Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

“When does the assignment end?” I ask. “When does anything end in this infinite world?” asks Farren.

At first I considered this a kindness, a way of manufacturing work when there was none. I now understand it to be a sort of game, the kind of constant undoing that leaves no actual accomplishment, that makes a person question her very existence.

It takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess.

“It’s the least we can do,” says Barnacle Toby, who in his former life was known as Harold. The new name uses his new species as a title, as if to speak his new identity into existence, and I wonder, if he had been called Human Harold, if we were all addressed as Human first, would it somehow enforce our humanity? And when we’re gone, will there be anyone left to fill in?

Life is a stranger in a crowd whose intentions are unclear and, come to think of it, so is death.

These days, all my boyfriends are long-distance. But then again, so is the length of an arm stretched between two people watching each other from afar.

Maybe the banks are all the same bank. Maybe the people are all the same people. Maybe I’m my sister and my sister is me, and in this way, living is also a state of mourning.

“How will you find me?” I ask in the same whisper. “How does anyone find anyone in this infinite world?” she responds.

The First Temporary was assigned to complete a variety of projects. “Burn this bush,” one god said, and so she did. “Now put the bush back the way it was,” another god said, and so she learned the drudgery of tasks done and undone, the brutal makings and unmakings of the earth. “Create an animal so rare it barely exists,” the gods said. The First Temp cobbled together something extraordinary, irreplaceable. “Someone,” she corrected them. “Now watch it go extinct,” they said, and so she held its wing and watched it glimmer, fade, disappear.

I could be happy and sad. It’s the way I can multitask, it’s the way two feelings can be the same feeling. It’s the way a rash and a willow can both weep.

The lights go out. In the perfect darkness I feel calm, maybe even happy. I feel the floating joy of a world without walls, without bodies, without days, without a single worldly thing. I feel my face and I don’t know how it’s positioned in relation to the sun. This lack of perspective somehow makes me hopeful. I’m a seed unsprouted. I think I even smile. I think I even sleep.

I can’t bear the task that makes and unmakes. Because in the end, what does that make of me?

Getting older is the difference between solving mysteries and studying to become one.

She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desired that kind of permanence all the same.