Fake Eden

When she saw Aidan again, leaning on his car, his posture so perfectly slanted that she knew he’d been waiting in that exact position for her to exit her work and see him, she gave so many damns at once her heart felt bruised.

“True or false,” he said. His voice was high and low, rumbling and full of starlight. “You are surprised and delighted to see me?”

Things cracked at the edges. Truthfully, she hadn’t seen him for years. Decades. She’d spent two of those decades in the same place before realizing that even in ten years, if you didn’t physically age, people gave you an odd look. She’d been in Memphis, then Portland, then a number of small towns in Canada, and finally she had settled in San Francisco. The weather was nice, and she had orange juice every morning. No one questioned her ageless face, because so many people wanted one. That was the magic of Los Angeles, she realized. Everyone within it or without wanted it to be Eden, so much so that they wouldn’t recognize a God if they saw one.

No one recognized Gods. The attention Aidan attracted probably had more to do with his pretty face and his vitality.

She lifted her bag onto her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” She checked to make sure that she’d left work at the right time, that the sky was still above them and hadn’t fallen down, and that it wasn’t snowing. No, there was only one impossible thing happening right now.

“It is possible,” he began, “That I’m considering a natural disaster.”

“In California?” she said. “They’re already experiencing a water shortage.”

Aidan stepped forward. “Maybe a flood, then.” He opened his arms and though he didn’t move quickly, shock sped his movements. Time lapsed between the moment Aidan was in front of her, at arm's length, and the moment his arms were already around her, her face pressed into the sleeve of his bamboo shirt.

Synapses in her brain died. She forced her surroundings to come into focus. She stood and waited for the hug to finish. It did not, for a long time. “How did you get here?”

“Plane. I got into LAX two hours ago. Are you hungry?”

“Am I- Hungry? I don’t know. I guess.”

His smiled stretched. There was little of his face that wasn’t taken up with it. It was a little dazzling. A man walking past them stumbled over his own feet.

“Stop that,” she said.

Aidan’s smile wilted slightly, but his energy did not. “I know a place to eat.”

That was amazing, because she didn’t. Two years in San Francisco and she’d never been to the same restaurant twice. It took three visits or her to remember a single place. She’d thought that San Francisco would suit her. It did, more than any other city, but indoors, crowds, people, noise- none of those suited her. She wasn’t sure there was a way to isolate herself from any of those without becoming a hermit. This is it. This is what humans do. This is life.

“Is this your car?” she asked. It looked like a Mustang. One thing she’d come to be enthusiastic about was cars. It was something about the speed and the technological advancement. She was sure that’s what being human was all about. Riding in a vehicle that ran on transient resources. Being in a car was like touching mortality.

“I got it in Virginia. There are some nice races down there. I had a mitsubishi, but it got stolen.”

“Oh dear.” She touched the window. The glass was hot. When Aidan opened the door, heat billowed out. He must have been waiting for a while.

Aidan rounded the car. While she could still see his smile over the top of it, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“A better question,” he said. “Is what are you doing here? Come on, Akina. Let’s talk.”

The restaurant was a treasure. One of those places that people walked into and asked how you’d found it. The correct answer was Two minutes on Google. The right answer was I just passed it and got curious, it’s got the most amazing smoothies/orange juice/booze/meat dish. Neither Jace nor Akina said such a thing when they entered.

Akina sniffed the air. It did smell like meat, and spices, and orange juice. And the perpetual gasoline and hot tarmac smell that California had in the summer. The walls were covered with wooden panels, hung with Turkish lanterns, decorated with paintings by local artists that were either minimalist or lazy.

A waiter directed them to a table. He couldn’t take his eyes off Aidan. The air around Aidan sucked in attention like a blackhole. She knew he could temper the effect. She did. But Aidan thrived on the notice of others. His mirror was one of his best friends. Possibly his only best friend.

