He clears his throat. “I am. Wish we’d met under better circumstances.”
He squints at the sky and wipes his face. When he looks back at her, he stares with an intensity that leaves her feeling invaded. She wraps her arms around her soaked body. The shame she felt at his concert resurfaces. She should leave before he remembers her as the girl who interrupted his performance.
“I should go,” she says quickly.
“Let me walk you.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I’m not that far away. Thank you though.”
He is rooted in spot, making no move to let her through. The expression on his face makes her feel uneasy, the same way she feels when looking over the railing to the street forty stories below. She walks around him. As she does, her side grazes his. She feels heat emanating from his body. Once a safe distance away, she takes off running without looking back.
Metis watches Aris over his shoulder until she enters her building. It took him too long to find her—the woman whose face has been haunting his dreams.
He began his search for her soon after the concert. He combed through the list of those who had purchased the tickets for his show and found her name among twenty others who sat in her row. He looked for addresses to go with the names and scouted each. Hers was in the middle of the list.
He did not approach her right away. Instead, he watched and waited. For someone who prefers to think of himself as brave, he feels like a coward. Time is ticking toward Tabula Rasa, and yet he is paralyzed by fear.
He was afraid she would only see him as a stranger. And he was right to be. The only recognition on her face when she saw him tonight was from this cycle—of Metis, the pianist.
He thought he had prepared himself for the pain of being forgotten by someone he loves. But it struck him like a branding iron, sending him down a spiral of doubt. She shrugged him off as she would any random person she met on the street. The Crone was right.
What if she is not the same woman from his dreams? She looks like her. She sounds like her. Her tiny frame fits into his embrace just as before. But are those qualities enough to make her the same person?
He continues walking toward the subway. It seems his life this cycle has been spent in train stations. Always coming or going. Never settled. He longs for the past. Of nights spent in the cocoon of his bed, in the arms of his lover.
He stops and turns around. Up in the clouds is a lighted window—the one he knows belongs to her. Is she sleeping in the arms of a lover tonight? He has seen her with a man and witnessed their closeness. Is she making new memories, slowly replacing the ones with him? Perhaps there are no memories of him inside her—not even in the deepest part of her brain. Maybe Tabula Rasa got them all.
He gazes at the silver bands on his fingers—reminders of a promise. He found them in the seat cushion of his favorite chair and instinctively knew what they were. They feel constricting. The burden of their pasts rests on him. They had made that decision together, and he would honor it. He takes another long look at the window and turns away.
Aris stares at the stream of hot water pouring from the faucet into the tub. She lets it carry her mind along its continuous flow like a raft on a river. The sound muffles all the other noise in her head. The steam rises, painting the air with thick, white fog. She pours lavender oil into the bath. Its sweet, herbal scent has an immediate tranquilizing effect.
She eases her freezing body into the filled tub. The heat wraps around her skin, seeping into her pores and unfurling her like a new leaf. She scoops a handful and washes her face. The saltiness stings her lips. The one bath a week they are allotted uses unfiltered water from the sea. Less wasteful. At least it’s warm.
Metis enters a gap in her mind. What was he doing here? Entertainers of his caliber usually live in Lysithea, a city on a hill. What was he doing in her city after dark in the rain when he should be hunkered down like everyone else in the warmth of his home?
Maybe he’s seeing someone here.
She wonders what type of person the pianist would be attracted to enough for him to brave the weather to see. She had once dated a musician, a jazz guitarist whose name she does not remember.
Aris sinks farther into the tub, leaving only her head above water. The silence of the bath reminds her that she has not listened to Luce since the concert. The humiliation she experienced there had left a bitter taste in her mouth. Each time the memory of it threatened to invade her mind, she swatted it away like a fly. But she misses the song.
“Lucy.”
“Yes?”
“Can you please play Luce?”
“Of course.”
The tinkling of piano music fills the bathroom. She closes her eyes. In darkness, her awareness becomes acute. The soft wave of warm water undulates across her skin, caressing it like a lover, sucking her life force and turning her fingers to prunes.
Does this song affect other people the same way it does her? It is a question that can never be answered. An experience is subjective.
But is it? An experience is only perceived to be subjective to the person who experiences it subjectively. How would one know another is feeling the exact same thing in the exact same moment?
What if her consciousness is not even her own? Could there be a collective consciousness that is borrowed as opposed to owned? What if, at a quantum level, consciousness is suspended inside spheres like molecules—like the air that
