Ari
To the rest of the world, it is an outdated pseudoscience from another era, old-world mythology that has given way to chemistry and modern medicine.
It is Eastern emperors swallowing mercury tablets in the hopes of living forever, and Western scientists trying in vain to turn lead into gold.
You do not speak of it because it cannot be spoken seriously about, because, unless you know, it isn’t real.
“Equal on both sides,” the class answers in unison.
“Good. Equal on both sides. And gold is much denser than lead. So lead will turn into a smaller amount of gold in order to keep the equation balanced.”
“Were there real alchemists back then, who succeeded in that transmutation?” Dominique, the friendly girl with a braided crown, asks.
“Of course there were,” another girl scoffs. “Isaac Newton wrote about it.”
“Was it really Isaac Newton?” Isla says casually, and the girl blushes. “Or was it an alchemist using Newton as his attribution?”
There’s a brief silence.
“Why do alchemists have attributions?” Isla asks the class. “Anyone know? Why bother with an extra name in addition to their own?”
Dominique answers. “Whenever one of the first alchemists passed away, another would use their name in all their correspondences, with no differentiation between the old and the new. We live on forever this way, taking on their attributions, as if we are one and the same being, immortal and omniscient and eternal.”
“Very good,” Isla says, and Dominique beams from her approval.
“Oftentimes, when ancient alchemical scripts are supposedly written by Isaac Newton or Socrates or the like, it is actually a more modern alchemist who took on their name as their attribution. There have been many Isaac Newtons since the original man lived. There is a living Socrates today, a living Confucius, a living Moses. It is our way of honoring those who came before us.”
“Moses was an alchemist?” another boy asks.
“An elementalist, to be precise. He parted the Red Sea, after all.”
“How far back do they go?” a girl asks. “The first alchemists?”
“We can’t be sure. We can only guess at some of our ancestors, as early alchemy was simply considered magic and interpreted through the lens of mythology.
The Greek gods, for example, were human alchemists.
Zeus was an elementalist who could transmute lightning from nitrogen and oxygen in the air.
Demeter was a bioalchemist who specialized in the healing of living things. ”
“Doesn’t the birthplace of alchemy lie in ancient Egypt?” a boy named Zan pipes up.
“Yes. Isis, Amun, and Cleopatra are common attributions too. But let’s focus on Greece for a second. What’s significant about alchemy’s migration there? Ari?”
Ari reaches for his notes, but Zan sneers at him. “Don’t you remember?” he says.
Ari tries to ignore him and thinks. Finally, he says, “The Greeks named it.”
“Good. What did they call it?”
Ari starts to answer, but Zan cuts him off.
“Khemia,” says Zan effortlessly. “The Black Art. Then, when practitioners fled persecution to the safety offered by the Persian caliphs, they added the Arabic prefix al-.”
Isla nods, and says, “Al-Khemia.”
“That’s why there are so many Persian attributions,” Zan finishes. “Cyrus, Anahita, Xerxes, and so on.”
It is still jarring to Ari to hear the name Persia instead of Iran, what his parents would say in Gujarat.
He wonders about Indian attributions, whether some of the legendary figures he grew up learning about—Gandhi, Ashoka, Siddhartha—were alchemists too.
Had Mr. Rudra known any alchemists in Gujarat?
Were alchemists hiding in plain sight at the temples?
He raises his hand shyly. Isla looks at him. “Yes?”
“How does an alchemist choose their attribution?”
“They don’t. It is chosen for them, by other alchemists.”
He clears his throat. “And how is that done?”
“Well.” Isla leans against the table and smiles at him, light winking against the rims of her glasses. “I’d worry first about becoming an alchemist, yes?”
Ari sequesters himself in the gallery’s cozy corners, and there, surrounded by shelves of books, he learns the periodic table of alchemical elements and compares it to chemistry’s periodic table.
Isla quizzes them on how 7 and Pb both denote the element lead, and how > and Ag both denote the element silver, and how modern alchemy has folded neatly into chemistry and accepted into its ancient pantheon all elements that have since been discovered.
