More Than Utopia by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Author:Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60701-555-0
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2022-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Jirayu returns to me with a hollowed look, the first sign I’ve seen in so long that there are cracks in the steel of her, a hidden spot of rust that has bloomed until it reaches the surface. But it passes. It always does. When I put her in my lap, she lets me—her way of giving me permission. It’s rare our positions are reversed and she is the one in need of consoling.

Her silence goes on for a long time, as if she is sheltering within it. By the time Noor turns up, Jirayu has regained her composure, her control once more complete.

Ey does not pass remark on Jirayu’s choice of seat; nor does ey interrupt while Jirayu explains who and what I am, and the current situation in which we’ve found ourselves. Ey stands straight, eir hands clasped at eir back.

“So,” ey says when Jirayu is done, “the child soldier academy doesn’t exist—that’s a relief. This woman apparently being your wife who was wiped out by aliens and then somehow came back, that’s much less good.”

“Are you asking whether I’ve gone mad?” Jirayu speaks without self-consciousness, nestled as she is in my arms, as though she metes out orders every day in her bodyguard’s lap.

We’re in the abandoned factory that I chose as my hideout when I first arrived in Three Corolla. I’ve taken a seat on top of a dirty crate—it’s just as well that Jirayu is in my lap, the better to insulate herself from the filth—and overhead city pigeons have flown in to eavesdrop on us, their heads tilted and stretched toward us as though hopeful for bread crumbs. I’d have liked to bring some. Jirayu doesn’t quite get my instinct to feed wild animals, the pleasure I take in doing so. To me, they’re another sort of mirror.

“I’m not.” Noor makes a face. “What bothers me is that I don’t remember. Until a few days ago, I’d never seen her in my life. I’m very, very sure of that.”

And to Noor, memory is a sure thing, as absolute as mountains, more durable than architecture. Ey has some of the best I’ve ever known, and it is core to eir identity. To confront the fact that a part of your recollection has been stolen away by a quantum event is a difficult ask for anybody, and for em more so. “We were friends,” I say, “at least in my native timeline. I’d guess in this one too.”

Ey meets my eyes. “That doesn’t help, actually, but I can see you’re the sort of obnoxious I might have taken to. So—you met the boss while she was on a business trip in America, she took you in, and hired you. And now the aliens have declared the two of you soulmates.”

Our meeting was more than such a prosaic synopsis. I want to tell em that when I met Jirayu, I knew: she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. When I bore her down to

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