[this-one-who-does-not-individuate]

PART 3

She remembers being here, sitting on this beach, with him, shortly after dusk. Sitting right on the ground, the sand a bit uncomfortable, some sort of cocktail in her hand, now about half full. The water laps in and out, lazily. They’re in a sort of cove, and to their left and right are mountains, in this light just blots against the very dim glow of the sky. Above, countless stars, shot through with the dim band of the Milky Way. As a city kid, Maria isn’t used to this flamboyant celestial display, and she can’t shake the sense that it isn’t real, that this simply isn’t what the stars look like.

It’s sometime in August, she thinks. Yes, sometime in August . . .

She turns to her left and sees him, discernible as a little bright tower against the pure dark of the mountain curling behind him. She can make out the breeze, warm but slightly bracing, playing with his hair.

“This isn’t quite how it happened,” she says. She isn’t sure if it’s a statement or a question.

She tries to remember. It’s sometime in August, and they’d gone out to the beach . . .

“Because I dropped my drink and it spilled on the ground. I hadn’t even had half of it yet. And you laughed and told me I should watch myself when I get to college.”

But now she has her drink securely in hand. And she sits back, relaxes a bit, takes a long sip, and gazes at the starscape and the tranquil ocean.

This is all so relaxing, and yet that word is so wrong—because part and parcel of the relaxation is a profound excitement, a stirring, a curious internal movement. A sensation of devious glee, of having beat the system.

How can it be, that one can really do this—that one can really end up sitting on a beach with the stars sprawling above, the sea just a calm friend, a stiff drink in hand, Martin to one’s left . . . this, this is not permitted. What one does is keep grinding on, gritting one’s teeth, fighting battle after battle, and keeping that little piece of glee secreted in one’s heart as a reason to push on. One can envision this, but one can no more live in it than one can step into a painting. And yet, here she is, sometime in August, in the summer, on the Northern Hemisphere of this revolving earth . . .

She thinks, for some reason, of her grandfather, sailing in the Navy in World War II. She sees him on shore leave, finally, after months of toil, dead drunk on rum, looking up with dizzy eyes at a sight like this sky. Maybe that was his way of stepping through the painting. You can’t really be there, on the other side of the painting—except perhaps on certain special evenings of occult significance, blessed by a subtle force which tells no one but you its devious secret—on certain summer nights, in August, you can look up at the stars with drinks in your belly and a woman you’ve just met at your side, a woman you don’t know, but who might one day (the alcohol makes her grandfather romantic) become your wife, the mother of your children, grandmother to little Maria—well, anything really is possible on these few special nights, these tiny things God forgot when He tallied up the balance sheet of life and made sure it all added up to zero.

Maria thinks of the crystalline quality of certain pop songs, of the unrepentant jubilance of a synthesized melodic line, pointing toward the other side, which is too much: too many stars, too much glee, a positive quantity in place of zero.

I will find my satisfaction on the other side, where there is no “I.”

She takes another sip, and says:

“You know, I never drank on the Sphere. Not a drop. Even though they built special breweries down there, just so people could have their fix.”

“Because it would remind you of me.” Of course he knows.

And now that he has spoken, something has changed. It didn’t happen this way the first time at all. She hadn’t known what the Sphere was. And she hadn’t felt that his words were—hers—that what she knew he knew—

—and that what he knew—

“You don’t remember this.” She knows. They know.

“I do now. Because you do.”

“But you—you didn’t spend the summer with me.”

She would expect to feel outraged, betrayed. But she doesn’t, not quite. Because she knows why she did it. Why he did it? Why . . . what exactly is the word one uses in this situation . . .

“Maria would have loathed you for doing what you did,” says Maria.

“I know, and I’m sorry,” says Martin, but it’s her apologizing to herself, isn’t it?

“I don’t need an apology from myself. I’ll never betray myself,” says Maria.

“Life really is tough, isn’t it?” Martin says, sincerely, with no note of mockery. “You can get as close to a person as Maria was to Martin, and that person can still betray you—”

“—but I know now that I won’t betray you now, and you won’t betray me—”

“—because we [teem]—”

“—because in the next moment I might be you and you might be me—”

“—and why would one ever betray one’s own interests—”

“—we’re closer now, we’re so close we complete one another’s—”

“—existences.”

There is a pause. The heavens blaze, self-sufficient and impassive. Another sip. The alcohol is dulling the rough feeling of the sand beneath her, and making her braver.

“I see why you did it,” she says.

“It wasn’t planned,” Martin says. “But when we found that our best candidate in the pneuma-branch study had had an affair with me in an unreal branch—”

“—what a wonderful find, yes—”

“—it meant that there was something, a feeling, that could grow and grow—”

“—absence making the heart grow fonder—”

“—making her an even better fighter than she would have been with her innate abilities—”

“—and reaching a kind of fever pitch when, finally, the beloved returns—”

“—a state of passion conducive to the production of untold energies—”

“Weaponize the self,” they mutter in unison.

“I’m angry at us for doing this,” says Martin.

“But we had to,” says Maria.

“Because think of all the suffering, suffering beyond all conception. Imagine every one of those stars up there being a soul in pain, and us doing nothing,” says Martin.

“A mere doomed romance is nothing, compared to all that. It happens to virtually everyone at some point! It’s the human condition!” says Maria.

“But there are worse things, and now you remember them,” says Martin.

“We remember the New City and the torture chambers,” says Maria.

“And think of all those stars up there, fusion reactions all—what if every one is putting out its own Boltzmen? Think of all the Boltzmen who are born crying out in pain—”

“—but only for, what is it, a picosecond on average—”

“—but a picosecond of ten hells’ worth of agony—”

“—or ten heavens’ worth of ecstasy.”

Martin laughs. “You know, EPRN put so much work into proving that it was ethical to create Boltzmen. That if such-and-such number of billion agony states are created in conjunction with such-and-such number of billion ecstasy states, it all sums up to such-and-such other number. You wouldn’t have believed the arguments they had, the ‘results’ they derived, endlessly, pointlessly.”

“There was a whole internal publication,” Maria remembers—

“—which, optimistically, they titled Progress in Boltzman Ethics.”

“So you want,” Maria says, already knowing what she wants—and isn’t it strange to think of what they are doing here as “speaking”?—“you want to save even the Boltzmen? Every last one?”

“If we can.”

“And your solution is this—this state of closeness?”

“That,” Martin says, “and superior firepower.”

They look out on the waves lapping gently against the shore, mere harmless surf, the shallow stuff of dishwater, without any hint of malign and hidden depths.