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She still loved Carol, after the unjoining. She loved her in exactly the same way. Her feelings hadn't changed from one moment to the next, from when she was joined to when she was unjoined. Why would they? She was still the same person.
Or, she wasn't the same person. Not quite. She wasn't us anymore, but she wasn't really me either. She remembered what it was like to be us. She couldn't feel the waves of connection in her body anymore, she couldn't hear the thoughts passing through her mind, she couldn't see the world through 14 billion eyes. But she still had all the memories.
“Have you been with a woman before?” Carol asked her.
But before what? Before now? Before yesterday? She's been with billions of women. She's loved billions of women.
“No,” she said, because before you were them, is what she knew Carol meant. And she saw that Carol didn't like that answer, but she wouldn't have liked it if Zosia had said “yes” either. If she had said that she had been with many women, when she was an us. Carol doesn't want to know about us. She wants to know about me.
But there is no her without them. She was just as much the same person after being unjoined as she was when she was joined and just as much the same person as before she was joined, which is to say that she was not the same person at all. No more so than anyone is the same person from one day to the next.
It isn't hard now, or strange or confusing for Zosia to say “I” now. “I like my eggs sunny-side up for breakfast.” “I don't like pop music but I do like jazz.” “My earliest memory is of my mother, kneading dough.” Carol likes it when Zosia says “I.” She doesn't like it when Zosia says, “I liked being joined.” Or, “I miss being joined.” Or, “The word ‘I’ doesn't mean all that much to me.”
Sometimes Carol is curious though, about what she can remember and what she can't.
“Do you still know how to fly a plane?” Carol asked her.
“No,” Zosia said. “It doesn't work like that. One brain can't hold that much information. But I remember what it was like to fly a plane. I remember what it was like to feel connected to so many people. I remember how good it felt.”
There were times, when that feeling became too much, when Zosia felt alone and empty, like her life had gone from one with a clarity of purpose to one that was meaningless and solitary. “I'm right here,” Carol would say, if Zosia expressed that loneliness, and Zosia would ask Carol to lie flat on top of her, to press her body into hers, and Carol would, and Zosia would feel for a brief moment that electric current running through her like how it was before. When she was never alone.
The problem wasn't that Zosia didn't love Carol. The problem was that Carol didn't love Zosia. She didn't know Zosia. She had neither fallen in love with the Zosia of before nor the Zosia of afterward, she had fallen in love with the Zosia of during. She had fallen in love with them. And Zosia wasn’t them anymore.
The first sign was when Carol gave her a new chapter of Wycaro, the paper still warm from the printer. She realized, as she read it, that she didn’t remember enough of the details of the previous books to keep up with the plot. She remembered reading Wycaro. At least, she remembered having already read Wycaro, but she had so many memories rushing through her mind, and she was losing more each day.
“I need to reread the books,” she told Carol, who responded with a look of repressed excitement and apprehension, and that apprehension was likely warranted. Because Zosia remembered that Wycaro meant something to her, that it meant something to us, and that feeling was still there, but she couldn’t access the substance of it. Nothing in particular resonated with her in the book, not now that her memories—of being starved for romance, of wanting that kind of grand adventure, of which pages she cried over or laughed at—were fading so quickly.
She asked Carol questions. “Do the twin moons have symbolic significance?” “What inspired you to make Raban a pirate?” “Why do the ships have sails if it’s the slipsand that actually propels them forward?” And Carol answered them with less and less patience until finally she snapped.
“It’s just a stupid fucking fantasy book,” she said.
She stormed off later, with her new chapter clutched in her hands, to find one of them, Zosia knew, and when she came back, she looked unhappy, but placated.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want Zosia back, of course they did, but it was more complicated now that she had been unjoined. They would need her stem cells and she would need to give permission. Zosia wanted to give permission. She wanted to be back with them. But Carol didn’t want her to. And Zosia loved Carol.
Zosia also knew peace. A similar kind of peace she knew when she was still them—a peace she never knew or had or would have been able to achieve before she was joined, when she was her before them. She had known so many people. She had been so many people. She had loved and lost and seen the world for what it really was. She still had that feeling in her, and it made her less afraid to stay unjoined, because being unjoined like this wasn’t really the same as how Carol was unjoined. Carol had no peace. She didn’t understand that calm that Zosia still felt. And Zosia didn’t want Carol to feel so alone.
So she refused when they asked her. Even if she wanted it as much as they did.
It wasn’t easy though. And things got harder quickly. Zosia found she couldn’t give Carol what she wanted, she didn’t understand her the way she did before. She didn’t have all the information stored inside of her anymore. She didn’t know all the ways Carol liked to be touched or the right jokes to make or the conversation topics that interested her. And the more time went on, the sadder Carol got. The angrier Carol got. The lonelier she got.
“Are you okay?” Zosia asked her.
“Yeah,” Carol said, dismissive. “Why?”
“You’re drinking.”
“I’m having a gin and tonic. Is that a crime?”
“No, I just noticed you’ve been drinking a lot.”
“I noticed you don’t drink anymore.”
“I don’t like to drink. I don’t like how it makes me feel. I don’t like how drinking makes you angry.”
“Fucking christ,” Carol said. “When did you become the fun police?”
They traveled, the two of them together, like they did before. They soaked in Icelandic hot springs and visited every museum in Paris and saw the Great Barrier Reef, already in the early stages of recovery after a few months of no pollution. They wandered through shipyards in Gdańsk, and Zosia took Carol to her childhood home, now empty and dark. Zosia felt little nostalgia for it now. What use was nostalgia when she had been set free by the truth? They drove for hours through the red deserts of Utah, past rock formations that looked carved by a long-since dead god, until they found themselves watching a mile-long transport train crawl across the horizon and listening to it blow its horn.
“The loneliest sound in the world, right?” Zosia asked her. And when Carol looked at her, Zosia saw nothing but pain.
Carol didn’t join her when they extracted the stem cells from her. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to be there when Zosia breathed in the steam, she didn’t want to see the shift in her eyes, she didn’t want to see something that she wouldn’t allow herself to admit. But she did come later. When they woke up, their bodies connected again, that electric current pulsing through them like it had never gone away.
“We love you, Carol,” they said.
Carol didn’t smile. But she no longer looked like she was in pain.