He learns which elements complement one another, which stay inert and calm, which cause explosive reactions.
He learns that any transmutation is possible so long as both sides of the equation are perfectly balanced, but also that limitations exist within this rule.
A living thing, for example, can be changed into a nonliving thing, but never the other way around.
The energy of a soul is a uniquely powerful, fragile, and transient thing, imperfect in a way that inorganics are not.
And once a soul is gone, it can never be restored, rendering the transmutation equation permanently unequal.
Wood, therefore, can be transmuted into steel, but steel cannot be transmuted into wood.
Skin and flesh cannot be healed by water and air.
The dead cannot be brought back to life.
Imperfection can always move toward perfection; but perfection, like the divine state of moksha, is eternal.
Ari struggles to retain each day’s onslaught of information.
He has always known his academic intelligence to be fairly average, that he is not one of those people who can skim a textbook the night before an exam and ace the test the next day, or write a report that sets the class’s curve.
Zan is the one who always calls out answers. Dominique scores the highest on exams.
Ari, meanwhile, reads slowly, takes several tries to understand a new concept.
But what he lacks in born ability, he makes up for with the sheer determination of hard work.
The others do not carry the weight of their families’ well-being with them—they have been recruited from higher classes, are used to private schools and rigorous exams and studying alchemy only for themselves.
But every difficult lesson reminds Ari that the monthly stipend being sent back to his family in Surat is dependent upon his academic performance here.
He asks Isla so many questions that she often waves him away in annoyance.
During study sessions at the sun-dappled oak tables, he seeks out Dominique, who patiently walks him through difficult concepts.
And even though the black car is parked outside for him at 6:00 P.M. every evening, even though everyone else has left hours earlier, Ari refuses to go until he has committed every bit of that day’s assigned reading to heart.
“Why does he always stay so late?” one boy says to Zan as they pass Ari on their way out for the night.
Zan shoves Ari hard in the head with two fingers. “Because his family doesn’t get to eat if he fails tomorrow’s test,” he replies, and they laugh quietly to each other.
Dominique glares at their backs, then touches Ari’s hand gently. “Don’t worry about them,” she says.
But Mr. Rudra likes this trait of Ari’s, and keeps the gallery open until Ari is ready to leave, until he staggers home at midnight and collapses in his bed, his mind overflowing with alchemical formulas.
Sometimes he dwells on Isla’s lazy smile and coy answer to his question.
I’d worry first about becoming an alchemist.
He has little understanding of what exactly Lumines does, or what this organization needs alchemists for, but the thought of letting his family down is more than Ari can bear.
All his effort and sacrifice over the past year, for nothing.
So the threat of shame keeps him up at night and wakes him up early each morning.
If Sam were in Ari’s alchemy class, she would be the top student.
Ari knows this with absolute certainty. In regular school, he watches Sam with awe and envy as she retains information seemingly without effort.
She will sit through an entire class without taking notes, staring off into space, then repeat back the teacher’s words verbatim when Ari asks for her help with the lesson.
She will memorize entire chapters of their textbooks after a single readthrough, can refer to it as if the pages are open before her.
How he covets her pristine mind. And yet she will leave exams unfinished, will put off homework until five minutes before class begins.
Ari fights hard for every A+ on his report, but Sam’s grades always languish near the bottom of the class.
Ari can’t understand it at all. Even though she shows up every day, she participates in school as if there is nothing it can offer her.
During a test one afternoon he notices her daydreaming again, her eyes fixed on some unremarkable section of white classroom wall, idly twirling her pencil. His gaze goes to her paper. Only ten minutes are left in the class, and her paper is still blank.
When he’s sure the teacher isn’t looking, he whispers “Hey” in her direction and, when she glances at him, slides his own paper to the side of his desk.
She blinks, seems to come back to herself. Then she shakes her head politely at him and turns back to her own exam without glancing at his answers. He watches as she fills out her paper until the bell rings.
“You don’t have to help me,” she tells him in the hall after class. “She’ll fail us both if she catches you.”
