About a month after she died I decided to open her chest and sort out her belongings. She didn’t have much—a winter cloak that doubled as a blanket, a pen and ink, some paints and brushes caught up in a scrappy paint-spattered rag, needles and thread, a scraper and a comb, another, finer comb with three broken teeth, a set of menstrual sponges. Underneath these things, all of which I had seen her use a million times and which seemed to miss the touch of her hands, was a pile of paper notebooks. I had seen her writing in them from time to time. “What are you doing?” I’d ask.
“Making notes,” she’d reply, shutting the book and putting it away. They were small, the standard little notebooks the Workers had produced and which we continued to produce now with rather more effort. They had buff covers and were sewn together. I had never realized how many of them she had. I counted—twelve. If they were full and each held five thousand words, which would be about right, that was sixty thousand words she had written. I expected them to be notes, perhaps dialogues. They had her name on the covers, and under that they were numbered with Roman numerals. I wasn’t sure how to read them—whether to glut myself on them all at once, or to save them. They represented something more of Simmea, which I had not expected. I was excited, and at the same time afraid of disappointment. I picked up the one labeled as number I and opened it and read.
“I was born in Amasta, a farming village near Alexandria, but I grew up in the Just City. My parents called me Lucia, after the saint, but Ficino renamed me Simmea, after the philosopher. Saint Lucy and Simmias of Thebes aid and defend me now!”
Whatever I had expected this was not it. I read the paragraph again. I had never known that her birth name was Lucia, nor guessed that she would have called on Saint Lucy. How little I had known her after all! But this was treasure, an autobiography. Many people in the city wrote one; there was a kind of fashion for them. Simmea had never told me she was writing one. I felt a little hurt, and yet still excited. She would be bound to talk about me. I could see our relationship from her perspective. It was the closest I could come now to talking to her. And yet I hesitated. Lucia, Saint Lucy—what if reading this proved I didn’t know her after all? What if she didn’t love me? But I knew she had. It was unquestionable. She had said once that she loved me like stones fall downward. I wanted to read her annals of our life together. I wouldn’t be able to show it to anyone except our Young Ones, because she was sure to have revealed that I was Apollo. How well I remembered her discovering it, that day in the Temple of Asklepius. How angry she had made Athene! What terrible consequences that had had! And it was all my fault. Yet even so, even in all its consequences that included the metamorphosis of Sokrates and the collapse of the First Republic, I still smiled to remember how well she had dealt with discovering who I was.
I read that first paragraph again, and this time I went on. I was brought up short again reading her pondering whether it might have been a better path to happiness for her to have lived out her life in the Egyptian Delta. “No,” I said aloud. I was astonished that she could even have considered that. Had I really known her? She had wanted, fiercely wanted, to be her best self, and surely her best self could only have been in this place and time?
I sat on her bed beside her chest, leaning back against the wall, and read the whole first notebook. When I read that she had said my name to Ficino in the slave market, I had to put the book down because I was sobbing too hard to go on. The first book brought her up to her arrival in the Just City and learning to read. Kebes was all through it, but she did not yet mention me as Pytheas. Every time I saw his name I felt a pang of jealousy. Kebes had known her name was Lucia—it didn’t suit her at all. She was Simmea, the name was perfect for who she was. Lucia sounded soft and hesitant, while Simmea’s mind had been like a surgical instrument. I remembered her smiling at me. Kebes was nothing. Matthias, she said his original name was. Well, he was gone. I didn’t know whether or not to believe that he’d been responsible for the raid in which she had been killed. We hadn’t heard anything from him for such a long time. Nobody knew where he was, or cared anything about him.
I took up the second notebook. I touched the letters of her name where she had written them in both alphabets. Simmea, not Lucia. I knew, with my rational self, that if I’d ever asked her what her childhood name had been she would have told me. That she never had showed how trivial it was, not how important. I turned the second book over in my hands. There were twelve books. If I read one a month they could last me a year, and for that long I could have a little more of her. If I had been my proper self that was what I would have done, one a month, or even one a year. But in mortal form, with emotions that pounded in my veins and clutched at my stomach, I could not bear the suspense of not knowing what she had written. I opened the second notebook.
It began with her learning to read, and to love Botticelli. It was far on into it before she mentioned me, and the time she taught me to swim. I was hurt that she had disliked me before she knew me, and then charmed by her description of that swimming lesson, which I remembered very well. I was surprised she was attracted to me so soon. The second book ended with our agreeing to be friends. I picked up the third, hesitated only for an instant, then opened it.
By the time Arete came to find out why I hadn’t been in Florentia for dinner I had read all but the last volume, and was up to the conversation we had with the Workers outside Thessaly. I remembered that time so well; Sokrates, and the robots becoming entranced with philosophy, and Simmea discovering my true identity. It was so exciting. It had felt as if we could unravel all the Mysteries and remake the world. The words were still engraved in the paving stones outside, I walked on them every day. “Read. Write. Learn.” And she belonged to the city and wanted it. And yes, she loved me, she saw me clearly and loved me. But I had always known that. I hadn’t known she felt unworthy of me whether I was god or mortal. And I never doubted that what she wrote was the truth. She never said that she held the truth above me—she didn’t need to. It was axiomatic to Simmea. That was the thing about her that was so hard to put into a song.
I went with Arete to Florentia and sat with Ficino as I ate porridge and fruit. He talked to me but I barely listened. My mind was with Sokrates and Simmea and a time that was twenty years gone. I missed that sense of infinite possibility, like a bud coming to flower. Everything after the Last Debate had been compromised. I wanted to go back and read the last notebook, even though I knew now that it would end before our life together, that I would never know more than I knew now of what she had thought of our Young Ones, never read about our one long-anticipated mating. I looked at Arete, the product of that one sexual act, who was eating grapes and talking to Ficino. I felt my eyes mist with tears. I had read about Simmea’s matings with Aeschines and Phoenix and Nikias. I hoped the one time we had sex together had fulfilled her anticipations. I thought it had, and she said it had, but unless she had packed more into the last notebook than the others, I would never know for sure.