Evensong

“You went back. Marek would always go back. He’d go back to make sure, and he’d shoot someone who was wounded and helpless. A passerby outside the UN Embassy in Zagreb. Rafiq’s seven-year-old-son. No,” he said, as she started to speak, “this isn’t just for Rafiq. Rafiq said, ‘Marek killed far more people than just my family. For all of them, this is unfinished business.’ I can’t leave it unfinished.”

“Body and mind. Hardware and software. Container and contents. It seemed obvious to them, when they did it, that the mind was the most important. But it wasn’t, it was the container! I didn’t change into Marek. Marek changed into me.”

“You went back.”

“You don’t need to do this. Marek changed into me, and I wanted to love you.”

“Wanted?”

“Love’s more intimate than just intimacy. Friendship and companionship grow out of it, over the years. Nothing could grow out of what we did together, Anwar.”

“You were right, it does overturn everything.” He paused, and added, “How did they do it to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’d rather talk about that than what you just said. And yes,it does matter. It’s the last thing. I need to tell Rafiq. They must have other Marek identities stored somewhere.”

“Wouldn’t matter. They’d all seep...”

“I still need to know. Are they organic or electronic?” “Both. They converted his brain patterns to algorithms, billions of them, stored as electronic programs. Then they converted them again to something organic, like a virus.”

“Why?”

“To insert them into a living brain that had been wiped of its last identity and needed billions more protocols to reorder itself. It spread and grew, like they intended. Lots of empty space to spread and grow into. But they didn’t know it would seep.”

“Seep?”

“Souls aren’t the same as software, and bodies aren’t the same as hardware. You can’t just transcribe or transplant them like computer components. They interact. They seep into each other. One becomes stronger, and it isn’t the one you’d think.”

“So Marek isn’t gone. They’ve got his identity encoded in some electronic or bionic storage device somewhere.”

“Yes. And if they put it in someone else, the same thing will happen. That’s the thing about taking an identity. You put it in another body, and the other body eventually shapes it like a glass shapes the water inside it. It can look quite beautiful...Of course, that didn’t suit them. I was supposed to be their creature, run the Church for their ends.”

“Why did they want Marek?”

“The Church was their counter to religious fundamentalism. Marek was political and secular. And an organisational genius. He thought strategically and played long. All points of similarity to Rafiq, and Rafiq would be their next target.”

She paused. “I still have the name I had before, but I don’t remember what it felt like to be me before. I made the Church do what I wanted, not what they wanted. When they looked into my eyes and realized Marek wasn’t in control anymore, they decided to kill me.”

“But you went back.”

“Do you want to stop saying that, and think of something better?”

“All right. How about this? How much of you is still Marek?”

“The dying part.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Why, you want to complain that all this time you’ve been fucking a woman who’s also partly a forty-two-year-old man?”

“Not fucking. That was just the means. Loving was the end.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “the end. Do you know what it’s like, having a dying conjoined identity in your mind? Dying but not quite dead? All these years, I couldn’t quite kill it, but I kept it in a state of dying.”

“I can’t leave it unfinished. I can’t, Olivia.”

He wasn’t an Othello person, he was a Lear and Hamlet person. Lear and Hamlet ripped the soul out of him, Othello just made him uncomfortable. That scene where Othello towered over Desdemona before killing her and chanted, ridiculously, ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul...’ as if chanting something monstrously wrong would somehow make it right. That was what he was doing now. Different words, but still just as wrong, and still just as inevitable. He had to do it. His feelings screamed its wrongness, but everything else inside him, everything he was, ridiculously chanted its rightness.

Time. He towered over her in cold perfection. Looked directly into her eyes. “I love you,” he said, and executed a perfect Verb. He turned away before she fell, in two separate impacts, and before her blood started pumping.

Outside the door of his suite he encountered the ginger cat. Its eyes were amber and wide, and for once it didn’t seem able to meow Fuck You. He had never been in combat with a cat before, but he found a pressure point easily enough, just behind its ear. It would be out for at least three hours. He went back to the suite, got a soft leather holdall from his wardrobe, put the cat inside, and took it with him. He didn’t know why he did it. From now on, he didn’t think he’d know why he did anything.