Aidan ordered a smoothie with beets. She ordered orange juice. The waiter departed. Aidan leaned back and stared at her; they’d once had staring contests, which she’d thought was quite human, but humans couldn’t hold stares for hours. They could barely hold them for minutes. She often wondered how humans got anything accomplished with so much of their lives spent with their eyes closed. Though she had to admit, sleep was a precious thing. Her appetite for sleep had grown in the last few decades.

“You have a job,” Aidan announced.

She stared at him. He’d ambushed her at her job. She didn’t understand why it mattered. Dozens of people had jobs.

“But dozens of people need them, unlike us,” Aidan pointed out.

She sighed. She hated when he did that.

“But I love doing it,” Aidan said.

“It’s a good job,” she said. “I have regular hours. And it’s near the tram. It takes me twenty minutes to get home.”

“How adorably human.”

The waiter reappeared with their drinks. Aidan’s was red, a violent vibrant colour. Akina sipped her orange juice; the sign outside the store had advertised it as liquid sunlight. It might not be changing her in the way ingesting liquid sunlight might, but as far as orange juice went, it was quite good. The waiter took a few steps away. Then a few more. She and aidan got older while he did.

When they were alone, Aidan drained half of his glass. “Is that why you moved here?”

She tapped her fingernails on her glass. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a pit of humans. An epicenter of some of their most ridiculous dreams. On the way to your work someone asked me if I model. Someone else asked me to read a script just because I told them I was a producer.”

Ah. Yes. There was a lot of that. She felt bad for their hope. As far as she’d witnessed, human life was made of cycles. Births beget births. Death beget death. But hope did not beget hope. More often than not, hope was a narrow hallway that led to disappointment. It was one aspect of human life she did not envy.

“That isn’t why I moved here.”

“So why did you?”

“Change of pace,” she said.

Aidan laughed. Somewhere, a hurricane hit a building. “A change of pace? What the hell does that mean? What kind of pace do you think you’re going at?”

She shrugged. The same one as our waiter, she wanted to say. But she was not a liar.

“Why would you want to go their pace?” Aidan asked. His eyes were burning. To anyone else, he might look like he’d been shooting up. But he was as indomitable as a star because he chose to be. It was a benefit, or a curse, of their beings. Neither of them would ever feel the fatigue of a hangover, or the hopelessness of flunking out of school, or the physical exhaustion that followed a long workout. Listlessness was not unheard of but, Akina thought, it was a poor consolation prize.

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” she said. “They’re going quite fast, aren’t they?”

“But they’re not getting anywhere.”

“I think that’s a matter of opinion.”

Aidan made a face that said he didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. He probably didn’t. He cared about her’s, and they’d spent years apart, when she’d decided that she wanted years to matter, and he couldn’t understand why.

Aidan leaned across the table. He was warm as a tropical island. He smelled like beets. “You’ve had your fun. It’s been decades. Aren’t you a little tired of working?”

She gave it some thought. She wasn’t tired of working. That was the whole problem. “No. I don’t think I am. What would I do if I wasn’t working?”

The waiter came and gave them a basket or organic bread with quinoa on top. He took their orders, removed their menus, and came back with water. He cleared away Aidan’s empty beet juice glass, and Akina’s empty orange juice glass, then brought them refills. Outside, someone had dropped ice cream, and someone else was flying a kite on Venice beach, and people were building up their hopes and burning down their dreams and reinventing themselves in this fake Eden.

“You would do whatever you wanted to do. You would have whatever you wanted to have,” Aidan said.

“But that isn’t what I want.”

Aidan looked at his hands in his lap. His voice sounded a little odd. “You don’t want whoever- whatever you want? Even if you could have it now, without having to wait?”

Akina looked at him. She hadn’t seen his in a little over four decades. She hadn’t given him her address or telephone number. There was so much land, so much ocean, and they were in a restaurant in san Francisco, thousands of miles from the last country they’d inhabited together. “I have the rest of my life,” she said. “What’s the difference between now and a few more decades?”

Aidan gave it some thought. He said, “Nothing at all.”

Art by RovinaCai

Text by Lucie MacAulay