Not all the trees are the same

                Ïåðåâåëà Ìàðèÿ Ìèëëåð Ñòîóí


     Looking back, I constantly remember that night.
     It was love at first word. Love at first sight was impossible.
On that fateful evening, like all the other men at my work, I received a perfume bottle for my wife, Chanel of course, this time, number five hundred (as the age-old brand is famous for producing a new version each year). I was drifting home through the tunnel, and I positively wasn’t expecting anything. I knew exactly how the evening would go.
In a snug home (this is anachronism, of course, but that’s the way the financier who’d invested in our building wanted it to be), in the clean and shiny kitchen, there is a stunningly beautiful woman waiting for me. The table is set. Both the home and the woman are not the same as they were yesterday; although sometimes I’m starting to doubt it. Once I open the door, she always says the same line: “Good evening, honey! Are you tired? Dinner is served.”
     Although, a simple glance out the window in enough to dispel all doubts – as the dark silhouettes of the trees slowly blur by. Subject to the random bit generator, the gigantic sphere dotted by buildings is spinning day and night. Sometimes, it would speed up or slow down…or occasionally, it would stop for a moment, and then, start spinning backwards.
Where the huge business center where we (the men) work, and the tube tunnels leading to the homes, reminiscent of side wings in some vintage airport, remain unmoved. Hence why, yesterday’s home just as today’s woman were history.
     Sometimes, I would barely suppress the urge to say something rude in return to the every-night cheerful greeting. But all I allowed myself was a question:
     “What’s your name?”
     Their reaction would always be the same – a frightful puzzlement. Sure thing. Names had been canceled two hundred years ago.
I was fully aware what I was risking, asking this question. Some day, one of those radiantly smiling identical women would decide to turn me in. Then again, who knows, perhaps, it was exactly what I wanted…
I’ve recently stopped caring about anything. Anything that could happen would be better than this. Two hundred years straight, they’d meet you with the same words. I’m not sure you can even imagine what it feels like.
That night, when I came in, I was surprised – the light in the kitchen was off.
      At first, I didn’t notice her in the dark. She was standing by the window.
“Good evening,” I said, flicking on the light.
She stood half-turned to me, her arms crossed on her chest, blankly staring at the blurring by silhouettes of the trees, and didn’t move a muscle. She was stunningly beautiful, just the same as everyone else. The table was not set.
     “What’s with the dinner?” I blurted.
“There’s no dinner,” she said defiantly, whisking past me and retreating into the bedroom, making it perfectly clear that I was irritating her.
I was stunned by her words and the searing look she’d given me.
Our kitchen is equipped with household appliances, and groceries coming through a hole in the wall, which makes the cooking easy. Which was exactly what I did, feeling offended. But…her behavior had made me feel so nostalgic! It brought me back the good old days, two hundred something years ago. I felt like a guilty husband who’d came home late. I still remember those times, while the young ones most certainly don’t.
Anyhow, ‘the young’ is relative. All the men have the same perfectly young appearance. All the women are identical sisters of Miss Universe 2200.
They’d argued so vehemently on which appearance to choose for the women, and which for the men! All of our men are equally handsome, in the image and likeness of Mr. Universe of said year. The only reason why women differ from men, and why the one and the other still exist, is obviously due to the fact (I’m not certain but I suspect) that the financier, whose beauty standards were realized here, is a hardcore skirt-chaser. 
Our birthdays are also celebrated on the same day. So that no one would feel offended. The gifts we’d give each other are the same. The wives would present a bottle of vintage cognac (it didn’t take me long to figure that it was counterfeit) Hennessey plus Equality. The husbands would give their wives perfume, strictly Chanel. Sure enough, all of our women smell of Chanel, while the men exude the odor of…hmm…equality.
Anyhow, the ‘wives’, the ‘husbands’…it’s archaism. The word remains, but back in the day, a woman, who every next day shifted together with her home from man to man, would probably be called differently. In here, it all makes sense. If it weren’t for such ‘shifts’ people could get attached. So much for ‘equality’ then.
     I had my dinner alone and then, giftwrap in hand, stepped in to the bedroom. She was standing there peering out the window, into the darkness where you could barely make out the floating black contours of the trees. Once in a while, the light of the brightly glowing R letter, which drifted by amid the trees, would illuminate her face.
You’re supposed to report unusual behavior. It happened for the first time in ten years. Anyhow, I don’t give a damn about their rules.
