One Becomes Two

ONE BECOMES TWO

by A.D. Sui

(Content warning: body horror)

This is a simple story, and I will spoil the ending for you. 

You and I begin as a one. Marriage is a deceptively complex single cell organism with the two of us moving inside the socially constructed membrane. Like the mitochondria or a chloroplast, we do our jobs, say our lines, play our parts so that the cell can live on. And just like the mitochondria, we were once free from this membrane. We were independent, individual, unburdened by the convenience that now necessitates our survival; two fully functional individuals with their own moving parts and their own drives. I’m forgetting who I was before you. That’s what I don’t tell you before the plane takes off. 

This ending is simple—one becomes two. 

•••

I measure out the clear sludge into marked test tubes, my parka a smear of red against the translucent turquoise ice of the glacier. Winds burrow deep into the cracks of the glacier, biting at my cheeks and turning them the same shade of red as my parka. I follow you here when Stanford sends us to study whether the sludge leaking from the ice is toxic and whether it would disrupt the ecosystem if it were to leak into the ocean. But you aptly note that the equipment that accompanies us is far more extensive than a toxin screen. Stanford wants us to figure out what the sludge is. You want us to figure out what the sludge is since you were the one to volunteer us for the trip.

I just want to go home. 

To the untrained eye, the Greenland wilderness is a barren landscape severed only by the thin line where the glacier becomes sky. White on even whiter snow. But look closer and you can spot arctic hares and foxes, chubby seals, even whales, all caught up in the endless struggle for rare sustenance, all fighting for a chance at survival. Against the monochrome permafrost, in the distance, our bright yellow cabin is an inorganic splash of colour. It sits off the side of a rapidly melting slab of ice, old enough to precede the Ice Age. All across the world, climate change is erasing biodiversity—but here, it’s reviving it, uncovering it from the depths of ancient ice. 

“Make sure you get extra. I don’t want us hiking out and back every day,” your voice crackles in my earpiece. I wonder, what is this us you are talking about? You are back in the warm cabin, probably sipping on your tea between giving me directions. It’s always you who gives directions. You name the place. I follow. Edenborough. Cambridge. Now, Stanford. From one lab to another, to another, to—this is the lot of being married to a scientist a few years ahead of you in career. 

The university gives us matching self-heating mugs to go with our matching gear. I can slip into your soft shell without noticing, you can take my scarf as your own, a reminder that we are nothing but organelle with the unified goal of keeping this project alive.

You decide that it will be me who climbs the precarious ice slabs to carve off the sample. Of the two of us, you are the more capable medic and the far more experienced climber. I remind you of my fear of heights. You laugh it off. The only thing of importance is that you can retrieve me if I break my leg, and then bandage me up before help arrives by helicopter. If the distress call ever came and they took me away, I wonder how long would pass before you grew lonely in your own company. I nearly get an answer when a snow bunting knocks me off balance—it lands to my right by the stream of sludge. I yelp.

“You good over there?” you call out in my headset. 

“Give me a moment,” I say softly as I watch the bunting reach down and take a sip of the sludge. The bird acts as if it doesn’t see me, or simply doesn’t care for my existence. Its pudgy little body squeezes itself neatly into a crevice as it steadies itself with half-open wings. After several gulps it looks at me with oddly intelligent eyes and cocks its little feathery-white head. Before I can do anything, it calmly flies off the glacier. 

“Say, what do you know about snow buntings?” I ask, and you only laugh in response. 

•••

Erroneously, we believe that multicellular life is necessary for intelligence, that our own evolutionary branch is the ideal one, that complex life could not exist without our hyperspecialization of cells and cell organelles. 

This is nothing short of arrogance. 

Groggily, you tell me to go to sleep, but the thought has already burrowed deep into my mind. What if there was one and not many? How complex could we possibly get? How far would we go without specialization and fragmentation? For most of life’s existence on Earth we were just that: single-celled and thriving. Even now, so much of it is just that. 

The night around us drowns in ear-ringing quiet. Only the faint glow of snow through the window reminds me that there is still a world out there. An arctic fox lets out a lonely cry in the night and its voice stretches across the nearly eighteen hours of darkness. Yet, even in this barren landscape there is life everywhere, at every hour of the day. I pull my hood lower over my eyes and do my best to sleep, but no sleep comes. 

What would we be if we were only one?

•••

We spend our non-work hours drinking bag tea and deciding what to name the sludge. You’re convinced that it doesn’t need a name, but I insist that saying “the sludge I got from the glacier” is too long and gets tiring to say over and over. I start calling it bunty because of the snow bunting that drank it. You roll your eyes.

