Upon hearing my name, tears came to my eyes.
“Today is the day you have chosen to formally and legally declare your commitment to each other. Marriage is among the most serious of all decisions. You are willingly entering into an intimate pact of trust and love.”
Since we had decided against a ceremony, I hadn’t expected so many words. The words moved inside me and I started to sob. Cyrus squeezed my hand.
“As equal partners, you will share the privileges, sacrifices, and responsibilities that come with the union. As your relationship continues to grow, you will face the challenge of being true to each other while remaining true to your individual selves.
“Asha, do you take Cyrus to be your lawful wedded spouse?”
“I do,” I said.
“And Cyrus, do you take Asha to be your lawful wedded spouse?”
“I do,” he said. Julian changed positions and pointed his phone at me. Then the clerk said—was that a crack in her voice? yes, with a crack in her voice—“By the power vested in me as a justice of the peace, and most important of all, by the power of your own love, I now pronounce you legally married.” And we kissed, a short, melting kiss mixed with the salt of our tears, the particular flavor of which I knew I would remember forever.
And so it was, without ritual, in the most ordinary of ways, that we were married. I moved into Jules’s house and put my clothes into Cyrus’s closet. I put my electric toothbrush in the bathroom and plugged in my phone charger, and that was it. I was ready to start a life with Cyrus, who was everything he had been all those years ago when I first met him: mostly human, a little bit cartoon, a tiny bit ghost.
Two
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Once the semester started, I was in class all day and at the lab late into the evening. Cyrus packed lunches for me in a metal bento box, and we walked together up to the T. At the lab, I thought about telling a few people, but then I didn’t. Would being married take away from my persona as a futurist soothsayer? Definitely. And Dr. Stein would not approve. I kept my head down and acted like nothing had happened.
But everything was different. I hadn’t changed my name, but sometimes I woke up in the morning and heard myself saying, “Good morning, Mrs. Jones.” Or when I was putting our clothes in the dryer, I heard, “Doing laundry for your husband, Mrs. Jones?” Mrs. Jones kept me up at night. She was my shadow self, a laundry-doing, husband-pleasing ordinary person who wanted nothing more than to be an excellent wife. I had vivid fantasies about murdering Mrs. Jones and burying her in the tangle of weeds that passed for Julian’s garden.
Despite my fear of becoming Mrs. Jones, my work changed for the better. Being with Cyrus made me feel powerful, as if I had somehow conjured him out of my dreams. All the ambitions I had around the Empathy Module suddenly felt within my reach, because if the two of us, after all these years, could find each other again, then surely I was capable of taking some of that magic and putting it into my human replica. I plunged into my work with new ambition, and though Dr. Stein continued to ignore me, it mattered less. I hummed through my days, and when I was finished, I went home to Julian’s.
Julian’s house was grand, but as the days grew colder, I discovered it had a major flaw: it was freezing. The windows were too big and the wood was all warped, so even if we stuffed towels under the doors, it was still drafty. I tried to use the toilet in the lab as much as possible, because peeing in that house was like attempting an arctic expedition.
Aside from this small inconvenience, Jules was an excellent host, in that he treated the house as if he, too, were a temporary inhabitant. He didn’t care about it, so it really didn’t matter who else lived there. He was an easy housemate—if quick to get irritated, even quicker to forget what was bothering him. A parade of people came through: friends, lovers, loud laughing guys from his lacrosse team, distant cousins who also hated being Cabots. Jules was in an a cappella group called Pitch Slapped, and they regularly rehearsed and got high in the living room, their songs floating up the stairs and getting stuck in our heads.
One day I was in the library, a room on the northern side of the house that never got any sun, when Jules came in. I wasn’t sure what he did all day—he didn’t seem to have a job, and Cyrus had told me he was touchy about being asked what his plans were. After college, he’d started a website called Sellyourshit.com, which seemed for a while like it might compete with eBay, but eventually it crashed, taking some of his father’s money with it. After that his parents gave him the house and a small allowance, which was their way of cutting him off. Cyrus had met Jules’s parents a few times, been to their house in the Hamptons and in Savannah, Georgia, where they spent the winter. It’s not that they weren’t nice to Jules, just that they had no expectations of him. “They smile in this creepy way,” Cyrus said, “and nod as if Jules is slightly, you know, not quite there and they have to humor him. It drives him crazy.”