Eternal Union

The glue took us at 3:14 in the morning, and I knew the exact minute because the clock on my nightstand was the only thing in the room still moving.

Her name was Vera. I'd known her for four hours.

We weren't in love. Let's get that straight before anything else, because the word gets thrown around like it explains what happened, and it doesn't. Love is a choice you make over years. This was a chemical fact. This was two bodies deciding, without consulting the people inside them, that they were done being two bodies.

The Maxim Institute calls it permanent bonding. The street calls it getting glued. Nobody calls it by its clinical name unless they're filling out a form at the clinic, and by then it's too late anyway, because the clinic can't do anything except take your information and hand you a pamphlet about coping strategies. Coping strategies. Like you can cope your way out of being fused to another human being at the hips.

I met her at a bar called The Anchor, which is funny in a way that stopped being funny around sunrise. She was sitting alone with a gin and tonic and a book she wasn't reading. I noticed her because she was the only person in the place who wasn't looking at her phone or pretending to have a good time. She had this way of holding her glass, both hands wrapped around it like it was the last warm thing in the world.

I sat down two stools away. Not next to her. Two stools. That's a decision I've replayed maybe ten thousand times since. Two stools of distance, like that was going to matter.

"You're staring," she said, without looking up from the book.

"I'm admiring," I said.

"Same thing with better manners."

That was the first thing she ever said to me. I remember it because I remember everything about those four hours, every stupid detail, like how the bar smelled of spilled beer and lemon cleaner, how her hair was pulled back with a clip that had a crack in it, how she laughed at her own joke before I did. The Maxim Institute says the memory consolidation starts within minutes of bonding. Your brain decides this person matters and starts filing everything away with the urgency of a drowning man.

We talked about nothing. That's the thing nobody tells you. The bonding doesn't happen during some grand romantic moment. It happens during nothing. She told me about her sister's wedding, which she'd skipped. I told her about my father's boat, which he'd sold the year before he died. She said she hated the smell of the ocean. I said I did too, which was a lie, but it felt true in that moment, and maybe that's the same thing.

At some point her knee touched mine under the bar. Neither of us moved away. The bartender, a guy with a neck tattoo and the exhausted eyes of someone who'd seen this before, looked at us and then looked at the clock. He didn't say anything. What was there to say.

We left together at 2:30. Her apartment was closer. Three blocks through air that had turned cold and wet, the kind of night that soaks through your jacket before you notice. She walked fast. I walked fast to keep up. Neither of us said anything about where we were going because we both knew.

Her apartment was small. One bedroom, a kitchen with dishes in the sink, a window that looked out onto a brick wall. She didn't apologize for any of it, which I liked. She just kicked off her shoes and went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of water, and I stood in her living room looking at her bookshelf, which was mostly poetry and true crime, an odd combination that made me want to know everything about her.

"You can sit," she said.

So I sat.

We didn't make it to the bed. We didn't even make it to the couch. The floor was fine. The floor was more than fine. I remember the rug was rough against my back and she was above me and the only light came from the streetlamp outside her window, and I remember thinking, this is it, this is the moment, and then I stopped thinking altogether.

The glue doesn't feel like glue at first. That's the cruelest part. It feels like heat, like the best kind of heat, like your whole body is finally waking up after years of sleep. It feels like recognition. Like you've been looking for this person your whole life and didn't know it until now.

And then it hardens.

I felt it at 3:14. A tightening, a locking, like a fist closing around something it would never let go. Vera gasped. Not a good gasp. A scared one. She tried to pull away and couldn't. I tried to pull away and couldn't. We were stuck. Not just physically. I could feel her heartbeat through my own skin, through the place where we were joined, and it was fast and wrong and I knew, in that moment, that everything had changed.

"What's happening," she said. Not a question. A demand.

"I don't know."

"You don't know? You don't know?"

"I don't know."

She tried to pull away again. The pain was sharp, like a nerve exposed, like something tearing that shouldn't tear. I grabbed her hips to stop her, not to hold her, just to stop the pain, and she went still.

We stayed like that for a long time. Minutes. Maybe an hour. The clock on her nightstand ticked. The streetlamp flickered. Somewhere in the building, a pipe groaned.

"This is permanent," she said finally. "Isn't it."

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. We both knew.

The Maxim Institute was founded in 1987 to study what they called "spontaneous biological fusion." Before that, people just disappeared. Couples who got stuck together and couldn't be separated, who were hidden away by families or locked in institutions or, in some places, killed. The Institute was supposed to be a solution. A cure. But there is no cure. There's only management. There's only learning to live with it.

