Chapter Two

I should tell you about the someone. I have said I would not, and I will not, not entirely, but some context is required if you are to understand what happened next. The context is this: the someone and I had been together for seven years. Seven years is long enough to learn another person's rhythms, to know when they are lying, to anticipate what they will say before they say it. Seven years is long enough to develop a private language, a shared history, a set of references that no one else would understand.

Seven years is also long enough to become complacent, to take for granted that the person you love will always be there, to stop paying attention to the small signs that indicate something is wrong. I do not know if I could have prevented the loss. I have played the final weeks over and over in my mind, looking for the moments where I might have intervened, where a different word or action might have changed the outcome, and I have found nothing, or I have found everything, depending on how you count.

The loss was sudden but not unexpected. This is a contradiction, but it is also the truth. The loss was the kind of loss you see coming from a long way off, the kind you watch approaching like weather on the horizon, and yet when it arrives it still knocks you flat, still takes your breath, still makes you think: I knew this was coming and yet I did not know, not really, not in the part of me that believed things would always continue as they were.

I am being vague. I am sorry. I am as specific as I can bear to be.

The point is that I knew the someone intimately. I knew the way they moved through space, the cadence of their speech, the particular way they laughed at jokes that surprised them. I knew what they looked like sleeping, and waking, and angry, and afraid. I had seven years of data, seven years of observation, and when I decided to build the thing that would become the creature—I will call it the creature now, because that is what it was, a creature, a made thing, neither fully human nor fully other—when I decided to build it, I drew on all of that knowledge.

This is why the table was empty. This is why the creature knew how to leave. I had given it the someone's instincts, their reflexes, their fundamental orientations toward the world. I had given it the someone's tendency to disappear when frightened, to seek solitude when overwhelmed, to find high ground and wait.

And so I knew, standing in the empty basement, where the creature had likely gone. I knew because I knew the someone, and the creature was the someone, or was meant to be, or was something that held the shape of the someone while being something entirely else. I knew the creature had gone to Griffith Park.

Griffith Park is four thousand acres of chaparral and oak woodland in the eastern Santa Monica Mountains. It is the place where the someone used to go when things became too much, when the noise of the city and the demands of work and the fact of being a person in the world pressed in too tightly. The someone would drive up to the observatory, or hike to the summit of Mount Hollywood, and sit there for hours, looking out at the basin, at the towers of downtown and the sprawl of the Valley and the thin bright line of the ocean in the distance.

"I need to see the whole thing," the someone used to say. "I need to get far enough away to see the shape of it."

I got in my car and drove to Griffith Park. It was afternoon by then. The Santa Ana winds had died down but the air was still dry, still charged with that particular energy that precedes fire. The sky was the color of a bruise—yellow at the horizon, purple higher up—and I could smell smoke from somewhere, maybe Malibu, maybe Ventura, somewhere the hills were burning as they always burn in November.

I parked at the observatory and began to walk. I did not know what I would do when I found the creature. I did not have a plan. I had only the knowledge that I had made this thing and that the thing was out in the world and that whatever happened next was my responsibility.

A word about responsibility. I have been thinking about this word for eleven months now, turning it over in my mind the way you turn over a stone, examining it from every angle. What does it mean to be responsible for something you have created? Is a parent responsible for the actions of their child? Is a scientist responsible for the applications of their research? Is a god responsible for the suffering of the world?

These are not rhetorical questions. I am genuinely asking. I made a thing and the thing went out into the world and did things—things I will tell you about, things that still wake me at night—and I need to know whether those things are my fault. I need to know whether I am guilty of the creature's crimes as well as my own.

The trail from the observatory to the summit of Mount Hollywood is about three miles. It winds through chaparral and coastal sage scrub, past stands of oak and sycamore, up a series of switchbacks to a peak that offers a 360-degree view of the Los Angeles basin. On a clear day you can see Catalina Island. On a day like that day—smoky, hazy, the light diffused through particulate matter—you could barely see downtown.

I walked the trail looking for signs of the creature. I did not know what signs I was looking for. Footprints, maybe. Broken branches. Some indication that something had passed this way recently, something larger than a coyote, something that moved like a person but might not be a person.

