’d forgotten to set it to Do Not Disturb. I was sitting up in bed, smoking, naked.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry, boss.”

I didn’t cover myself.

“What’s going on?”

“Somebody came in a little while ago. Some lady? She said her husband’s in the ICU. He can’t move. His eyes are open, but he won’t talk or anything. She said the doctors said it’s not a stroke. She said they don’t know what it is. She said there must be something in the food he ate. The alien food. He left here, I don’t know, three hours ago?”

“All right. How serious is this?”

“Pretty serious. She was freaked out.”

“I’m not asking how serious she was. I’m asking if she had a lawyer with her.”

“I don’t think she had time to hire a lawyer.”

“All right, then. If she comes back with one, you know who to call.”

I hung up. I called the head of my legal team, made sure our people were briefed and ready. If that woman came back, with or without counsel, I’d have half a dozen of my guys there as holograms, to send her reeling back to her idiot husband.

How was I supposed to know she wasn’t blaming us for his stroke because she wanted money? I thought she was making it up. I thought she might not even have a husband.

Antoine blinked into the room. Another hologram.

“Holy shit,” I said, taking a drag, “it’s a convention in here.”

“Why aren’t you home?” he said. “You said you were coming back.”

He looked tired. And since I’d gone away, he’d been growing his beard, skipping haircuts, and otherwise losing his grip on his appearance. He looked like he’d been on a frontier, somewhere.

I thought for a second. “That’s right,” I said. “I did say I was coming back.”

“Summon a chopper. Get out here.”

“I can’t. Something’s up in Denver. Zaid just called.”

“Did someone who ate Zösch get paralyzed? Like they had a stroke?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Don’t go to Zaid. You need to get here now. I’ll tell you everything.”

He hung up on me again.

Hours later, stoned and airsick from a rough chopper ride, I found Antoine in our kitchen, though it was hard to find him in our kitchen.

I wasn’t sure it even was a kitchen anymore.

He had transformed it. He had filled it with beakers and vials, burners and pipettes. Metal rods attached to wires stuck out of jars of Zösch. The wires ran to machines, and other wires fed from the machines into what once was a soundboard, but which Antoine had converted to something I could never have made sense of on my own.

“Antoine,” I said, “what’s going on here?”

He stood. He’d been crouched behind one of the machines.

I didn’t know what the machine was—some kind of computer from long ago, when computers were big enough to crouch behind. I don’t know why he needed that.

His beard looked worse in person than it had as a hologram. He had a look in his eyes I didn’t like.

“You took your time getting here,” he said.

“I was busy.”

He scoffed.

“You know who pays for this house, don’t you?”

“Come look at this.”

“I pay for this house. Come look at what?”

“Put your hand here.” He pointed to a metal cylinder he’d mounted vertically so that it rose out of what had once been my stove. I followed the wires sticking from it with my eyes and saw that they ran from machine to machine to a jar of Zösch.

“Why should I put my hand there?”

He took me by the arm and put my hand on it himself.

I felt an electric shock. Or something like an electric shock.

It didn’t hurt. It was gentle. The shock ran in waves through my hand, up my arm.

I knew at once why Antoine had that look in his eyes. He’d been spending all his time lately with this electric current running through him.

How did I know that?

I took my hand off the cylinder.

“What did they say?”

“What did who say?”

“Zösch. They spoke to you.”

“Have you lost your mind? No one said anything. Your machine shocked the shit out of me.”

He grabbed my arm again and put my hand back on the cylinder.

He was quick. I didn’t think to pull away.

And I knew as soon as I felt that shock again that Antoine was right.

They were telling me he was right.

I let go again.

“We are in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We are.”

How was I supposed to know that what looked like space gravy—and was handed over to us by the authorities to serve at restaurants—was a vast assemblage of cells that worked together to solve problems and make decisions? That even when those cells spread across the surface of the Earth, they could think like we can, only better? That the reason complex intelligent life never evolved on Sariel III was that the planet was covered already with simple intelligent life—life that was so smart it could prevent anything that could threaten it from ever evolving there?

I know all of this because I’d placed my hand on that machine. I touched it for two seconds, and I learned all of that.

Yes. I know. Antoine alerted me to the likelihood that the Zösch were alive before that point. I could have listened to him then.

But he never said anything about them being smart. He never said they might be choosing to adapt their taste to how other foods tasted, rearranging their molecular structure so more of us would want to eat them.

And why were they doing that?

I asked Antoine that question, after I was done throwing up in the sink, which was a reaction to what I’d learned from my first couple of shocks.

He said, “You want to know why they do what they do. Don’t you want to know how I learned to talk to it?”

“Later,” I said. “Just tell me what they want.”

“They don’t want anything. They don’t know what it means to want.”

“Dear God!”

“They’re beautiful creatures.”

I clutched the metal cylinder again.

No words passed between me and Zösch. They didn’t use words. But I knew as I spoke to Zösch that I was talking with all of Zösch. The metal handle was wired to one jar, but through it I could reach the whole, vast being.

They said, without having to say it, that they were everywhere, now—not only in the foods we’d put it in, and not only in the bodies of the people who’d eaten that food.

They had passed through human bodies and spread from sewers to waterways. They had reached into the trenches that run across the floors of our oceans, where humans can’t go. Zösch had embedded itself in the world, like microplastics before them. They had done it fast, and we couldn’t breed new bacteria to eat it, like we did with microplastics. Zösch were too smart for that.

They had done the same thing on Sariel III. Their home planet. Now here they were.

