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New York City is her last attempt. She has burnt out Mumbai, Beijing, London, Sao Paulo, thrown half the globe away like so many matches. Everywhere feels like winter. Everywhere, her bones ache. She flies from AICM to JFK and once again throws herself deep into a hive of humans.
She searches. Not for her head. She threw that away, decades ago, when Shinra passed.
Nowadays, she is looking for something simpler, less specific than her own face and the love she knew then. Rather, she will take anything that keeps her present. That keeps her warm.
But New York is cold and the crowds large. She feels herself becoming more distant the same way humans feel the onset of hypothermia, as a faint tingling at her fingertips and toes and a growing lethargy, the desire to ride back to the emerald mountains of her youth and sleep a thousand years in the clover and the ferns.
And why fight, anyway? Why battle to remain? There is no one now who knows her. Shizuo and Shinra are buried at opposite ends of Ikebukuro and Izaya’s body is gone somewhere beneath the waves of Tokyo Bay, never found, a name stamped in an abandoned open-case file in a musty police department drawer. The Orihara twins’ great-grandchildren are in their eighties, crawling wizened around the darkened halls of retirement homes and hospitals. All the school children in Tokyo wear the faces of memories of people she once knew. The legend of the Black Biker is as dead as if it had never lived. She is haunted.
Truth be told, it is not a good time for her. Now is the era of aliens, or at least of space. Even now if she looks up she can see the moon twinkling with its thin half-halo of colonies like a great diamond ring wedded to the finger of the night sky, and a shuttle sluicing through the dark like the arc of a tear. She feels that doom is close by. She waits for the night that the maw of the sky opens up like a hinge. Huddling beneath blankets, she watches World War Z, Prometheus, Alien. She falls asleep in terror and wakes in sorrow like a fog. Perhaps, beneath the bay and half the earth away, her head cries, sheds salt in salt water. More likely it is still, at rest.
She walks. Fifteen blocks down, fifteen up a day. She marks them off in red pen on a photocopied map like a prisoner marks hash marks on the wall. She never returns to a block after she has left it.
She has decided that when the city is covered in red, when she inevitably fails to find the warm dark eyes and high reedy voice that she is looking for, she will go home, and give up humanity. Return to the wild things and wait for ruin to come from the heavens.
On her hundred and second day in New York, she reaches the last one hundred blocks.
On her hundred and third day in New York, she falls off the map.
()
How does she get there? Ten steps to the left, two archways and one dark alley, the same way you get anywhere, the same way you get lost.
The New York around her is drawn from the movies. Girls with pearls and feathers and black skinny-strapped dresses. Cars the color of silk and silks the color of candy, alcohol and laughter and laughter like alcohol and smiles like gin. Intoxication.
She is in a movie set, she thinks. She doesn’t know where she is. Wandering, smoky-headed, she tries to count signs of normality—but although the moon is up it hides, coy, beneath a scarf of white lace, and she cannot make out the lights of the colony whatsoever.
A young man stands in the street and watches her approach. He looks too young for the cigar in his fingers, but his eyes when she meets them are ancient and clear as amber. His smoke wreathes her in the smell of cloves and honey.
“Welcome, stranger.”
She tears her eyes from the sky. “Where am I?”
He smiles and bends his arm. After a moment she rests her hand, gingerly, in the crook of his elbow.
Inside the house the air is jazz and golden. The lights are gas and firelight and the room moves as they move, glittering and shimmering like rain; combined with the carven wood walls, the place feels like the deep, swaying belly of a ship. The carpet is dappled deep maroon and burgundy, lush and thick as leaf-fall at the height of October. From it double staircases arch up and away into the dark like the tails of peacocks, their burnished gold railings rising like the entwined serpents of the caduceus. An ivory baby-grand sits like a pearl in the center of the room, and an ivory girl sits there, pressing yellowed keys with her tiny fingers as she sings a French song.
“Firo, you’re back,” she sing-songs.
“I was only out for five.”
“Ennis was looking for you.”
“Tell her I’m here.”
“Tell her yourself.”
“Ennis got back yesterday,” he says to Celty, like an afterthought. “She can hardly bring herself to leave my side.”
“Hah!” laughs the ivory girl. “What hot air.”