I found nothing. The trail was empty, the hillsides quiet, the chaparral undisturbed. I passed a few other hikers—a couple with a dog, a man running in expensive shoes—and none of them looked at me strangely, none of them seemed to have seen anything unusual. I began to wonder if I had been wrong, if the creature had not come here after all, if the data I had accumulated over seven years was not as predictive as I had believed.

And then I reached the summit, and I saw.

The creature was sitting on a rock at the edge of the viewpoint, looking out at the city. From behind, in the smoke-filtered light, it looked exactly like the someone. The same posture, the same angle of the head, the same way of holding the shoulders that I remembered from a thousand afternoons like this one. My heart seized. My breath stopped. For a long moment I forgot everything—forgot the lab, forgot the loss, forgot the eleven months of circling—and I thought: you came back, you came back, you came back.

And then the creature turned around.

I will try to describe what I saw. I owe you that much, and I owe the creature that much, to describe it accurately and without prejudice, to see it as it was rather than as I had hoped it would be or feared it might be.

The creature had the someone's face. This was by design, was the result of months of painstaking work, of cellular scaffolding and tissue cultivation and techniques I had invented myself. The creature had the someone's eyes—brown, deep-set, with that particular intensity I had fallen in love with seven years before. The creature had the someone's mouth, the someone's cheekbones, the someone's way of holding their head slightly tilted when considering something carefully.

But the face was wrong. I do not know how else to say it. The face was wrong the way a photograph is wrong, the way a reflection is wrong. All the features were there, arranged in the correct order, bearing the correct relationship to one another, but the face did not move the way the someone's face had moved. It was too still, too symmetrical, too perfect. It was the face of a person who had never laughed or cried or been surprised, a face that had never weathered the small storms of daily life that shape us into who we are.

The creature looked at me and said nothing. Its eyes—the someone's eyes, but not—tracked my face, my body, my hands, as though cataloging me, as though trying to place me in some larger context.

"Hello," I said. My voice was steady, which surprised me. My hands were shaking, but my voice was steady. "I'm Victoria. I'm the one who made you."

The creature continued to look at me. Then it spoke, and the voice was wrong too—too flat, too uninflected, the cadence slightly off—and yet underneath the wrongness I could hear the someone, could hear the voice I had listened to for seven years, and the sound of it made me want to weep.

"I know," the creature said. "I remember."

This was not what I had expected. I had expected confusion, maybe. Rage. Fear. I had not expected memory. I had not known the creature would remember.

"What do you remember?" I asked.

The creature looked back at the city, at the smoke and the towers and the basin sprawling to the horizon. "Everything," it said. "And nothing. I remember being somewhere else. I remember a house with a red roof. I remember looking at this view a hundred times. But the memories are not mine. They belong to someone else. Someone who is not here."

"The someone," I said. "The memories belong to the someone."

The creature turned back to me. Its face—the wrong face, the right face—was expressionless, unreadable. "Who was the someone?" it asked. "Who was I supposed to be?"

This is the question I cannot answer. This is the question that circles and circles, that wakes me at night, that sits at the center of everything. Who was the someone? The answer should be simple. The answer should be a name, a relationship, a set of facts. But the facts do not capture it, cannot capture it, because the someone was not a collection of facts but a presence, a weight in the world, a particular way of taking up space that I cannot render in language.

"Someone I loved," I told the creature. "Someone I lost. Someone I wanted to bring back."

The creature considered this. I watched its face for some sign of recognition, some flicker of the someone I had known, but there was nothing. Just that terrible stillness, that uncanny perfection.

"But I am not that person," the creature said. "I have their memories. I have their face. But I am not them."

"No," I said. "You're not."

We stood there for a long time, the creature and I, looking at each other on the summit of Mount Hollywood while the smoke drifted across the basin and the light changed from yellow to gray to something approaching orange. I did not know what to do. I had not thought past this moment, past the finding. I had assumed—stupidly, arrogantly—that finding the creature would be the hard part, that once I found it everything else would follow naturally, the way it follows in stories, the way the third act resolves the conflicts established in the first and second.

But this was not a story. This was my life, and the creature's life, and we were standing on a mountain in Los Angeles with no third act, no resolution, no idea what came next.

"What happens now?" the creature asked. It asked the question without emotion, without urgency, as though inquiring about the weather or the time.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what happens now."