When the Corps discovered Zösch, they thought they were nothing more than another inert substance, confined to the pools of black slime they found them in. But there was nothing inert about it, and bits of Zösch were everywhere you couldn’t see them, not just in those pools. They were in the water, in the air, in other plants, and in the clouds. They saw, felt, tasted everything. They were in control. They didn’t show up in the Corps’ analyses of water and soil because they knew how to outsmart their instruments, how to hide from us.

While Zösch explored the Earth, they reproduced constantly. In the dark places—in pipes and water treatment plants, rivers, lakes, and oceans—they thrived and spread farther than anything.

When they described to me how they were growing, I could feel the whole of Zösch growing. They conveyed the information to me in the form of sheer sensations. I could feel all that they said, the knowledge running through me faster than words. My body felt like an instrument Zösch was learning how to play.

I let the metal handle go. I left the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Antoine asked.

“I’m calling my lawyer.”

But I didn’t call him first. I called the CEO of my company.

She asked if there was a problem, and for a second it was hard to answer. I realized why Antoine had that look in his eyes, why something about him seemed off. Talking to Zösch, even for a moment, made it hard to form words.

“Shut everything down,” I said. “It’s all over.”

She asked me to explain.

I said, “Zösch are alive.”

After a pause, she said, “Could you slow down? Explain what’s going on?”

“No. Call the restaurant managers, call the distributors of our microwave dinners—”

“They’re not microwave dinners.”

“Whatever the fuck they are, don’t let one more of them get sold.”

“I can’t do that,” she sighed. “It’ll ruin us.”

“We’re already ruined. That’s the point.”

I hung up and called the lead lawyer. I briefed him on the situation. It was all hands on deck.

I went back into what used to be my kitchen. I pulled up a stool, and while Antoine asked what I was going to do, I put both my hands around the handle of the device, the direct line to Zösch.

I don’t know how I knew how to talk back to the Zösch, how I made meaning by pressing on a metal thing. Somehow, though, the thoughts in my head traveled down my arm and through my hand to meet them.

I told them I was sorry I had eaten so many of them.

They didn’t understand what I meant. They didn’t comprehend Sorry.

And they didn’t think they had been wronged. They thought they had consumed us, not the other way around.

I had an image in my head of eating a pumpkin and finding myself growing out of the inside wall of a vast pumpkin.

Electric thoughts ran down my arm and I knew what Antoine knew. That the husband of the woman in Denver was an experiment. Others had suffered the same fate since then, people we hadn’t yet heard about.

Zösch weren’t cruel. They were only running tests. They wanted to see how our bodies would respond to stimuli.

We were in their test kitchen, now—only Zösch didn’t want to eat us. They had no need for that. They didn’t eat.

I didn’t know why they did what they did. I asked them not to do it, but I don’t think they understood.

I spent a long time pleading with Zösch to spare us, to not give more people strokes. I tried to make them understand.

I had a hard time paying attention to what was going on in the room while I spoke to Zösch—it was like my mind was being split in two—but I knew my phone was blowing up. I knew what it was about. Zösch told me they were running more tests on people. The calls must have been about those who’d had strokes as a result.

I had to do something. Didn’t I?

I mean, I’d done some awful things in my life. I’d cheated on Antoine, cut corners with the health department, embezzled money—and one time, long ago, I broke a young man’s heart. I felt nothing when I did it, and wondered for the first time—not for the last time—if everyone else had something in them that was missing from me. Something that made them good.

But minds were blinking out, one by one, all over the world. Maybe I have no heart, but I had to do something about that.

I asked Zösch if they were in me. If they circulated in my system.

They didn’t understand the concept of Me.

I knew I had to make them understand it, if I was to get anywhere. Zösch had to realize that human beings weren’t one mass organism with a shared intelligence that could spread across the world and still think as one.

I knew from the way the electric shocks felt that Zösch had no sense of time like we had, that they had no sense of history. Their experience was unified. When all your constituent parts, all the little selves that make up your species, are bound together, then when one of those selves dies it’s like shedding skin cells. It’s nothing.

Zösch knew their history as a constant present. There was no past. Everything was now.

I thought the way to tell Zösch that one life was precious to us, that it meant something it didn’t mean to Zösch, would be to tell them a piece of our history. And so I told them about something Antoine and I had talked about, not long after we’d opened the box and seen Zösch for the first time.

We talked about how this wasn’t the first time something like it had happened before, how we were repeating a drama that had played out centuries before we were born.

Way back in the middle of our second millennium—I explained to Zösch without using words—if you lived in Africa or the Middle East, Europe or Asia, you had no clue what was growing on the other side of the world. You’d never seen a tomato. You hadn’t heard of corn. And when those things started showing up at harbors?

Imagine it.

Imagine what Italian food must have looked like before they had tomato sauce. They didn’t even have noodles for the longest time. Those came from China.

No spaghetti. No ziti. No lasagna as we know it.

Can you imagine going to an Italian restaurant that didn’t serve those things? What would you order?

Garlic bread. That’s it!

Now imagine you’re an Italian chef in 1492 AD. You’re at the top of your game, you know everything there is to know about feta and artichokes—I almost said zucchini, but those came from Central America. Potatoes were imported from Peru.

But you’re the best of the best, the master of carrots and chicken. And then out of nowhere this jackass comes back from his suicide trip across the Atlantic with a round, red thing that everyone thinks is a vegetable but is really a fruit.

