Renacimiento

The sky in Santiago is a steely grey, threatening rain, when Alejo steps off the plane. He shivers, though it isn’t cold, not compared to Antarctica. It has been a long time since he was last here in winter.

His family have come to collect him from the airport. He’d never normally ask — but, while Alejo knows the way like the back of his hand, he does not. He’d emerged in Punta Arenas, and Alejo had nearly missed his connection. He refuses to wander lost for hours in the city he knows so well and loves so much.

So Alejo’s homecoming is quiet and grey, whispered and wary. His family greet him guardedly, uncertainly — and though he does understand it’s strange, it feels like another icicle-spike to the heart. First Andrei, now this.

All he wants is to leave it behind.

But first: he sends a bottle of pisco nearly nine thousand miles around the world, to Moscow, a note attached. Thank you for everything — I would not have made it this far without you. This is “Chilean vodka”; I thought you might enjoy it. He owes Andrei his life. This is the very least he can do.

He walks, a lot. Through the places he’s known for years, reminding himself of the jigsaw-forms they cut against the sky. There are murals everywhere, pinks and purples and yellows and greens and oranges and blues standing out sharp and cheerful in the winter sun. It is a kind of colour that, on APERIS, only Gwyn’s shirts had even come close to: the chaotic, relentless, defiant brightness of home. He’s missed it.

He wanders unfamiliar places, too, shaking Cartwright off in strange alleyways, unknown barrios, and once, notably, in front of Santiago’s SPRHD office, as Cartwright’s feet learn the rhythm of the ground. He isn’t fighting him as much, any more. There’s no need. They get on no better than before — but here in Santiago, there isn’t much damage Cartwright can do.

(Or so Alejo hopes. He remembers Evelyn, wheedling trust even as she slipped a knife into his soul, and wonders what passed between her and Cartwright then. What he might be working on.)

And he talks to people. Friends, family. A therapist. Gwyn as well: they agree to stay in touch and see what happens. They’ll forget, of course. Maybe they, as themselves, will not get on quite so well as they did with Antarctic blizzards clouding their minds. But they’ll try.

None of them — bar Gwyn — really understand. That said, he doesn’t expect them to. They have not experienced what he has, and as the memories get hazier, they get harder to explain. In Santiago, APERIS is Alejo’s and Alejo’s alone — and even he is losing it. So maybe, just maybe, Cartwright was right about the value of writing. Alejo decides to record everything he remembers, before he forgets. Futile though the attempt might be, he does not want to lose something that has cut him this deeply. Not again.

Where the therapist does help is with Cartwright. She’s met people like him before, although none quite… like him. She’s understanding. She doesn’t judge. And she gives Alejo an idea.

He loves Santiago’s murals. To him, they have healed the city from the grey of dictatorship, piece by piece, artwork by artwork.

Why shouldn’t they help his healing, too?

Alejo is not an artist. But the murals mean everything to him — and this is something to do. Refusing to return to SPRHD, too unwell to apply for something new, he has spent the past few months drifting. He needs focus.

It takes shape over the spring. Alejo increasingly has to turn to his notes to remember what he’d wanted to include, and it takes redesign after redesign to look even a little pleasant — but, slowly but surely, it comes together, Antarctica in miniature on the side of his family home. Snow glitters blue under a purple-black sky, the shape of the station picked out in silver constellation-lines underneath. And around it all are images, snapshots of an unarchived past now consigned to the snow: a scrap of ragged brown cloth, a silver shovel, a computer screen blinking blue in a yellow-lit, exhausting room. Penguins. Seals. Hybrids of the two, which he is forced to recreate from notes alone.

It does not go well.

The mess, he decides, will simply have to be part of the charm.

By the time he is finishing, Christmas is coming, and with it the roasting, roaring heat that Alejo loves so much. The memories have faded almost entirely now, Cartwright only an occasional annoyance (although Alejo is still not alone in his mind: Cartwright has been replaced. It is a strange, new form of existence, which takes some getting used to — but he will learn.)

(Confidence.

That’s a new feeling.

He’s glad to see it again.)

He is beginning to think he might stand a chance of truly leaving the past behind.

And then, on New Year’s Day, he retraces his steps to the airport — alone, and considerably more excited than he has been on previous early-January airport trips. Because this is not for work, this time: he’s here to meet a friend. It is a scorching day, clouds scudding across a bright blue sky: the kind of day designed specifically to luxuriate in, to let you stretch out your hands and be enveloped in a soft wave of warmth.

It is perfect.

He shows Gwyn not the city, but his city: a tour from mural to mural, through alleys and parks. It is good to talk, as themselves, without danger. To get to know each other properly. They decide to make it a tradition.

And when he leaves, Alejo is left feeling hopeful. Things still aren’t perfect. He still struggles, gets confused and lost, forgets things he needs to remember, remembers things he wants to forget. But he is certain, now, that however long it takes, things will be ok.

Written by Eloise P.