Most nights, you slump over the microscope, silently observing bunty do its thing, as bacteria do. You're in your happy place, a dark room; the only light on your face comes from the slide below. You’d think that after fifteen years together I’d know every line around your eyes, I’d know you through and through, but seeing you hunched over in the dark reminds me that this is your ambition we’re chasing and I’m only a passenger. It started simple enough, with a promise. It would be your turn first, to secure funding, stability, prestige, and then I could have the stage. 

But now, even as there’s a lab with your name on it, you ask me to prepare slides, to jot down notes as you dictate them, to brew more tea, and then when morning comes, more coffee. I never ask how it is that we hold the same degree and even share publishing credits that you never brew your own coffee, never prepare your own slides. 

“I think I’m starting to understand what this is,” you say one morning, and I find myself jealous of a tube-full of clear sludge, so easily understood by you. 

•••

The snow bunting arrives at the three-in-the-afternoon dawn break with a friend. An arctic hare stares up at me with the same indifference as the bunting, and they both cock their heads as they watch me drink my coffee just outside the doorstep. Their white coats are nearly invisible against the powdered snow. I carefully call for you to come out. 

“I don’t think they’ve seen people before,” you say and kneel before the hare. It doesn’t budge, only scrunches its little hare nose and moves its whiskers. “We’re in one of the more isolated parts.” 

But there is something too directed in that animal glare that causes me to disagree. I say nothing.

•••

The decision first solidifies somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, but never leaves the confines of my mind. It’s always there, with every slide, and every subsequent cup of coffee, like a hangnail in my mind. I can say it. I can say it. I can—

I can’t follow you anymore.  

“I think this is just a single-celled organism, not too different from yeast,” you say from the dark of our small laboratory, a red-brown blanket wrapped around your shoulders, and all I can think is how this is where we differ, that to me, yeast is not just, to me, yeast is really quite complex if you only look closely enough. This is where we differ, in our consideration for the minute, in the appreciation for the little guy. 

“Do you think it poses any danger to the local ecosystem?” I ask, already knowing what you’re going to say. We’ll disagree here too. I think bunty can cause quite the damage if left unattended. The bunting’s and the hare’s focused glares return to me, and I wonder just how far I’m willing to go to prove I’m right. I have nothing more to go on than a gut feeling and that’s never been enough to convince you before. 

“Will you run an experiment with me?” I try. 

•••

Between spoonfuls of powdered egg and bites of dehydrated bacon, between sips of already cooling coffee, I tell you that I can’t follow you any longer, that hearing “next year will be your year” has grown stale and empty. I suggest we go our separate ways as gently as I can. After all this time, I owe you this much. Be kind. Handle carefully.

“You’re an adult,” you say, spreading preserve over toast. “You can make your own decisions.” 

I chew my eggs, swallow. The pieces lodge themselves half way down my throat. 

You take your space, your air, like you’re preparing for the distance that will stretch between us, large enough for the wind to cry out and echo back. Once outside, frigid gusts of wind keep your tears frozen along lash lines before they ever make it down your cheeks. The glacier unfolds ahead of us, early morning light shimmering across the polished ice like one monstrous mirror held up to the world. This place is too quiet, too dark most days, too cold. Too much space between  every silence that spurs between us. I say that I’m hoping we can finish this project together and then simply walk in different directions and hope for the best. 

“Not literally,” you say, a hint of bitter humor on your tongue. 

No, not literally, but it may as well be. After this much time, I fear I no longer know how to walk without you, how to be without you. I only hear your voice when I start thinking. I can’t remember who I am without you. 

“Let’s run your experiment,” you say and head inside the cabin. 

•••

No matter how tightly I clutch the arctic hare it still kicks up a storm, raising clumps of white fur with every movement. Some of it sticks to my hair, patches of it to my wool sweater. The hare doesn’t understand, it only fears. The hare goes into a cage, a drip water dish gets set up in the corner. Into the water dish goes bunty. 

I’ve got a hunch that bunty does something to animals, pacifies their amygdala when ingested. It’s not too strange for a bacteria, which are also single-celled, to cross the blood-brain barrier and do all sorts of funny things, mostly to animals, but sometimes to humans too. It’s significantly less funny when it’s humans. Bunty could be like that, pacifying animals so that they may transfer it to bigger mammals and so forth. That could be problematic for the ecosystem at large.

After I shut the cage door, the hare crouches in one corner at first—trembling. But when we leave it alone it eventually ventures out to the water drip and sips some of the mixture. You step outside for fresh air while I watch the hare. Barely five minutes go by before you call my name. I find you standing outside our hut. Twenty arctic hares sit before you, frozen on their hind legs, their little whiskers twitching in the breeze. 

