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The night is a quiet one, the cold falling heavy like a blanket with the onset of dusk, and Marc can see it in the occasional shudder of Layla’s shoulders beside him, the stiffness to his fingers where they’re wrapped around the steering wheel.
Layla’s smiling nonetheless, and it’s irresistible, every few seconds Marc finds his eyes darting away from the road just to catch a glimpse of her quiet contentment. She has no such qualms, staring openly at the side of his face, resting her head against the window.
The closing lull of a radio station song has Marc’s fingers tapping against the wheel, Layla’s head bobbing, her lips tracing the words out silently, unwilling to break their carefully crafted silence.
It’s a good night; the job had gone well– or, Marc can hear Layla protesting in the back of his mind, not well. They’d fallen into some trouble, and there’d been a scrabble, a scrappy fight that ended with the three men knocked out in the sand three miles back. But it was the adrenalin that Marc loved. The caress of the suit against his skin. The protection it offered, to an otherwise vicious world. It was running back to the car on Layla’s heels, watching her throw her head back with relieved laughter when he started the engine, and then pulling away into the night, towards Cairo, together.
“You look happy,” Layla tells him. Before Layla, Marc had never known someone to address him with such shameless affection in their tone, someone must have done so before her – his Mom and his Dad presumably – but he doesn’t remember it. If he does, he prefers to pretend he doesn’t.
“Aren’t I always, with you?”
“Are you?”
“I am,” he turns again, steals a longer glance at his wife this time, drinks in the soft lines that crinkle her eyes. In the moonlight, Marc can see the occasional dusting of sand across her shoulder, her cheekbone from the fight earlier. If he didn’t have both hands on the wheel, he might reach over and brush it away.
“You look happy,” he echoes, with a quirk of his mouth.
“Hmm, excluding the near-death experiences, I’m always happy, with you,” she offers back to him, cheeks pink with amusement.
“Oh,” Marc says. He frowns at her, pinching his lips tight together to stop the over-eager smile from slipping out. “You call that a near-death experience?”
“Well, for me, certainly. Some of us don’t have gods to watch over us, to keep us bundled up in cotton wool.”
“Cotton wool?!”
“Oh, relax, Marc, it’s just a saying,” she laughs. Rolls her eyes with that familiar grin. "You know I think it's hot."
“A saying, she says,” he mutters, ignoring her second comment and turning his eyes back to the road reluctantly. “I’m putting it down to jealousy.”
There’s a beat of silence. And then another. Marc wonders if he’s truly hit a nerve and has an apology on his lips before he’s even turned to glance at Layla. It crumbles away at the sight of her expression.
“Layla?”
She leans forwards, fiddling with the volume notch on the radio until a man’s voice rises from a faint, background mumble to fill the entire car.
“--reports of a number of unexplainable accidents on the roads just coming in,” the speaker’s saying in arabic. “There’s a, well there’s a–” the line crackles slightly, there’s a muffled thump, somewhere distant “--there seems to be a lot of confusion… I’m not– not too sure what’s going on right now–” the line crackles again, and the sound sets Marc’s teeth on edge, raises every hair on the back of his neck.
Khonshu?
The god doesn’t reply.
The radio cuts out abruptly and the car is thrown into an awful silence.
“Something’s happening,” Marc says uselessly, bringing the car to a stop in the middle of the empty road. It’s only then that he turns to his wife, who’s got the window wound down and her head halfway out of it, squinting at the cityline in the distance.
“Layla.”
She turns to look at him, face pale and desaturated, ghost-like, as if she’s not really there. She opens the car door and stumbles out, and Marc is close behind her, opening his own, watching as she moves towards him across the dusty road, with her hands held out before her. They’re shaking, tiny earthquakes under her skin.
“Layla, what’s–”
“Marc,” she whispers, as if she hadn’t properly heard his words. The moonlight has captured her in a sharp silhouette, head tilted down, hands held out before her as if she doesn’t recognise her own limbs.
And that’s when Marc sees it.
