Aris clears her throat. “Hi.”
“You look just like your picture,” he says, obviously pleased. He takes the seat across from her. “I’m Benja.”
“I’m Aris. It’s nice to meet you.” And your cheekbones.
“So, you’re a scientist,” he says.
“Something like that. And you?”
“I write.”
“Anything I know?” she asks.
“Not yet. I still have half a year left.”
“What story are you working on now?”
“It’s a quest of a sort. The main character is on a long journey home, and he meets all kinds of monsters that delay him.”
“Like the Odyssey?”
“It’s an influence.” He smiles and leans back in his chair. “‘We come too late to say anything which has not been said already.’ If La Bruyère felt this at the end of the seventeenth century, what hope do I have?”
“Everyone has a unique perspective,” she says.
“You’re sweet.”
“Tell me more about it.”
“You don’t really want to know, do you?”
“I do.”
He gazes at his interlaced fingers on the table. “It’s about a man searching for his way home. He wakes up in the middle of the desert, not remembering his name or where home is. He only has this urgent feeling that if he doesn’t get back, something bad will happen. So he treks across the desert. On his way he encounters strange visions—hallucinations from thirst and hunger. But he realizes they are clues and learns to use them as a map.”
“You thought up all that?”
He shrugs.
“Why did you decide to be a writer?” she asks and sips her wine.
“There are words inside me trying to break out. My job as a writer is to birth them and raise them into responsible adults,” he says.
She looks blankly at him, and he guffaws.
“Too melodramatic?” he asks.
“Yeah. I was deciding whether to walk out.”
“A more honest answer to your question is ‘Hell if I know.’ Aren’t we all clueless most of the time? I mean—how can we not be?”
She decides she likes him. She leans in. “Now that we’re being honest, I think we should skip the boring first-date conversation. Let’s just cut the crap and talk. We only have four years at each life, and this one’s almost gone.”
“Aris.” He gazes at her with glinting eyes. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard from a date this cycle.”
An empty bottle of wine sits between plates scraped clean.
“Would you like another bottle?” the server droid asks as he clears their plates.
“No, thank you. We’re good here,” Aris says.
After he leaves, she says to Benja, “Any more, and I might get in trouble.”
“Trouble is a good place to be in,” he says and winks.
She rests her chin on one hand and studies his face. Candlelight reflects off the gold flecks in his hazel eyes.
“You want to know a secret?” he asks.
A corner of her lips curls up. She tugs a lock of stray hair behind her ear and leans in. There is a light scent from him—something familiar that she can’t put a finger on. The back of her neck begins to feel damp. She gathers her long hair and moves it over one shoulder.
“Sometimes I dream about places I’ve never been to. Faces I’ve never met,” he whispers, “Do you know of the Dreamers?”
She shakes her head.
“They’re a group of people who believe their dreams are manifestations of their past lives, and they use them as clues to lead them back.”
She thinks of the angry man. The one taken away by the policeman. “Are you one of them?”
He laughs. “No. But I’m looking for them.”
“How?”
“They meet occasionally.”
“Where?”
“Places with books. Bookstores. Libraries. I’ve never been in so many libraries. Or maybe I have; I just don’t remember.” He sighs.
Books. That’s what he smells like.
“How you do know all this?” she asks.
“I hear things. I find if you sit somewhere long enough, you become a part of the room. No one sees you anymore.”
Aris doubts anybody would fail to notice him.
“Yesterday I saw a man being arrested,” she says. “He was assaulting people. Yelling for everyone to fight against Tabula Rasa. He seemed . . . dangerous.”
“You’re wondering if he’s a Dreamer?”
“He wanted the past.”
“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t a Dreamer. Or maybe he’s just mad as hell he can’t remember his past.”
Benja draws circles on the rim of his wineglass. She finds it difficult to keep her eyes off his long finger. She wonders how it would feel circling her—
She clears her throat. “Why do you want to meet them?”
“Maybe they can help me, you know, understand myself better. Don’t you ever wonder what your other lives were like? What you were like? Were you different?”
“That’s what personality and proclivity tests are for. They help determine your propensity for liking or hating something.”
“You mean like there is a forty-six point seven percent chance you will like sushi. And a sixty-eight point nine percent chance you will want to see this play.” He mimics the monotone voice of an AI.
He moves his wineglass to the side and leans forward. “What if the person I was when I took the last tests is not the person I am now?”
“We’re always who we are,” she says.
“Are we?” He leans in closer. “What if I only sleep with women because I’m fifty-seven point three percent curious?”
“What about the other forty-two point seven percent? Is he curious too?”
Benja reaches over and kisses her.
“All strangers are sexy. You more than most,” he says.
Metis navigates the darkness of his house with one purpose: to resist. The claws of sleep will not get him tonight. He has nothing against sleep. It’s the dreaming he dreads.
Dreams were once a destination he looked forward to visiting each night. Now, they serve to remind him that he is not with her when he wakes. In reality, his wife is as far away from him as if she were on Jupiter’s moons.
Years of searching—an obsession that almost destroyed him—have unearthed nothing. He doesn’t even know her name. Only her face. Her smell. Her laugh. The way her skin feels against his. This cycle she could be
