The Loved and the Island God

After my months pestering to see Aapirah, the guardian theologians’ response seems an insult: ‘You may speak to Salamt, silence be upon her.’ Aapirah’s name isn’t Salamt.

Burying my indignance, I fly through the caves, feet firing me from graceful arc to graceful arc. Dusty air whooshes around my skin. Lightspheres chase my sleeves, sending illumination slithering across sandstone. Why do I bother? Hope has become as intertwined with my body as my heart; to rip hope away would be to rip my veins away with it. But that hope is what pumps blood through me, so I can’t resist its commands.

I land in the yellow glow of the warren, deactivating my gravity suppressor. Weight lurches back, and I clench my stomach as I slump forwards, lightspheres jangling on their strings. Melodious prayers echo from a distant chamber. They must be my old warrenmates, and likely some new ones. A voice in my head joins the singing, lyrics flowing back. I try to silence it, but I can’t. It tugs me towards the noise, towards my friends. I want to see them, but I don’t want them to see me, so I chart my route far around the prayer chamber.

Thoughts spawn in my mind, not rooted in any previous. I tense; this is the subtle yet familiar sensation of Aapirah’s machines messing with my mind.

My thoughts are different to humans’, so it’s no wonder Heela recognises them immediately. Yes, my mind is different in scale: a day is like a thousand years, a thousand years are like a day, I see causation where others see chaos, and no memory goes to waste. But I am different in type, too. Nothing binds my mind to unity, stopping others’ thoughts from being mine and mine from being others’. I am not blind to the future. Like moonlight diffracting through a window slit, time diffracts through my intentions into millions of potentialities. The lone past is near meaningless to me.

Heela will enter the balcony-cave soon—sooner now she knows where I am. She’ll do so with a knock, then push the door open slowly, peeking a nervous head in. No—she’ll throw it wide and stride in, staring me down. Ah, now it stabilises. She’ll ease the door open and edge forwards, aware I already know how this meeting will go.

I step lightly through the corridor as it slopes up. Despite how long it’s been, the tunnel is familiar. It was bigger in my memories though, a runway with a daunting, distant ceiling. We ran through it, chasing each other, the floating glowspheres sending sharp shadows whirling around us. Aapirah once tripped on the uneven ground and kept her momentum as she soared on, then skidded against the stone. Sand scorched skin from her hands and right knee, but she just bolted back up and kept running. Play was more important than pain. I caught her, of course, and brought her back to the prisoner circle. Only then did she cry about her injuries.

Now, the corridor is only twice my height, and only as wide as a one-way street.

Childhood was so freeing. No dread, no responsibilities, all the time in the world. Now, though, we’ve seen behind the curtain. Our minds have expanded, and the moment is no longer habitable.

I ignore her. The singing pauses, then switches to another song. It’s louder now. I imagine myself in the chamber with them, slipping back into my place in their harmony, even my ugly voice helping to make a beautiful whole. In that chamber, we chatted joyfully at iftar, with common foods somehow tastier than any other time of year. There, we held the present-giving of Christmas, and I knew my community appreciated me. There, the prayer leader announced that Salamt would soon be upon us. I had so many friends then, but I always sat beside Aapirah.

Aapirah was the first of us to get God. Stories and songs were pressed upon our child minds, but we didn’t understand them yet. She did. Watching her walk around, kind and confident like a character of myth, convinced us she understood something we did not. When years later she at last stood before us to lead prayer, pride gripped my cheeks. I knelt to pray, and I realised what a gift it was to have her beside me.

I can do nothing but hold these memories for warmth as their spines pierce my flesh.

Nearing the balcony-cave, I pass my old sleeping quarters and brace for more memories. Who lives there now? A friend? A friend’s child, whose name I was never told? Whoever they are, they’re lucky. It’s a small room, built into the edge of a cliff, so while you approach sleep you hear water lapping at your feet. I spent so many nights there, basking in the warmth of Aapirah’s body as moonlight splintered through the window. We held each other closer, tighter, doing anything to bring ourselves together.

My throat chokes me, and I hurry my pace. The songs disappear behind me, and soon I stand in front of a door. The only sound is the crashing of waves.

