If it had spoken in any language other than English, or sounded anything other than tired and a little like some of the voices he had known as a child at the Ethical Culture School, he thought afterward that he might have left the room then, as carefully and steadily as a man who knows he is undergoing a breakdown, picked up his hat and walked out across the lawns until either the trees or a passing scholar stopped him; he would have had no idea what to say. If he had seen, as it raised its face to him, the charred blood of Nagasaki ground zero or the throat of Shiva Nīlakaṇtha, poison-blue as a cloudless New Mexico sky—if it had been his own face, heavy-lidded, tight-haired, its fragile ascetic look aged as sharply as radiation sickness under the comfortable brown brim of his pork-pie hat. He saw a human face in glass as green and foamy as a breaking wave, hollowing the light against itself like jade. It was no one’s he recognized, Pompeii-cast from the melted sands; its owner shifted its weight a little in the slatted light, the first unconscious movement he had seen it make, and he saw a hard-traveled man with quick dark brows, a mouth that might have been humorous if it had not held itself in so hard, eyes as green as the rim of a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Yiddish, he thought, as forthright Rabi, who had once asked him why not the Talmud? with all the argumentative assurance of an atheist from the Lower East Side who could nevertheless call a row of Orthodox men at prayer my people and introduce himself in prewar Germany with the unflinching ich bin ein Aus-Jude, and he knew then what his visitor was.
The golem said in its unremarkable voice, “Undo me.”
He was neither mad nor dreaming, the desk under his hand as real as the cigarette forgotten between his fingers and the phantom of a Geiger–Müller tube still crackling its faint caution. Oppenheimer said, “I can’t.”
“None of the others can. That leaves you.” He saw the burnt desert flicker again as the golem smiled, a sunset-green flash. It reminded him a little of Feynman, except that it did not, at all. Its voice was light with irony: “Destroyer of worlds.”
He could smile a little himself, thinly. “At present, the world appears to be surviving me.”
“Yes.” The golem, taking one step forward, was abruptly on the other side of his desk, swift as a shockwave; its hands were still in its pockets, its hat pushed back only enough to see. “So. Don’t let me.”
The plaster falling, which was the last weight of the building after all. As suddenly and hopelessly as nausea, he wanted never again to be asked for anything, names or dates, admissions, miracles, unless it was Peter for some electrical gimmick or Toni for a hug, no accountabilities, no decisions, nothing. Carefully, steadily as he had imagined himself walking out of his life, he said, “It can’t be done. Any more than the bomb can be un-dropped, or the atom un-split.” He could not swear it was the truth, if he could take five minutes with a rock hammer and reduce an existential dilemma to a janitor’s problem, put a green-eyed man on the next train to Nevada to wait for the countdown at Yucca Flats, but in Washington he had grown tired of talk of genies and bottles; he was thinking of the sky boiling at five-thirty in the morning, Bainbridge’s handshake. Now we are all sons of bitches. He would not ask if the golem had pulled itself out of the glittering crater that night or some day long after, where it had learned to look as human as anything else born in the fallout age; he saw it riding the rails, Geiger-clicking its nights away in bus stations and hotel lobbies, one more drifter in the bright streets of tomorrow. His shoulders were stiff and slumped as if he sat on the old leather couch in Room 2022, waiting to be told how he had lied. He could take nothing back. He said softly, “I am afraid that kind of thing is out of my pay grade just now,” and remembered to brush the ash from his cigarette just before it scarred the wood.
The golem said above him, “You don’t have to go on living.”
Automatically and testily as if it had said something idiotic about Sanskrit or Baudelaire, he snapped back, “Of course I do.”
He was quiet, then. He had not thought it was true.
There was a breeze beyond the windows, ruffling the last of the dogwood blossom. The golem must have made another one of its fast-tracked, soundless movements; he registered that it had taken a cigarette from the half-empty pack on his desk, but by the time he reached instinctively for his lighter, it was already exhaling smoke. He thought of a hot white spark burning in its palm like the smallest of suns, but then he would have been dead already, like Slotin with his screwdriver, the sour taste of hard radiation in his mouth.
