I take her to the clearing one day for a change and up its hill under an afternoon sun. The sun has just passed its zenith and hangs like an over-inflated balloon. As before, the sky is startlingly clear and blue, but the air is much hotter, the beginning of summer. There's a strong breeze, but it does nothing to stifle the heat. It's like a blow dryer turned on full blast. Sweat wets our brow yet all around the grass seems to be entirely unaffected, vibrant green overly saturated. The tree tops stretch out towards the horizon, in this strangely flat way. As if a giant printing press had mass-reproduced the image. We hear the cicadas whine and birds dart by above. Weeds rustle. Trees swell and billow. But in this kind of viscous temperature, everything takes on a sluggish pace and sound travels slower, as if the world is retreating to a safe distance away. When I ask if she recalls this place, she tells me she isn't sure. There's a feeling, she says, but like the faded markings on an ancient ruin with no context.

"Everything I once knew, seems to recede away. At nights, I cry and wake up from nightmares I never knew I could have, and when I wake up, I don't know what it had been. And I don't know who I am."

Her voice fades away in the wind.

Then she shakes her head. "I know what's happening. I know I'm dying."

"You'll never die to me."

"You'll forget everything too. The Free Energy current is still there, no matter where we go. Even though here, we are free from physical repressive state apparatuses and cyclic performance, it's all like remote control, invisible wires or something, there's always something there to remind us we are connected to something more powerful than us. We had a little delay, a minor detour for them, like a vacation to someplace far but the System naturally owns us. The flow of the universe takes away everything little by little."

I say nothing.

She sighs. "But it doesn't matter to me anymore. Perhaps I've finally begun to accept it. Each day the inevitable fact grows a little duller. Less cruel. A little more comforting." She lifts her hands and drops them again, as if a half-hearted attempt at flapping wings, "you know what, I really don't care anymore."

She looks at me. I look at her. She leans her head against my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her. She's warm and soft - different from before - a fragment of the past.

"Things come and go," I say. "Even if we don't remember it, it all still happened. Even if we lose ourselves and die and become nothing. If our soul transcends to the Collective, it still had happened once, and is eternally written down somewhere. Inaccessible, but written down. We perceived everything happening in some form, reality, pseudo-reality, delusion and dream-state, and we worry it had been only limited to our consciousness, only in our minds. But if we are taken away, that means wherever it flows, there it will be remembered."

We stay silent for a while.

"I guess that's fine with me. All I know is that I'm here with you right now. And if you say so, I'll believe it." She concludes.

There on the hill, under the sun, she lays down and we make love, as a historic testament to complete the entire course of things.

*

Afterwards, we live each day as pleasantly as we could.

Every few weeks, the old man from the Seven Eleven would see to it that supplies are sent through the mythical gate, but we could never catch when it had opened. We would have omelettes and salads, smoked salmon and pasta with homemade sauce, canned soup and loaves of leavened whole wheat bread. One of the families grew vegetables so we had a decent supply of food. Sometimes fresh fish from upstream at a natural reservoir. We would never be bloated but there was always enough to go around.

Eventually, the coffee tree started to bear fruit and we began to make our own coffee. The villagers were astounded in utter disbelief, since it was clearly no climate for coffee growing, but the tree was strong and unyielding. It became something Shizuka and I were tremendously proud of. It also became a part of the house, blending its trunk and branches with the dead and rotting wood. It reinforced the house and the house reinforced its will and our hearts. Next to it however, the second plant looked like a wild weed wishing to be rooted out and thrown away.

In the mornings, we would go for a jog along the creek I had found before where the trees were thinner and reach the top of hill where dawn would break, the fiery crimson lines of the horizon brushing slowly over the treetops below, before it pulled up to light up the sky and dash it with splotches of pinks and blue. These colours seemed to mix with the air and with each breath, it would fill us. The air would still be cool and gentle. Tasting like fresh meltwater from a glacier. It was a sight that would take away our breaths, one that we looked forward to every morning. Afterwards, we would return in time for a simple breakfast.

