When he opens his eyes, he realizes that Mirella has damped the sound around him. The Night Market comes back to life, and she breathes out. “Okay,” she says, “I thought you had bought him a ring or something.”
“No,” he says. “I wasn’t that in love.”
“So that was the last one?”
He bites on his bottom lip. He’d saved the worst for last, and so he shakes his head at Mirella. An exhaustion has settled into his bones, and he wants nothing more than to go home and bury himself under his cobija.
But he has to do this.
“One more,” he says.
“No.”
It’s a complete sentence. She glares at him, her hands crossed in front of her.
“Just one more, I promise,” he begs, and he knows his voice sounds pitiful.
“This is way past the—” she begins, but then he is crying, and he knows it’s manipulative, but it’s also real.
“I need this one gone,” he explains, wiping at his eyes. “More than the others.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Fat. Ass. Tip.” He says each word with force. He means them.
She closes her eyes. Opens them again, nods her consent, and they glide through the crowd, Felix’s heart flopping and dancing in his chest, a scowl permanently etched on Mirella’s face. He knows she wants to stop. But then he can see the stringed lights, the sparkling orbs, the enchanted birds flying about, and he brings Mirella to La Estrella Mágica and stands off to the side of the outdoor patio.
“Here?” she says. “La Estrella Mágica?”
“Yes.” He stills. “I want to be able to come back here someday, and right now…I can’t.”
The memory is pulsing in his mind, the images flashing over and over.
“This has to be the last one,” Mirella warns. “Even I am starting to get tired.”
He agrees.
They begin, for the final time.
Felix sucked air through his teeth. It had taken him two weeks to get this reservation, and Arturo didn’t seem to care. His phone was floating just in front of his face, and he swiped down in the air. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll.
“Arturo,” Felix said.
Arturo looked up over his phone. “Damn, sorry,” he said, and with another swipe, the phone was turned off and floating down to the center of the table. “I’ll leave it there for the rest of dinner.”
He smiled then. It sent a pang of desire through Felix. He wanted to leap up and over the table, to take Arturo in his arms, to feel his tongue in his mouth.
But then the waiter arrived. Arturo ordered first, and the waiter scribbled runes in the air as Arturo spoke. Then he waved the order toward the kitchen and turned to Felix. He studied the menu, unsure of what he wanted, and when he looked up, he caught it. A short glance at the waiter’s ass and then Arturo licking his lips. He probably thought he got away with it.
Felix stuttered through his order, then off to the kitchen it flew, and he watched it. Focused on it. Tried to keep his thoughts off all the doubts that now swirled in his mind. Why couldn’t Arturo just appreciate him and him alone?
Dinner arrived, carried by los pájaros mágicos, and by the time it settled on the table, Arturo had made eyes at two other guys, one of them a forward on their school’s soccer team. Felix told himself to ignore it, told himself he was being too sensitive, told himself that this was just how guys acted.
Felix picked up his fork.
Looked up.
Arturo was still staring at the boy on the soccer team.
He winked.
Raquel’s voice rang through his head. “Felix, he should at least make you feel special. Like he actually wants to be with you.”
They ate mostly in silence. Arturo made a comment on how bougie the meal was. Felix tried to laugh. It came off more like he was choking.
“Come on, boo,” Arturo said. “Liven up. Can’t you relax just this once?”
Rage pulsed through him, out from his chest, up into his throat. The words spilled from his lips before he had a chance to stop them. “It’s hard to relax when you keep checking out other guys.”
Arturo dropped his fork, and it clanged loudly against the plate. “You just can’t let that go, can you?”
Felix scowled. “So you don’t deny that you keep doing it?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. I’m here with you, aren’t I?”
“But are you?” Felix shot back. “You might be sitting there, but your attention is elsewhere. I organized this whole thing for us. Why can’t you just be here in this moment?”
Arturo’s napkin plopped on the table. He stood, letting his chair scrape against the cement. “I don’t need this tonight,” he said. “You always stress me out.”
Felix stood up, too, but a force shoved him back down into his chair and kept him there. His words stuck in his throat when he saw Arturo, his hands raised, the spell leaving his lips. “No,” he said. “You stay. Don’t come after me.”
Arturo stormed off.
Felix sat in silence for half an hour.
He paid the entire bill by himself.
Tears pour down Felix’s face. Again. He opens his eyes. Mirella is crying, too, and her chest heaves.
“Wow.” That’s all she says as she wipes at her cheeks.
“I know,” he says, and he sucks air into his lungs, but the memory is fading, disappearing, unmooring from this place. He sees more pájaros, their shiny wings flapping as they deliver food, and he knows there is a reason this should hurt, but it’s…it’s…
Gone.
He turns to Mirella.
Her eyes go wide.
She grabs his arm. “Come this way,” she says, and she’s pulling him back toward the bus stop, toward the way they came, and he asks her what’s wrong, but she won’t talk, won’t answer, and he looks the other way, looks at La Estrella Mágica and its lights and sparkles, and there’s a man on the other side of the restaurant, standing next to—
No.
