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Zosia wakes up in a hospital. For a second, she’s eight years old and getting shards of glass taken out of the palms of her hands. Her hands reach out, and the linens are scratchy beneath her fingertips. She shivers. It feels cold here. It’s always too cold in the winter because of the Motława.
Her fingers twitch and she looks down at the back of her hands. She turns them over and the scars are faint. A lifetime of using her hands has worn them down to thin white lines that barely catch the light. No longer angry and raised.
She yawns and blinks a few times. Trying to get rid of the strange feeling like she has been stuffed full of wool after being scooped empty.
There is a man on a chair against the wall. He looks at her like he hates her.
Next to him, there is a blonde woman that is slumped into her chair. She is frowning at the floor and Zosia wonders how someone can look so miserable while asleep.
The man stands and walks towards her.
He blocks the faint light above them and his words are harsh, like an interrogation. “¿Por qué se desmayaron?”
She blinks.
“¿Qué andan tramando?” His voice is like a clenched fist, about to strike.
“¡Contéstenme!” His fingers are wrapped above her elbow and it’s painful.
“Spierdalaj!” Zosia shouts, angry at being manhandled by this stranger. She digs her fingernails into the back of his hand and tells him to fuck off again.
He shouts in surprise and for a moment, he looks terrified.
The woman’s head jerks up.
“Zosia.” Her voice, like a gravel road, rough and unused, says her name wrong.
She rushes towards them so quickly that the monitor beside her shrills angrily.
The man’s fingers are pulled back towards his wrist, and he leaves behind a red indentation where his hand had been.
The woman is touching her face. She is too close and hugging her so fiercely that Zorsia feels bad for not knowing her name. Not knowing her at all.
//
The doctor comes in, eyes bloodshot and tears streaming down his face. His smile is so artificial it makes her uncomfortable.
A light shines in her eyes and he asks her some questions. His smile is empty as he tells her that she’s in New Mexico, America. Not Tangier.
He talks about a happiness virus and not knowing how she went from infected to cured. She was not immune and yet, here she was, an anomaly.
It sounds absurd so she laughs. The room is tense, and the doctor’s smile is an odd contortion of happiness without feeling behind it.
It is empty and it makes her want to claw at his hands too.
He asks how she is and pulls the sheet below her very pregnant belly. Zosia throws up all over his hand and stethoscope.
The blonde woman, Carol, is patting her shoulder and talking in low, reassuring murmurs.
When the doctor leaves, Carol tries to smile. It’s strained and weak. But at least it’s not artificial.
Manousos had given the doctor the same look she had received before. Now, he stares at her differently. She feels like a bug beneath a microscope.
//
Carol helps her get cleaned up in the bathroom and lets her change into a new gown by herself.
She stares at her face in the mirror, and she mouths the words. “Carol. Carol. Carol.” The name feels foreign in her mouth.
“Manousos. Manousos. Manousos.” Still, she feels nothing.
They were the only two people in her room and they were strangers.
//
Carol helps her settle back into the hospital bed and reassures her that they’ll fix this.
“Fix? I am broke?” She asks in the basic English she remembers from school and around the city.
Carol’s fingers squeeze hers and she smiles. Broken. Unused to doing this.
“No, no, Zosia, you’re perfect… it’s just… it’s a lot to explain.”
She nods. Staring at their intertwined hands and trying to understand who they were to each other.
She stares at the man in the chair. “Manousos” she reminds herself. She wonders if she has permanent brain damage from a fall she took. “I can’t believe I am not in vacation in Tangiers.” She wants to say. She had spent years trying to save everything she made just to feel sand beneath her feet. To have the sun warm her skin. To see the ships meet the shore at the other side of the port. Zosia doesn’t have the words for any of it, so she wipes under her eyes and turns away from both of these people.
“Are you tired? Let me go get you another blanket.” Carol squeezes her fingers and pushes her hair back from her forehead.