Ashes, dust, sand, whatever it might be, rises from her fingertips, leaving nothing in its wake.
Panic leaps in his chest and he launches forwards, taking Layla by her shoulders, her firm, steady, real shoulders.
“I don’t know what’s going on, I can’t– I can’t stop it,” she says. Terror seeps into her voice, unfamiliar and out of place, but bewilderment, too. She has found something that she cannot wrap her head around, that she cannot fix or fight off.
Marc, if anything, holds twice as much of Layla’s helplessness.
The dust steals Layla’s body away from him, too slow, slow enough that Marc should have a solution, should have a way to save her. Yet too fast. She’s gone in mere seconds. Marc hasn’t even caught his breath and his fingers are closing around nothing, falling forwards with the sudden absence of her shoulders beneath his hands. He’d been leaning most of his weight atop them.
The remnants collect between his palms like old dirt or ancient dust or– something dead and decaying. It can’t be Layla, not when she was the very embodiment of life itself; warm summer nights and shameless laughter and dancing at their wedding, dynamic and graceful all at once beneath his palms.
The cold hand of panic clamps down on Marc’s mind.
“Layla!” he roars, and his voice is shredded with pain. His hands are empty, they’re empty– there’s nothing there, even the dust crumbles under his touch.
“Layla! Layla!” He yells, again and again, until the word feels foreign on his tongue and his throat is raw and his words are indecipherable between one gasping sob and the next. The grief isn’t even the worst of it– no, that’s almost undetectable beneath the clamouring noise of panic and utter confusion.
It didn’t make sense.
Where was she? What had happened? Had he done something wrong? Was it his fault?
Was it his fault?
“Layla!” Marc sobs. But there’s no one to reply, no answer given in return. There’s only his shaking hands closing around empty air and coarse dust. He is a mourner, with nothing to show for it but negative space and his own howling sorrow.
His vision flickers. Darkness. Momentary relief. And then he’s brought back with full force, hyper-aware of the gasping noise of his own breathing, the guilt in his gut, rotting like a dead limb.
“Layla!” he howls it at the sky. At the moon. At anyone that might listen.
Even Khonshu, even a God, has fallen silent in this sudden arrival of decay.
“Fuck,” Marc gasps. He’s struggling for breath. His chest is tight. His eyes travel the horizon, tracing the city in the distance. Layla isn’t there, though, she is really, truly, properly gone. He’s certain of her absence just as he is certain of Steven’s perpetual presence.
In his sorrow, through the fog of delusion and panic, two figures conjure themselves into existence on a far-off sand dune, away from the road. They dance together beneath the moonlight, and her movements are sharp and alluring, whilst his are violent and beautiful. His hands are not painted red. Her heart is not fragmented. They are whole.
And they are happy.
The moonlight doesn’t extend to Marc’s own figure, hunched as it is in the shadow of the car. He sits in darkness on the side of the road, clutching uselessly at empty space.
Layla’s gone. He is still here. These are the only two constants that Marc can comprehend as his vision flickers once more and time slips like sand through his grasp.
+
Five years.
Sixty months.
Forty thousand hours.
A lifetime. Marc is dragged through it with heavy reluctance. He’s not sure if he wants to see the other side of it, not without Layla, not trapped in this lonely, lonely existence. The world has turned dark in her absence – darker – it takes on an awful grey hue, its days folding together in a monotonous continuation, even sunny days heap their sorrow on his shoulders. More often than not, Marc wonders if he will survive this lifetime.
Moments like this are when Steven slips in to take over. It’s no surprise then, that for all of those forty thousand hours, Steven spends most of the time fronting. Marc finds him an apartment, fakes some documents to make it look like their mom’s, and pushes Steven into his own life, taking cover in the absence of his own. Steven gets a job. Falls in love with London, a little. Develops a daily routine.
Marc wonders if five years ago he might have been happy for Steven.