“You have that choice,” it said gently. “I wasn’t asked.”
He could say nothing to the golem. He did not want to claim its existence or its undoing; he was not Rabi or even Einstein and had never known, never wanted to know the mysticism his parents’ generation had shed long before they spoke more French at home than German and named their son for a father still alive. Prometheus was one thing, Rabbi Loew another. This thing of darkness—but Prospero had broken his staff of his own free will.
When he met the golem’s eyes again, they were brighter than he had thought: copper salts in a flame test, a smoked-glass sunrise. Its cigarette was half gone, smoke curling about its shoulders like winter steam. He did not want to ask the question. He did not think it would lie to him.
“Why?”
As if it were taking polite leave of a colleague, the golem tipped its hat.
He saw its springing dark hair, as brushy as his own in the Trinity days; he thought, as distantly as if it mattered, that it looked younger, hatless, and more Jewish, and less like anyone he had ever known. He saw the letters on its forehead, torch-cuts of white fire writing מת ,מת, and nowhere to smear out death or write the truth back in. He could not hear the noise of the Geiger counter anymore, only a dull roar billowing like the backwash of a vast tide and small popping clinks that might have been falling metal, broken blown glass, and he was less afraid than he had been every day of April in Building T-3, because the damage was already done, and more than the day after Trinity, because he had not known what it would be. There were cities burning, but he had known about those; islands, forests, children. The golem walked through blackened landscapes, carrying nothing, saving no one. It sat in hospital waiting rooms, its hat on its knee, as gravely speaking doctors passed charts and X-rays back and forth. It stood on a catwalk, looking down into a silvery plutonium swirl. It stood in the high cold air of a mesa, watching the silent fusion of the stars.
Undeniable as atoms, a pillar of sea-green glinting Alamogordo glass, the golem replaced its hat. Something in the room went out.
It was quiet in his office, at ten o’clock on a morning in June; it was not empty, with his books and letters and the sounds of mathematical conversation passing his door, and he heard a great silent space in between every heartbeat, after every breath. His throat was burning, as if he had breathed in a desert-blast of heat; his fingers, too, as if he had tried after all to write something in that glassy fire; when he reached for the half-cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, he found himself staring at his hand, thin muscles and wire-tendons, nails bitten down to their nicotine stains, frail as a shadow on the tabletop. It opened and tensed, aging, alive. After a moment, he used it to pick up the cigarette, and then a pen. He wondered what the FBI would make of the conversation—the disgraced scientist answering himself like a vaudeville act, or the soft white silence of blank tape, unspooling inch after inch of empty air until some bored G-man wondered if the microphone was broke? Or just a voice, weary and audible and mostly New York, just as they might see a slight man in a trenchcoat walking down Einstein Drive, waiting for the Dinky at the Princeton stop with his hands in his pockets, the sun in his sand-bright eyes. He would not see his golem again, he thought. It is easy to destroy a life; it is the things that come of living that are harder to kill.
* * *
We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you want, mermaids?
—Isidor Isaac Rabi (1954)
By Thread
of Night and Starlight Needle
Shveta Thakrar
She gave me the moon.
I gave her the stars.
She let her gaze drift wearily over my gift, over the glitter and glitz, the shine and shimmer of silver fire. Sighing, she shook her head. “You always have to outdo me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, seeing no reason to lie. “It’s what I do.”
My sister leaped at me then, fangs bared and flashing. I reached out to meet her, my claws bursting forth, eager to rend flesh from bone.
Once we were done tearing each other to shreds, all that remained was a black space encompassing everything, a void lit only by the luminous gifts we’d cast aside in our hunger to win. If you’re feeling poetic, you might even call it the first sky.
It’s my favorite love story.
