How High We Go in the Dark(82)

“It sounds like you’re trying to make a point,” I said.

“I was never angry with you,” he said. “And I’m so happy for you and Sean. I know it’s different for your generation, for you especially. You need to move on. But do you miss any of this? Could you ever come back?”

I watched my mother swing her arms in the air, occasionally waving to an acquaintance, a group of teenagers huddled outside the manga shop I used to call my church, the same old men I saw growing up sitting at the counter of their sake bar. In the street, self-driving taxis began their nighttime circuit picking up salarymen from their required nights on the town with superiors. Somewhere behind us, Tamami was walking the aunties and uncles back to their homes. I thought about how, if I raised my child here, they would have an entire neighborhood of love.

“I do,” I said. “Miss it, that is.”

We approached the funerary tower and my father stopped before we caught up with my mother.

“Your mother loves you,” he said. “And I think she’s forgiven you, even if she’ll never admit it. She wants you, and your family, in our life, even if you’re an ocean away.”

On the twenty-second floor in suite 38B, my mother tapped her phone against a sensor in a wooden pedestal that stood in the center of the room. A holographic cherry blossom tree sprouted from the cold linoleum floor and Baba appeared sitting on a stone bench, staring up at the petals as they danced throughout the room. The urn arrived shortly afterward, emerging from a trapdoor, coming to rest on the pedestal. My mother pressed another selection on her mortuary phone app and Jiji appeared next to Baba, playing the violin. And then the great-aunties and -uncles, as if they had just walked through the walls. A miniature poodle that belonged to my cousin came up to Jiji and curled at his feet. The barren floor was now a garden populated by stone lanterns, meticulously raked sand. I imagined how I might be captured here if I chose to remain a grave friend. Would I be immortalized as an old woman, a little girl, a mother? Could I see Sean and my child here, sitting beside my grandparents? Both my mother and I waved our hands through Baba’s image.

“She wanted to see the world that she missed out on,” my mother said. “Before the world was sick. Before the oceans rose, when the city was as it used to be hundreds of years ago—no concrete walls over our shoulders, no funerary towers.”

I walked around the room to stand before every ancestor and prayed to them, let the light of their images wash over me.

There would be more conversations and arrangements to come—visits to Chicago, visits to Japan when my child was old enough—but right then I sat silently, on ripples of sand made of light with my mother and father, and listened to Jiji’s music, clinging to the perpetual flurry of cherry blossoms that held us all together.





The Scope of Possibility


When she was seven hundred years old, still a baby by world builder standards, I walked my daughter to the seed field where I had been designing Earth. Kids usually weren’t allowed in the fields until they had completed their apprenticeship in their second millennium, but I needed to show her; she needed to understand. We walked between the rows of giant spheres, some as big as moons, glowing with ribbons of light, as I told her stories about each one. The fields are where most of the advanced civilizations in the galaxy are born and, for all we know, every galaxy has a world builder planet orbiting just outside in the dark, utterly alone. At the time, our world was only a giant playground to her. I stood in front of a tiny blue seed and handed her a probability scope.

This is what I’ve been doing for most of your life, I said. And one day, not long from now, this is where I’ll go. To observe, guide if needed. I’ll be one of them, little one. I’ll be among their first and their last. But I’ll always be your mother.

*

Nuri, my poor girl, looked betrayed when I left. The light within her flicked off for a moment when she realized I wasn’t coming back. No more walks, no more telling bad jokes to the laughing tree, no more looking through the probability scope together at funny animals that may or may not exist in the future. And that’s all I could think about, trapped in my cradle, my space pod (whatever you want to call it) for centuries. I was so much older when my mother left me. I had already completed my training. She was too young to realize, you see. We could get from point A to point B much faster, sure—a day, a week, a month for the farthest corners—and maybe the elders wanted it this way, for the world builders to have the time to dwell on what they’d left behind, to become comfortable with forgetting. But how could I ever forget?

I landed beneath the water and washed ashore as a small sea creature, an ancestor of the starfish. My cradle, as far as I know, has long been trapped in hundreds of feet of ice. When I first arrived, I could not talk, obviously did not have the biological means to do so, could not write in journals or relay these words as I do now. I’ve confided in others now and then. But I had to be careful. I can’t come back from some things—the sorts of deaths that were popular for so long, burning and decapitation. For those first few eons, there was nothing but water, ash, the simplest of organisms, and the seed I had launched into the heart of the planet. I fell in love with a box jelly and then a trilobite, but these were single-sided love affairs.

*

She didn’t understand. She asked if she could go. Mommy, please, she said. I’ll be good. The elders, who determined seed launch order long before any of us were born, assigned my husband and Nuri to be among the last world builders to remain. And so we grew used to saying goodbye to everyone we cared about—our neighbors, my best friend, the boy who told me he would love me forever before leaving to care for a planet populated by bipedal crustaceans.