Brett ducked under the window frame and stepped out onto the ledge.
“Stop her,” Maya said quickly. “Arrest her!”
“Stop her how? I don’t have a weapon.”
“Why don’t you have a weapon, for heaven’s sake?”
“Do I look like I carry a weapon?” Helene walked to the window. “Young woman, please come in at once.”
“I’m going to jump,” Brett said indistinctly.
Maya rushed to the window. Brett sidled away rapidly out of their reach.
“Brett, this is stupid. Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this. You can talk to us, Brett. Come back inside now.”
“You don’t want to talk to me. I can’t say anything that matters to you. You just don’t want to be embarrassed, that’s all.”
“Please come in,” Maya begged. “I know you’re brave. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
Brett raised her cupped hands to her face. There was a stiff breeze outside and her hair was flying. “Hey, everybody!” she shouted down into the street. “I’m gonna jump!”
Maya and Helene jostled for space inside the window frame. “I’m going out after her,” Maya announced, putting her knee on the sill.
“No, you’re not. You’re in police custody. Sit down.”
“I won’t!”
Helene turned and said something in Français to the dogs. The white dog left at a brisk little run, slipping through the open door. Plato stood up, fixed his silent eyes on Maya, and growled deep in his throat. Maya sat down.
Helene leaned out the window.
“Get out of my sight, cop,” shouted Brett. “I have a perfect right to kill myself. You can’t take that away from me.”
“I agree that is your civil right,” Helene said. “No one is trying to deprive you of your rights. But you’re not thinking clearly. You’re very distraught, and it’s clear you have been taking drugs. Killing yourself will not change anything.”
“Of course it will,” said Brett. “It will change everything, for me.”
“This is very wrong,” said Helene intensely. She was doing her best to be soothing. “It will hurt everyone who loves you. If you’re doing this for a cause, it will only discredit you in the eyes of all sensible people.” Helene glanced back hastily into the room. “Is she one of Paul’s people?” she hissed. “I’ve never seen her.”
“She’s just some kid,” Maya said.
“What was her name again?”
“Natalie.”
Helene stuck her head out again. “Natalie, look here! Natalie, stop it! Natalie, talk to me.”
“You think I want to live forever,” Natalie said. And she jumped.
Maya rushed to the window. Natalie was lying crushed in the midst of a distant little crowd. People were talking into netlinks, calling for help and advice.
“I can’t bear to look,” Helene said, and shuddered. She pulled back into the room, and took Maya by the arm.
Maya wrenched free.
“I’ve seen this so many times,” Helene said wearily. “They just do it. They just take possession of themselves and end their lives. It’s an act of enormous will.”
“You should have let me go out there after her.”
Helene shut the window with a bang. “You are in my charge, you are under arrest. You are not going anywhere, and you are not killing yourself. Sit down.”
Plato rose and began to bark. Helene caught at his collar. “Poor things,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “We have to let them go. There is no choice.… Poor things, they are only human beings.”
Maya slapped her face.
Helene looked at her in shocked surprise, then, slowly, turned her other cheek. “Do you feel better now, darling? Try the other one.”
6
America had never quite caught on about trains. Americans were historically obsessed with individual cars. Maya couldn’t afford a car. She could hitchhike sometimes if she wanted to. Mostly she could walk.
So she was walking through rural Pennsylvania. She had come to love the simple physical process of putting one foot in front of another. She liked the clarity of walking, the way that walking put you outside the rules and deep inside a tangible, immediate world. Nothing illegal about walking all by yourself. Walking cost nothing, and it wasn’t traceable. A sweet and quiet way to drop off somebody else’s stupid official map.
She had a sun hat, and a backpack, and a change of clothes. She had a cheap camera. She had a canteen and a little spare food; the sort of food one could chew on quite a while. She had a rather old but very decent pair of well-engineered and highly indestructible walking shoes. And she had nobody bothering her. She was alone, she was just herself now. To gently become herself, with no one watching and counting her heartbeats, free to savor the infinite thereness of the world, free to get her own grip on the quotidian—it was a series of little astonishments.
She liked Pennsylvania because there was so little fuss made about this particular corner of the world. She much preferred this sort of place now. All the fussy and glamorous places were far too brittle. Of course it was hard to find any genuine place to hide, in an era when all law, almost all media, and even most art could be phoned in; but the places that seemed entirely quotidian were the best locales for an exotic hopeful-monster like herself.
Europe was a boutique. America was a farm. Sometimes there were bicyclists in rural Pennsylvania. Occasionally hikers. There weren’t many like herself, people perfectly enchanted just to walk and look. This wasn’t a popular tourist niche in the North American continent, but the local Amish attracted a certain interest.
A car passed her outside Perkasie. The car pulled over, stopped, and a pair of well-dressed Indonesian tourists stepped out. They shrugged on shiny new backpacks and then headed her way. They walked hastily. Maya, who would not let anyone hurry her now, trudged along peaceably.
As the two approached her, the man tugged the woman’s sleeve. They waved excitedly, then shouted something.
Maya stopped and waited for them. “Ciao,” she said, a little warily.
“Hello?” the woman said.
Maya looked at her, and was thunderstruck. The stranger wore Indonesian couture, rather shiny and chic, but the stranger was American. She was familiar: much more than familiar. She looked and felt fantastically important, absolutely compelling, a personage like destiny. Maya was flooded with occult recognition, an impossible visceral surge of tenderness and heartache. She gaped as if an angel had descended.
“Are you Mia Ziemann?” the man said.
Maya closed her mouth and shook her head resolutely. “No, I’m Maya.”
“Then what have you done with my mother?” the woman demanded.
Maya stared at her. “Chloe!”
Chloe’s eyes widened. She relaxed a bit. She tried to smile. “Mom, it’s me.”
“No wonder I love you so much,” Maya said with relief, and she laughed.
It was funny to have lost so much, and yet lost so very little. The details were all gone sideways, somehow out of her mental reach now, but not the disorienting intensity of her love for her child. She scarcely knew this person, and yet she loved Chloe more than she could have thought possible.
It no longer felt much like motherhood. Motherhood had been very real, very quotidian, a primal human relationship, full of devotion and effort and strain, fraught with bitter calculation and the intimate battle of wills. But now, all those complexities had been blown away like sand. The presence of this strange woman filled her with oceanic joy. The very existence of Chloe was a cosmic triumph. It felt like walking with a boddhisattva.
“I hope you remember Suhaery?” Chloe said. “Surely you must remember him, right?”
“You look so well, Mia,” said Chloe’s husband very gallantly. This Indonesian guy had been married to Chloe for forty years now. That was easily twice as long as Mia had ever been able to manage her. Mia had been—she could still feel this, some dim tingle of ancient resentment—politely horrified to find her daughter running off with an Indonesian. The Indonesians, in their vast island nation, had gotten off rather easily during the plague years. They had played up that advantage enormously in the decades that followed.