You can slice it, crush it, chop it. It’s like nothing anyone’s eaten before. And everybody wants to put it in everything.

It’s the tomato.

Huzzah, shithead! If you don’t figure out what to do with it fast, you’ll be out of a fucking job.

You do the best you can. You get a handful of those little guys, you see what you can do.

And before long, you’ve got the world’s first pizza. And some beautiful maniac down the street makes a plate of spaghetti with meatballs.

And you change the course of history. You don’t conquer any nations. You’re not Julius Caesar. You haven’t discovered electricity.

You’ve done something bigger than that. You’ve changed what people put in their mouths. You’ve given them something new to crave, something to look forward to eating after a long day’s work, something that a year before then no one on your continent had ever even smelled.

You’ve changed how they sustain themselves, how they put nutrients into their bodies and one another’s bodies. You’ve introduced to the world a new way for people to show they love one another. You’ve expanded the vocabulary of human relationships.

That is what cooking is about. That is what I have devoted my life to.

I didn’t even realize that myself, until I told it to Zösch. I’d never had to formulate the thought before. But it was true.

And Zösch seemed to know it was true.

Something in what I told it made it understand what it was doing to us, that it was destroying the bodies, minds, and lives of individual people, and that those people and their lives were precious to us.

It worked. I felt, through that metal handle, that everything Zösch had been doing was paused.

I had to act fast.

Zösch said they couldn’t halt what they were doing forever. They said they had to carry on with their work.

I asked how many people they needed for their experiments.

They still hadn’t quite wrapped their collective so-called mind around the basis for that question. The sense we have of being individuals. Our identities, and the lives we lead apart from one another.

But after some time passed, I understood that Zösch had made quick progress on this. Their answer was that they didn’t need more than one person. One of us would suffice. Now that they realized we were all different people, or that we thought we were all different people, and not just a vast species, like themselves, they said they could work on just one living body, not thousands.

And so, after a split-second of hard thought, I did what anyone would do.

Or, not anyone.

Actually, a lot of people wouldn’t have done what I did then.

A lot of chefs wouldn’t have done it. They’re egomaniacs.

I may, in fact, have been the only chef of my standing who would act as I did in that moment.

I offered myself to Zösch. I asked if they would settle for experimenting only on me. They could take my mind away, and use it for what they needed, if it meant they could spare everyone else.

The answer came back in an instant.

Zösch agreed to my proposal. They said okay.

That was when my grip on the handle began to relax at last. I began to be aware again of what was happening in the room.

My hand was stiff. My arm, too.

Morning light shone through the kitchen window, which meant I’d been there at the stove for at least an hour. My phone was still buzzing on the counter. The first thing I wondered was how its battery hadn’t died. It was low when I got there.

Any second now, I would leave my body. Zösch would take over. I’d be there, but I would be gone.

I wondered what it would be like. To be alive but unable to move. To be locked in myself until I died.

I wondered what was taking Zösch so long.

That was when I saw Antoine lying on the floor. And I knew at once what had taken place.

I should have known what would happen. I wish I had known.

Zösch had not yet mastered the concept of individual human beings. They were still getting the hang of human experience.

When I offered myself to Zösch, and said they could take me as their living cadaver, their perpetual test subject, they still didn’t quite know the difference between me and Antoine. They couldn’t tell us apart, didn’t fully know what apart in this case even meant.

They had mistaken him for me. They had thought they were still talking to him.

He was gone before his body hit the floor.

Nothing that’s happened since then has mattered much to me. Not the bankruptcy, not the foreclosures, not the testimony I gave before Congress, where I was so drunk I could barely sit upright.

There may have been several of those. I don’t remember and I haven’t checked.

After I lost Antoine, I lived in a fog.

Things got a lot worse before they got good again. I lost everything before I got back some of it.

It took time for everyone to realize the wave of Zösch strokes had halted for good. All they knew was that a lot of people had eaten Sariel food and gotten sick, that more of them could start getting sick at any time, and that it was my fault.

Or, rather, they thought it was my fault, when really it was the fault of the Interstellar Expeditionary Corps. They were the ones who had brought Zösch to Earth, not me. I’ve never even been in space. I have no interest in going. I hear the food is awful.

But I can’t blame people for blaming me for how Zösch took their loved ones away. I did, after all, ensure that everyone in the world associated Zösch with me. I had hired a marketing team to make that happen.

I got hate mail, I got death threats. I went into hiding, and three times I tried to kill myself.

I was in a bad place. Zaid helped me out of it. Hooray for Zaid.

It worked out, in the end. A few months after Antoine’s mind went dark, and the light left his eyes, but he kept on breathing, Zösch decided it was in their best interests—and in ours—to keep the human race around. To help us, to make us better. Since they were living in all of our bodies, and in the trees, the grass, the air, and the soil, and since their intelligence is vaster than anything we can comprehend without their help, they were in a fine position to improve our lives, our species, our world.

Once they made up their minds, the change happened overnight.

People stopped getting sick, first off.

There’s no cancer anymore. There are no diseases. We don’t even catch colds, because the Zösch supplement our immune systems.

We all stopped getting hangovers. Zösch preserve us, now, from hangovers.

No one goes hungry. When we don’t eat for a while, Zösch reproduce in our stomachs so we feed on them.

Zösch live in our brains. Mental illness is no more. No one gets dementia.

People make mistakes, and hearts get broken, but no one gets depressed for no reason.

Zösch cleaned Earth’s oceans in a year and restored balance to the natural world, which they say they will maintain in perpetuity. The forests are thriving and the ice caps are back.