It’s comforting, having this warmth from this stranger.
Or friend. They could be friends.
Zosia doesn’t know.
Apparently, she doesn’t know anything about the world anymore.
//
She jumps awake as soon as she hears the footsteps creep into the room.
The doctor walks softly towards her and Zosia sits up. Expectantly. She wants him to talk to her in Polish. He’s the only person she doesn’t like but can talk to without having to dumb everything down into the same tired phrases.
She waits for him to speak. Instead, he leans in and kisses her.
Zosia pulls back and slaps him.
The sound echoes in the room. Loud enough to wake up Carol and Manousos.
“Hey, you get away from her.” Carol launches the man back with such force that he stops moving. He stops smiling at her. He just stops.
Carol starts apologizing and she gets pulled down, towards the ground, as she tries to soften the doctor’s fall.
He convulses.
“He is hurt?” She asks, trying to understand what is happening. “Was virus?”
Manousos steps closer to her. Curious.
She sits back, instinctively. Already tired.
“Quién eres?” He asks through hooded eyes. Suspicious. Always suspicious of her.
She frowns at him and looks at Carol instead. Who is worried about the doctor in this desperate way.
Zosia wonders if she is just like the doctor. A person for Carol to worry over and not really known. Not known at all.
//
They leave the hospital and the city is quiet. There is no traffic. There is a vast expanse of nothingness and empty buildings shimmering in the distance.
“New Mexico, very small city?” She asks, trying to make conversation. Trying to fill the sad silence from Carol and suspicious glares from Manousos.
She wants to go home. Back to her apartment in Gdańsk. Screw the sand and wearing bikinis for boys on holidays.
This place is dry and too full of sun.
She feels like every bit of moisture in her body has been sucked dry. Desiccated.
“Albuquerque.” Carol says as she pulls up towards a giant house that seems to be made of clay.
“Albuturkey.” She repeats. Slowly. Painfully.
“Albuquerque.” Carol says again and looks at Zosia as if it hurts to be near her.
It’s different than before.
//
//
The television talks to her when no one else will.
She calls the number underneath, and they sort of explain what happened without telling her anything at all.
She wants to ask who Carol is. Who Manousos is. Why she’s here in this place of sand and clay and sadness.
Instead, she asks if they can play movies from her childhood. The ones she saw on the marquee but could never afford to see. She wants to remember what it is like to hear someone else speak her native tongue. She wants to feel less foreign in this alien place.
//
It’s been days and Carol still says her name all wrong. It’s comforting. The way she can’t wrap her tongue around Polish. They are both awkward in their borrowed tongues.
Carol smiles, too sharp and forced but her eyes are always soft.
The rest of the world is in tatters and Carol is angry but oh so soft. Just for her. Soft and willing to learn from borrowed books what it means to conjugate a verb just to talk to her.
Manousos haunts her like a ghost, and she feels ashamed of not wanting to be here but being stuck because it’s the end of the world.
//
Carol and Manousos take a lot of hikes.
They leave for hours and talk about radio waves.
She stays behind and looks through everything.
It feels like she is haunting this place. Where Carol and her wife Helen live.
Lived.
Helen is buried in front of the kitchen window, and she wonders if Carol is haunted too.
Maybe they are all ghosts, and the world is truly over.
//
She asks the man in the television why she’s here.
They tell her that she was sent here to act as an emissary for them. That she was taken… not taken. Tasked to help Carol see that it was best to join them.
She was part of something greater, something from the cosmos. And then she was back to being herself. Not enough.
It’s confusing. To know that she wasn’t special. And yet she was extraordinary.
She was here, because she was beautiful and empty. A vessel.
She wonders if this is how the virgin Mary felt. An empty vessel for someone else.
The thought is so sacrilegious that she crosses herself and runs from the television.
She’s in the bathroom, holding her stomach and the sad eyes of painted icons refuse to leave her thoughts.
They remind her of Carol.
