He stood up a little taller, flipping his long black hair over his shoulder. “But I can, Trina. I did. With The Seep, anything is possible. Our bodies are just containers for our immortal essences. And that’s my exact point. We’ve become too narrow in our thinking. Remember how intense it used to be, when you first Seeped? Now we drink punch at a party and barely feel anything!”
“I feel things,” she said slowly. “Our bodies may be containers, but they still carry specific histories. And those histories are still meaningful. Of course The Seep doesn’t understand that—they’re amorphous beings with no physical bodies! But I won’t let you stand here, looking like that, and tell me that my history is interchangeable with yours.”
He shrugged again. “Well, you can feel however you want about it, obviously.”
“Horizon, listen to me. You’re being so color-blind it’s racist!”
He looked stung, as if she had struck him. “I can’t believe you would use that word on me. How long have you known me?”
“Clearly, we don’t know each other very well at all. I don’t even know what you really look like!”
Horizon threw his cigarette butt to the ground. The grass swallowed it up instantly, taking it back to the earth. “This is what I look like, Trina, and that’s my point. Our bodies are completely malleable. We haven’t been given this gift to just grow gills, or to sprout angel wings. There has to be something more, something greater to achieve, through The Seep—”
Just then, Deeba’s round, shaved head peered out of the door. “Everything okay out here?” she asked. Then she giggled. “Allie wants to show us pictures of her trip to India. My love, should we call it a night?”
“Yes!” Trina stomped out her cigarette. The ground started sucking up around Trina’s shoes. “Hey, watch it!” She wrenched her feet up from the ground.
Horizon breathed deep. “I forgive you, Trina, for calling me that word. I know you didn’t mean it.”
Trina rubbed her forehead. She was suddenly so tired. “Horizon, I do mean it. If you can’t acknowledge that what you’re doing is fucked-up, I don’t know what to tell you.”
His lovely face was blank with surprise. “I have made my whole career as a memorial to my dead lover. What is more thoughtful than that?”
“Well, he didn’t get a say in it, did he?” Trina took her wife’s hand and turned toward the door.
“You can’t judge things based on the way the world was thirty years ago, T. Everything has changed!”
Trina turned back toward him. “You know, I’m going to tell people about you. That they’re looking into the face of a dead boy who never gave you his consent. That every person you fuck is fucking the mask of a dead person. How can you not see how creepy, how violent that is?”
Horizon looked at her gravely. “I’ll tell people myself, Trina. And when they react with pleasantry, or with boredom, or when they try to show me pictures of their trip to India, you’ll see just how mired in the past you are.”
She laughed, but the sound was hollow, joyless. “If you’re right, I don’t think I want to live here anymore. Good night.” Trina and Deeba left the garden. They made their apologies to their hosts and walked out into the quiet, lush street.
4.
“Can you believe him?” asked Trina later that evening, lying in bed with Deeba. Their home had very few Seep modifications, but Deeba had insisted their ceiling be a huge roof window open onto the sky. The moonlight was so bright, Trina couldn’t see any stars.
“I can,” said Deeba. “Peaton and Allie make a big show of how much they Seep, but Horizon is dosed practically all the time. And I agree with you. It’s dangerous, all that ‘nonseparation, we’re all the same, there is no good or bad’ stuff. Makes accountability very slippery.”
Trina rubbed her eyes. One couldn’t really blame The Seep for the inability to make distinctions like race. Before they were joined with life on Earth, they didn’t have corporeal forms, a concept of linear time, or even emotions. But that made it so humans needed to be even more thoughtful, more nuanced. “That’s exactly why The Seep needs us, maybe more than we need them. And I’m not one of those Keep Earth Human people holed up in the Compound.”
Deeba snuggled in close. “Hey, babe,” she murmured. “The Compound called. They’re sad you don’t want to join them.”
Trina was too shaken up to laugh. “I really can’t believe Horizon would do such a thing and compare it to my transition.”
Deeba practically yelled in her ear. “He did what?”
“Oh yeah, I didn’t even tell you that part.” She leaned over and propped up on her elbows. “And then he acted all high and mighty, and tried to forgive me! The nerve.” In the darkness, Trina could hear Deeba swallow.
“What did you mean when you said, ‘I don’t want to live here anymore’?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Trina lightly. She gave her wife’s soft waist a squeeze and affected a cartoon voice. “Sometimes I think, hey, stop the world, I want to get off.” But Deeba didn’t laugh. She let Trina’s statement hang in the air like fog.
In the morning, Trina was cooking oatmeal when Deeba brought up the channel on the Electric Spirit, the one with the video of the woman becoming a child, for a second time.
Trina cringed. “Ugh. Why do you want to watch that?”
Deeba pressed her head into Trina’s shoulder. “I thought maybe we could watch it together.”
Trina turned off the stove and doled out two bowls. “Why would we do that?”
“It doesn’t look painful at all, it looks cathartic.”
“I don’t think it would be painful. Deebs, what are you saying?”
Deeba added dried cherries and chopped walnuts to her oatmeal and stirred. “Ever since I saw that video, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.” A high, airy laugh escaped her throat. “I think I’m losing my mind!”
Trina stood very still. “Oh?”
She looked up at her wife. “Isn’t it amazing, Trina? To think about going back to the beginning? All those years of therapy. The old wounds never really heal, do they?” Her eyes were large and strange. “I could do it all over again. With good people this time. Get the parenting I deserve.”
Suddenly, Trina was nauseous. She pushed her bowl of oatmeal away. “What are you saying? That you want to die? Now? At forty-six years old?”
“Oh, no sweetheart, no—” She took Trina’s hand in hers. “I’m saying I want to live. Without all these memories. Without that old pain. Don’t you see the difference?”