10. Enigma

Growing up, June had wanted to be an astronaut. She grew up in the suburbs of Mumbai, where seeing stars was a luxury because the sky was always hidden behind creeping, hazy tendrils of smoke and dust that shimmered and sometimes even sizzled under the perpetual heat and humidity of upwards of ninety degrees. Now that she thinks about it, the only star she could discern with absolute confidence was Rigel, named after Rijl Jauzah, which translates to the “left leg of the giant”, in the Orion constellation. What a giant Rigel was, flickering blue-white in a city so polluted that everything else in the sky remained lost to June. Then, in seventh grade, on a school camping trip to the Dehene village, June saw a night sky untouched by smoke and truly began to believe that four thousand stars could really dominate the night sky like her textbooks claimed; she decided to become an astronaut.

It is human nature to be drawn to what feels rare and just beyond reach; the stories that the stars hid among themselves became so enigmatic to June that every star in the Universe became a kind of person to her. The kind of person with a lingering presence that you meet and remember without quite knowing why, a person you can never fully figure out. June wanted to know these stars, be their best friend, ask them how their last few billion years had gone and what stories they had for her. How could all these stories be stitched so carefully onto the sky, but all the storytellers be stuck down here on Earth? How devastating.

After returning home from the Dehene village, when she had searched for “brown astronauts”, she had, instead, found astronauts from Brown University. When she asked how many women have been to space, she learned that the number limped at a mere eleven percent. To make matters worse, only twelve percent of astronauts in all these years of space travel had not been white. Space may be 93 billion light-years in diameter, but it had such little room for people who looked like her. She wondered why. June’s mother calmed her down by telling her about the heroics of Kalpana Chawla, the first woman of Indian descent in space, re-invigorating June’s desire, albeit with a seed of pressure that would only grow over the next six years of her life. “When white people fly, they fly for themselves. When you fly, you fly along with two billion other Indians,” June’s mother had said. With the weight of an entire nation hurled upon the shoulders of an eleven-year-old, June devoured all of Chawla’s flight logs, mission transcripts, quotes, biographies like a thirsty, devout, lost traveler in the desert.

She shares it all with Orion, who leans against a fence overlooking a pond where several turtles swim by. Orion’s told her about the memories he remembered during his Reinstatement, and now June is telling him some of her own stories. June’s face softens as she continues to tell him how, in memorizing the shape of Chawla’s dreams, she’d mistaken them for her own.

It was not until the second semester of her college course in the United States that June realized astronomy was less about stories and more about math. She was taking a class on classical mechanics when it dawned upon her that if she fixated on it a little longer, concepts like momentum and velocity hardly made any sense to her. Sure, she understood that momentum meant how hard it is to stop a moving object. Some of her classmates described it as “inertia in motion”, but if inertia is the tendency to remain still, then shouldn’t “inertia in motion” be the tendency to remain moving? When she pressed on this subject, someone told her to study the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics to understand the right way to think about momentum or energy. That is how June figured out that she had no capacity to visualize physics.

It felt like walking in the wrong pair of shoes that didn’t fit, reeked, and had missing socks. Her disinterest was only corroborated by the labs, where it felt like she was locked away in dungeons with a pair of breadboards and resistors tormenting her to make a mock radio in two hours or fail an entire class. Telescopes were now handled digitally from couches in windowless underground rooms; observing nights were mostly just a bunch of different Python routines threaded together. The skies turned into data points, not stories. Galaxies were just another error bar. Understanding the physics behind every little thing in the Universe started to take away the magic of being enchanted by its mystery. Why not let falling apples be falling apples? There was a cruel irony in it all. When she was twelve, smoke had hidden the stars from her. When she was seventeen, science did.

It was hard for June to accept that astronomy was not really for her, and that maybe she never wanted to be an astronaut, but only someone who knew where they belonged. After all, she grew up in a city of thirty million people, each trying their best to describe themselves. Being an astronaut and studying astronomy had seemed like a good way to describe herself, but that wasn’t really what June wanted anymore. She felt helpless, lost, like an enigma herself because for some reason, when we are seventeen, we are foolish enough to chastise ourselves for not figuring everything out. June loathed experiencing anxiety in crowded lecture halls, noisy dormitories, and bustling laboratories, diligently swallowing the blue pill in the orange cans with the white lids that her therapists would recommend.

She had spent so much of her life trying to become something extraordinary that she had forgotten how to become someone ordinary enough to be loved.

Then, she found Clem, who loved her like people love a fresh bouquet of flowers, carefully at first before suddenly losing interest when they realize that flowers decay. June shivers, thinking about how she let being with Clem become part of her identity; that being with Clem filled the gap left behind when she lost her dreams of being an astronaut. She’d fooled herself into believing that she could make a home out of his hands, blind to the dirt and grit etched between his fingers, blind to the odd barbarity of needing someone more than they need you, blind to the cruelty of men who demand you beg for love and compassion.

So many years later, she feels an undying contempt for Clem, who unfairly expected an odd kind of reverence from June. “I could be with anyone, but I’m with you,” he would say. “Where else would you go?” he’d taunt with a smirk. The words stung more than they should have because they were true. Even though June traversed the relationship like a turtle crossing a busy highway, frightened of being crushed, she had no idea who she was if not a broken turtle on a crowded highway. Was it love that made her stay? Was it fear? Are they really different?

When Clem left, cursing her in all the seven languages he knew, June recalls being devastated despite every terrible thing he did, bemused that grief was not compelled to math like physics was; if someone loved you little, shouldn’t the grief and hurt you feel for losing them be equally proportional? The worst part of it all was that Clem, being twenty, got his Erasure and abandoned June with the grief-ridden bowl of rotten memories that besieged their relationship. How dare Clem be allowed to forget, but June be cursed.