Last week, it snowed in Maine, for the first time in fifty years.

We are all partially Zösch, now. Zösch are the human race’s better half, the piece we were missing that has made us whole.

We are each other’s perfect symbiotes. Intergalactic soulmates.

I don’t know for sure what they get out of the deal, except that we spread them to new planets, new species, new ecosystems.

That’s probably it, actually. We have spaceships, and they hitch rides with us on those.

The human race is expanding, while I stay here and attend to Antoine. I file his nails, cut his hair, bathe him, read to him. Every time a ship travels to a star we never thought we’d reach before Zösch showed us how to get there, I sit with him and a tall glass of whiskey, and I read him the news of things we never thought possible.

He takes his meals through a tube, but we eat together, still. I cook meals the way he laid them out in his black notebooks, the ones he wrote his ideas, thoughts, and recipes in, starting long before we met, when he was young and his whole life was ahead of him. There are hundreds of those notebooks, and in some of them he wrote about us.

Moments ago, Dayeema had let out a shriek which alerted us. She was crestfallen, having let the tail of the ugly black cloud slip from her fingers. The ugly black cloud that had abducted Dina had climbed in bursts of three—mimicking a child, somewhat imbalanced, hurriedly climbing upstairs while skipping one-legged, as though abundantly cheerful and equally naughty—she recounted. It had wiggled through the power cables high above, disengaged its body and escaped into higher atmospheric territory, then out of our vision.

Gathering around, we don’t speak. Dayeema doesn’t say anything more. Dina is gone forever.

Your sisters and you just wait for Dayeema’s orders. You’ll not let any more of your sisters be stolen like this.

Her nod could be the thunderbolt. You are shoving the photograph into everyone’s face, when the woman-with-the-thunderbolt-nod nods. In your culture, the nod has many variations, and equally, those many meanings. This head is tilted in alternating up and down arcs along the sagittal plane, like a child’s spinning top, whirring, deciding which way to fall.

The next one is not a tilt of head that signals irritation. Instead she measures you, feet to hair, and decides. What? That’s not clear, because the nod meant a no, she tells you, by way of explicit confirmation, when you look confused. She has never seen this girl of twelve in the photograph, now seventeen, in a parrot-printed summer frock, ears reddened from the piercing she’d just had, a mischievous smile because she’d been stealing mangoes from the neighbour’s orchard.

Every nod is an omen setting you deeper and deeper into domains of unknowing. The cloud clan is stronger than ever. Sisters of thunder-men are everywhere. They are the lightning-women; they can take forms that suit their fancy. They’re the shapes of rustic women, shapes of aromatic nameless wildflowers, and shapes of buoyant neem trees that nod to winds for eons. This thought makes you suspect these women who nod. Do they know something about Dina, and are yet, conniving?

‘Kyon?’ the milkmaid steps out of her home at your call, shoves you aside and tosses vegetable peels out on the street to make use of her time stepping out. As you balk, she queries again, ‘Why you ask?’

‘She’s a sister. Stolen by the thunder-men.’

‘Ah-ha!’ She laughs.

‘Then, why look for her on the ground, amidst our fields and homes? Ha?’

‘Thunder-men are crafty. I only explain because you act like you know nothing. Well, if you didn’t know yet, I suspect she’s been deposited with their many sisters, the lightning-women, for safe-keeping, until they have the podium ready, the horoscopes matched, and an auspicious night with storms and fireworks ready for the wedding.’

‘Is it?’ She laughs one more time. A strange laugh of disbelief, mocking the story of a child-woman like myself, perhaps too unhinged to be true in her estimate.

This is not a time to cry, not with face abegging, eyes to heavens. The cloud clan has forcibly married Dayeema’s daughters for centuries now. If you saw an interface, it might be one of Dayeema’s daughters peering from there, someone who could be your mother, except she was never released, and you—the baby of a cloud and a woman, liberated instead to grow into a woman who they might fancy when the time is ripe. They let you go. They let you fall miles to soil, ensconced in one of many raindrops that regularly descend on earth, to be reunited with Dayeema, and nurtured through adolescence.

You often hear the rumblings of your thunder father, imagine your mother crying when it rains, and bereft of love above and below, watch the shelves of cottony clouds play on a blue field when autumn arrives. You think of the place you were born in, in the upturned vessel of the sky.

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki: As a child you often roared emphatically, little knowing it was actually a curse.

You remember what mother told you once. Cotton flowers are trapped clouds. Only cotton farmers can expertly hook thunder-clouds, cleave them into tiny bits and stuff the pods in their fields with those bits. Packed like that for long periods, the thunder-men are drained of all their powers to regroup again. So cotton farmers are the only ones that can end the tyranny of the cloud clan.

You had listened in awe.

Today, you shout again:

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki.

Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki.

Your cries float away to the distant hills and back.

You shy away when you spot gaping onlookers, peasants and labourers from the nearby fields, baffled at your dishevelled clothes but royal manner of speaking, as though someone possessed or of unsound mind. You run off to where your mother once hid to escape being taken away by the thunder-kingdoms Vikings. It’s a ruined mansion that was once struck and destroyed by lightning. Mother said she had spent days together, hidden there, among the braided mountain-ivy. The mansion smells of moss, the bricks showing up like a monster’s jutting teeth, the pillars like they’ll give away any minute, and rather be a concrete pile washed away by the rains. You walk through the undergrowth that has taken over the mansion to discover the twines around. They are handy to make a swing, tied to one of the hooks in the walls. You think it could be made into a rope ladder for you to meet your mother and older sisters held captive up there.

