I told him I’d been to a lecture on lifespan.
“I’m down with extending lifespan.”
“You want to live forever?”
“Maybe not forever,” he said, “but I may not be done by the time I’m a hundred.”
This was typical, I came to understand, from Cyrus. That he never wanted things to end. “You’re not afraid of being old?”
“Under the right circumstances, no.”
“How old are your parents?” I asked. “Lifespan is mostly genetic.”
“I never knew my father,” he replied. “And my mother died after eleventh grade.”
All those years ago, I’d been obsessed with him and never known anything about him, not even the very basic facts. “That’s why you did those crazy projects?”
“We did them together—she gave me ideas from her hospital bed. Right down to the last days.”
We talked about the intervening years. After his mother died, he had gone to live with an aunt. He didn’t finish high school. He backpacked around Mexico, and then he helped to organize a copper miners’ union in Chile, and after that he had taught English in Ecuador before returning to America. He met Julian, his best friend, while hiking the Presidential mountain range in New Hampshire （they had met on Madison and started talking on Jefferson, and by the time they had done the Washington traverse, they were inseparable）。 Days before I’d moved to Cambridge, Jules had convinced Cyrus to move into his house, just streets away from my dorm. By now I was over being shy; I decided it would be best to just tell him.
“This is a strange and wonderful coincidence,” I said, smiling. “That the you I was so smitten with all those years ago is the same you who moved around the corner from me at the very moment when I am about to complete my metamorphosis.”
“You were smitten with me?”
“Oh, don’t act like you didn’t know. I could’ve written it on my forehead with a Sharpie and it would’ve been less obvious.”
He laughed. Then he said, “Into what have you metamorphosed?”
“That’s for you to figure out,” I said.
“Well then, that is a wonderful coincidence.”
“You’re really Cyrus Jones,” I said, shaking my head.
“You’re really Asha Ray,” he replied.
The metamorphosis was this: I was no longer the awkward new kid at school with the smelly lunchbox. I had taken the heaviness of my childhood—the story of my parents and their exile and those years above the pharmacy and all the striving I had to swallow—and I had turned it into fire-breathing. I was clever and awesome and, despite my less than stellar performance in Dr. Stein’s lab, beginning to understand my powers. This is the me that Cyrus met for the second time. In his mind, the person sitting in front of him and the person who gazed adoringly at the back of his head for nine months were one and the same, and for me, the boy with the long wavy hair who made magic out of homework and the man sitting in front of me who made magic out of a funeral were also one and the same person, and suddenly every novel Mrs. Butterfield had me read made perfect sense, because all the great love stories are about two people bringing the story of their yesterdays and the story of their todays into one epic sewn-together poem, and that is what they mean when they say lightning strikes. It’s not when it strikes the first time, it’s when it strikes twice, which hardly ever happens, except, I think, when you fall in love.
* * *
Cyrus didn’t seem to mind that I sometimes went on and on about brain modeling. In fact, it seemed like he had been waiting to talk at length and in detail about various things himself, and that for the first time, he had the right audience. Me. When I wondered out loud if the Empathy Module was ahead of its time, he told me that in the third century, an engineer called Ma Jun invented an entire mechanical puppet theater powered by a waterwheel for the emperor Cao Rui. What happed to Ma Jun? Nothing. Just that there were no water-powered mechanical puppet theaters for at least three hundred years after that.
We were together all the time. We talked and talked. We talked while walking the baking streets of Cambridge. We talked while eating. We read the same book, a Korean novel about a woman whose family freaks out when she stops eating meat, and then we talked about meat, and about Korea, and about our families. Cyrus had none, so I did most of the talking that afternoon, telling him how my parents existed in a halfway world between Long Island and Bangladesh, too comfortable to go home, never comfortable enough to stop longing for it.