Freshwater(49)

But it was not the using of humans that alarmed the Ada enough to try and guide us with a code. It was the places we went for pleasure with As?ghara guiding us—the ecstasy we felt in tricking humans and watching their heartbreak, watching them crumple against walls, seeing the shocked pain in their eyes. We had no remorse; we left that to the Ada. We became complicit in many betrayals, met men who lied and devastated their women, who despised humans like we did, who acted like they were gods and not humans. We let As?ghara play with these men, and when she was tired of batting them around and baiting them with the Ada’s heart, we helped her remind them that divinity was deliberately not accorded to all flesh, that they were nothing, no better than the women they thought they could injure. The men all confessed their love to the beastself, with their mouths or with hunger in their eyes after she left them, after she threw them all away. The Ada suffered in this because, like a human, she had loved some of them.

When we were faced with Yshwa, it was easy to justify the things we had done. We did not care. The Ada wanted to be contrite. As?ghara wanted to burn the world down. We were guilty only of allowing the beastself to run the body into mattresses and hearts. What did it matter?

“You are weak with lust,” Yshwa told us.

“Argue with the beastself,” we said, and we left As?ghara out for him.

She shrugged. “They are only humans.”

“You’re no better,” he countered. “Driven by instinct, incapable of restraint, ruled by desire.”

As?ghara hissed, offended. “You don’t understand—” she began, but Yshwa raised a hand to silence her.

“You forget,” he said. “I once had a body too.”

The silence that fell was weighted. “I just want to be free,” As?ghara said eventually.

We wondered if she meant from us, if she wanted to be a separate self, with her own body, doing as she pleased. If so, she would have to learn, as the Ada had, what things in this life were impossible. The whole is greater than the individual.

“I thought you wanted to follow my teachings,” Yshwa said, but he meant all of us, not her.

We hesitated. The Ada wanted to follow him, that much was clear; she had never tried to steer all of us as firmly as she was attempting now, but we were many and she was small.

“Don’t ask me to stop for the humans,” As?ghara spat. “Taking from them is the only pleasure we have left.”

“You can’t lean on that forever,” Yshwa said.

“Do you have a better plan? Do you know how to make the pain stop?”

It was only with eyes like ours that we saw Yshwa flinch, just with fractions of his skin, as if he was remembering. “It doesn’t.”

As?ghara spoke for us. “Then we won’t either.”

He came up and laid his hand on her cheek. It burned, and she turned into the Ada. “Do it for me,” he whispered.

The Ada’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s not fair, Yshwa. We just want it to stop hurting. Or have you forgotten? At least you got to die.”

She wanted to look away—we wanted to look away—but Yshwa held her face tight. His breath felt like a thousand tiny cuts against our skin.

“We’re gods,” he reminded her. “I don’t have to be fair.” When he pressed his mouth to her forehead, our bones boiled underneath. The Ada closed her eyes. “I will lead you,” he whispered, “down the paths of righteousness for nothing, other than the sake of my name.” When we looked up again, he was gone.

It was not the last time he tried to save us, to pull us out of our own condemnation and wrap us in his peace. Yshwa knew the Ada’s secret fear—that she had become evil because of the things As?ghara had done.

It didn’t matter. He was not enough.

We stopped hunting because it had lost its shine, but we could not give Yshwa what he wanted. There was too much safety in sin, too much sweetness to walk away from. We took lovers who belonged to other people, kissed husbands after the sun had set and also in the broad brightness of afternoon. We gave the Ada new men, not entirely reformed, but not as cruel as the ones before them. She felt a little safer with these ones, so she wrote about them to Yshwa, like evidence of small remedies, proof that she was slowly, somehow, being saved.





Chapter Nineteen


You cannot find it. And if you find it, you cannot touch it.




Ada

Dear Yshwa,

I am lying in bed in my lover’s shirt. He always leaves something behind, but he doesn’t mean to. The first time it was that navy cardigan, the one I wore till he came back. The sleeves were too big and they swallowed up my elbows.

Yesterday, when he left, I walked him to the train and he kissed me on the platform. I watched the train pull away and then I walked back up the stairs, across the concrete of the plaza. I walked through the battered white door of my building and up the rickety stairs to my apartment. His white T-shirt was lying on my bed. It smelled like him. I stripped off my clothes and pulled it over my body. I slept in his scent.

I love him, but not too much. Carefully. He doesn’t touch me when he sleeps but he holds me against him when he’s awake. It is simple with him. There’s fun, good friendship, and powerful orgasms. Sometimes, it feels like I don’t need anything else.

“I don’t believe in missing people,” he tells me. “If I miss you, I can just call you.”