“But why do you do that?” he asks her.
“Do what?”
“Sabotage yourself. You should be at the top of our class.”
She looks confused by his assessment. “Why would I be?”
“You’ve got everything memorized.” He taps his head. “You know every answer off the top of your head.”
“My answers aren’t usually the ones teachers want.”
“Well, what’d you write down for the question about the butterfly effect?”
“What’d you write?”
“That it’s the concept of every action in life leaving a ripple in the world,” he replies, “that small actions we take can therefore create huge effects.”
“Oh. I just left that one blank.”
“Why?”
“Because the idea of the butterfly effect is fundamentally flawed, because in the end, you will never know what the future would have been, so without seeing alternative timelines, how can you ever properly test the validity of the effect?”
Ari starts to laugh. It is somehow both the wrong and better answer. “But that’s not the question,” he says. “She just wants to know if you understand the concept.”
“But I don’t understand the concept because it doesn’t make sense to begin with!” she argues.
“So? Just give her the answer she wants!”
“I don’t know how.” And Sam looks so genuinely at a loss that Ari takes pity on her.
“Oh, Sam.” He shakes his head and smiles. “You’re too good for this class.”
She laughs, and Ari glances at her, surprised and pleased. This is the first time he’s ever made her laugh, and he loves the sound. He wants to say more but doesn’t know what, and then it’s too late anyway, because they’ve reached the exit.
But as they prepare to separate for the afternoon, Sam hands Ari a folded piece of paper. “Here,” she says. “I wrote you something.” She turns away before he can react. “Bye, Ari.”
Ari looks down at the letter, then quickly up at her, but she is already heading down the steps and toward the bus. So he just waves, his heart thudding, until she’s out of sight. He unfolds the paper and starts to read.
Since we never get to hang out after school, I figured we could keep exchanging these? I’ll start us off this time.
It becomes their daily ritual.
Every morning, Ari gives her a letter, and every afternoon, Sam hands him one in return.
He tucks it safely into a secret pocket of his backpack, anticipates it all throughout his alchemy lesson like a dessert he’s saving for later.
He doesn’t dare read it until he’s alone in his apartment at night.
There, in the silence and the glow of his bedside lamp, he can hear Sam’s voice in his head, as comforting as if she is right beside him.
And through her letters, he learns thousands of details about her—that she has a particular affinity for the color green, that she thinks pumpkins taste awful, that she finds it impossible for us to be alone in the universe, because then what is the point of all that empty space?
Maybe the point of the universe, he responds, is that there is no point. It simply happened, just like the Big Bang.
She writes back playfully: But the Big Bang was literally a point.
She draws a bunch of polka dots around the line, and it makes him laugh. All right, fair enough. But maybe the need for reason is just a human trait, so that we don’t feel so alone.
More seasons pass. The rains cool the land, the land greens, the green flowers, the flowers yellow, the yellow catches fire, and the cycle restarts.
Ari and Sam transition into high school, grow older and taller and lankier, get their own phones and start texting each other.
But the physicality of a letter makes them cherish it more, so they continue their habit.
Ari channels all his pent-up grief over missing his family into messages for Sam.
Their conversations spiral down wild tangents, sometimes rambling and hilariously nonsensical, sometimes full of deep questions.
It doesn’t matter if they’re in the same classes that semester or not.
They always find a way to get their letters to each other, whether stuffed into each other’s lockers or taped to the bottoms of their desks or tossed into the hoods of each other’s sweatshirts as they’re passing in the hall.
Still, there is a curious, unspoken rule between them where they share nothing personal about their lives.
Perhaps he starts it, shying instinctively away from any mention of what he actually does every day after school.
And perhaps she follows suit, understanding that there are secrets in their lives not meant to be shared.
Whatever the reason, they stay on the surface of their friendship over the next two years, holding back even as they never run out of things to talk about, guarding their vulnerabilities even as they write each other hundreds of pages.
Even as they each wonder what they’re missing in the other.
Even as they each hope, quietly, that the other will ask.
Even when, one day, something terrible happens.