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much at that moment, that fierce protectiveness, the fact someone, anyone, can look at you that way, can look at you and feel love.
    â€œNot everyone is doing it.”
    They’re sitting in a cafe outdoors and it is hot, it is very hot, and overhead, the twin Petronas Towers rise like silver rockets into the air. In the square outside KLCC, the water features twinkle in the sun and tourists snap photos and waiters glide like unenthusiastic penguins amongst the clientele. He drinks from his kopi ice and traces a trail of moisture on the face of the glass, slowly. “You are not dying ,” she says, at last, the words coming as from a great distance. He nods, reluctantly. It is true. He is not dying, not immediately anyway; only in the sense that all living things are dying, that there is a trajectory, the way a jalopy makes its slow but finite way from Earth to Mars. Speaking of jalopies, there is a stand under the awnings, for such stands are everywhere now, and a man shouting through the sound system to come one, come all and take the ultimate trip—and so on, and so forth.
    But more than that, implicit in her words is the question: is he dying? In the more immediate sense? “No,” he says. “But.”
    That word lies heavy in the hot and humid air.
    She is still attractive to him, even now: even after thirty years, three kids now grown and gone into the world, her hair no longer black all over but flecked with strands of white and grey, his own hair mostly gone, their hands, touching lightly across the table, both showing the signs of gravity and age. And how could he explain?
    â€œSpace,” he tries to say. “The dark starry night which is eternal and forever, or as long as these words mean something in between the beginning and the end of spaceandtime.” But really, is it selfish, is it not inherently selfish to want to leave, to go, up there and beyond—for what? It makes no sense, or no more sense than anything else you do or don’t.
    â€œResponsibility,” she says. “Commitment. Love, damn it, Haziq! You’re not a child, playing with toys, with, with … with spaceships or whatever. You have children, a family, we’ll soon have grandkids if I know Omar, what will they do without you?”
    These hypothetical people, not yet born, already laying demands to his time, his being. To be human is to exist in potentia, unborn responsibilities rising like butterflies in a great big obscuring cloud. He waves his hand in front of his face, but whether it is to shoo them away or because of the heat, he cannot say. “We always said we won’t stand in each other’s way,” he begins, but awkwardly, and she starts to cry, silently, making no move to wipe away the tears, and he feels a great tenderness but also anger, and the combination shocks him. “I have never asked for anything,” he says. “I have … Have I not been a good son, a good father, a good husband? I never asked for anything—” and he remembers sneaking away one night, five years before, and wandering the Petaling Street Market with television screens blaring and watching a launch, and a thin string of pearls, broken, scattered across space … Perhaps it was then, perhaps it was earlier, or once when he was a boy and he had seen pictures of a vast red planet unmarred by human feet …
    â€œWhat did I ask,” she says, “did I complain, did I aspire, did I not fulfil what you and I both wanted? Yes,” she says, “yes, it is selfish to want to go, and it is selfish to ask you to stay, but if you go, Haziq, you won’t come back. You won’t ever come back.”
    And he says, “I know,” and she shakes her head, and she is no longer crying, and there is that hard, practical look in her eyes, the one he was always a little bit afraid of. She picks up the bill and roots in her purse and brings out the money and