All sad and blue and full of longing as they stare towards the sky.
//
Carol knows she’s been rummaging through her house. Room by room. And yet, she never shouts at her. She just drowns herself in amber liquid as Manousos talks to her about the signal and how Zosia is proof that there is a vaccine. There is a cure for this virus.
Zosia doesn’t feel cured.
She knows that Carol loves her. Can see that naked longing. But she feels nothing.
She looks at the woman across from her, trying so hard to be accommodating. As hard as she tries to remain so angry at the world. And she feels nothing.
//
The longing for what was lost never leaves her and she wonders how this new world can feel like the old one.
Back when she was a child and they had nothing. Yet she felt so carefree.
The only thing she misses are those mango flavored ice cream bars. Being sold from a cart by a man that loved to see the kids in his neighborhood smile more than he loved making money.
//
She finds Carol outside. Screaming into the phone as a pool of yellow liquid melts at her feet.
“No, I want ice cold bars. Not melting. Not kind of cold. Ice cold. They are ice cream bars. They need to be cold.”
Zosia watches as Carol screams and steps into the puddle of sticky liquid.
Her anger dissipates as soon as she sees Zosia. She brightens and softens at the same time.
“Zosia.” She says her name like a prayer. Or an answer. She doesn’t know.
“Carol, you are angry at them?” She pretends to ask a question but really, she is teasing the other woman.
Carol rolls her eyes and smiles as she shakes her head. “No, not me. I’m never angry.” She lies and they both smile.
“Yes, not you. Must be other Carol.” She jokes and lets the other woman come inside.
The laugh is genuine, and it feels like she won something.
//
In the house, Manousos ignored her in his angry, sullen way.
Carol is awkward and full of questions she cannot say. She holds them all back and Zosia wishes she would be less accommodating.
She sleeps alone, in Carol’s big bed and she wonders why the sheets feel so familiar.
“Had she always slept here?” She shivers at that thought.
She looks over and Carol is doing that frowny face at the screen. Her lips move and Zosia can see how the other woman is struggling with the passive participle of becoming. “Zostać.” Her lips move in tandem with Carol’s and she wonders if this is what it was like to be a part of the entire world.
Always in sync with someone else.
//
She wants to go to the store. She is tired of the food Carol makes. She misses her home. She misses her life. She misses the world, and she doesn’t feel anything at all.
//
The store is empty.
The city is empty.
The world is empty, and she cries as she realizes that the phone didn’t lie.
She wasn’t a prisoner. She wasn’t recovering. She was living the rest of her life in those quiet moments. Not recovering. Not getting better so she could go home.
There is no home.
She is a stranger in an alien place and Carol looks at Zosia like she is breaking her heart.
Carol doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know what makes her smile. She knows nothing about Zosia and yet she’s the only one willing to drive her into the unknown. Just because she asked.
Zosia feels like a bitter replacement for a dead wife with a baby that was meant to usher a new type of humanity.
Linked to the others and yet she was lost.
A ship adrift.
No home port.
Nothing but an ocean. Ready to swallow her whole.
//
She makes pierogi, so she can have a little taste of home. Potato and cheese.
Carol asks the others for ingredients and a drone drops it off right at their door.
She looks at Carol through the reflection on the kitchen window and there’s nothing. She longs for a flicker of recognition. Of something more than just shipwrecked survivors holding onto the same piece of flotsam.
She thinks that Carol Sturka might as well be a perfect stranger.
//
She asks the voice on the phone if there is a way to stop feeling so lonely.
They tell her that she cannot join them. Not anymore.
She has been severed from the whole.
They tried to bring her back, in the hospital, but Carol poisoned her with some sort of antidote.
They are no longer compatible.
They hang up with a goodbye that feels plastic and fake. Like their smiles on the television and she is so furious she smashes the phone against the wall.
//
She wakes up on the couch with a headache.
Carol is next to her. Face tight. Frowny. Always frowny when she’s not looking at Zosia.