The rest of the day, tasteful classical music would drift from the Mihara's place via an old CD player, some days Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, some days Schubert - I particularly enjoyed the thrill of a few of his string quartets while Shizuka and I sunbathed, re-read old novels and followed two of the kids tromping through the forest. It was what might have been the perfect vacation full of leisure and the simple pleasures of life. But overall, doing away with all schedule and production left me uneasy. Eventually I tell her I am going to write everything down, so I wouldn't forget and make use of the time here. She tells me we ought to forget everything and seek new lives.

"But it doesn't seem like there's any real life at all."

"The life is in the nature around us, being a part of nature, this world, the harmony of the inner world and the outer world, letting time pass by and things move along its course," she says. She is cutting up an apple. "Do you like apples?"

"Yes I love apples. And you."

She gives me a look but I know she's blushing.

"You know way back in the day, I guess this is how people once lived," I say, "but now that we've experienced more, it makes me restless."

"It depends on what you mean by experiencing more. Is experiencing all that we've gone through truly more? Or less?"

"True," I say.

"I'd say it seems like less. We've lost a lot."

"Yes, we have."

"Let's just not think about it."

"Okay," I say and draw her closer and kiss her.

I try not to think about it. We didn't think about the past, about high school and our seventeen year old selves, about how we met or the coffee shop, nor the temporality of this retreat, nor the times we had been separated or the pain we had suffered in the facility, nor death. It was all at the back of my mind like a haunting ghost, but watching Shizuka try to live, became my focus. I thought it was essentially the same as the nothingness we had experienced, or the mundane cycles of the metropolis system, but she shook her head. It was a conscious choice. Living in the moment, she called it.

But it didn't last long.

*

A few nights later, she began to forget. The first time it happened we were lying down on our backs at the top of the hill, the raw earthy scent of our grass bed all around, watching the clouds above lazily meander by. The wind was a whisper around us and it watched from far away, every now and then reaching over to cover us with its blanket. Beneath, the grass scratched our heads in a friendly way. It's a little too bright out, too quiet, too peaceful, no cicadas or birds, like something had lifted us and silently changed the bedding underneath, set us back down again as if nothing had happened. I was holding her hand and she was holding mine. Our fingers tangled together. We weren't speaking but every now and then, I'd give her a little squeeze. She'd return the gesture in mutual understanding. I was thinking about nothing really - with every blink of an eye, I would endeavour to reset my thoughts and just drink in the summer light.

A long time passed and she hadn't squeezed back for a while. I thought she was asleep so I didn't bother her. But she didn't respond when I did say something, her hand grew limp and cold. It wasn't her actual body temperature, but I could feel the sudden change in attitude, as if she wanted to pull away but didn't know how to, as if she had stiffened in fear.

It was worse than any pain I had endured in the facility. To see the total lack of acknowledgement or response right in front of me without any room for doubt - that she had been lost. It would falter only for a few minutes in the beginning. She would be in the middle of a bite or a book, or sitting next to me shoulder to shoulder gazing off at something talking or not talking. And she would not know where she was or who I was and become utterly silent and still, as if her system had shut off. Like some kind of machine that was powering down. Her eyes would grow dim, dimmer than before, empty and blank, just a solid black stone. It was reflective and impenetrable. I could see nothing within her eyes. The eyes that once drew me in, into her world. I would call her name and touch her shoulder but there would be no response, like her spirit had gotten up and left, leaving an empty husk. And in the same way, I no longer knew who she was. Gradually, it grew longer and longer. Until there would be entire days where she would not respond to anything, not eating, not drinking. Whenever she came to, she would cry and I would hold her. I would tell her I loved her no matter what happened, but it all seemed to fall on deaf ears.

"I'm scared," she said. "Really scared. This is worse than just dying."

One day, I had returned from the creek after washing our clothes and found her holding a knife over her wrist while Sarasate's "Jota Aragonese" played in the distance. "It's better to die," she said. But I wrestled it away from her, tears pouring out of my eyes. And we collapsed onto the floor. There wasn't anything else I could do or say. I watched her condition deteriorate and though I wished to exchange our positions, I was still the same, an Anomaly, ever thinking and perceiving, like a machine, as everything else fell away from me.

By now, the second coffee plant had withered and died. No matter how much I watered it, it had died.

I told her I love her as I turned off the lights. And the next morning, she was gone.