1 #4
“I’m trying.”
“Can you keep trying? Can you be their father?”
He was watching the children. They were so small. They needed him. He had no way to get home.
“I can try,” Kareem whispered.
“They’re so young,” Ibari said. “In a year or two, they might not remember anything about a different father.”
Kareem was thinking of the parents he’d known in the barracks of the desert camp, subdued people who worked their menial jobs all day, uncomplaining, because that was the only way they’d see their children again.
What terrified him, when he thought of it, was that kind of love.
The idea of loving someone—two someones—so much that you’d give up your freedom for a chance to see them again.
A black van was passing on the far side of the park.
He watched the way the van drew attention, the way a couple of the older children watched it, the way the adults carefully avoided looking at it at all, the subtle relief when it was gone.
“Ibari,” he said, “is this a place where sometimes people just disappear?”
“It’s best not to talk about that,” Ibari said softly.
She came to him once a week after that, always while the children were at school, and they talked for hours and drank coffee in his kitchen.
At first she was his handler, his guide to the territory, the person who told him everything he needed to know to convincingly pass as a local, but quickly he came to see her as a friend.
She wanted to know about the place he’d come from.
They traded information about their imperfect countries and talked about this place, these children, their lives.
As part of the arrangement Ibari had brokered, the children’s father had paid off the mortgage on the house.
Kareem found a job at a clothing store nearby.
Retail suited him. He had an eye for clothes.
He cared for the children, went to work, maintained the garden, drank coffee with Ibari, cleaned the house. He built a life.
When did he come to love these children?
Within a month or two of meeting them, although it wasn’t possible to pinpoint an exact date.
When did the children forget their original father, or forget that their first father and Kareem weren’t the same person?
Quickly, very quickly, or so it seemed to Kareem.
He seldom felt like he knew what he was doing, but he read all of the parenting books he could, and he tried to be a steady presence.
It seemed to him that Marlowe and Samir were happy, most of the time.
Samir and Marlowe were seven and five when a statue of their mother was erected in Memorial Square.
There was a brief ceremony on a brilliant day in July.
Ibari was there, stone-faced behind dark glasses, but few other people were in attendance.
Kareem stood with the children under a UV umbrella.
Marlowe and Samir were very still. They knew that their mother and their mother’s colleague Saraya had disappeared in a catastrophically botched teleportation experiment.
The failed experiment had been highly publicized, because it was the reason the State had taken over not just UCLA but all universities, ending tenure as a matter of public safety.
Samir and Marlowe—and the general public—had no idea that their father had been involved.
In popular imagination, Nico and Saraya were the Lost Travellers. They were cast in vaguely heroic terms: yes, they’d been the victims of an inexplicable accident, but also they had set out for a destination at which they’d failed to arrive, and there was romance in this.
“I remember her planting the jasmine in the garden,” Samir said quietly, on the night the statue was erected.
“I don’t remember her,” Marlowe said, but then she couldn’t sleep that night and came to Kareem at two in the morning, crying from a nightmare. He tried to put her back to bed but she couldn’t bear the dark. Kareem took her to the living room and held her on the couch in warm lamplight.
“It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s okay to be sad.”
“Dad,” Samir said. He’d come out into the living room, blinking in his pyjamas, dragging his favourite blanket. “Is Marlowe all right?”
“She’s just having a hard moment,” Kareem said.
He’d come across this phrase in one of his parenting books.
“Come here.” Samir came to lie beside his sister, and Kareem covered both of them with the blanket, then held them close.
Within moments both children were asleep, warm weights against his body, breathing lightly.
He couldn’t move without waking them. He was perfectly happy, and the realization brought tears to his eyes.
Although some nights he lay awake in the darkness and he couldn’t breathe.
The State was a malevolent weight on their lives.
It was a low-level fear that never entirely left him, it was black cars moving too slowly down sunlit streets, unsmiling plainclothes agents in pairs, drones gliding quietly through the air above him, a constant possibility of disaster.
Sometimes people he knew disappeared and he never saw them again.
Sometimes living in this country felt like living at the end of the world. He tried to accept this, tried to find some meaning in it. Who will you be at the end of the world? I tried to be a good parent. I tried to be a good friend.
When Marlowe at twenty-one brought home the man she’d eventually marry—much older, superficially charming but sulky in unguarded moments, obviously jealous of Marlowe’s intelligence, obviously more interested in the aesthetics of being with a younger woman and less interested in, say, the composition of Marlowe’s character or her soul—Kareem was dispirited.
He knew that if he stood in the way, he would lose her, so he stepped back.
Sometimes all you can do is be there to catch someone when they fall.
There are so many different kinds of violence, that was the thing he always thought of when he saw the State’s dark vans moving through the city, when Marlowe started to fade out and make herself small in the face of her husband’s control, when Ibari cautioned him against criticizing the State in public.
He was certain that the children didn’t remember their original father.
He felt it was better that way. But when he watched Marlowe fade into her marriage, when he watched her grow quieter in her husband’s presence, what he wondered sometimes was whether some sense memory of Marlowe’s original father remained, some trace memory of neglect that made neglect feel like home.
Kareem hated virtual reality, but in the last few years of his life he liked to come to Marlowe’s lectures, even though usually it was the same lecture, shifting and improving over time.
He was so proud of her. He would put on the headset, without telling her he was coming, and visit the silvery virtual rooms where she spoke.
“Let us begin,” she always said, “with some fundamental definitions. What is transport? It’s the movement of matter through time and space.” He loved the next part, and always smiled when he heard it. “Incidentally,” she said, “that’s also life.”