“Good night, Sylvie. I’ll see you later.”
He moves into the kitchen and pours Celty a tiny tumbler of brandy. He talks the whole while: “Let’s see. I’m going to the space station in ten to pick up Claire and Chane. They’re coming back from a honey-moon, you might say. Old man Maiza is in his office working—I’ll drag him down in a second. I dunno where Czeslaw’s at—he’s the one that looks like a little boy, but he’s been around longer than me, so be careful of him, although Ennis’s mostly declawed his ittle-little claws by now. You saw our lovely singer Sylvie out there in the front room, and Elmer’s probably asleep in the wine cellar with his nightcap. Miria and Isaac will come tumbling in two hours late like a pair of wet cats, as usual. Who else? Oh, Luck and the rest are upstairs. How’s that brandy? You haven’t drank anything yet.”
She pulls her little notepad and pencil out from one of her pockets.
[I don’t have a head], she writes rigidly.
“But you have a way to manage?” he says kindly. “Or you can give it to me, if you don’t want it.”
[Hold on. I don’t—want anything. First of all, who are you? What is this place? Why are you all dressed like you’re from the 20s? You mentioned the space station—that’s still there, right? And the moon colonies? And why don’t you care that I don’t have a head?]
“Whoa there, miss. One question at a time and the easy ones first. I’ve been rude, not introducing myself. I’m Firo Prochainezo, of the Martillos—but that was centuries ago.”
[Centuries?] she writes weakly.
A pitying look rocks his face like a swell.
“Hey, hey,” he says gently. “There’s nothing to worry about. We’re not aliens and we’re not monsters.”
[Then what? What am I supposed to think?]
“Good question. I’m not too much for thinking. Wanna talk to Luck? Sure you do. He’s better at explaining these things than me. Up, and let’s away.” He cups his hands around his mouth and his arm around her waist and hollers up the stairs, “Luck! Lady Luck! We gotta guest here, pretty woman all in black and just your type, and she wanna talk to you.”
()
Luck is not a mathematical improbability or a pair of dice; he is a hawk-eyed gaze and letter-cutter cheekbones and a single twist of untamed hair corkscrewing out from an otherwise-impeccable hairline. He tolerates Firo’s hug the same way a king might tolerate a golden retriever licking him.
“Looking fine, Luck. Not a day older than last.”
“Must have heard that a thousand times from you.”
“But you always give the same response, too. Guilty as charged. Luck, meet—”
[Celty Sturlson].
“Mizz Sturlson. All the way here from—”
After a moment, she settles on [Ireland].
“Seems like you don’t know much about our guest.”
“That’s why I’m leaving the hostin’ to you. I’m off to find Ennis. Call me if you need me, else I’ll see you in a couple?”
“Sure thing, Firo.”
When the door closes, he just looks at her for a long, long minute. He is the kind of man who can make every second feel like a scratch down your face. He is sharp like he has cause to be. He has the same eyes the boy has, but far less of honey and more of steel.
“Not many strangers come to our part of this town,” he says. His accent is classic New York, thick as cigarette smoke and rye bread and none of the boy’s hoppy Italian.
[I don’t know how I got to your part of this town.]
“Everyone says that. I can say that you only get here if you’re looking.” He stretches, rolls back the cuff of one of his sleeves by half an inch. “Though not many have found what they want here.”
[What are you?] she asks, bluntly.
“A man, once,” he answers. “Now? I’m not sure.”
[Doesn’t seem like something that’s that unclear.]
“What links most of us in this building, Miss Sturlson, is a party and a long, unclear story, about alchemy, and fire, and most importantly alcohol. As for where we are, this is a building untouched by death.”
[You can’t die?]
“None of us can. Maybe we’re immortal humans. Lately I begin to think of us as just—immortals.”
[…How?]
“It is a long story, and you’ll forgive me if I don’t relate it now. In a few hours from now we are reuniting, as we have not in some years, and the company may, I’m afraid, be rather bored by the telling of a tale we’ve all lived. But I’ve talked overlong about myself. Tell me, what brings you here?”
[I don’t know. I didn’t try to end up here.]
“Are you looking for something? Someone?”
[There is no one I’m looking for. There’s no one left.]