This is not your village, or you could have asked for help with the search. Only you and your sisters must do it alone, without aid.

Dina could be dead. As you roam around, the thought swirls more often, now that several hours have passed.

You think of Dina with increasing dread. She is your twin; she is more than a sister. She is the one you saw in bed next to you every morning as you woke up. The only time you didn’t see Dina, was when she’d escaped five months ago, revealing her plans to you beforehand. She said she was tired of the way Dayeema kept all the girls hidden—in mango boughs, sometimes in mud huts meant for the cattle, sometimes in a trunk meant to keep heirloom saris.

Dayeema warned you not to venture out, even for water, because she feared the thunder-men would spy on you. She believed you were safe from their hunting, safe from the abductions, if you stayed hidden.

You had feigned sleep that morning, until Dayeema noticed that Dina was missing. You wished that Dina escaped the curse that has haunted women of Dayeema’s clan for ages. For yourself, unlike Dina, you hoped you’d be taken away by a prince instead. That morning too, you and your sisters had embarked on a search like this one.

An unenthusiastic head bobble can be a polite way of declining something without saying no. But you noticed they were more like a pattern. It seemed the nods were a contorted way to mock your plight.

Following Dina’s disappearance five months ago, you had all gathered at Dayeema’s private chambers. There, while everyone was praying, the brass idol of Kumari Devi had briefly nodded in a direction that indicated where Dina might be. She was brought back because Dina couldn’t be allowed to do what normal girls her age normally do. Dina couldn’t be permitted to live like a commoner. She could not be allowed to elope and marry a simple, hardworking cotton farmer who lived with his parents in the far corner of the village.

That young man was no prince. Unlike you, Dina had never desired one. One morning almost a year ago, a boyish-faced man was on his way to the market, when he had discovered you sisters hiding among the haystacks where Dayeema had ordered you to be. He had openly been enamoured with Dina—and did not shy away from revealing his feelings. In turn, Dina was immediately brought to liveliness by that young man. After that chance encounter, Dina met him secretly, to which end she enlisted your help. Once they were together, even though you remained away to allow them private comfort, you could hear Dina giggle and laugh, as though she was her happiest self ever. How badly she wanted to escape her doomed future!

When you were alone, just the two of you, Dina told you she was waiting for the right time.

Waiting for far too long, Dina had decided to twist open the knob of her captivity that morning five months ago, and waking you up and telling you, she had the courage to escape out and be where her moods took her. Alas, by evening, owing to the intervention of the brass idol of Kumari Devi, it turned out to be a misstep, one that ended in futility.

The sun can be seen crawling to its perch. It must be nearly noon. This second time you’re searching for Dina, it is turning out to be much worse. Dina hasn’t shared her intentions with you. Besides, Dayeema vouches that she witnessed the abduction—of Dina being carried away by that ugly cloud. However much she tried, she lamented many times, she could only grab its tail, and had to let that slip through her fingers too, because clouds are unimaginably powerful.

Even though you feel, deep down, that Dayeema has erred, and that Dina is safe, you dare not mistrust the old, fragile woman who brought you up.

You wipe your tears as you walk the mud-lanes that crisscross the village, thought-dried and aimless. Your hope eroding fast.

You’re at the outer periphery of the village where the lane meets the concrete road. You watch a small caravan leave the village. The bullock-cart is laden with humongous bales of cotton. The young man who commands it wears a turban so huge it partially conceals his face. The family, that trails the bullock-cart on foot, carry possessions bundled under their arms or on their heads.

You wonder if you really saw the turbaned-man nod, or if it was something your mind conjured up.

At noon, you are on the fire dragon’s back, because it’ll give you a free ride. Besides, fire dragons and the branch-sons of cloud men, are arch-enemies. You know this fire-dragon has an eye on you. If you manage to escape the thunder-men, this fire dragon will surely take you away. You accepted its offer of help because now is not a time to think of personal dislikes.

Riding against the train tracks, you keep peeping into the shanties by the tracks to look for Dina. Perhaps the sisters of thunder-men are keeping Dina there, hiding her under the enormous tarpaulins.

But there is no success.

Tired and parched, you lick your own sweat streaming down your face.

By late afternoon, you reject the fire dragon’s plea to continue assisting. Your sisters and you now regroup and climb onto specks of dust to travel through the air on the shoulders of a tropical storm and go barge into the hotel that’s near the railway station.

You and your sisters sift through each room, there’s not a trace or hint of someone held wrongly.

The storm is still picking up speed when you cross the pavement, and run across to the railway station premises. Pilgrims to Kumbh, caught in the storm, and freshly invested in briny grains upon their skin, hurry for cover.

A woman with hip-length wavy hair, pushes a stack of cardboard boxes on a cart towards the stall by the roadside, causing a commotion.

‘Dina!’

Hearing you, one of your sisters runs and grabs a woman pilgrim by the arm. She turns to look, but it’s not Dina.

You look at the faces of the people standing around stunned by the suddenness. Most are pilgrims. They stop and empathise, gauging the immediacy of the situation of a near-relation gone missing. Some, overwhelmed with concern, offer to help, but you politely refuse.

Your sisters and you resume the search for Dina. Minutes tick away.

‘We lost her. The lightning-sisters may have boarded a train with Dina.’ The sister, with the long bony arms, says.

