i.

Zahir walks backwards through time. He is born old, solemn-eyed and quiet with the terrible knowledge that he will live again and again. The world has no mysteries to be revealed. Growing older is losing himself; piece by piece the memory of what was before falls away like dead skin and leaves only exposed raw strips of muscle in its place. He recalls surprise, and then forgets the reason why it is new to him. He takes his place beneath the sun.

No: instead he buries his face in his hands and wonders what he's done. All his life, he wonders what he's done.

No: he dreams that world is flat. He stands at the very edge and looks upon a shimmering veil of darkness against which even the stars are muted. Sometimes men slip upon the cliffs and fall. Sometimes they are pushed.

ii.

The rain flashed across the asphalt like thousands of birds taking flight. His converses squeaked with water and above the sky was blank as a white lie. He wants to stop here and change what happens next, take her arm and turn back and go home. Up the stairs and down the narrow hall, into the living room where their father still sits, playing his records upon the weathered gramophone.

But memory rolls forward, relentless, no matter what he wills. His Dreaming is no use when this dream comes. His eyes roll wildly in his sleep, the sheets sticky with sweat and blood. His nails bite crescent moons into his palms. Everything done can be undone. Nothing is immutable, nothing lasts. Except what he has done. He knows too much and has worn that knowledge like a yoke around his neck all his life, but this is the bitterest truth. This is what he cannot face.

She turned to face him, hair swirling in the wind, the bright red of her coat stark against the muffled colors of the day.

”I'm sorry,” he says, ”I was always willing to pay the price. I just didn't think it would be you.” They are words he never said in truth, in life. Her eyes do not widen in confusion. She does not ask what he's talking about. His apologies and explanations have no anchor here, and even in his dreams she will die, again and again, with no understanding of why it had to be.

(Sometimes he envies her that ignorance but such thoughts are always fleeting, and curdle his stomach with shame. Sometimes he wishes she were still here to be the brave one, the one to do what has to be done. She would take this burden from him. She would have done it without hesitation, he knows, and not because it was her fate but because she was better. But she is rotted flesh and bones beneath six feet of earth and he has to live for both of them.)

She turned to face him, hair swirling in the wind. She smiled. The rain fell. The crosswalk sign flashed a foggy orange. And his entire life was traveling towards this moment, but it does not mean it hurts less when she reaches for him and he only watches, as if his body belongs to someone else (and it does, it does, it has never been his, not in a thousand lifetimes). He wishes that he had touched her face. He wishes he had taken her hand, one last time, before the end, but dream after dream the scene unfurls into sudden violence and he pushes her hard.

She staggers, off balance to an extent that defies his single shove and his bones burn inside him, his body crackles with a towering freeze and she stands in the street as if frozen, the wind whipping her hair, the rain filling the distance between them with a silver curtain and he cannot see her face. And though he will give over hours and hours to imagining the shock, the dawning realization that must have struck too late, he can only ever remember her smiling.

iii.

He has migraines more often than not these days, heated iron vises that grip and grip  and will not let go. When they come he knows why Moridin wants to die.

When they recede and leave new secrets in their wake, unearthed like bloody bits of shell on some foreign shore, he knows why Moridin has long given up hope of oblivion.

He is the beloved pet. He is the bright edge of the knife. He is the prodigal son. And his punishment for his failing, the price of his favor is this: to live and die and live again, to play out his role in steps as intricate as any waltz and as binding as any hell and never forget.

iv. 

The car threw her fifty feet into concrete and steel, but she was still breathing when he knelt by her side and blood soaked into the knees of his jeans. 

Zahir doesn't even realize he's snapped her neck until his hands pull back from the pale column of her throat and he begins to scream.

v.

Autumn rolls into Queens with a lazy trumpet of horns, shades of bronze and red bursting forth under a swollen noontide sun. Zahir watches his sister scramble up the apple tree in their backyard and shifts from foot to foot on the ground.

Come on, she shouts. Time has turned the sound of her voice into a mist he can't hold, but he remembers what she said. Come on up, you big baby! I can see to the end of the world from here.

He knows the best she can catch a glimpse of is the Manhattan skyline, but he follows after her anyway. He scuffs his shin on bark and skins his palms, but he makes it to the top beside her. The branches creak restlessly beneath their weight, but both of them are young still, and Thalia is small for her age.

Zahir squints at the horizon and tries to see whatever it is Thalia sees from here. All he can see is the chrome gleam of skyscrapers in the distance, the crooked cluster of houses and shops that unfolds just below the hill. 

It's great, she says. We should climb up here more often. A pause, where she kicks the base of the branch with the toe of her sneaker. Even if there aren't any apples. 

There's a spot of blood welling just under his knee and Zahir braces himself against the trunk to bend over and wipe it off when a sudden wind shakes the tree. More than wind; it roars in his ears and he watches branches snap and twist, contorted like acrobats. He's petrified on his own branch, like the air has turned to jelly around him. He can't move. He can't move. 

Thalia falls. Her hair flies up, suspended against the sky for a moment like a dark curtain drawing shut, and then she starts to tumble backwards, her hands clutching uselessly at nothing. Zahir lunges forward, through the wall of wind that seems to press back against him, straining to hold him back, and grabs her flailing left hand in both of his.

He lands with a heavy grunt on his stomach across the branch, the wind knocked out of him, and for a moment all he sees is stars. He blinks his vision clear, sucking air in hoarsely. His breath rattles in his throat.

Thalia looks up at him wide-eyed and pale as a sheet, but Zahir can only see past her, to the sharp drop to the ground, and he imagines what his sister's body would have looked like, broken and still on the grass. It makes him want to vomit. 

I-I got you, he says, and pulls her up back slowly. She crouches on the branch beside him, licking her lips and already beginning to summon back her bravado, starting to tell a joke, but Zahir isn't really listening. Her words buzz in his ears with infuriating persistence until he mechanically follows her down the tree.

But by the time they walk back into the house and sit down at the kitchen table, Thalia scattering shirmal crumbs across the tablecloth as she talks and chews at the same time, the memory is already fading. The overwhelming sense of wrongness he felt, the sense of being danced like a puppet through a certain set of steps---

When he wakes the next morning, he can hardly recall what bothered him at all. And for the rest of his (their) life, Zahir will wish that the story had ended with that blank absolution. But fate does not turn aside for the wishes of boys. Not for the prayers of nations.

LAIKA OF GAGNAM STYLE