All of a sudden, she said something. No, I hadn’t heard it wrong. Gazing out the window, she uttered pensively:
“Not all the trees are the same.”
     For a while, I was silent, stunned by her thoughtless audacity, and, even more, by the fact that she had actually noticed it.
     “Right,” I said, “not all of them.”
She winced, turning towards me abruptly. Looking at me with hostility, she asked, “Are you gonna rat me out?”
     “No. Although it looks like you want me to.”
     “You know what?” she continued firmly. “I don’t give a damn.”
She just couldn’t have said anything more shocking.
     “I’m very happy,” I said.
     “You don’t get it, you idiot. I’m not afraid of you. I really don’t care.”
     “Well, I do now. You must be so tired. Let’s get undressed and go to bed.”
     “Tired,” she repeated irritably, parroting me. “Let’s get undressed! Go to bed! ...I’ll sleep out in the guest room.”
Guest room. That’s right, there is a ‘guest room’ in the house. Except for the guests… It makes no sense. People invite guests to see and to be seen, as they say. As you will appreciate, in our case all you have to do is look in the mirror, and there’s your ‘guest’.
She was irritated. I’d never thought about it before, but apparently, my words had been no different from the words any other ‘Mr. Universe’ would say.
     I awkwardly offered her the neat giftwrap containing the perfume.
     “There. It’s a gift…”
     “No,” she said, “it’s not.”
     “Huh? Why not?”
     “All that is given to everyone equally is not a gift.”
     She gave me another contemptuous look and faced away.
I set the wrapper next to her, on the windowsill. We kept quiet as we looked outside at the moving silhouettes of the trees.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
     I suddenly realized that it was exactly what I had to ask.
She flinched. Her expression was so bewildered if the sphere had suddenly spun off its axes (the axes…another anachronism, hard to explain).
She stared at me incredulously for a long while. At last, she said quietly:
“I always wanted to have a name.”
“What did I tell you? You’re tired of waiting for me. Well… You have no reasons to trust me. Same here. Then I guess there’s only one thing left. We have to risk trusting each other. Or not to risk. Your call. What do we possibly have to lose? It’s all the same. So is life and death. Your call. We’re short of time. Only till the dawn.
I shed my clothes and tucked into bed. In a while, without saying a word, she also stripped off and obediently lay down beside me. 
For a while, we lay in silence. The rain quietly pattered behind the window. Something significant was happening… For one thing (this is how it looked minus the trees), this was my wife to whom I’d been married for over two hundred years, and she just as I hadn’t changed at all. We don’t age, we don’t die of diseases. There are simply no more diseases. There’s only execution as punishment.
For another thing, lying next to me was the one. The more distinctly I realized it the stronger the fear washed over me, the presentiment of an impending loss of this moment. A criminal moment, the one you’d say, “stop” to.
     Finally, she broke the silence:
     “I can’t believe it.”
     We both knew that tomorrow, the sphere would mercilessly take her away from me in its unhurried rotation. Tomorrow night, when I come home from work, another woman, her dead ringer, would never say, and would never believe me if I tell her that there might be something which is not the same.
“From now on, I’ll be counting my blessings,” she whispered.
“Bless the random bit generator,” I said and then added, “darling…”
For the first time in the last two hundred years, I felt like saying this word.
Our criminal night didn’t last long. You do understand that time is measured not in hours and minutes but in the events. But it slipped away just like a dream. By the dawn, we gave each other names. It was the crime punishable by death.
Before we parted, we’d agreed upon a sign we would give each other when we met again, the password.
Something’s changed since then.
Each night, I drift home through the tunnel, anticipating what the new miss would say to my greeting. I come in and constantly say the same line.
I wonder if they even hear what I tell them. They know perfectly well, they boned it up at school that all the things are the same. Hence why they fail to notice the evident things behind the window. To my usual greeting, they’d answer glibly:
“Good evening, honey. Are you tired? Dinner is served.”
Not that I’d ever planned or still panning to be faithful to her, but I never gave her perfume to any other woman. The other women… Sometimes I’d merely goof on them. They look exactly like her, and that gives me flickering hope up until the moment they open their mouths to speak.
I wait patiently until the gigantic wheel executing its great circular motion, under the law claiming that rare events happen twice, will bring her back to me.
Who knows, maybe it will take another two hundred years. But one night, I’ll walk into the right door. I’ll say to the woman who’s waiting for me:
“Not all the trees are the same.”
She will smile at me and say:
“I know.”
I really count on the random bit generator.
I have everything ready to elope.