I'd read the pamphlets. Everyone had. They showed you in health class, grainy videos of couples who'd been bonded for decades, sitting in matching chairs, finishing each other's sentences. They made it look peaceful. They made it look like a choice.

They didn't show you the ones who couldn't stand each other. The ones who spent forty years trapped with someone they hated, unable to walk to the bathroom alone, unable to sleep without feeling the other person's breath on their neck. They didn't show you the ones who went mad. The ones who tried to cut themselves apart, which doesn't work, by the way. The glue goes deeper than skin. It goes down to the bone.

Vera was crying. I could feel it through our connection, the way her chest hitched, the way her tears hit my shoulder. I didn't know what to say. What do you say to a stranger you're going to spend the rest of your life with? What do you say to someone you'll never be able to leave, someone who'll be there when you wake up and when you fall asleep and every moment in between?

"I have a sister," she said. "She's going to think I'm dead."

"You're not dead."

"I might as well be."

She wasn't wrong. That's the thing about the glue. It doesn't kill you. It just takes away everything you were before. Your privacy. Your solitude. Your ability to be alone with your own thoughts. From now on, every thought would be shared. Every feeling would be felt twice.

I thought about my apartment, three blocks away, with the dishes I hadn't washed and the book I was halfway through and the life I'd built for myself, small and quiet and mine. I'd never see it again. Not really. Not the way I had before.

"Vera," I said.

"What."

"I'm sorry."

She laughed. It was a horrible sound, wet and broken and furious. "Sorry. You're sorry."

"I don't know what else to say."

"Say you'll kill me. Say you'll find a way to kill me."

"I can't."

"You can't? Or you won't?"

I didn't answer. Because the truth was, I didn't know. I didn't know what I was capable of. I didn't know what either of us was capable of. We were strangers. We were stuck. We were, according to the law, married.

The Maxim Institute would find us eventually. They always did. They'd take our information, run their tests, give us our pamphlet. They'd assign us a counselor. They'd tell us about the support groups, the couples who'd made it work, the techniques for managing conflict when you can't walk away. They'd tell us it wasn't the end of the world.

But it felt like the end of the world. It felt like the end of everything.

Vera stopped crying. She lifted her head and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time since we'd left the bar. Her eyes were red and swollen and angry. But underneath the anger, there was something else. Something I recognized.

Fear. The same fear I felt.

"We're going to have to trust each other," she said.

"I know."

"I don't trust anyone."

"Neither do I."

She nodded. Slowly. Like she was filing that information away, adding it to the list of things she knew about me, the list that would only grow from here. The list that would never stop growing.

The sun was coming up. I could see it through the crack in her curtains, a thin line of gray that meant morning was coming whether we wanted it or not. The world was still turning. People were waking up, making coffee, going to jobs, living their lives. They had no idea. They had no idea what was happening in this small apartment, on this rough rug, between two people who'd met four hours ago and would never be apart again.

Vera shifted her weight. The glue pulled, a dull ache that radiated through both of us. She winced. I winced.

"We need to figure out how to move," she said.

"I know."

"Together."

"I know."

She took a breath. Then another. I felt her heartbeat slow, felt her body relax, felt her decide, in that moment, to survive. It was the bravest thing I'd ever witnessed.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Let's try."

We tried. It took twenty minutes to get off the floor. It took another hour to figure out how to use the bathroom. It took the rest of the morning to stop crying.

By noon, we had a plan. We'd call the Institute. We'd tell them what happened. We'd do what they said. We'd learn to live with it.

But even then, even in that first day, I knew it wouldn't be that simple. Because the glue doesn't just bind your bodies. It binds your lives. Your futures. Your everything. And there was no way to know, not yet, what that would mean.

Vera was standing at her kitchen window, looking out at the brick wall, and I was standing behind her, my chest against her back, my arms around her waist. We'd learned that this position worked. It was comfortable. It was the only thing that was.

"What are you thinking," she said.

"I'm thinking about the ocean."

"The ocean?"

"My father's boat. You said you hated the smell of the ocean. I lied. I love it."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Maybe we can go there. Someday."

"Maybe."

It wasn't a promise. It wasn't hope. It was just a word, a small word, a word that meant nothing and everything. Someday. Like someday we'd figure this out. Like someday we'd be okay.

The clock on her nightstand ticked. The streetlamp outside had turned off hours ago. The world was still turning, and we were still stuck, and neither of us knew what came next.

But we were still here. Both of us. Together.

For now, that was enough.