Happiness is an indistinct memory these days. He has no way of knowing if he’s misremembering Layla’s smile, or how she’d looked in her wedding dress, or that feeling of unfamiliar, soaring elation when she’d made him laugh over the simplest of things. Forgotten. Turned to dust.
He ruminates on a lot of things during this time. He blames Khonshu, for one. The god tends to laugh in his face when he does. But surely without Khonshu’s protection Marc would have gone, too? Surely the universe would have stolen his life over someone as good as Layla? He deserved worse punishment, so in a way, perhaps, he deserved this.
Primarily, he recognises just how awfully he’d treated Layla– not- he’d been good to her, of course he had, he’d loved her with every inch of his being. But it was never enough when he’d loved her from behind thick, iron bars that she could never break through. He’d hidden everything behind them. Brothers and mothers and suffering and drowning, tears and blood and grief that he thinks would batter both him and Layla into the ground if he ever had the courage to release it in its full fury. She’d never even caught a glimpse.
A lot of the time, he finds himself wondering what he would do differently if she ever came back.
There’s a familiar, vindictive voice in the back of his head that tells him there would be no difference. It was either that, or Marc would flee like a coward.
The voice is wrong.
There is no universe where Marc could be reunited with Layla and somehow find it within himself to run in the opposite direction.
+
It happens on a random Thursday.
Marc’s thrust into the front seat, disorientated, and his hand is wrapped around the door handle to Steven’s building and people are running down the street and somebody’s yelling something and the chaos and confusion feels so awfully familiar. It feels like a whole lifetime ago.
Only– there’s unrecognisable euphoria in the woman’s voice, she’s yelling– what’s she yelling? Marc can’t make it out between her tears. Tears of happiness. Did those still exist?
The door that he’d been clinging to in bewilderment flies open and a group of Steven’s neighbours come pouring out. Marc staggers sideways and one of them grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him like they’re brothers.
“They’re back,” he says, gasps it like he doesn’t believe the words leaving his mouth. “All of them. Every single one. They came back.”
Marc stares at him.
Who’s back? He wants to ask. There’s no one left that he cares to see return.
Back from where? He wonders. A distant country?
Fifty percent of the population, Khonshu declares. Somehow even he seems to express a degree of disbelief. They’ve returned. Every last one.
It takes him a long, endless moment before Khonshu’s words fall into place. They are battering knocks on a door that Marc had closed indefinitely.
And then he’s turning his back on a street teeming with reunions between loved ones, he’s careening up the stairs, wild adrenalin fueling his thundering heart and his frantic movements. He crashes through Steven’s door and scrambles for his hidden phone as if it’s his last chance at survival, seconds from slipping from his grip.
His fingers trip and stumble over numbers he’d never forgotten, not in an entire lifetime.
“Layla,” he gasps, before the call’s even connected, “Layla, Layla, Layla, Layla.”
His legs tremble beneath the sudden, crushing weight of his entire body, the guilt, and the grief, and the scepticism, and the crippling yearning. The long-forgotten love that had never truly left.
“Marc? God, please tell me that’s you, what the hell is going on…”
Her voice – sharp and soft all at once, lilting with her accent – is a light at the end of an endlessly dark night, desperate rays of sunlight dragging themselves into dawn. Marc crumples to the floor, phone clutched to his chest as if he might feel her touch through the metal, and he sobs. The darkness falls back. A couple dancing in the moonlight become visible once more, the sun rises at their backs.
Happy tears, he thinks; they still exist.
+
Two days later, Marc is swept along a sea of people, thrown through the crowd towards his final destination, the only one he’d ever been running towards (crawling towards, sometimes, limping and hobbling towards, other times, but always moving in the same direction).
The airport is overpopulated and teeming. Everywhere he might turn there are embraces and tears and the touch of palms. He doesn’t turn. His gaze is steadfast and focused.
There is a woman by the window that Marc would recognise anywhere. A swarm of blurred faces and she is clear, she is distinct, he can make out every feature like he’d never forgotten. But he had, hadn’t he? An entire lifetime had taken an eraser to Layla’s face, finger-print smudges had distorted her features in his mental images of her.
