21. The Magus

After I destroy myself and grow back together, atom by atom, cell by agonizing cell, I am at a loss as to what to do. Eva has gone. Eva has run away from me. The manor that I built for her and filled with beautiful baubles for her is empty of her laughter, her voice. Her smell is fading from the halls.

I pace the rooms. I pause in each one, hold perfectly still, as if by being quiet enough I will still be able to hear something of her sound. But there is nothing. I pace the hallways, I circle furniture, I enter and leave her room. I am an animal with zoochosis.

Sometimes I find myself destroying furniture, losing my ammo at trees, boulders, walls. She's still alive, I must remind myself. She's fine. She just doesn't want to be with me anymore because I misunderstood her. I hurt her. I scared her. It is my fault she is gone. Just like when I broke her wrist, I can't control myself. I know it is for the best that she is gone, I am more of a danger to her than anything else, but there is no comfort in knowing. I want her here with me, in my arms. I want her to be the one in a cage.

I want her safe, and I want her forever. Seconds, minutes, hours, nights, days, pass as indifferent to me as I am to them. All is darkness to me.

The transmitter in my arm signals me that Iago is calling. I ignore it. It keeps signaling. Maybe for hours, maybe for days. I consider ripping off my arm and the transmitter with it. I need to be alone. I am unfit for human—or otherwise—society. And the thought of Iago's gaiety chafes at the best of times.

And now he's banging at the door, undoubtedly because I wouldn't answer his transmission. Let him bang. The violent thudding is better than a human heartbeat.

"Genji!" he is screaming in my face, shaking my shoulders, "Pavlov!" We are in the dining hall, and I am unhinged. There are no longer any dining room chairs in this room, and the table is splinters. The glass in the windows is shattered, beautifully. Am I malfunctioning? I hope so.

He keeps screaming until he removes one white glove and slaps me with it across the face. The sting is just a tap, but the shock of it has me putting my hand against my cheek. "Did you really just slap me with your glove?" My eyes focus on him.

Iago grins at me, "I've always wanted to do that."

I laugh until I don't, "Leave."

He sighs dramatically, "I will, but I need to tell you something first."

My forearms pulse. My guns at the ready—did something happen to Eva? "What?" I say.

"Relax. Eva's fine. The rest of the world...maybe not so much." Iago rubs his hands over his face, "The Martians...I think they are coming back...or at least coming for a visit."

We sat in a triangle in the sand: Schrodinger—now known as Iago—Barbie, and me, all three of us naked. I waited

"My idea is simple," Iago smoothed the sand in front of him as he spoke, "So you know how you and I are clones?"

"Yes," I could already see where he was going, "And do you think I hadn't thought of that already? It's impossible."

"What? Impossible? Cloning Eva you mean?" Iago twirled squiggles in the sand with his forefinger.

"Yes, cloning Eva."

"Why?"

"Because there was no viable DNA. Nuclear blasts tend to do that to a body."

"No viable DNA," Iago looked up at me and smiled, "But what if there was viable DNA?"

"There isn't."

"But what if there was?"

I stood up. Iago was taunting me. He has turned sadistic since we last met, I thought. The only way to drown out the pain was to return to the ocean. I wouldn't let him affect me.

"What if there was DNA?" Iago insisted.

"Then I would do everything in my power to clone her back to life," I said.

"I know where to find some of her DNA, unharmed. I think. I mean it should probably be fine, a bit stale, a bit old, but something to work with at least…" I realized that Iago had been doodling DNA in the sand. Helix ladders spinning in circles.

"Where?" I snarled, "Show me where. Bring me to it." I had Iago by the throat without thinking about it. The cartilage in his neck cracked unpleasantly in my fist.

"Oh, no! Master!" Barbie said ineffectually, moving her face in an exaggerated expression of shock and throwing up her hands. She distracted me just enough so that Iago was able to twist out of my grip.

"That wasn't very nice, brother," he coughed. "Hold your horses."

I clenched my fists by my sides. He was right. I was being irrational. He, it seemed, even wanted to help me—assuming he wasn't lying. "I'm sorry," I said.

"It's fine, it's fine," Iago's throat was already healed. "I am going to need to explain some things to you and I'll need you to promise to help me first and I really must insist we get some clothes."