He looks down, and it’s those Jordans.
It can’t be.
Three weeks. In three weeks, Arturo has found another guy.
The thought pulls Felix to a stop. “How can he?” he says, and he doesn’t even know who the words are for. “How can he just move on so quickly?”
She tugs on his arm again. “No, Felix,” she says. “It’s not what you think.”
He whips around to her. “Why? What else could that possibly be?”
“My coworker.”
The other man. Felix squints. He’s doing some sort of magic, waving his hands, and Felix almost falls over from the shock. How can Arturo do this? How can he want to purge his thoughts of me? Wasn’t I the good one? Didn’t I try my hardest to make this work?
The last thought devastates him the most:
What does Arturo want to erase of me?
“Do it.”
Mirella doesn’t know what Felix means at first.
Arturo turns.
Sees Felix.
Confusion passes over his face.
And he starts walking toward them.
“Do it!” Felix yells, and he is grabbing at Mirella. “Whatever it is, whatever you said earlier!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The spell you mentioned! The one that’s stronger, that you use on bigger cases.”
She is shaking her head, her hands up, her palms out. “Absolutely not! You don’t need that!”
“I’ll pay you twice what I owe.”
Her mouth drops open.
Arturo is closer.
“No, it’s not right—”
“Please,” Felix begs. “I can’t face him. I can’t have him hurt me all over again.”
He watches her strug
gle. She glances at Arturo, who is now calling Felix’s name, and then her fingers are tracing a rune in front of her body, and her mouth isn’t moving, and Felix is trying to ignore Arturo, but his voice is so loud, so high-pitched, and he can hear the worry in it, and he’s yelling now—
“Felix! Felix! What are you doing—”
Pop.
Felix sways.
He looks to the man who had been with Arturo.
Sees the horror on his face.
Mirella gasps for air.
“I had to,” she blurts. “He wasn’t ready.”
The man reaches out, puts his hand on something.
“Arturo, I need you to calm down,” he says.
To nothing.
“Come this way,” the man says, and he turns away, and it looks like he is guiding…nothing.
Felix sees nothing.
Hears nothing.
Tears brim his eyelids as he faces Mirella. Her face is contorted; she is out of breath.
There’s an image in his head: brown, soft eyes, so dark you could—
No. The shadows swirl. Dissipate.
It’s gone.
Whatever the memory…it’s gone.
Felix tries on a smile.
He’s not sure it fits.
June 21, 2031, First Day of Summer
The bodies are all broken.
Stuck in the ice, all the color drained from their skin. Once they saw the water coming, they tried to make it back to shore, but the waves were too fast. Too frigid, crests crystallizing as they arced through the air, trapping people in the glacial swell.
Ummi said they took a foolish risk, rushing toward the last supply boat, trying to get to it before it capsized and the grain was ruined anyway. “That kind of courage gets you killed,” she warned me. She didn’t add “sooner.” Gets you killed sooner.
But they took the risk for us. And now they’re like dead trees, limbs bent at nightmarish angles, breaking against the waves. And we are slowly starving. They lost their lives for nothing. Like so many others. Like all of us will.
The few who were still in the shallows made it back, toes and fingers blackened by frostbite, but alive. Or at least not yet dead.
But the others—the dumb, brave ones, the ones who were more athletic and rushed the ships—first the slushy depths grabbed them, slowed their movements through the viscous waters. Then came the waves. Relentless. One after the other, crashing over the ship and onto their stuck bodies. Not the normal waves we used to see in the dazzling, ferocious thunderstorms, which crashed against the rocks at three or four meters. No. These were monstrous. Tidal waves. In a lake too wide to see across. Perhaps this great landlocked sea is landlocked no more. Maybe those last lingering appendages of land that connected us to other states, other countries, are ash now; maybe that’s why the ocean rushed in. But there is no way for us to know. All we know now is what we can see, and our vision ends at the horizon. I’m too terrified to look any farther.
I pray that their eyes froze shut before they saw the wave that would kill them. But I’m too old now for fairy tales. Nearly an adult in this age that ended childhood.
I know they faced the horror of their death, eyes wide open.
I saw it all from our fortified tower.
I wonder if it will be the same for me and Ummi and sweet little Zayna. I can’t bear to think about Zayna, whose only real memories will be this, the after, and not the before, messed-up as it was.
Inshallah, may our end be fast and gentle, like falling into a dream. Because this world we’re living in is the nightmare.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 1 Saal 3027
The bodies are all broken.
And they are everywhere. Frozen in ice, half-buried, stop-motion hands in the air, lips blue, eyes open. They must have faced the end totally aware. Frost creeping up their immovable bodies but the synapses of their brains still firing. Still screaming.
Abba—whom I only call Salar while on mission (yes, it is strange to call my father “Commander”)—says the bombs fell and the clouds rose high into the atmosphere, hundreds of saal ago. Or longer. And here they all still are. Planted like the carcasses, like trees in a lake, limbs shattered by a storm, on this frozen dead planet. Preserved like fossils for us to find. Like a warning to show us how easy it is for a planet to fall.