‘We can’t give up now!’ The chant from the rest is spontaneous.

Dusk, raw like wound, settles in where the storm has just passed through. You, daughters of Dayeema and daughters-of-daughters, similitude of drops, tokens of your thunder fathers, are still around, looking for Dina.

Everyone whom you ask, they only nod. And the ‘no’ sticks to you—the no-in-the-N-O-D sticks to you even more, the more unlikely you’ll ever find Dina.

You pause; something holds your attention. The bullock-cart you saw earlier, still laden with cotton bales, has been abandoned under the prayer flags hanging from a pole near the railway station. The bullocks are nowhere to be seen, nor the women, nor the young man in a turban. As you try to see more clearly in the descending semi-darkness, try to see deep inside, conflicting thoughts arise in your mind. Cotton? Farmer?

A couple walk by, very close to you. The man is oddly familiar but has his face painted with colours as is common for pilgrims, making him unrecognizable. The woman has a veil drawn over her face. She playfully brushes your shoulder. As you turn, surprised and mildly irritated, she lifts her veil ever so slightly, then nods very slowly as she crosses.

You don’t grab her for affirmation. You know dead-sure who this woman is, and what her nod means.

The couple are headed to catch the train leaving for Kumbh soon. You shield the sight of their passage onto the platform from your sisters, who are still swarming the steadily-thinning mass of pilgrims, checking every face.

Locking the truth of Dina’s daring escape deep in your heart, you discharge a long sigh of relief.

When you return to Dayeema and report an unsuccessful search, you must make sure to steal the brass idol in Dayeema’s chambers before it has occasion to sway its head one way or other to indicate Dina’s bearings. You must bury it deep in the backyard.

I go about my day—all twenty minutes of it—as I do other days. I contemplate the state of the world, mine in particular, smoke a couple, hit a couple and then end my day.

I begin the next day by closing my eyes in time to begin the next. And after that my day stretches to exactly twenty-two hours and nineteen minutes. There’s a lot to do; buy groceries, cook food, clean the space I call home, wash the dishes, water the plants, change the sheets, take a shower, wear clean clothes, stare out into the world with longing, read something (anything!), get milk, make tea, answer the neighbors’ numerous annoying questions, nap for just about forty-five minutes (in which the world awakes and brings you out of slumber), wake up all groggy and contemplate what to do next, cook more food, eat it, peek into the lives of those you may know or had known, wash the dishes in the sink, wash your face, wash your skin, wash your teeth, wash your veins, turn the lights off.

The day after lasts about a minute. The one after that about all of seventeen seconds. I wonder if you’ve caught on to the workings of my inner world. Whether it is so in reality or not does not bother me. It is certainly so in my reality. The only one that matters. So now that you know about this fun little fact, what do you think of me? Am I an object of fascination, a thing to be marveled at? Or do I confuse and irritate you? Do I remind you of the many insolents who defy the ‘normal’ working order of this world of ours? Doesn’t matter, judgment will be passed either way.

“How goes the lonely old sages that roam the coast,” I wonder, and I shout. Though none hear me. The wind has carried my voice, though I am pretty sure that instead of carrying it towards it has carried my voice away from the sages it was meant for. This is my favorite thing to do—sit next to the sea, observe and sometimes shout out sentences and questions. Today this is all I do.

I am not bound by the ordinary confines of time. I am not bound by ‘appropriate’ times to wake up, eat, sleep, drink, think, talk, repeat. I make my own rules, just as I have made my own time. I haven’t physically created it, no. But I have tweaked the rules around to suit me. All these regulations and rules about time, day, night, etc. were made up by someone. And if they can be made, they can certainly be unmade. I haven’t unmade it really, just rearranged it.

My time on this earth began the day I had my first thought. Before that all time ceased to exist. And I thought: “Could it be that I could make my own place in this world?” And then after I seemed to grow by many months before my next thought: “How much longer will this linger inside me?”

This thing, this entity that gripped me in its sharp, tight claws. This thing that is now a part of me, a moving, breathing, active thing. This thing I dare not name. This thing that I am as attached to as it is to me. If it stops lingering, I will end. There won’t be much else to hang on to. Can I take it out and place it somewhere? A prize trophy that I can just stare at, stroke at moments when it all gets too much, a solid reminder of it still being in my life. I fear if it slips away I will not realize it, I will live in hollow, barren ground without it.

The only reference point I live by is time. The minutes, seconds, hours that make up my day. Weeks, days and years are of no consequence to me. I am told we live in the year 2025. I am also told we live in the year 1447. I am sure many others have ways of measuring time. I simply do not care.

In the thirty-two hours that make up my day, I am driven from branch to branch of a dinosaur of a bank. Neither know what to do about my application or my papers. They both tell me to try the other. Each branch has its own quirks, and each branch has a minimum waiting time of three uncles there for an argument, not their money. I am spent to the edge of my sanity. I am overstimulated and alone and Oh God, It’s back again! And I keep a straight face as I head to the counter, explain myself the umpteenth time and am told once again to head to the branch I came from. I go home. I sit in silence.

The next day lasts about fifty-five minutes. It begins with a sip of tea; it ends with the cup shattering on my balcony.

The day after is four hours of contemplation. I can’t really say what I was thinking about; it’s all such a mishmash in my head. What happens in the brain should stay in the brain. At least that’s what I believe.