Now, though– now, it floods back in.
“Layla,” Marc whispers. There’s an entire crowd between them, but for once – finally – she’s within reach.
She cuts a sharp silhouette against the Egyptian sunrise that paints the window golden. Five years previously, she’d cut the same silhouette through the night sky, silhouetted then by the moonlight, fragile and impermanent. This time, though, she stays whole. Not a speck of dust lifts from her shoulders, her silhouette is unbroken.
“Layla!” he shouts. He’s closer now, pushing stoically through the crowd of people, and he’s unafraid, all around him people are crying out to each other, beckoning loved ones into their embrace. His shout is easily the loudest of them all. “Layla!”
It doesn’t catch her attention, and Marc can’t help but wonder briefly if she is real. Or perhaps he is still standing alone among the sand dunes, under the full moon, staring at a mirage of the one thing left that he wants from this world.
He closes the distance, he reaches out and–
“Marc? Marc, oh god!”
Not a mirage. Not dust. He falls heavy into arms of weathered stone, and they catch him.
Marc hadn’t forgotten this, not a single moment of this, not the way Layla’s fingers find their natural place at the nape of his neck, tangling in the small curls there, not the sharp line of her shoulders pressing into his collarbone as if they are made from the same skeleton, and not the heavy smell of home, the one that had faded from her belongings just weeks into his torment. He’s adamant that he couldn’t have forgotten this, because now that he’s here, now that her arms are anchoring him in one place, it becomes the only thing he’s ever known.
“Five years, they’re saying,” she’s gasping into his shoulder, and she sounds equal parts furious and terrified. Layla, darling, he might say if he weren’t so dazed, you can’t fight an inexplicable universal event that happened five years ago. There’s no one left to fight. He’s certain that she’d argue otherwise. He’s certain that he’d fight it with her, either way.
“Five years,” she repeats. The words fall from her mouth as foreign ones, incomprehensible, impossible. “Five years. Is it true? It can’t be true. It isn’t. Tell me it isn’t, Marc.”
Marc has no solace to offer her, no excuse, no fabricated story about what really happened. He doesn’t even have the words to disagree with her demand.
The first tears bleed through Layla’s shirt where it presses against his wet cheek. Maybe that is answer enough.
“Five years,” she says again, and her voice goes funny, it wobbles uncharacteristically and stumbles over a panicked intake of breath. And then she’s struggling backwards all of a sudden, practically wrestling Marc out of her arms only to pull him upright to meet her eyes, one soft palm cradling each cheek, holding him steady for her to inspect.
Her eyes are gentle, though, as they pull him apart. They may linger on the dark shadows pressed beneath his eyes, or the unshaven stubble that breaches his jaw, but they stay longer on the disbelieving quirk of his mouth, the light in his eyes, the fire, brought back from embers that had long since gone cold.
“You weren’t alone, were you?” she says, only her voice doesn’t reach upwards in question. She won’t let it be false. She knows it is. “Not for five years.”
Marc turns his face into her palm, ashamed. No, he could say, but he won’t, not ever. No, I wasn’t alone. I had Steven. Even if he didn’t know it.
“I was alone,” he confesses, voice gravelly with the words. Layla shakes her head, and the line of her lips tightens – a sure sign that she’s wrestling with some unwanted emotion.
Her answer doesn’t consist of words, it’s made up of the next moments that follow. It is her arms around his neck and her lips on his wet cheek, it’s her fingers slotting themselves between his and their wedding bands pressing together as they walk, together, away from the airport. It’s her head in the crook of his neck in the taxi to the hotel, it’s her willingness to let him map her body out with unfamiliar hands even as her own had never forgotten his. She is an unexplored landscape for his hands to rediscover, dips and crevices and curves and sharp lines and blemishes and freckles unspool his memory like string.
It is two bodies, melded together, daylight bathing their skin in warmth, in a tiny hotel room on the outskirts of Cairo.
‘Not anymore’ doesn’t need saying.