Page 115 of Death of the Author

His words bit her and she winced. He didn’t think she was “from” Nigeria. He thought what had happened to her was her fault. “I wasn’t some fucking tourist,” she whispered. “I grew up going there. That’s where my parents were born and raised, it’s not the—”

Msizi seemed to realize, then, what he’d said. He held up his hands in a gesture for them to slow down. “Zelu, you don’t have to prove who you are to me. Iknowwho you are. I understand it.” He closed his eyes briefly and seemed to think hard on his words. “But you almost got yourself killed over there. Your family,me, we all nearly imploded. We couldn’t do a fucking thing but sit there and hope the Nigerian authorities saved you. Imagine how that felt.” He turned away, but then he whirled back around. “And now you want to do it again, but even worse! In space! You keep wanting to go where I can’t follow you!”

Silence hung between them, punctuated only by their shallow breaths. Finally, she began, “Msizi, that’s not—”

“It is,” he insisted.

“It’s only three days in space.”

“Three days?Oh, dear God! I thought it was for, like, a few hours. Do you hear yourself? Three daysnot on this planet!”

“I thought you were down. We talked about this before.”

Msizi looked more wrecked than she’d ever seen him. “Zelu, Zelu,Zelu, that was years ago! Come on! Look at all that’s happened in those years!”

Zelu stared at him. Oh yes, she’d made a mistake. She really hadn’t considered a lot of things. Like whether she should include the person closest to her in the decision. Like how it would make him feel. Like how bonkers her family was going to go. Like that three days wasn’t short when you weren’t on the planet. Like all the ways she could die up there. Now she wanted to curl into herself and disappear.

Msizi sat back down beside her and took her hands, holding them very carefully in his own. He looked her hard in the eyes. She didn’t look away, couldn’t blink, though the sides of her eyes twitched. It was difficult. For nearly a minute, they sat like this, looking at each other, a silent conversation passing between them that couldn’t be put into words.

Abruptly, Msizi scoffed and stood up.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “Seriously, Zelu?!” He turned and left the room. She heard the front door open and shut.

They’d never fought like this before. When the rest of the world was against her, Msizi was always by her side, not perfect, not without flaws, but steady as a rock. She should have been crying, but instead, she found herself smiling. Maybe that was manic of her, but they’d just had a whole argument with their minds—when had they learned to do that? And what else could she have said to him? She wouldn’t have lied or held back the truth. She still wanted to go, and if she’d pretended otherwise, that would have blown up in their faces, too. She’d told him what she wanted, and he’d heard her. Heknewher, knew who she was, knew what she was capable of, whether he liked it or not.

They never said “I love you” because they didn’t need to. Their love existed in the space between words, in the moments when they were apart, before they came back together. Zelu would just have to believe that when she left, he’d keep loving her.

He came back to the condo three hours later with a bag of Harold’s Chicken and two pomegranates. Zelu was on the living room couchwatching a video about the previous space mission, and she quickly shut her laptop. He threw his jacket on the couch beside her, glared at her, and then silently went to the kitchen. She watched him clear the counter, wash his hands, and then cut, peel, and disassemble one of the pomegranates. He liked to prepare food as a way of relaxing, and Zelu was glad because heneededto relax.

Without looking up, he said, “I don’t want you to go.”

Her heart dropped. “I want to go.”

He picked up the second pomegranate and held it up. He slammed it on the counter, picked up the knife, and sliced into it, red dribbling from the puncture wound. “I won’t stop you.” He paused, looking at the pomegranate juice bleeding out. “It hurts.”

Zelu’s heart ached. She hated causing him any type of pain, but this one she couldn’t help. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

He picked up the severed half of the pomegranate and tore it open to expose the juicy red seeds. “What is the timeline of this shit?”

“Three months.”

He began to pick out the seeds and put them in a glass bowl. “Hayibo!” he muttered.

“I’m scared,” Zelu admitted quietly. “I hear being on a spaceship is synonymous to sitting on top of a bomb.”

“Then why the fuck are you doing it?” he snapped.

She pressed her lips together. He already knew the answer, but he didn’t want to hear it.

What if I die out there?she wanted to ask, but that wasn’t the right question. If she died, then it would have been her time. Period.What willyoudo if I die out there?That was the question. But she didn’t voice it. She was already burdening him with enough.

“Do you love me?” she asked. She held her breath. She’d never asked him to say it, hadn’t thought she even wanted him to. But in case something did happen to her up there, she at least felt it was important to understand what she was leaving behind.

He didn’t hesitate. “More than anyone in this galaxy.”

Eyes open, she took in all she felt: Fear. Surprise. Hope. Fear. Suspicion. Worry. Wonder. Fear. Her fault. She wanted to whimper.

He finished disassembling the second pomegranate, and as he stood there, scooping up the lush red seeds and loudly crunching on them, he gazed at her, his expression blank.

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