"Fine," I said.

"Great! Follow me!" he said.

We ambled up the coast, leaving a long line of footprints behind us. To the left was the ocean, expansive and calling to me. To the right was a coastline of forest and buildings in various states of repellent decay, like the empty broken shells on the beach itself. Alternately, I felt the skin of my back warmed by the sun and cooled by a breeze. I was expecting to come upon corpses to undress soon enough, but there were no bodies for miles.

For a while, Iago hummed happily, and then he broke into song with Barbie intermittently singing with him. They made me want to rip off my ears. Instead, I hummed tunelessly and loudly, trying to drown them out.

Eventually, Iago stopped singing and started talking.

"I suppose you're curious about how I was so dapperly dressed before you so rudely destroyed my clothes. And you are also probably curious as to what I have been up to all this time and how I found you as well and maybe you are even curious as to why I was looking for you," he said.

"Not really."

Iago frowned and then went on talking as if I hadn't spoken. "Well, you see brother, don't get me wrong, I'm no more a fan of humans than the next guy, but after the Armageddon or whatever you want to call it, they all started screaming out all these suffering thoughts. Their thoughts were...Well, insufferable."

I kept my eyes on where the beach tapered off into the horizon. If Iago really did know where to find Eva's DNA... if it were possible…

"So, I had to do something about it, you know? I thought about killing them... And I did. I killed quite a few of them to get them to stop. But that brought me no satisfaction. It was like slaughtering starving animals, only you can hear what the animal is thinking as they die. Their fear made me go crazy. And you can only stomp on so many ants before it gets really repetitive. It"s really boring. Anyway, it wasn't working, and the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

"So, I asked myself, I says to myself, if killing the humans isn't gonna work, how can I stop their suffering?"

Iago paused as if he expected me to answer, but really the only answer I had for stopping a human's suffering was stopping the human, so I said nothing.

"Feed them! Take care of them as if they were pets!" Iago said, "Well at least that is what I decided. But it was so much work. And it seemed to make them rot on the inside. They had such evil thoughts. Idle minds are the devil's playground and all that. And when they weren't busy being bastards to each other, they fought against me. I might be exaggerating a bit, but not as much as you'd think.

"Really, it was so much work," Iago kicked up a pound of sand, "So, so much work. So, it got me thinking, give a man a fish, they'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, they"ll over fish and destroy the lake's ecosystem leading to systematic collapse of the environment and resulting in a mass exodus of the men who could get their grubby hands on the most fish to Mars.

"You see my dilemma? I'm not even mentioning how with the collapse of industry it has been increasingly difficult to find clothes that suit me. So, then I really lost the plot. I decided to try to live like a normal human for a while. I tried to be a cobbler. I tried to be a baker—that didn't last long. I became a monk, a priest. Humans can't accept me, and I don't like them. I've been working on Barbie for years, trying to improve her, imbue her with soul, but I don't know...she's just a robot at the end of the day."

Iago stopped, grabbed my shoulder, turned me towards him. He had tears in his green eyes as he said, "Really, I've been so, so lonely."

I clenched my jaw. "I'm a robot too."

"Yeah, but you are so much more than that. I can't predict you. You have DNA from actual animals in you. You're more mammal than robot. I think you have a soul."

"I'm a clone," I said.

"Yeah, so?"

I looked past Iago to the shore. Truly, the Earth had been destroyed, but now trees and plants were growing. Iago let go of my shoulder and kept walking and talking. "Anyway, I want your help with my latest project. And I also want your company. No matter what you think, you're my brother and I love you. You help me with this, and I promise to help you with Eva. We can be like animals huddling together in the cold, mutually benefiting from each other's warmth."

I did not expect Iago to tell me about a ‘project' that I would have anything but indifference towards, but the more he spoke, the more I found myself thinking, yes, Eva would have agreed with that. Yes, Eva would have wanted that. Eva would have supported that. Even if he doesn't know where to find Eva's DNA, I'll help him, I vowed. Better to spend my time honoring Eva's memory than floating aimlessly. But as it turned out, he did know how to find Eva's DNA.