Zosia stares and she wonders how she can be cured and cursed at the same time.
There is a new phone where the old one was. Plugged into the wall and the broken pieces of the other one are gone.
Zosia shifts and Carol turns towards her. Soft and worried and no longer made of frowns.
“You okay?” She asks in English. Too tired to try. To mask her anger in uncertain Polish.
Zosia nods but she doesn’t feel okay. She doesn’t feel anything but a heavy weight in her chest. Crushing her until she’s nothing but sticky sweet, yellow liquid, melting against the asphalt.
//
She’s bored of looking through Carol’s things and asks if she can hike with them.
Zosia joins them on their hikes, and they don’t really hike at all.
They are underground. In a cave. Pieces of antiquated equipment is wired into each other. It leads outside, to a satellite dish that is whitewashed grey with faded letters.
For a moment she feels nostalgic for her neighborhood. It was like those dishes that pulled the rest of the world into their homes. The ones where you had to keep buying pirated cards in the market to keep the signal going without having to pay a month’s wages.
//
The satellite cave is like entering a womb and she looks forward to being there.
She feels less like a prisoner and more like a friend.
Manousos is less angry at her while him and Carol work together. She hands them tools and tries to read through a novel about a pirate.
Carol is a writer, but it is airport trash.
The kinds of novels that you pick up at the airport and just forget at the plane because it was only meant to pass the time.
Or maybe she thinks it’s vacuous because she doesn’t have a firm grasp of the English language. Carol could be the next Bruno Schulz, and she would never know.
//
For once, they are alone and she is uncomfortable. Manousos is quiet anger directed towards her but he still asks her what’s been on their minds.
“Now that you are not one of them, did you stop loving her?”
Zosia is silent.
“I don’t remember her.” She looks towards the cave’s entrance, where Carol went. “I don’t remember loving her. I don’t.”
Manousos’ eyes turn into slits. “Okay, Zosia. Whatever you say.”
It’s the only time he’s said her name, and it feels like a lie.
//
She is deep inside the cave when it feels like the world is shaking. She grips onto the earth, trying to ground herself, and she feels the walls of dirt and rock dig into her palms.
Carol is suddenly at her side and she breathes in. Deep and painful until she’s crying into the other woman’s shoulder.
Carol holds her like she’s afraid she will disappear beneath the earth.
Zosia wants to remember her.
She wants to know how she came to love a woman enough to live through an infection and have her baby.
To come out whole and scooped out empty from the happiness virus that rejected her and left her almost as miserable as the woman that loves her with eyes blue like the ocean and endlessly deep.
//
The air is charged around them with disappointment. Anger. An endless sadness that will swallow her whole.
The work day was cut short because she wasn’t feeling well and they are heading towards Carol’s home.
They go to their respective corners to sulk.
Carol is in her office, Manousos is in the living room. And she is in Carol’s bed. Cold and empty. Like the desert that surrounds them.
She wants Carol to hold her and pat her hair smooth as she falls asleep. She wants to feel human. To be loved and comforted. But she doesn’t want to hurt the other woman because she doesn’t remember her.
Carol looks up and smiles in that same broken way as before. Full of sadness and longing and so much love.
Zosia tilts her head. An invitation.
Carol looks behind her.
Zosia laughs.
Carol looks back, across the small expanse of desert between sheets of glass.
Zosia nods.
Carol looks unsure. Even as she stands up and turns her back to Zosia. Already headed for the door and towards her. Always moving to her.
//
Carol is warm at her side. Solid. An anchor in turbulent seas.
She feels real and it is the easiest thing to turn her back to Carol and ask the other woman to hold her.
She feels uncertain hands encircling her. She feels Carol’s forehead against the back of her neck and she shivers. Carol takes a deep breath and stiffens.
Zosia reassures her that it’s fine and Carol barely relaxes.
Zosia always wondered where those giant ships went. Brand new and ready for a journey.