“I think they’re here to bail their buddy out,” you say as if it’s some joke. The hares stare at us with their eerily intelligent eyes

“I don’t think hares can communicate telepathically.” I don’t find it funny.

•••

When we first started dating, you said that it was my curiosity that drew you to me. Now, that same curiosity is keeping me awake and staring at the hare in the cage at three in the morning. It’s calmed down now, oddly so. The animal lets me get blood samples and doesn’t flinch when the needle pushes past the thick fur and punctures its skin. Its glassy eyes burrow into mine as if to say, I know what you are, and I know what you’re doing. 

When we were still pursuing our undergraduate degrees, working away with animal models, you suggested I was too soft for such work. The first rule of working on animals was to never name them—I always broke it. The day we met you said that it was endearing. A year later you were convinced it would be the reason I wouldn’t pass the lab. 

“Sorry, little buddy,” I tell the hare and pet it. Another rule: Do not form attachments to subjects. Even here, after all these years, I break the rules. 

Outside, an arctic fox calls out in its high-pitched laughter. You’re sound asleep in our bed, too deep to rouse. Hare still in hand, I go to the front door of the cabin and peer out. Untouched by light pollution, the sharp daggers of distant stars rain down on me in their chilling glory. 

In the shimmering snow before our cabin, the fox, with its puffy, white fur, sits calmly with its tail over its paws—regal. I’m not sure what possesses me to open the door, what causes me to drop the hare, but when it hits the ground it rushes to the fox, then turns around. Both fox and hare stare at me. The fox doesn’t seem spooked by my presence, which in itself is strange since people have been hunting them all across Greenland and the foxes know how dangerous we can be. It doesn’t go for the hare either. It only looks at me.

And with the predator and prey so calmly before me, I begin to form a tenuous theory of what the sludge is doing, of what bunty’s goal is. Yes, bunty, primordial sludge, is intelligent in its own way. We like to think of intelligence as building cities or writing important books. In reality, anything with a goal that can independently act on it is intelligent by some definitions. I hold that definition closest to heart.

When I observe the slide with the hare’s blood on it, I find bunty in every cell, merged, fused, invading. I find it riding along on every cell, in every organ, never once impacting their function. But one thing is certain, bunty won’t be letting go of the hare. 

•••

Over breakfast and in between sips of your morning coffee, you ask me if there’s a way to work on the marriage, if there is something you can do to convince me to stay. I don’t know how to tell you to stop being yourself, to stop being ambitious. Your once lovable drive has become suffocating. It drove you first to your doctorate and then it drove all over me, and I let it. I’m not innocent in this either.

“We had a good fifteen years,” I tell you softly. I’ve waited all this time, trying to be a good research partner, a good spouse, a good friend. That us you mentioned earlier never existed before, even as my name was printed on the same publications as yours, sometimes in front of yours. 

“Is there someone else?” you ask. 

Only myself.

•••

“I don’t understand,” you keep repeating and I don’t know if you mean the divorce or the experiment. Because the experiment is quite simple. We build the maze in our cabin out of boxes and other loose cardboard. We grab a hare from the front of the cabin. They’re hanging out there nearly all the time now, with foxes and buntings joining them occasionally. 

“I feel like a Disney princess,” you say, trying to get me to laugh, but I can’t let myself, can’t let myself feel this way around you. If I focus on the experiment enough, I can forget that the inevitable is coming. We can both return to playing our parts—researchers, lab mates, support staff. We don’t belong to each other as people anymore. 

When we begin, I test the hare’s blood for bunty. It’s there, swimming happily with every cell. Then, I toss the hare into the maze. Hares are not very good problem solvers, but with some time and a lot of coaxing, the hare manages to figure out the maze and receives the biscuit we provide as a reward. Now, it’s your turn. You grab another hare, and place it inside the maze. It solves it on the first try. 

“I think bunty is communicating with itself,” you mutter. It’s the first time you used its name. 

“The hares never met.” 

The hare’s beady eyes reflect in your wide-open ones. “I don’t think they need to.” 

•••

We run the experiment over and over throughout the day. First, we test the hares, then the buntings, then a reluctant fox that refuses to leave even after we give it five biscuits. We release everyone back into the wild when night falls, but they don’t venture far. 

“There has to be a more reasonable explanation for this,” you say, holding my hand as we lay shoulder to shoulder on our bed. No one planned that we would be ending our marriage on some glacier in Greenland. No one plans for that kind of thing anywhere.

“We know bunty crosses the blood-brain barrier easily.” We sacrificed a few hares for that, something I’m not proud of. I made you take a mallet to their skulls to extract brain tissue. I couldn’t even watch. As if I didn’t feel enough guilt about leaving. “It would explain why they’re not scared of us. Bunty has decided that we’re not a threat to it.” 

