One Heartbeat

All of the answers I seek have been put off far too long. Questions haunt me like memories in old houses and places; unlike Menarka, Galasu should be pain-free, question-free, memory-free. Here, I did not find Kelis dead in a first-floor room, blood pooling into the mortar between floor mosaic tiles, with a slashed-open neck and slit wrists. Likua’s nonchalant lips did not move towards my cheek and miss only to strike sensually against my mouth in the darkness, the first and last boy I would ever kiss. Suka and I did not bind our hands together in a Shiji temple to solidify our eternal friendship.

Aneti has given me enough to find information on her anywhere. I … didn’t want to do it because I was afraid of what I would find, but I had no choice. Information-digging took me three hours. It would have taken Likua three minutes.

For the first time since Likua and I argued, I turned on my computer and went looking for things, hoping all the while that he would not notice and route messages through my computer asking for forgiveness or pleading me to get myself out of this dangerous mess he brought me into. A part of me—the part that stood crying on that balcony in the rain—wants to call him and make everything all right between us. It wants to overlook everything in favor of that image of the perfect trio of friends. The other part of me, the part that made the drug concoction on the stove today and prayed for it to work without killing her, feels intense rage. If he cared about me so much, he could have refrained from telling me or he could have left me to die at the falls.

The computer told me many things about Aneti that I do not know. Her father is interviewed speaking about her performance at a children’s sporting event. She threw discus and wrestled with other girls in blue body paint, her breasts bound to her body with athletic tape. She married a man in 1860 who left her two years later for a male lover who lived in Inasa Iri, and she followed him only for the satisfaction of punching him in the face and throwing a six-month-old baby to the ground in the glass. The child survived. Records list her as henego, disowned by her maternal family; her father engaged in a lawsuit when she was thirteen to try to give her family ties again. She began to work for the Progressive Movement in 1857, teaching her fellow youth how to become politically active. The Bulletin of the Progressive Movement profiled her work in 1859.

None of the records in the Galasu Knowledge Foundation tell me why she would sign up for a place in an assassination plot. Her ex-husband belonged to Cradle and was caught with bombs on a train in Aderei on the Kai River, a town known for foreign religious sects due to its proximity to Khessa. He committed suicide with a poison pill in his mouth when they caught him. The police found hundreds of bombs in his apartment; he had scribbled the walls with every combative dialogue from the Shushei Enaharipui. They interviewed his former boyfriend, who had moved to Galasu to go through courtesan schooling. He said, Extremism is why I left Cradle for the Daybreak Movement. You know a political cause is doomed when its adherents start committing violence against their fellow human beings.

Considering what the Daybreak Movement is now doing, I find the former boyfriend’s comments ironic.

That man also had links under his name, and he is a member of a small courtesan network in one of the suburbs for upper-class clientèle. In his promotional photos, he wears his hear long and loose like a vagabond. Not too muscular, not too soft, he wears bioluminescent tattoos that go from his abdomen to his groin. His eyes are the color of roasted nonukhë nuts. On his profile, he states that he knows two Shiji dialects, Tveshi and Karoumi—my father’s dialect—along with Comasjok. He is the one who told Aneti that the assassination needed to be rescheduled.

I don’t know what happened. My mind has constructed an impression, a story that likely contains as much falsehood as fact because I don’t know when Aneti met her husband’s would-be lover. I can see her, a double agent, listening to her husband talk with the man about Cradle. Influence crept into her skull and, a woman who already had aggressive tendencies, her moral framework began to erode. Others must have left Cradle for the Daybreak Movement. Others must have brought the same seeds of violence that Aneti now harbored within herself. A political movement changes with its members.

When Aneti and I went out later, I tried to think of her as the woman who threw a child at someone. Perhaps that is the secret remedy against heartbreak.