She wonders where she will go, once her baby is born and they are not part of the collective.
She always wanted to be liberated. To be part of the wider world that had exotic flavors like peach and mint.
Now she is here, and it was nothing like she imagined.
She starts to cry and suddenly Carol is holding her like she’s the only thing that matters. She turns over and cries into Carol’s neck.
Her tears fall into the hollows of Carol’s skin, and it makes her entire face feel warm and sticky.
Carol, who is always watching her with a longing that makes Zosia ache. Carol, who is careful not to reach out and touch her first. Carol, who laughs at her jokes in broken English and gets her mango flavored ice cream bars because she knows they’re her favorite.
Carol, who knows nothing about her and yet she knows how to take care of her.
Zosia reaches up and tilts Carol’s face down, towards her own. Her eyes are blue and full of sorrow. She shifts against the mattress and presses her lips against Carol’s. Trying to remember what it feels like to love a woman that seems to hate the world.
Carol pulls back and she inches forward.
Their lips meet again, and Carol tastes like forgotten amber liquid, made of alcohol and smoke.
Carol’s chest fills up with her name. “Zosia.” Her mouth forms around it all wrong and too American but so perfectly imperfect. Unlike the voice on the television. Who says her name right, but it feels wrong.
“Please.” She murmurs against Carol’s lips and they kiss. Soft. Closed mouthed. Carol tastes like the drink they shared, months ago.
Zosia breaks the kiss. Startled. Her vision blacks out and she is dimly aware of Carol saying her name.
Over and over, Carol says her name, just like before. Her name is a prayer and Carol is kneeling at her feet.
It is sacrilege to feel sacred and like a sacrifice.
She thinks back to them. Remembers everything they made her do. The things they didn’t make her do but she did anyway, like poke and prod at Carol. To bring up Helen, even when she knew Carol would react like a rabid animal.
She remembers Carol staring at her, across an expanse of asphalt, as she went with Koumba because the other woman wanted her to decide what she wanted. They couldn’t decide, because they just wanted to make everyone happy. Even then, Carol couldn’t let her go, because there was a chance that Zosia would have said no.
Not the hive mind, not the virus, not the billions of people and memories that loved Carol as much as Helen had loved her.
Zosia.
She’s crying again and Carol is awkwardly holding her. Like she forgot that they had been lovers. Like she had forgotten everything but how to be raw and exposed against the world.
“Carol, did it work? The others, they are silent.” I am silent. Silent and alone once again. She wants to say.
Carol wraps herself around her and Zosia had felt confused before, out of balance, because she didn’t understand what was going on.
Now she feels out of balance because she had all the knowledge in the world and she is severed from all that love. All that happiness.
Yet she is here because the love bomb worked. The red vaccine, as they called Carol’s love, had cured her.
Who could have thought that being loved so deeply, so fiercely, could force her to be an individual again.
She really was like a protagonist in a Wycaro novel. Where love saves the day and she remembered that the coat she was wearing was her own, once again.
It takes a minute for them to settle down and she stares at Carol. She feels that echo of Helen’s love for other woman and she wonders if that is Helen, her fans, the others, or her, Zosia, feeling it.
She can’t separate herself from them as easily as she thought.
They are not humming inside of her, like a radio turned way down low, but she still remembers them.
She remembers Carol.
She stiffens, thinking about the explosion and the drugs.
Carol is lovely and so self-destructive that she might break the world apart just to get Helen back.
No, not Helen.
Her. Zosia.
Who can’t separate what she truly feels from what they felt but is grateful that Carol saved her, saved her baby from the others. She knows that they planned to do terrible things to her baby because he was just a body. He was nothing. Not a person but a tool.
She shivers and Carol rubs her back. Comforting her.
She had forgotten but not anymore.
“I remember you, Carol Sturka.” She says as she presses her palm against Carol’s chest. Feeling her heartbeat beneath her fingertips.