The creature nodded, as though this was the answer it had expected. "I have been sitting here since Thursday," it said. "I walked here from the house. It took a long time because I did not know how to walk at first. I had to learn. The body knows things the mind does not, and the mind knows things the body cannot do."

I tried to imagine it: the creature waking alone in the basement, learning to use its limbs, learning to stand, learning to walk. Making its way out of the house, through the streets of Laurel Canyon, through the neighborhoods of Los Feliz, up into the park. All of that while I was lying in the rental in Silver Lake, staring at the ceiling, pretending I had not done what I had done.

"I'm sorry," I said. The words felt inadequate, absurd. What do you say to the thing you have created, the thing you abandoned? What apology could possibly be enough? "I'm sorry I left you. I was afraid."

"I know," the creature said. "I remember fear. Or I remember someone else's fear. It is hard to tell the difference."

A helicopter passed overhead, heading toward Malibu, toward whatever fire was burning there. We both watched it go. When I looked back at the creature, something had changed in its face—a slight softening, a hint of something that might have been sadness or might have been the orange light of the smoke-filled sky.

"I cannot stay here," the creature said. "People have seen me. A woman screamed. A man called me a demon. I do not understand what I am, but I understand that I am not what they expect, that my face is wrong, that something about me frightens them."

"Your face isn't wrong," I said, automatically, the way you would to a child, and then I stopped, because the creature was not a child, and its face was wrong, and lying about it would not help either of us.

"My face is wrong," the creature said. "I have looked at my reflection. In car windows, in the water fountain at the observatory. I have the face of someone who should be alive, but I am not alive in the way that person was alive. I am something else. Something new."

"You're alive," I said. "I don't know what kind of alive, but you're alive."

The creature shook its head slowly, deliberately, in a gesture that was almost—but not quite—the way the someone used to shake their head when they disagreed but did not want to argue. "Alive is not enough," it said. "I need to know what I am. I need to know why I am here. I need to know why you made me and what you expected me to be and why the memories in my head belong to someone who no longer exists."

"I don't have those answers," I said. "I don't know if anyone has those answers."

The creature looked at me for a long moment. Then it stood up from the rock where it had been sitting—stood up with the someone's grace, the someone's economy of motion—and walked past me, toward the trail that led back down the mountain.

"Then I will find them myself," it said. "I will find the answers, and when I have found them, I will come back to you, and we will talk again."

I should have stopped it. I should have called out, should have followed, should have done something, anything, to keep the creature from walking back out into a world that was not prepared for it, that would not understand it, that would fear and reject and possibly destroy it. But I did nothing. I stood on the summit of Mount Hollywood and watched the creature walk away, watched it disappear into the smoke and the dying light, and I let it go.

This was my second failure. My first failure was the running. My second failure was the letting go. There would be more failures to come—many more—but these were the first, the foundational ones, the ones on which all the others would be built.

I drove back to the house on Laurel Canyon. I went down to the basement and I looked at the empty table and the equipment I had built and the notes in the fireproof box, and I asked myself what I had done and why I had done it and what I was going to do next.

I had no answers. I had only questions, circling and circling, the way the creature had circled through my mind for months before I built it, the way the someone had circled through my heart for years before the loss.

The next morning, I called in sick to work again. I sat in the living room of the house on Laurel Canyon—the first time I had sat in that room since the loss—and I waited. I did not know what I was waiting for. I only knew that something was coming, that the creature's departure was not an ending but a beginning, that whatever happened next would be worse than what had already happened.

I was right about that, at least. I was right that it would get worse. I just did not know how much worse, or how quickly, or how completely it would destroy the life I had worked so hard to build.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I am trying to tell this story in order, to impose some shape on the shapeless months that followed, and I keep jumping ahead, keep reaching for the end before I have properly established the middle.

The middle is this: I sat in the house on Laurel Canyon, waiting. The creature was out there, somewhere, asking questions, looking for answers. And I did not know—could not have known—that the answers it would find would lead it back to me, and to the someone, and to a truth I had never told anyone, a truth I had barely admitted to myself.

The truth about what really happened to the someone. The truth about why I had built the creature. The truth about the particular shape of my grief, and my guilt, and my desperate need to make something right that could never be made right.

But that comes later. For now, I am in the house, and the creature is in the world, and the Santa Ana winds are blowing, and somewhere in the hills the fires are burning, and I am waiting for something I cannot name to arrive.