She had done everything she was supposed to have done that year, avoided the things she should have avoided. She had been so good that year, but nothing was going her way. She had lost her dreams. Then, she had lost Clem. All these rules that were enforced against her were merrily ignored or even rewarded when others broke them. Love, she decided, must not be free, which is why after she graduated, she joined the Department of Memories. Perhaps, because she comprehended that memory and love dilly-dally long after their time has run out, haunting you in bloody wounds that refuse to be stitched up. Joining the Department of Memories seemed like the perfect antidote to a life spent becoming very good at mourning ghosts.

Yet, looking at Orion’s blank face, in the middle of her workday, makes June question everything about the Department of Memories. And herself. This job, this path she’s chosen, it’s meant to help others, yet in the silence struck between them like the thinnest whispers of widely stretched bowstrings, she questions whether what she does really helps people.

She studies him. He wears a white T-shirt from a bird sanctuary that identifies birds by several different names; his pants remind her of her school pants. He’s watching the turtle keenly, ruminating over May, occasionally absent-mindedly remarking, “Whoa, its tail is so huge” as a turtle passes by under the bridge that June and he are perched over. How easy it would be to be turtles, floating in ponds, eating cucumbers, not giving a damn about anything remotely outside the confines of a pond. June wishes she was like a turtle, a stranger to the scent of worrying. The weather finds a sense of ridicule by posing nicely, in a breezy kind of way, while they carry around an air of unspoken gloom between them, ready to blame one another, knowing very well that these faults are not theirs.

“I know it’s your job and it’s not my place, but this…this is not right,” Orion says, shaking his head, the words leaving him brittle and exhausted.

“I understand.”

He scoffs at that; a scream caught in his throat. He looks at her, his eyes bloodshot with tears, searching June’s face desperately, as if there is a crack in her face through which he wishes to pierce. “Do you? Really?”

“I do understand that you are hurting.”

“No!” Orion squeals, the words leaving louder and with shades of more reproach than he intends to. He shuts his eyes and inhales deeply, till his chest hurts. “Sorry, it’s just…how can you understand?” his voice cracks. “I’m sorry, but the Department took this life I had away from me.”

June is quiet.

“How exactly are you helping people here?” Orion asks.

June thinks about it, trying to convince herself that what she is doing here is right. “Did you know that the rates of domestic abuse and violence have gone down significantly ever since the Department started mandating Erasures?”

Orion laughs. “This is different, and you know that. People out here don’t feel safe. They are frightened.”

June replies softly. “Everybody I have ever met who argues against the Department thinks that they are the exception. That their pain is different and that they have not hurt someone.”

Orion shakes his head in disapproval, clicking his tongue. “This is different. This is different,” he repeats.

“To delete or not to delete,” June continues. “To forget or to forgive. Why do you think you and I can solve this moral dilemma by ourselves?”

“I don’t know.” Orion fidgets with his fingers. “All I know is that something about this feels wrong.”

“Certain memories chain us, preventing us from pursuing the future we would like to have.”

“Are memories freedom or chains? Or is the lack of them freedom or chains? You talk about Erasures like they are surgeries. They are not. An Erasure is not curing me of a disease. You are taking away more than my memories. You are taking away my life. My memories were not real!”

“I understand-”

“-you do not!” Orion growls, biting his finger to stop himself from saying everything else he knows he’ll regret. There is so much he wants to say, so much begging to pour out of his mouth, but he knows it’s not really June’s fault – she is just another victim to the horrific sins of a Department that stands between them.

June sighs. “Do you believe in love?”

He laughs bitterly. “That is a dangerous question to ask me right now.”

“Humor me.”

“Of course, I do.”

“You can never lose someone else’s love, because it never belonged to you in the first place. True love cannot be owned. So, it must be mandated.”

“You and your fucking ridiculous conclusions. What about once true love is gone? Once it is gone, not taken away, what you have is its memory. I,” Orion says, thumping his chest, “get to mandate it.”

June looks at him sadly. “And that is enough for you? Will the memory of hurt stop you from hurting? The first time I told you about Clem, you said there are other ways to forget people. Like what?”

“Time. Distance,” he shrugs.

“How poetic. And then what? I grow? Pain and suffering and grieving and all these adjectives help me become a better person? I am so tired of people telling me that people who grieve should use it to grow. I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t be expected to. I am tired of everyone romanticizing grief.”

“But sacrificing your memories is the same as sacrificing your freedom. And this is not about you. You are not the victim here.”

June is afraid of looking at Orion, because deep down she knows everything she has just said is an argle-bargle piece of incredulous nonsense, but what great power our silly little brain holds in making us succumb to irrationality in the face of change. June cannot change now, can she? It’s too late to rebel now, when she has sacrificed so much of herself to believing the ideals of the Department. To rebel now would be to rebel against herself, and June isn’t ready for that. A coward. An enigma. June hears a voice inside her head, wishing for quieter, wishing to float away like a turtle. “You are free, and that is why you are lost,” she rebukes instead.

“What does that mean?” Orion asks.

“Freedom isn’t merely choosing what to do next. It’s choosing which chains we continue carrying. Why must we drag every ghost into tomorrow?”

“Because they are ours.”

“Are they?” she asked. “Or are we theirs? Memory can sometimes be an act of violence.”

“Ridiculous. Do you remember the myth of the lotus-eaters?” he asked. “Odysseus’s men tasted forgetfulness and found peace. They no longer desired home, purpose, or struggle. They wished to remain in that state of blissful ignorance, with their memories gone. Do you know what Odysseus did?”

“No.” June lies. He must be the one who says it.

“He dragged their fucking asses back to the ship.”