* * *
When nothing is left but the skin you have cast off, be it serpent or selkie, when you don and doff lives like ill-fitting dresses, when you twine the hearts of those you love ’round your wrists while allowing your own to wane, when at last you, too, learn the cost and promise of your blood, that is when you will be ready.
At least, so claimed the old woman who shamelessly sported a sheer fuchsia sari with gold embroidery instead of proper modest cotton. She perched on the edge of her counter and sipped wine, a black like opal and just as iridescent. Kiran had never seen anything so odd.
“Bug wings,” mouthed her brother Sanjay. For a second, Kiran imagined the old woman distilling molten moths, and she nearly gagged.
She frowned at Sanjay, then took another swig of her tea, a sparkling snow-blue beverage that tasted of nothing so much as candy and forbidden dreams. If the old woman was indeed a sorceress, as her reputation implied, perhaps she would have some advice for them. “Grandmother, we’ve come far to avail ourselves of your renowned wisdom.”
The old woman let out a snort. “Just because I’m advanced in years, as they say, and indulge in a fine tea or two, I must be a witch?”
“Well, what do you expect when you keep drinks like those around?” asked Sanjay, who’d never been one for social niceties. Kiran kicked him under the marble tabletop.
“Young people are too self-absorbed to listen to the world around them,” the old woman said. “All the answers are already there. And I’m hardly your grandmother, so ‘Rekha’ will do just fine.”
“Well, then, Rekha,” Kiran said, squeezing her mug harder so no one would see her hands tremble, “what is it we should be listening to?”
Rekha shrugged. She picked up the bottle of black wine. “Everything wants to be consumed, even stones. Even bugs that struggle to fly away. Everything longs to be part of something else.” Before Kiran could argue, she laughed. “Yes, everything. Even you, or you wouldn’t be here.”
Kiran exchanged a horrified glance for Sanjay’s amused one. Old women were supposed to wear white and be solemn in the twilight of their years, not drape themselves in garish colors and cackle about eating people. Maybe they were wrong to have come here.
She had just risen when Rekha spoke again. “Are young people really so easily scandalized these days? No wonder you know nothing!”
The irritation in her voice sparked a fire in Kiran’s chest. She took her seat again. “I came here hoping you would help us, but I see there’s no chance of that happening.”
“Spit it out, girl,” snapped Rekha. “How am I supposed to help you if I don’t know what you want?”
“I want to know how to make wine like that,” announced Sanjay.
Normally Kiran enjoyed Sanjay’s quirky commentary, but right now, she could only curse the gods for his lack of decorum. “No!” she put in. “I—we—need to know how to—how to …”
The words failed her. She’d come for such a simple thing, but suddenly she didn’t care. Not about that, anyway.
Now she just wanted … what?
“She wants to know how to create a bucketful of gold coins,” Sanjay said in a bored voice. “She wants you to show us how to get rich. Me, I just want to drink that wine.”
“Peace, boy,” the old woman ordered, motioning for him to shut his mouth. His eyebrows raised, Sanjay did so. “Now, girl,” said Rekha, her tone prickly as a thistle, “what do you want? Why are you really here?”
* * *
See us now, stitched together,
Skin to unscarred skin,
By thread of night looped through
The eye of a starlight needle,
The eye, the eye,
The all-seeing eye.
We are bound for all time,
Brother and sister,
Kith and kin,
Hand in hand against
The relentless dark.
—from “Ballad of the Star-Stitched Siblings”
* * *
Bindul held tightly to his sister’s hand as they wandered through the market. It was a hot day, the kind where dust nestled into every crevice and spiced every breath with grit. Using the back of his free hand, he impatiently swiped at the stray lock of hair dancing into his face.
“I’m hungry,” Sri complained. She was small, only reaching his knee, and Bindul knew it fell to him to keep her fed. She gazed up at him with large, innocent eyes. “I want a laddoo.”