The Hyacinths were no longer contained to the rectangles of the graves. Their dark blue was a carpet covering the entire cryometery and extending to spill outside the cryometery's crumbled walls. Fireflies, like stars, floated about over the dark blue flowers. It was as if the night sky was puddling onto the ground. The cryometery pods still glowed stubbornly blue, the bodies inside never to know that no one would ever come to wake them. The gravestones themselves were in various states of decay, some crumbled, some simply worn down until the words were illegible. But I didn't need words to locate Caesar"s grave.

It still read, "Ever remembered."

"I suppose we should get digging then," said Iago.

"I'll do it myself," I said.

"Aww, I so wanted to check ‘digging up a grave' off my bucket list."

"I'm sure you'll get plenty more chances," I said. "If you want to, you can do any one of these other graves, but I am doing this one myself."

I stomped the spade into the hard ground. The feel of it slicing through roots and dirt was satisfying. I tossed dirt and hyacinths and roots behind me. There would be dead, wilting flowers in that cryometery.

The night was cool, but the digging warmed me. Eventually, my body began wicking the humidity from the air to use as artificial sweat. I took off my shirt (which Iago had proudly procured for me) to keep from ruining it and draped it over the gravestone. The white fabric nicely hid the words, Ever remembered from view. I ignored Iago, who was lounging against a nearby tombstone, when I imagined he smirked at my action.

The dirt got darker and smelled more alive the deeper I dug. I sliced through worms and saw them wiggling unconsciously in the black soil. I could have spent the rest of eternity digging that grave, stuck in the in-between of knowing and not knowing what I would find when I opened the box at the bottom. Certainly, I would find a coffin with a corpse, but the locket, and Eva's hair within the locket? As long as I was digging, I could be sure that the locket was both there and not there. I did not want to stop.

But then there was the hollow thunk of my shovel hitting a casket. Instead of digging down, I began to widen the hole. I could have just punched through the casket, torn it apart, but that would be messy. Maybe the locket, if it were there, would get lost in the chaos.

Finally, there was enough room to maneuver in that black, filthy hole. The top of the coffin, while still coated with black dirt, was uncovered. I only paused a moment before I was at its side, wrenching it open. I broke it off its hinges.

Somehow, I had expected to exhume a version of myself. The funhouse mirror version of me that Eva had so desperately loved. A face with my blue eyes but with lips that truly knew how to wear a human smile. Instead, there was the smell of dry decay and there was a face without eyes or lips. It looked like an apple rotted to nothing but core and skin, all juices sucked out. The only hint the skeleton gave of who it once might have been was the few tufts of curly black hair lingering on its head.

This... object could be me, I thought without emotion. Only I can never die. The night was stagnant except for the fireflies, the sound of the crickets, and Iago twirling his hat as he lounged against the nearby gravestone.

The thing—Caesar—was still wearing rags of black clothes. It was such a black, black night. I reached down, and gingerly, as if I were peeling a bandage from a wound, ripped the shirt from its chest. The shirt came apart like spider webs.

The locket was there, on its chest. Dull, grimy—yes. But still a shining heart of gold: a hint of a glint in the darkness. Gingerly, I lifted the skull and attempted to slip the chain and locket off over it, but the skull was too wide and the chain too short. I could have snapped the chain off or looked for its grimy clasp. Instead, I ripped the head off the neck as I would snap a branch in my path when walking through a forest. The locket dangled from my hand, spinning black and gold. With it clutched in my fist, I vaulted out of the grave. Iago watched me, expressionless. I had nothing left to do but flick open the locket and see if Eva's hair was still inside. If... But I couldn't think of ifs; there was only ‘is' or ‘is not.'

Carefully, I rested the locket in the middle of my left palm. With my right hand, I felt along the sides of the fragile little heart until I heard the soft click of it unlocking. And there, nestled between two halves of the heart, it was: a wisp of hair. Those dry wisps of hair made my dead planet begin to spin on its axis once again.

"Please destroy the coffin and the body with it," I asked Iago. "And the headstone," I added.

"My pleasure," he said.

Leaving the cryometery with the locket clutched in my left hand, I allowed myself to feel something other than the coldness, stillness of death for the first time in so long. I remembered how it felt the first time Eva had taken my hand. I remembered how it felt when we had first kissed. I remember breaking her, and I was determined that this time around I would do it right. I smiled.

The best laid plans of mice and men, as Iago would say.