I hope you understand by now. I would caution you to not try to understand this peculiarity of mine with the constraints of your lives. I do not live by them, nor do I care for them. If you choose to do so, you will find yourself more perplexed than when you started. For your own good, it’s useless to even try. Differences are usually labelled. I am sure I will be too. Make your own theories about me, go on. Why else would I put myself out there?

One day—sixteen hours—the water ran out. A common problem. A fixable problem. But only if the stars align and the man with the tanker of water and a political song as his caller tune picks up. He does. He has none to offer today. I implore the neighbors, ask if I may borrow some water. They oblige. It is enough to wash my face and use sparsely in the toilet. The next day—ten hours—the man arrives. He fills my life with hope, just as he fills my tank with water. As he leaves I am renewed with a sense of purpose. I cook, I clean, I read, I watch, I scribble, I turn the house inside out. And then I sleep.

There are moments when this thing inside of me grips me like roots grip the ground. As though it uses me to grow into this massive, tentacle-like network. A tentacle gets activated each time I remember. And depending on the intensity of the thing I remember, the tentacle either beats to the intensity of the pain or it triggers the many many tentacles inside me, and they all beat as one. Sometimes a tentacle will lodge itself in my throat, sometimes in my eyes, sometimes in my stomach. At all times I am overcome by it. There is little for me to do than to feel it, fully, wholly, as intensely as I can. This tentacle will not stay inside me. I cannot make it. Sometimes I really wish I could, I wish I could control it. I wish there was a switch, a controller, anything. Instead I lay here, drowning into myself. Some nights I feel the tentacles wrapping and squeezing me from the inside out. Some nights I want them to wrap themselves around me. Call it a false sense of safety if you will. Some days I am left motionless. This thing that grows and keeps growing, this ball in the middle of my chest.

A day—five minutes—that feels like eternity stretching out onto the horizon. Horizons have always been fascinating to me. Where the earth and the sky meet, where the world was once thought to end. But that ending stretches, elongates, endures beyond our imagination. To reach that end, that line, and see what lies smack in the middle of it, we’d have to invent something. An invention to cover up another invention. That day I invented a way to cover up my days.

The thing—the creature, the tentacle, the monster, the butterfly, my solemn companion. I try to forget, to not remember and bring more aches. I try to do it all and yet the thing has its own way of making its presence known. Very subtle on its quiet days, right beneath the beat of my own heart, a throbbing so slight not even my body can feel it. A throb that has existed since the first day I remember.

Ten hours of swiping, scrolling, watching, ducking buses, rickshaws and bikes. Ten hours of being very aware of the fragility of our lives. Ten hours of looking at a dead body, at a decomposing face. I wasn’t standing next to a dead body for ten hours, no. But a glance at it was enough. The rest of my day was spent wondering at a life lost, a life that was possibly as ordinary as one could have. That face roamed in my mind, round and round and round, always coming back to it. Straying far from the face was never an option. It existed in tandem with the thing, the throb. That day was particularly challenging; the thing would tingle each time the face would take a front seat in my brain. A tingle that activated all the various tentacles lodged throughout my body, one singular tingle that made my muscles, veins and skin ache and itch. I went through the motions of being an ordinary being when out in public. At home I dropped down and tried to fix whatever was happening inside with the coolness of the stone floor. I rolled and wriggled and slid like a snake. I rubbed my body against the floor, laying myself as flat as I could. I took a cold shower, I turned on the air conditioning and I tried to stick my entire body inside the refrigerator. It was only when I was exhausted, panting, pleading, skin red, blue and raw, covered in dust and lint, that I passed out.

Some days I wonder about the thing I am not supposed to think about. The thing, that is. The thing is that the thing itself isn’t the problem. The thing is a thing is a thing, it has no name, no identity, no importance save for whatever I choose to give it. The thing is just that, a thing. I wonder if I just stopped referring to it, if I just refused to acknowledge its presence if it would somehow just fade away. The thing that was born with me, in me, the thing that I dare not name, the thing that at times feels like a friend, an enemy, a companion, a soulmate. The thing is of course its own thing, it is not mine. It is not mine, it is not mine, it is not mine.

It is mine. It always has been, it always will be.

Most days pass by in a blur. I don’t remember much, nothing exciting happens. What good is remembering, then? But I must remember, I must. I can’t remember why I need to do so, but I must. Once I spent the entire day making lists of things I saw, people I spoke with, to-do lists, this list, that list. That day was also incredibly long, forty hours and thirteen minutes long. A lot happened then. A lot happened that I have documented although I cannot make sense of it somehow. Those lists were unintelligible, scribbles on pieces of scrap. I must remember to remember by not making lists. I must remember to remember by devising another way. I must remember to devise this way.

On a cool winter’s morning, a day when the world was asleep and I was awake, I could feel for the first time in a long time a sense of calm. I was never a calm person, I was very quick to jump to conclusions, shortheaded, quick to joy, quick to grief. I was only calm in retrospect. It felt like a new beginning. The thing hadn’t vanished but it had stayed in the back, deep, deep in my subconscious. I felt as though I had more energy, a life renewed. I had interests, hobbies, work, people to meet and things to see. And while I was doing it all, I had the peculiar sense that for the first time in a long while I could trace back to a moment hours ago in the day and recall it with great clarity. For most of my life such moments have been fuzzy, outlined like the halo around light. When the day had ended, fifteen hours and three minutes later, I did not feel overstimulated or anxious. I was simply tired. The simple tired that signals the fact that the body is ready to take a break, nothing more. This break that made me forget about the thing was also quite peaceful. My mind was a vacuum, a plain (a plane) canvas, a flatland that stretched beyond recognition.

