The time was late and the night was as dark as void when Tom came back. The mission had gone impossibly well.
Elongated silhouettes of trees were whirling by as we drove through the dark street. We were surrounded by different shades of black, a sea of silhouettes that let our imagination do the work and put names on the forms.
I rested my head against the window pane and closed my eyes, wishing the unconsciousness of sleep would soon come and find me; the stabbing pain in my heart was becoming unbearable.
We pulled up a deserted house. The dark forms that neighbored it belonged to trees rather than houses. Either way, no sign of light was around, the new moon of the night included.
Tom killed the engine, but didn’t make a move to get out of the truck. Neither did I; I couldn’t find my legs. Something snaked around my hand and grabbed it. I recognized Tom’s fingers, and squeezed them back.
There was something about his presence near me. There was something about him worrying about me that made me feel vulnerable. And that something always tipped off the tears I couldn’t otherwise shed.
Loss was inevitable. We never got to keep anything for too long, that we had learnt all along, one way or another. But the strike of loss never loses its edge, and its pain is always as smoldering.
I keep telling myself that I wasn’t here, that this wasn’t happening. Nana didn’t die, that she wasn’t alone when the troops closed in on her and stole the last family I had in this world. I wasn’t here.
The deep breath I took made my chest throb in pain. Tom’s fingers released my hand. I heard his door open, then close. Heard his footsteps going round the truck. Heard him approaching my door. He opened my door and helped me out the truck.
The night had a cold breeze. I took it in as well and let it burn my lungs. I looked up into Tom’s eyes and held his gaze for a while. He was searching for a sign, something, anything that showed him I was in pain.
Somewhere deep inside, it was there. But it wasn’t near the surface. It didn’t touch my eyes. It was this small creek snaking in me, that would rise with the flood of memories and sink away under the cloud of unconsciousness. I craved unconsciousness, I craved sleep, but they were becoming a rare commodity.
Of someone else’s accord, my hand rose to cup Tom’s face. His gaze faltered the slightest bit. My face strained with a smile that screamed in hypocrisy with my little creek, but on the surface, it was somehow genuine.
That night, the creek sank more as clouds of long awaited sleep rolled in and swept me away.
Death is a curious thing. It’s weird how it’s part of life, though it’s its very end. It’s like the newborn that kills its mother. It’s never a new thing, we recognize it, but never understand it comes to reap lives.
Sometime during the night, I opened my eyes, though my eyelids felt heavy. I felt alone, but I thought I smelled pan cakes. A creek rose in the midst of an unexpected flood. I propped myself up, and sniffed the air to find the subtle smell of dust and long abandoned houses, the smell of time and nothing else.
“Angeni,” Damien said, his eyes sinking in pools of sorrow, “Mrs. Maples, they… Angeni your grandmother has passed.”
She “passed”. She belonged in another tense now, to another world.
I gave my hair a quick brush and put on a dress. I smiled to the mirror. She liked to see me in dresses. Somewhere inside of me, I felt like a hypocrite. Somewhere else, I was wondering how much we had to pay, and how much was too expensive and if the prize was worth it, if the prize ever existed outside a collective imagination.
I entered the kitchen and saw Tom seated at the island bar, sipping on a mug of coffee. His eyes drifted to mine after ascending my body. I remembered last night and heard a crowd of questions approaching the door of my mind, so I closed it, then double locked it.
“Hey,” I croaked.
“ ‘Morning. Come have a seat, I’ll pour you a cup.”
The wooden stool creaked as I dragged it across the floor. I sat and found that Tom has been reading our brief. We were penetrating a government unit. One of the highest ranks too. It didn’t take a scientist to figure out why the choice had fallen upon us. We had no family left. If anything were to happen to us, the government wouldn’t have anyone to threaten us with in exchange for information about the organization. Our qualifications weren’t bad either.
I took the steaming cup Tom was offering me, and picked up the brief. But before I let my mind begin soaking up the numbers and facts, I sensed something on the other lane. I felt Tom’s unease. As if something was brewing in him. You developed this extra sense with time as you get to know someone, as you get to live with them, as they become as much a part of your life as your own body does. I liked to call it soul affinity.
I turned to him and saw him looking at me. I surprised him because he seemed lost in thought, deliberating to find some right words. He opened his mouth, closed it, breathed in, let the breath out, then looked down at his feet. They were bare.
“I don’t regret it,” I heard myself say. “I don’t think I ever will. And there wasn’t an outside motive to it, it came from within me Tom.”
“I got some bread from the bakery. Took me half an hour to get there, but at least it’s fresh,” Tom said. “Make yourself a sandwich.”
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t feeling hungry, that I wasn’t in the mood for breakfast, but I didn’t want to get into another fight over food with Tom. So I hopped off the stool and went to stick my head in the fridge.
“Do they really expect us to go into the government so easily?” I could sense the indignation in my tone, especially as it rose a couple of notches too high.
Tom shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a first. A lot of people went in. Problem was, they never got the information out, not the right one at least.”
“But they expect us to? This is ludicrous. We’ve never gone undercover so deep.”
“No one ever doomed first attempts to failure.”
I held my tongue as it tried to lash out at Tom’s optimism.
I had the distinct impression or illusion, as we rolled away from that house, that we were heading back home. And then I remembered, that home, my home was gone. Not the house itself, not the walls and the rooms and their furnishings. But the life that used to waft among them, the blood that used to fill their emptiness, and the memories that washed their surfaces. You could rebuild walls, you could stack up the stones and the wood. But memories, they’re morsels of time, glimpses of our pasts carried through the winds of change. Somewhere down the line, they get trapped in frames. A picture with smiling faces, a book where you read your first story, a step on the stair case where you had your first broken bone.
But they came to my house, and they pillaged my home. They killed my last branch of family and destroyed my relics of past. In some ways, that made things easier. Because the loss was only in my head. It belonged to my imagination and not my senses. I couldn’t go back there and wander through the rooms and lament the loss of what was and was no longer. The ruins make the grave of the past, sometimes, if you don’t see the grave, you don’t believe the death. Or at least you can tell yourself that maybe, just maybe, that death was just another child of your imagination. A battle of reality against the unreal.
And sometimes, you didn’t want reality to win.
“Where’s your mind?” Tom asked, sucking me back to reality.
“Back home,” I answered, feeling a melancholic smile creeping to my lips; feeling the clouds rolling above my creek.
I saw his hands tighten their grip on the steering wheel. “We can make a new home. When all of this is over, we can have a home of our own.” He tore his eyes off the empty street we were driving through, and bore them to mine. He smiled, and just like that, hope wafted from his lips, and hit me in the face. I felt the mirror effect his smile had on me.
“When all of this is over,” I repeated, not sure which ‘this’ I was referring to.
“Now,” he said, his tone lightening up a few notches, “do I look like an aspiring member of the government?” he asked playfully.
“Why yes my friend! You have the look of a killer of truth and a reaper of lives, most definitely!”
We were enrolling in the ranks of the government for two reasons. The first was that the times were getting more critical, and we needed inside spying more than ever. The second was that the last Folds to have been insiders were now in the Labyrinth. We were supposedly two aspiring youngsters, hungry for wealth, and thirsty for power. Typical government members.
