## Emil POV The day was nearly over, and I finally caught a chance to have a chat with Solomon. He was just the way he had always been—easy, airy, charming in that self-absorbed way, unperturbed by the turmoil of the last chaotic work shift. On the other hand, I was perhaps… not exactly like myself. I was drawn to him more than ever, and I knew it was for the wrong reason. The two of them don’t exactly resemble each other; not in the ways that matter. However, I… failed to quell the part of my heart that was screaming out for something I couldn’t even name. Then it was Sunday, and as expected, Schumacher won the United States Grand Prix. If he was to win the race in Suzuka in two weeks, he would be crowned World Champion, and Häkkinen would fail to defend the title. How I wished I’d been able to see Häkkinen in action last year. But I was being tortured in literal Hell; couldn’t exactly follow motorsports news from a torment nexus. That said, next year, the Schumacher-Häkkinen rivalry would be very exciting to witness; all things considered, I felt quite grateful to have returned to earth at the present moment. I pondered over the future of F1, especially the constructor teams; Schumacher seemed to be working very closely with the engineers, to a degree that most other drivers were not able to. As much as I didn’t like the thought, we might be seeing a period of Ferrari domination for the next few years… As a result of my daydreaming, I didn’t retain much memory of the diner staff meeting in the morning. Solomon seemed to have some strong opinions, while Aurelian couldn’t respond in a decisive manner to this challenge to her authority. I thought I already knew whose side I would take if I had to choose. But do I really? Thankfully, the day went on without much mishap. We closed shop early so that Duke Egelon had time to individually talk with each staff member. My meeting with him served to confirm my growing suspicion that I might have been lied to. That he, in fact, never had the ability, or intention, to get me into one of those coveted seats in the American motorsports scene. But I was strangely at peace with that possibility, as if a part of myself had always known, but had chosen to take on this assignment in spite of it. Or it could just be that I knew there was nothing I could do, in any which way. Shortly before the meeting, there was another moment that stinged a tiny bit, as the staff members who weren’t meeting with the boss sat around a table and busied ourselves with arts and crafts. Aurelian wanted a cigarette, so Solomon offered her one. Aurelian needed it lit, so Solomon took out his lighter and lit it for her. There was nothing else to it. There was nothing else to it, really, but for a split second I almost wanted to ask Solomon for a cigarette, too, despite having never smoked, in my real life or afterlife. The people I knew from my old work used to scoff at me for it. They scoffed at me over many things—not smoking, not getting blackout drunk, not throwing my reward money away over cards and dice. They mocked me and called me names. But I didn’t care; they were nothing to me. The person who was everything to me told me that I should never smoke. *Because it only does bad things to you. Besides, what if the smell gets into your hair, or stuck to your skin? Could blow your cover in a stealth operation,* he would laugh. It was a joke, of course. If my hair or skin ever smelled like cigarettes, he was the only one who would know, and be bothered by it. At the end of the day, it was his preference. That I still abide by. To this day. My musing was cut short when Leslie asked me what I was making. His curiosity was warranted; in my frustration, I had started folding origami cranes, one after another. “Just some paper cranes,” I said, and seeing that people at the table seemed interested, I started a demonstration. Soon most of us were folding paper cranes; Leslie got good at it very quickly, whereas Aurelian kept obsessing over each fold, ruining many of his attempts in the process. Watching them learn origami felt like getting to know them from a different angle, and before I knew it, I found myself smiling. After I returned from my meeting with the Duke, we had a veritable pile of paper cranes on the table, with Aurelian finally able to produce one finished crane that he was happy with. I showed Leslie how to thread the cranes together onto long strings, and we put them up as decoration in the break room. Leslie seemed very much in his element. He had tried to keep up a calm facade after his one-on-one meeting with Egelon, but it wasn’t difficult to tell that he was shaken by what had transpired. If this little distraction was able to aid him in regaining his footing, then I suppose my moment of misery wasn’t entirely pointless. I took a longer look at the strings of paper cranes after everyone had left—Solomon, Leslie, Jonny, Cherry, and Old Jeb all back to their respective homes, Aurelian got up into the rafters, and Isha disappeared into some hidden corner of her own. It was just me in the break room. I lay down on the couch, letting my thoughts wander free. I first learned how to fold paper cranes from a couple of children lingering around a memorial site in Hiroshima. They didn’t have their guardians around, so I stayed and folded paper cranes with them, until a woman who seemed trustworthy enough came looking for them, calling out their names. For the few hours I was with them, they kept trying to talk to me, wanting to make me understand something, but I didn’t speak the language, so I just gave my best smile and nodded. It was a stupid thing to do, especially for someone who was looking to flee the country in a fishing vessel that very night. What if they told their families about this tall foreigner with a scarred face, and the adults got concerned enough to report to the police? D would get so mad at me if I were to tell him about it. But there was something about the situation that drew me in. Something about loss, grief, wounds that remained raw over the years… There was a period in my past life when I had to lay low for a while. The consequences of my last job spiraled out of control due to someone else’s mistake. D looked for a lawyer on my behalf, and through some strange luck, came across Solomon’s law practice. I was put through the wringer, shredded many documents and forged new ones, dyed my whole head of hair a darker color. But thinking back, it was not all bad. D had gone to the US a year prior, and secured himself a spot at a hospital in Los Angeles. I stayed with him during my arguably well-earned “sabbatical”. I had basically nothing going on, so every day I drove him to work in the morning, and picked him up at night. I would never forget threading through traffic in the streets of LA in that second generation Honda Accord of his; she was a real car, and I miss her to this day. Sometimes, after finishing his shift, D was so tired that he would fall asleep on the ride home. At every red light, I would turn to look at him sleeping peacefully in the passenger seat, usually with his arms crossed, head tilted to lean against the window, strands of hair coming undone and falling over his relaxed brows. Those were the only times his face was fully free of tension, and he almost looked like a younger version of himself, the bright and rosy-cheeked boy who once looked down at me with a sharp-toothed smile and a twinkle in his eye, who held my hand as we ventured into the bustling streets of Leningrad, heavy with history and traces of the war… Those nights were the only times I was ever free of my instinct prodding at me to go fast in a car. During my time in Hell I had often asked myself, *What if I had never left him? What* if *I had never left him?* Could I imagine the two of us growing old together? Could I have stomached the rancorous arguments over trivial matters every other day, the constant policing of how I lived my life, the slow and inevitable death of everything I had ever dreamed to do? Could I have put up with it all and stayed with him? Would that have been a better existence compared to what I had actually done? There was no use wondering about it. The reality was that I had gone back to Europe in the name of personal freedom, thrown myself into increasingly dangerous situations, first tying up loose ends with unsavory acquaintances, then rally racing, until the engine of that Ford Escort started billowing smoke in the meandering mountain roads of Corsica, after which I could only vaguely remember the world spinning, round and round, tree branches poking into broken windows, heat, pain, the sound of my co-driver—whom I was relieved to never have met in my afterlife—crying out for his mother. I remember being on the phone with D the day before the race in which I died. The distance between us laid a staticky veil over his voice. He said he had a bad feeling about where things were headed with the WRC. He knew of Ratzenberger’s and Senna’s recent deaths in Imola—it seemed that the whole world paused to grieve. He tried to persuade me to resign from the race, despite knowing better than anyone that I would never have listened. At last he sighed and made me promise to be careful. Thinking back, everything about that conversation was uncharacteristic of him. I… All these years, I have been avoiding the thoughts of what he must have gone through afterwards. I sprang up from the couch and hurried into the staff bathroom, to take a shower. As if water could wash away the feelings inside of me, too.