He sits back and steeples his fingers. Waits.
[Mr. Gandor,] she writes, [do you have a wife? Do you have children?]
For some reason he smiles at this. “No, never. Lovers, though, and some for many years.”
[Did they know?]
“The ones that lasted longer figured it out. It’s difficult to hide a condition like ours—perhaps more difficult than it is for you to hide yours.”
[And then? After that?]
“Then, I went on. Some left, and I did not try and stop them. My condition is a perfectly valid one to reject, just as insanity or psychopathy would be. But some stayed. And some lived to die in my arms.”
[Isn’t it exhausting? Don’t you look for them in later years?]
“If I may be so blunt, Miss Sturlson, reincarnation is a fool’s game. All faces look similar over the years, but I have not seen the same one twice. And if I did, what of it? A person is formed by truths and lies, and both truths and lies are so malleable that even a single incident shapes a hundred different people in a hundred different ways. Have you heard of the butterfly effect? In a world that fragile, I can’t believe that when a person leaves I will ever see him again, in face or in soul.
“But I will say that each of them made me feel—thinner. I do believe that love, real love, takes something of you. Of course they gave of themselves to me, too. But, after years, I found that what they had given was not enough. I was vast in my centuries; their lives were small by comparison, and getting smaller as time went on.”
[I’m the opposite. I’ve lived longer than all of you]—Gandor inclines his head slightly at this, a token of respect—[but I never felt full until I had loved someone, and I didn’t know how empty I was until then, either.]
“Love treats all lovers differently. Ennis, Firo’s girl, feels the same as you. But she has only loved once, like you, I imagine. Perhaps that makes the difference.”
[I don’t think I can love again. Or—I don’t think I want to. I’ve tried. I’ve looked all over the world. But in the end, I want him back. Only him.]
“May I give you some advice?”
[Go ahead.]
“Love is the most human of all human follies. If you commit yourself to it, you will lose part of that mystical part of yourself. You may live without a head, but your heart will begin to beat, and the difference will tear you apart. So retreat into your Irish mists, Miss Sturlson, or give yourself over; if you choose to remain, look into every person’s eyes and remember the days you shared yourself with humanity, and when you feel yourself spark again do not hesitate, because the years will not. But, too, if you find yourself tempted back into godhood, leave and breathe and return again. I myself find the idea tempting—God knows, it is tempting…”
[But you stay here for your friends.]
“And the chance of loving again. Wouldn’t you do the same?”
After a second, he smiles. She wonders if he can sense that she is doing the same.
An enormous crash. The building resounds. The green-glass lamp on Luck’s desk arches off its surface like a diver jumping off a board; Luck catches it casually and rights it.
“That’ll be Miria and Isaac,” he says. Rising, he opens the door, just in time to catch what appears to be two people covered entirely in bright-silver tinfoil suits and huge sun visors spilling through the entranceway, along with a great quantity of smoke. “Hello, you two! Have you crashed your car?”
“Nay, good sir—the car is a dinosaur of the early twenty-first century. It was a hoverboard upon which we so nobly crashed!”
“And it was a blast! But, ah, part of the window is missing now.”
In unison, the two figures pull off their hoods, revealing a cascade of bushy brown hair and silky blonde respectively.
“Luck!” cries the man.
“Luck!” cries the woman.
“Mystery lady!”
“So mysterious!”
“We’ve missed you both!”
“It’s our first time meeting, but we’ve missed you both! We’ve missed the lady in black even more because we haven’t had the chance of meeting her yet! We’ve missed meeting her!”
“Oh, Miria, don’t look—I’m about to cry.”
“That’s okay, Isaac. I’m already crying.”
Celty bursts out laughing. It is not yet the era of aliens, and right now the era of space looks a lot like the collision of a roll of baking foil with a 2000s conspiracy-theorist Halloween outfit, with a couple of white gogo boots thrown in for good measure.
Luck Gandor laughs too. He says low to her, “They didn’t realize they were immortal until 80 years after they had turned. They were too busy laughing with each other. Isn’t that a wonderful thing?”
“Miria!”
“Isaac!”
“Luck!”
“Mystery lady!”
“Would you like to come meet them?” says Luck.
He takes her hand, and they move down the staircase together.