But we grew apart.
* * *
In the end, the monster’s three hearts yearned for different things. I, Melora, the youngest, carry on our father’s legacy. Most of the music you hear passes through my hands, and I’ve absorbed innumerable companies along the way, including Bennie Salazar’s, although I call him my partner out of respect.
Lana broke away in 2025, the year after our mother did. She, too, has joined the eluders—that invisible army of data defiers. The two of them are likely together, much as it hurts me to think of this.
Winning has its price, like everything else.
I’ve wondered endlessly—obsessively—when and how Lana’s perspective began to diverge from mine after so much shared history. If we’d uploaded our memories to the Collective Consciousness, I could pinpoint the moment exactly. But we both knew better than that.
Our father’s office belongs to me. His trophies, and mine, line the walls, and sunlight splinters on the ocean outside my windows. As I stare at it, I sometimes imagine eluding myself: selling off Melora Kline or consigning her to a proxy （now a booming and specialized business） and starting over as someone else. I wouldn’t go far. In fact, my favorite fantasy involves returning to Venice Beach on a Sunday, something I haven’t done in many years. I imagine threading my way among Rollerbladers and dancers and grifters and stoned teens, past acres of sunbathers shielding their eyes to study their screens while invisible entities study them in return. I wend my way to a nondescript bench where two women are already seated, familiar strangers, and sit down beside them at last.
Where have you been? I imagine asking as I fold them into my arms.
Right here, they say. Waiting for you.
What the Forest Remembers
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a forest. It’s gone now （burned）， and the four men walking in it are gone, too, which is what makes it far away. Neither it nor they exist.
But in June 1965, the redwoods have a velvety primeval look that brings to mind leprechauns or djinn or faeries. Three of the four men have never been in these ancient woods, and to them the forest looks otherworldly, so removed is it from their everyday vistas of wives and children and offices. The oldest, Lou Kline, is only thirty-one, but all were born in the 1930s and raised without antibiotics, their military service completed before they went to college. Men of their generation got started on adulthood right away.
So: four men moving among trees whose musculature resembles the thighs of giants. When the men throw back their heads to search the sunlight for the trees’ pointed tips, they grow dizzy. That’s partly because they’ve just smoked marijuana; not a common practice in 1965, especially among squares, as anyone would agree these four are. Or three of them. There is a leader—there is usually a leader when men leave their established perimeters—and today it is Quinn Davies, a tanned, open-faced man accoutered with artifacts of a Native American ancestry he wishes he possessed. Normally, Quinn would wear a blazer, like the rest of them, but today he’s donned what strikes his pals as a costume: a purple velvet coat and heavy moccasins that prove far better suited to navigating this soft undergrowth than the oxfords they’re sliding around in. Only Lou manages to keep pace with Quinn, despite the fawnlike skittering this feat requires of him. Lou would rather look spasmodic than risk falling behind.
These men all moved to California recently, driven by a lust for space that can’t be satisfied by old cities with their tinge of Europe and horse carts and history. There is an ungoverned feel to California’s mountains and deserts and reckless coast. Quinn Davies, the only bachelor in the group, is homosexual, and was on the lookout early for a graceful exit from Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his family has lived for generations. After the navy, he followed the Beats to San Francisco, but now that he’s here, they’ve proved maddeningly elusive. Still, there are always sailors who share Quinn’s view that a man can be a multitude of ways, depending on circumstances. He has a flickering hope about one of the other three: Ben Hobart, from Minnesota, married to his high school sweetheart, a father of three. But it’s too soon to tell.