How High We Go in the Dark(23)

Farther ahead, the old woman recognizes her late husband. She looks back toward the group, uncertain what to do.

“It’s my Francis,” the old woman says. Her hands graze the orb and the entire scene ripples. “It feels like oil.”

I take her hand, lead her into the orb, and others follow. The orb’s membrane washes over our bodies as we pass through, as if we’re walking through a waterfall. When we emerge, surprisingly dry, we’re standing in the corner of a hospital room—the antiseptic smell wafts through the air. A past version of the old woman is feeding her husband in bed as they watch Jeopardy! on the television. Who is Thomas More, her husband says. His voice is barely audible. What are mitochondria, answers the old woman of the past. I squeeze her shoulders as we watch, and she begins to cry. I lead her out of the memory, pushing through the hospital room wall where we emerged. I wonder if all the various parts of our lives have been untangled and laid out before us to explore.

I push forward, half searching for an orb of my own, weaving through the crowds congregating around tiny planets of memory. Excuse me, excuse me. Have you seen my childhood? Some people are wandering into the lives of others as if connecting the dots toward enlightenment.

“That was a really amazing one,” someone says as I pass. “Real salt-of-the-earth people. My great-grandparents also suffered through the Depression.”

Out here, largely alone, I feel like I’m walking through the vast empty spaces between the stars of our constellations. I approach a lone man sitting on the ground, staring at an orb of himself. The memory shows him at a theme park, putting a little boy wearing an astronaut outfit into a roller coaster car. He slowly walks toward the control booth, watches as the train climbs toward the sky. He is crying in the orb. He is crying outside of it. I crouch beside him for a moment and rub his back.

“I thought maybe he’d be here,” the man says. The orb shows the arms of children waving in excitement as the roller coaster plummets. “His mother is still out there. In the world. Alone.”

“Maybe you should go back to the crowd and be with the others,” I say.

“They’ll make their way out here soon enough,” he says.

“Walk with me for a bit, then.” I hold out my hand and help the man up.

Together, we move through the orbs. Other scenes seem to exist out of step from the rest—more looking glass than memory. These ones are impassable, locked—a warehouse filled with people laid out on cots, attended to by medical staff. Those not sleeping seem catatonic. Their eyes follow the doctors like mannequins or dolls observing the world. The skin of some resembles my arms before I found myself here—translucent, filled with light. It’s unclear if this is the natural course of the plague or a side effect of our attempts to cure it. In some orbs, white CDC vans collect the afflicted who have been cast out of their homes or fallen in the street.

“Is this what happened to us?” the man says.

“Who knows,” I answer. I wonder how much time has passed out there and if my parents are safe. I do not want them to join me in this place.

Of course, some orbs seem to lack any explanation at all—a silver pod the size of a coffin darting across our solar system, crashing into the ocean; a large iridescent planet like the interior of an abalone shell orbiting three stars; a woman in a cave wearing animal skins and crying over the body of a little girl. We watch this cave woman sing in unknown languages, place flower petals over the girl’s eyes. We watch her walk across a vast plain as she sheds her clothing and turns into light.

The orbs begin to tremble, sending ripples across our memories. The crowd slowly catches up to us. I can see the old woman and the lawyer. I wait for them, wave them over. Not far from where I stand, a scene of a girl eavesdropping on her parents fighting begins to disintegrate, evaporates into mist. And just beyond that orb, I finally see my life—my parents strolling through Japantown in San Francisco, me lagging behind, a preteen with headphones, peering into shops that reminded me of my childhood, smelling the aroma of grilled eel, riffling through the manga selection at Kinokuniya bookstore.

In other orbs I see my uncle Manabu give me my first bicycle while at a picnic in Golden Gate Park. I see my mother talking to a school counselor about my college options and the long nights I never knew about—my parents poring over legal and financial documents they only half understand, trying to buy my way into the future.

“We have to make sure Jun’s going to be okay,” my father says. “In case we’re not here.”

“Exercise more,” my mother says. “Drink tea. I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.”

I stand over this incarnation of my parents and desperately want to hug them. I want to shout beyond time and tell them they were perfect—every bike ride, every sleepover, every toy we couldn’t afford. All the prayers and lessons and after-school programs that helped me belong in this country even if I never fully believed it to be true.

“It’s there,” my father would say whenever I asked him why I needed to believe so hard in everything, why my friends didn’t seem to have to try as hard. The man, the lawyer, and the old woman enter the orb, crowding into my childhood bedroom. “Opportunities are like little seeds floating in the wind. Your life is there. Some people have a big net to collect them all. Other people need to pray that the right seeds, the best ones, make their way to them with just enough bad ones to appreciate the good.”