You shrug. “It’s a single-celled organism. I don’t think it can decide anything.” 

But the hare and then the bunting and then the fox knew the maze before they ever set foot inside the cabin. Now the maze is abandoned in the living room and Greenland’s wildlife knows a useless skill. 

“Life could have gone this way, you know. Instead of multicellular, we could have gone towards complex single cell life. The world could have looked very different.” 

“No coffee,” you muse and squeeze my hand. I don’t squeeze it back. 

“No wars. No conflicts at all.” 

You push up on your elbow. In the dim light of the bedroom, you look ten years younger. In moments like these, it’s easy for me to forget why I need to leave. It’s easy to get lost in how absolutely gorgeous you are, how you make me feel gorgeous too, just by looking at me. I can justify that breathing is overrated and that ambition is overrated and that as long as you look at me like that, I’m happy. I’ve told myself this lie for fifteen years, but it no longer rings true. 

“If everyone was always privy to everyone else’s thoughts. Would we ever misunderstand each other?” You lean over and kiss me slowly. 

“But then we would just be the same thing. The hares outside don’t act like hares anymore, neither do the foxes. They’re all the same now,” I say. 

“Is that so bad?” You turn the light off and try to convince me that nothing at all is bad, that nothing at all matters except how you fit against me even after all this time, how you love me after all this time. 

I don’t remember how to sleep without you.

•••

When we first got married, you told me that marriage is more than the sum of two individuals. It’s something that exists beyond two people. It’s an organism of its own that wants and perseveres. I tell you that the data will be waiting for you in your office. 

“Our office,” you correct me. 

No, it’s your office now. 

The Northern Lights play above us, dyeing the black sky in greens and yellows. We throw our heads back and for a moment forget that we are two separate people with a chasm spreading between us. For a moment, we are lost together, and I understand what you meant when you said how something can exist beyond two people. 

“Do you think that if you were in my head and I were in yours, we’d make this thing work?” you ask me, head still tilted to the sky. 

“I think you’d know what I yearn for.” 

You squeeze my hand, and I don’t squeeze back. 

“I want to fix this,” you say. “I want things to go back to how they were before.” 

But before is not a place I can return to.

•••

A cup sits between us: a cup of sludge, a cup of bunty, a cup of a primordial single-cell organism that is uniting all of Greenland’s wildlife under its rule. A cup sits between us with the promise to make us one; make us whole. 

You explain everything like you’ve done it a thousand times. We both take a sip and that fixes everything. We go back to how we were before. It’s just like you, to think that this wound can be sutured with a single intervention. But like a cell ready to divide, I’ve been preparing for this for far too long, to split from you, to become someone else—myself.  

You tell me that you’ll go first, to test the waters. You always did. Your fellowships, your promotions. I never made a fuss. I never argued. I’d ask for you to stop, to wait, to reconsider, but once you make your mind up about something there is no going back. I watch you take a sip. You can’t let me go. Since that first time, the first day you laid eyes on me, your talons sunk deep. You knew I loved you and I would cast aside whatever goals I had to further yours. 

The night before, my hand still in yours, you said that surrendering yourself to better understand me was not a big sacrifice. You said you’d do it in an instant, only if I would. But I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what self I’d be surrendering. I tell you this, spill my proverbial guts to you only to hear I want to make things right again between us. But they were never right to begin with. 

You take another sip and hand me the cup. 

Life could have been so different if it had spread from bunty. A life without disagreement. A life without separation. 

No loneliness. 

No ego. 

No spats or fights or conflicts. 

No pain. 

I take the cup. But I can’t follow you here. To Edenborough to Cambridge, to Stanford, yes, but not this time, not here. I pour the remainder of bunty over the floor. I rupture the membrane that holds us together. The cell dies. The organelles spill over the slide. You open your mouth to say something, but then your eyes glaze over with a cloudy calm. Bunty crosses the blood-brain barrier with little effort and nearly instantaneously. 

Does it hurt you? I wonder if some part of you screams out before it dies, before it loses its edges. And then you’re the hare and the bunting and the fox, and all of them are you, and I am very separate and so very lonely. 

I give your temple a kiss and leave you sitting by the table. The helicopter will arrive in a few minutes. I called ahead. I don’t want you sitting alone too long. The medics will examine you. The wildlife specialists will cull the hares and the buntings, as many as they can find. They will try to stop the spread. And you? They will attempt to treat you, save you, make you into a one again. But you are part of something much larger than yourself now, the boundaries of your conscience gone. You are a mere organelle in a gigantic cell, now stretching across all ecosystems of Greenland. You’ll never be alone again, even without me here.  

This is a simple story, and the ending is right here. 

One becomes two.