On approach, the planet was beautiful, quiet, the blanket of snow and ice beginning to recede back to its poles, quietly revealing brown dirt, even tender buds of green dotting the landscape, waiting like a breath held in secret ready to exhale.
July 4, 2031
There are no fireworks today. No celebrations of our independence. People gathered briefly on the first terrace, where the swimming pool reeks of composting food and human waste. We pretend not to notice. Pretending helps. Long ago we salvaged and filtered what water we could. Not to drink—too much of a risk, since we couldn’t be sure what direction the wind had shifted the fallout—but for cleaning and washing and failed attempts at indoor gardening. That was a few months ago, when people still had hope in their eyes. And yet there must be echoes of faith and optimism, because the families left in the tower all came down to sit in a corner, consoled by the cold rays of the sun—at least the sun shone today—to trade stories. To reminisce. All of us, save the very youngest, like Zayna, know that nostalgia is dangerous. It keeps you looking backward at what you’ve lost and how things used to be, when we have to keep our eyes forward to try to make it another day.
Supplies are getting scarce. Ummi won’t tell me exactly how little is left; I know she is still trying to shield me from horrors. So she can feel like she’s doing her job as a mother. Her face betrays her, but I pretend not to notice. It’s a small gift I can give her.
Later I will climb the stairs of the tower again, as high as I can go without worry, twenty floors, to the apartment I have claimed as my own hideaway. All the families—the ones who stayed, the ones who were either too scared or too realistic to hope that traveling south would be a salvation, everyone who remained—live below the fifth floor. It’s safer and, honestly, it doesn’t make sense to try to make a home any higher. The higher you go, the more dead bodies you have to see on the lake. No one ventures to the shore anymore; we’re too scared of ghosts.
Is it strange that even with so few of us left in this once-teeming city, I need to be alone sometimes? I mean, we are so alone. No phones. No TV. Soon after the bombs, someone was clever enough to break into the Museum of Broadcast Communications to steal an old-fashioned radio, the kind that has a crank. The kind that doesn’t need batteries or electricity. That’s how we knew there were others who survived—that’s why some people tried their luck on the open road, heading south. There was a voice on the radio, and some people decided to trust it.
I’m glad we didn’t go. At least here, we salvaged part of our lives. There are people. This is home. And if Papa-ji is out there somewhere, this is where he would come to find us. But it’s been six months, and if he could’ve found food and weapons and if he could have survived the unbearably cold nights in the open air, he would have been here by now, even walking all the way from the East Coast.
Maybe that’s why I need to be alone. So I can believe. I have to believe. Magical thinking is the only thing that gets me out of bed.
Tonight I will walk back into this apartment that I’ve taken for myself—one that faces the lake and the pier—and close my eyes and pretend that there are bombs bursting in air in glittery pinks and blues, reds and greens, lighting up the night sky, to fill our eyes with wonder. Sentimentality can kill you. But we are all dying anyway. I still have my imagination. I still have a bare flicker of hope. And this is a small gift I can give to myself.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 2 Saal 3027
We have set up camp in the fields near the immense metallic be
an that reflects our faces and the jagged broken towers they built into the sky. Abba said this was a place of gathering, perhaps worship—that its higher elevation and the wide stone platform on which it was mounted indicated reverence. That the sinuous low bridge that leads from these fields, snaking its way toward the shore, was meant for the masses and that the curlicued and bent-metal exoskeleton structure, which spans a distance nearly as large as our ship, would have been a place where music was heard, a place for the smiles and laughter of a people who did not realize how near their end was.
This is where we landed the Khawla—in this dead place once so full of life. Both my fathers had concerns that I would be overwhelmed with the weight of what had happened here. That my heart would be too soft, that I was too young. I promised them I was ready. I had studied. I had learned their language, their consonants so similar to our own but the irregularities still twisting my tongue. I did not expect Salar to treat me any differently than he would the rest of the crew—to baby me. Not after he’d assured Papa that he was allowing me on this journey only because he had already been to this planet on five previous missions and because the atmosphere was no longer toxic to our people. The Great Melting was under way, and our Terrapathos work would resuscitate this planet. It is a profound thing to bring life from death, Salar had said. I could bear witness.
Looking around, maybe Papa was right—he is a poet and softer than Salar, after all. Perhaps sentiment does get the better of me sometimes; perhaps our people view that emotion as dangerous. But I see it as an asset in the future I want for myself, studying the archaeology of ancient civilizations.
Still, I am only seventeen suraj, the youngest by three saal on this voyage, and I intend to show my value. While Salar sees to the botanists and terraformers and hydrologists, I take my pack and set off toward a tall tower in the distance, still standing relatively intact.
There is no hope for survivors on Mirzakhani, but if any lived through the first melting and the bombs whose mushroom clouds blocked their sole life-giving star, then surely they would have sought shelter in structures built to survive the great storms that inevitably came.
A Universe of Wishes Page 21
