strongest stuff I’d ever tasted, had helped a lot. My shoulder and ankle thudded in time with my heart as I drove, my torn palms so swollen they looked like gloves.
I pulled into long-term parking and shut the Rover off, the engine winding down, ticking sharply in the cool, dry air. The low concrete building ahead of me was a bastion of friendly, twinkling lights. At this hour there were few fliers, virtually no one to witness me turning myself in, begging for help, far from home. Maybe I could even toss a call in to Rutger somehow, demand to speak to my family. I could be with them soon, comforting them at the end of the world. Mom’s soft arms around my shoulders, the feel of the kids’ hair under my fingers.
Far away, a noise began: the long, low call of a horn or some brass instrument, resonant, grating, a warning. I waited for it to die down, entranced. People left the airport and examined the wooden poles outside, each crowned with a bouquet of megaphones—even putting their hands to the wood—to see if it was air-raid sirens. It would have been so easy to just tell them what it was, and wait to be disbelieved. “That’s what it sounds like on the far side of the gate,” I’d say. “Don’t you know that?” Knowledge long her only power, now mine too. To have something that no one else had.
Enough. I got out, dragging my bag, coins jingling in my pockets, change from the hummus stall. Whoops. Get flagged going through the metal detector for that. Even in this place full of young brown men, what they feared at the airport would be a young brown man. We were what the whole world feared now—for a few minutes more. Soon enough they would fear other things.
I turned my pocket inside out, finding the coins and something soft—the ziplock bag full of frankincense. I opened it without even thinking and dug my nose into the warmed contents. Sap, she’d said, the sweet smell of the deep desert and the blood of wood, a perfume I’d never known. Would never have known, if not for her. The most precious gift anyone could think of to give to the baby they thought was their prophet, their saviour, their messiah, the one that the star shone upon, telling them where He was. As precious as gold. Given to me with barely a thought, for a couple of American dollars, simply because I was curious about it.
(That time we’d gone to see La Dolce Vita at the Metro. Her uncharacteristic silence afterwards when I had asked if she’d liked it. “Yeah, I guess.” And weeks later, she’d asked me what I’d gotten from it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Mainly that nobody is really meant for each other. And that love isn’t enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Anything, I think. What about you?”
And she’d said, “I cried. When I got home, I mean. I was trying not to in the car. Because what I got from it was that if you ever choose, you get trapped in a cage, so it’s better to go on forever never choosing.”
“You can’t go through life like that,” I said.
“I know. Not choosing traps you too. But the cage is bigger.”)
And now, holding the frankincense, all I could think of was the cage she’d locked herself in by her choice, the famous prodigy, how They hadn’t waited till she was an adult and could make real choices, how They came to her as a child too young for preschool, how she’d made the choice based on such simple math: Her or the world. The world or her. The biggest cage in the world, but still a cage. Not the sweet life. Just a life.
I’d chosen too, of course; chosen to leave. But how much of that choice had been mine and how much had been Theirs? How much had been love, how much the death of love? How much had They counted on me leaving when I knew her secret? Counting on Their gifts to go wrong, waiting for the inevitable. Laughing to Themselves. Hoping for that pain. Their trump card, saved for the final hand. Rules for her. Rules for me, too.
She had changed the whole world. Everyone in the world had been touched somehow. Everything in the oceans, everything in the skies, everything under our skins. And she had chosen the world. Did I dare make the same choice? As