Heela opens the door and shuffles forwards, eyes passing over the tubes and wires hanging from my body like ribbons. I finish a mouthful of mash and stand from the table.

‘Silence be upon you,’ I say.

‘…And upon you.’

She still signs as she talks, but her deaf accent is gone—now she listens through my ears. With each movement of her arms, she drags the black cords around like chains, causing a grating, rustling sound. The machinery leaves little room for clothing—the dangling tubes cover more of her body than any fabric—but nobody would consider her immodest; the cords gouge and crawl under her skin in such density that looking at her causes me to itch. Jealousy tingles within me. Once, her nude form had been a hidden, precious thing, a symbol of trust whenever she revealed it to me. I push those thoughts aside and smile, almost happily. I haven’t seen her in so many years.

Her face seems tired and unplaceably older, but still so clearly her. Even the wires can’t change her bones, so prominent in her thin body. As she looks me over with a raised head, her neck tightens, and a blue glow reflects off the ridge-like muscles spreading from the tips of her clavicles. Through the lump in my throat, I say, ‘You’re beautiful.’

‘Thank you,’ she responds, unnaturally soon. ‘You too.’

She returns to her seat in the centre of the wide, low room. The cave opens behind her, revealing the light of the moon-overlooked ocean, which tinges the marble tiles and pillars blue. Aapirah continues to shovel some incoherent mush of dull brown and green into her mouth. Even from here it smells like unwashed dog.

‘What did they do to you?’ asks Heela. ‘They made you into—’

She won’t have the guts to finish the sentence—‘a monster, a false god,’—so I interrupt her. ‘Salamt. The daughter of God. She isn’t like you expected, nor did you expect her to be me. But I am here; it is my holy purpose. Why are you here?’

Again, she is too afraid, and asks, ‘Do you still love me? Do you love anything?’

‘Be precise in your language. Yes, some form of love. No, not the kind you want. An adult can love a child, but not in the way two adults love. But this analogy is limited: the difference between adult and child understates the difference between us and still operates within a one-on-one framework. Rather, I love you as I love all of humanity. You could not comprehend my love, even if I implanted it in your mind.’

‘You told me God’s love was personal.’

Ah, there’s her bravery. ‘It will comfort you to know that I loved you when I was human,’ I say, ‘like you did me and as much as you did me. I do not recall the time well—I didn’t store memories efficiently, then—but this I know.’

She admits it, then: how weak human memories are. Conjectured chronologies. Impressions of images. Retrofitted rhyme. Only the emotions are vivid, and those are bittered by the future. I don’t want a past with Aapirah, like she offers. I want a present.

Cool, salty air flows out through the doorway behind me. Aapirah continues to eat her muck. Her cords stretch and spread from the far corners of the room, coalescing on her, making her the knot of a thousand strings.

I purse my lips to settle their trembling before speaking. ‘If I were to unplug all of these… would you die? Or would you return to being human?’

‘I used to see futures where we stayed together, but not for a long time now.’

I try to shout, ‘Then why did you invite me here!?’ but it comes out as a croak.

My heart is torn away. The pain in my throat flourishes, and a groan rattles out. The dampness accumulated in my eyes becomes too thick to see through. She’s no more than a blurred black coil against the moon.

Begging the guardian theologians for entry to the island, I had assumed—hoped—that it was merely space which separated me from Aapirah, not time.

My cheeks itch with flowing wetness, and my throat aches from an invisible strangler. I force jittery, deep breaths decreasing in depth. Hands clenched, nails digging into flesh, I bow. ‘Thank you for seeing me, Salamt. Goodbye.’

She closes the door behind her, and my desired future slips into the firm groove of the past. I return to my meal. If I’d told Heela to go away, she wouldn’t have listened. Realising for herself was the only way to make it stick. That was my last task of the day, and I’m satisfied with a job well done. It wasn’t clean—it couldn’t have been—but in the grand scheme of her life, it was better that she didn’t waste more time on me.

She runs through the warren. Running is all she can do, the only thing that gives her power, as she gags and whines and wails. I narrow my aperture, bringing the limit of Heela’s mortality into focus. She’ll live a good, happy life, even if it’s not the one she wants now. In none of the future-threads, trimmed by today’s actions, do we meet again.