Chapter 14 — The Return

They found Rohan at the wall.Not inside. At the exterior, standing at the opening with his back to them and his hand flat against the wall surface, the way Haripada had placed his hand against the tree trunk when the forest changed. His camera was in his other hand, held down at his side, not raised. He was not filming.He was listening."Rohan," Lata said.He turned.His face. In the accounts from all three: he was Rohan, recognizably, undeniably, and there was something in the arrangement of his face that was not. Not a physical change. A presence in his expression that did not originate from him. A quality of attentiveness that was not his attentiveness, that was pointed outward rather than inward, that was looking through him rather than from him."Lata," he said. His voice was his voice."Come away from the wall," she said."I've been thinking," he said. He was very calm. He was the calmest person any of them had ever seen. "I've been thinking about what it took. The fear. All the fear." He looked at his hand on the wall surface. "I didn't know how much of me the fear was. It wasn't just a feeling. It was — structure. The fear was the structure of knowing what mattered. Now I know what matters but I don't—I can feel that something is supposed to feel different about it. And it doesn't. And I keep coming back here to understand why.""Because the answer isn't here," Priti said. She moved toward him carefully, with the movement of someone approaching something that might not want to be approached. "The answer isn't going to be here.""I know," he said. "But here is the only place where I feel like I understand what was taken. Outside—outside I can function, I can think, I can feel some things. But I can't feel the weight of anything. Nothing has weight." He looked at Lata. "You. I care about you. I know I do. But I can't feel the weight of caring. It's like a language where I know the words but I've lost the grammar."Lata looked at him.She felt the thing she had been noting since the day after the temple — the absence of urgency, the calm, the place where the sharp edges of caring about things had been. She felt its absence and she felt, underneath that absence, the original shape of it. The shape of what had been there.She said: "Rohan. If you go back inside—""I know," he said."Do you?"He was quiet for a moment."It's already taken most of the fear," he said. "What would be the cost of the rest?""The rest is what keeps you from going in," she said. "The rest is what makes you come back out."He looked at her.