One Heartbeat

I need to learn more about Shiji culture. As each region observes different holidays, keeping track can be difficult, especially if one needs to read the notices in another language. On 1 Telenekhin, the Shiji will hold a festival for Enahari, Enakhiavoshei (which, to the Tveshi, means that Sehet Annyi receives precedence), and Enashisha. We do not have to work on this holiday, but some people in the ambassadors’ offices do, I am told, because they don’t want to participate in Shiji religion. The holiday means that I can attend the first day of the water festival—thankfully, the day with the rain dances—so I called to have my dress express-shipped from my family’s home.

Aneti noticed how this news affected my mood. She saw how I worked quickly, spending much of lunch in the archives to put the finishing touches on a project, only she attributed this to our new relationship. We kissed in the elevator as it went down towards freedom. Aneti murmured something about a relative who had died in an elevator crash and I tried to be sympathetic. We stopped kissing when the doors opened and four other people got on, but they must have known what we were doing because they smiled at us and said something in Shiji that Aneti wouldn’t translate for me.

This afternoon, we walked for a time on the waterfront. Aneti comes here to gather her thoughts because the near-constant stream of good street music soothes her when she has anxiety attacks. I didn’t know that conspirators felt anxiety or apprehension. Everything they do is dangerous. Everything can lead to arrest or death. Anxiety attacks would just get in the way. Perhaps they would weed out the less able-bodied. Or … maybe they’re an expression of her latent conscience.

We sat down on one of the benches for a few minutes to listen, but the music had a dancing beat and one or two others had turned part of the walk into a dance floor. Do you dance?

Aneti shook her head. Do I look like I’m from the canyons? Of course I don’t. The pride in her eyes was a wall between us. She must have joined the Daybreak Movement out of pride—out of all of the political movements in Tveshë, it has the best sense of purpose, the most to say about right and wrong—and she must have joined it for these things. Or perhaps her facial expressions and emotions cannot prove this. Maybe she has a more complicated history.

Your girlfriend is from the canyons, I said, grabbing her hand. You will dance with her. Before she could protest, I dragged her into the center of the dance floor and began to teach her steps.

She has no instinct for dancing, but I managed to make her passable—no one would dance with her in Narahja, though, because she stands too close to her partner and sometimes steps with the wrong foot. She will get better in time. I can’t believe you made me do that, she told me later today. They must think that I’m— Aneti cut herself off, but we both knew what she would say. People uproot themselves and adopt other cultures so often that you can only tell where someone is from by the way they dress and move, the accent they use and the ideas they voice.

I kissed her hands—a symbol of strong affection in Narahja, but a foreign gesture to her—as the rain began to fall. The music had hidden the thunder rolling in the foothills. A few seconds and the music had stopped. Artists and people ran this way and that to escape from the showers. I grabbed her warm hand in mine and dragged her beneath a restaurant awning. Rain waterfalled over the sides. Aneti was soaked.

Where should we go? I wiped water from my face and looked up at the rain-dark sky. We could dance more in your apartment—

No, let’s go to yours.

We remained quiet on our way to the skyrail terminal, dashing with everyone else in the rain. The line for the trains extended past the elevator into the streets below. Aneti huddled close to me for warmth.

This evening, she stayed for dinner. We had gespedgyal. I taught Aneti how to grind the bird meat and mix it with canyon spices and ground nuts. She put too much in the dough wraps, so some fell apart in the water, but she knew the noodle recipe that went with them. Nurannyi came in after we had set the table, just in time for the offering. Aneti says that the cultural things we did made her feel uncomfortable. That’s why she had to leave.

Half an hour ago, I went to the window to watch her go. She left the apartment and looked up at my window, but she could not see me because I had turned off my lights. I could see everything: the man she met halfway down the street, the whispers they shared in the dark, the sudden dash towards the skyrail.

Akah Gysabalar wrote her best plays after her husband’s death because her grief made everything she penned beautiful.