Bindul had no money, and his own stomach rumbled. He’d have to be quick. If anyone caught him stealing, he’d be separated from Sri, and likely tossed into a beggars’ orphanage. The idea of her alone and at a slaver’s mercy, cruelly maimed so she would bring in more coins from pitying tourists—it made his scratchy eyes sting.
So many vivid colors, so many lush fabrics, so many rich and sumptuous foods on display, and not a one was intended for them. This world hadn’t realized the two of them even existed. For a moment, especially with his leg still bruised from the last near-capture, he felt so slight. So weak. He coughed, and his throat was as dry and shriveled as his hope.
But the tiny hand clutching his did so with such trust that of course he would try again.
Bindul found a nook between stalls and, after making sure no one was watching, lodged Sri into it. “Wait here,” he said, “and don’t let anyone see you. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
* * *
Sanjay was an elephant handler. He trained the strongest, most intelligent bulls and cows for the raja’s and rani’s army, and Kiran assisted him. Her favorite things were stroking the animals’ trunks when feeding them and playing with their large, floppy ears. Yet the thought of the animals going to war—of Sanjay going with them—sickened her. She would do anything to keep him safe.
“I—I just wanted to find a way to …” She’d thought asking the witch for riches would be sensible, a guaranteed way to ensure a life of comfort and freedom from worry.
But the words stuck like burrs in her throat. Something inside her quavered, shaking loose in an avalanche of buried thoughts. They threatened to smother her, and at the heart of each was a single word: alone.
Though she didn’t know what that meant, it made her skin hurt. She didn’t understand; she’d crawled out of the womb followed by her brother. Her twin. They’d always been together. Even when she thought of marrying, she knew she would pick no man Sanjay did not approve of, any more than he would choose a wife without consulting her. It was unthinkable.
Rekha turned a razor-quick gaze on her. “You wear a strange skin,” she said, “doubled.” And then she spoke the words Kiran was certain were not for her. When nothing is left …
So she pushed them away. “I want security and safety. I want to know how to make the right decisions, the ones that will keep us from harm. You’ve lived a long time; surely you can teach me that?”
The old woman burst into rude, raucous laughter. “Is that really a thing you think you can solve with magic?” She glowered at the elaborate mosaic-tile ceiling, all reds and golds and blues. “Why is it only fools who seek my knowledge? No one can escape making mistakes. How do you expect to learn when you don�
�t even know the right questions to ask?”
While she spoke, Sanjay stood and poured himself a goblet of the ebony wine. He sipped it, and something in his expression shifted. “This,” he said, coughing. “Whatever it is, it’s strong.”
Rekha watched him, her eyes all keen interest. “Yes, it is.”
Still smarting from the old woman’s comments, Kiran watched him, too. Her thoughts refused to come together, coy as a house cat that yowled for affection until it was offered, then hissed in offense.
Claws. All claws, sheathed until they weren’t.
Whatever Sanjay was about to say would draw blood. She could feel it.
Something kindled within him, turning his dark brown eyes bright. “I want to stay here.” He looked at the old woman. “I want to learn from you. Really.”
Now Kiran jumped to her feet. “No!” That wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. He was supposed to stay still while she obtained the information, the magic spell she needed to keep him out of danger. What he was not supposed to do was get strange ideas about staying with the witch.
And if he did, what about her? Where was she to go?
* * *
Dear Ketanbhai,
There’s a black forest in the world of stories. It could be across the planet; it could be just in your backyard. But one thing is for certain: it lives deep within you, its twisted roots intertwined with the shadows in your thoughts.
Did you know narwhals and unicorns share the same horn? It’s called an alicorn, and maybe share is not the right word. Once we pushed unicorns from fact into the black forest, where all myths go once we think we’ve outgrown them, narwhals inherited the horn*. So you might say they’re the unicorns of the water, down in the depths where it’s black, except they grant no wishes and have no particular use for virgin women. Is that really the world you want to inhabit? Be honest, big brother.
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