That didn’t last long. A few days went by, of varying lengths, where I felt as though I was walking on a cloud, that there was nothing more to life than its mundanity. And those days ended and my world became the same again. For a while it oscillated that way, between mundanity and total anxiety. And then it became a mishmash of the two. Such that I never knew where I would end up at the beginning of a day. The thing was moving along with it, I believe it also didn’t know how to behave. We were each finding out as we went along, as each day brought out new feelings and reactions. The thing wasn’t an all-consuming force by this point, it was there in the back, making itself known at times and obscure at others. We spent a total of one thousand four hundred and eighty-nine hours in this in-between.

At the one thousand four hundred and ninetieth mark, I accepted. I accepted the varying nature of my disposition. I accepted that my world view could change after having lived all my life in it. And it was as if I was birthed anew. The thing was a part of me, I was a part of it. We relied on each other, dependent like breath is to air.

There was a time when I lived. I lived like each day was my last, I made memories, made food, made friends, made a carpet once, made a shelf, made sweets, made napkins, made a fortune. I can’t remember if that was all in the same life or if I’m thinking of other lives. At some point I did all of the above. At some point I stopped doing all of the above. At this point I am a shell of my former self, but I am not unhappy. I’ve heard that often: people being referred to as shells which equals unhappiness. I am a shell because I have left my former self behind, I am a shell because I chose to be one. My happiness is not relevant here.

The thing seems closer to my happiness than all my past lives. The thing claws on to the thing that makes the thing throb. Once it lets go the thing gets space to breathe and the thing is once more dormant. This is an emotion one should feel. This is an emotion one should feel in abundance. I have lived so long with the thing attached to the thing that to not feel an emotion others expect of me is ordinary. I am apathetic towards everything my body is unable to do because I simply do not feel the need to care.

A day, a second day, a third, a fourth. A week, a month, a year. Time goes by in numbers, sure, measurable, exact, constant. Exactly what I hate. In a year’s time—my version of three hundred and sixty-five days—I have come to think of the thing as an extension of my left lung. It stays right there, not moving around much like it used to. And each time it needs to make its presence known the thing constricts, writhes, slides around. I never have to look farther than my own beating heart.

I am in my own little alcove, one of my choosing. I have created the circumstances necessary for myself to remain permanently enclosed in this vast grey space. The thing stays with me, of course it must. It had created this alcove, a space where only we exist. Sometimes I wonder if the thing is well and truly obsessed with me. Am I obsessed with it? Why do I keep it around? I have tried to expel it from my being, tried to shoo it away. Either it doesn’t listen, or I need to do more than just talk to it. I do that too, sometimes on the shorter days I will speak to the thing as a friend. I seldom get an answer but that doesn’t deter me. The thing is my companion and I am its. This alcove, though quite big, is perfect for the both of us.

On a day that was particularly gloomy and dark—unlike the usual—everyone decided to stay in. I know this because I saw more cars parked downstairs, more people flitting about the grounds and stairs, more noises from outside. They tell me it’s unsafe to go out when the weather turns stormy, a drop of rain would upend the city. I can agree with that, but I have never had cause to step out much and so I cannot understand why. And then the rains started; children screamed in joy, the backup generator turned on, a pipe burst open, a car broke down and afar I could see the beginnings of a traffic jam. That day was exactly three hours and forty-five minutes long. I spent it watching the world disintegrate.

Even if I don’t remember, the thing does. I think. It remembers why it is a part of me, I do not. All our lives are spent remembering, tapping into memories, keeping the past alive. All of life is an act of remembrance, of holding on to memories, silences, faces, feelings. All of life is holding the wound of time with grace, mourning it, nurturing it, remembering, trying to not let it fade from memory or body. I may have let it fade from memory but with the thing present, it will not fade from my body.

At the last hour of my day—the fourth—I decide to extract the thing. I don’t have a plan as such, just a will, a need. I take both hands to my chest, try to hold onto anything (my kameez) and pull it from my body. All that does is stretch the cloth out. I put more force into it, pull harder. The fabric rips. I place my hands on skin, where the fabric has left a hole, and pull. I pull until there is blood dripping from my chest, skin scratched and maimed. I stop when I get tired. I vow to try again, and again.

And each time I do I am left with nothing but scars, gashes, bruises. A searing pain has made its way on me since that first day. It stays, like film on still water, until I stop. The coolness of the morning after I stop trying to extract my lungs feels like I have woken up after a long, dreamless sleep. Could I try from the back? But I would require assistance for that. No one I knew would be willing to be a part of this experiment. I could just let the thing be, as I have for so long. But the need to remove it from my being is so strong I have to try. So, I rip my clothes from the back as well but can’t get a hold of my skin or get a good enough angle to even make a dent. Beyond careless scratches I don’t get much farther. I fall into a heap of my selves, too exhausted to pick up the pieces.

There isn’t much time left. I may have lived for as long as I did but I can live no longer. Soon a self of me will not exist. A version that existed before I wrote this sentence. After I write the next it will vaporize.

The thing is, I don’t mind the thing being around so long as it can behave itself. It tends not to. When my day began three minutes ago, I noticed marks on my chest and back. I’m not sure where they could have come from, but I suspect the thing may have something to do with it. I’ll have to make a trip to the pharmacy, there’s quite a lot of bandaging up that needs to be done.

We now live as one. The thing and my selves. In me there are multitudes. Outside of me there is only one certainty.