You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer.

A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts.

“Why did you leave?” you ask his vertebrae.

He does not answer, but there is movement in one of his eyes. It does not see you, but it moves as if it could. If you could transmute “want” into “miracle,” his optic nerve would magically connect with a nonexistent brain.

His brain. Yes, that soft cushion of nerves that once recognized your voice, that pinged with the same memories and joys as you like a shared window—that was the one thing you could not retrieve, the one thing she would not give up. That, and his heart.

She. She. She. You do not want to give her a name because to give her a name would be to acknowledge that she is real, and that is something you’re not yet ready to accept. You don’t have the nerves to take it. You’ve been raised to believe that something without a name does not really exist even when all its parts are swinging at you.

So you ask the incomplete body in front of you instead:

“What was it like with her on Mars?”

This is not the question you want to ask. What you actually want to know is:

“Did you ever love me?”

Love is a series of questions answered by the heart. Do you feel safe? Happy? Do you want this to end?

No. No. No.

What is an incomplete feeling? A contradictory feeling? Ambivalence isn’t what you’re looking for.

“I’m sorry,” you say to the incomplete body in front of you. It does not answer. It cannot forgive you. But forgiveness and love have nothing to do with each other.

• • • •

The distance from Earth to Mars is 191.62 million miles. This journey used to take seven months, but with innovations in nuclear propulsion and payload capacity, a body can make the journey in a little over a month now.

You too were gone for a month, sleeping in the alcove of a floating train station in New York City. You didn’t tell anyone. You ate handouts from kind strangers who passed through, people who didn’t know you, people you didn’t feel ashamed to lean on.

Just one month. That’s all you needed to find yourself again.

People have fallen out of love faster than it takes to walk across the sky between Queens and Manhattan, but you expected him to love you until the end of time.

A body doesn’t last nearly that long.

Still, when you returned to the house, smelling of the industrial soap from the floating station bathrooms, you expected to find him there.

Instead, you found a one-way ticket to Mars and an address, with a name you didn’t recognize.

You won’t speak that name.

She is not real.

You took the ticket and boarded the first flight to Mars. You sat in your ten-foot-by-ten-foot pod, staring out the rounded window into the starry burnt ashtray of space. One month was longer than you expected.

When you arrived at the address, she was there, but he was not. She did not speak your name, but she knew who you were. He had told her all about you, packed all those precious memories between the two of you into the folds of this stranger’s brain. Or at least she said so. Maybe this was her technique, you didn’t know. You didn’t trust her.

She was pretty. And you do not trust pretty.

She brought you parts. At first you didn’t understand. A cloth. A piece of bone. Then you did not want to understand. An eye. A slippery shred of liver.

What is the meaning of this? you asked.

You wanted this, she told you.

You fought the urge to turn to violence. Pretty things can lie; they do it all the time.

Where is he? you asked.

He?

She would not give you answers. Instead, she laid out all the parts so you could count. So you could confirm if this was the man you came to get. This was a transaction, and she wanted to know your transaction was complete.

He was missing many parts. Most of his face, a left hand, a hip bone. You did not know enough about anatomy to know what was missing, but you knew enough about him to know he was not complete. A brain. A heart. Where is his heart?

She told you this was all you get. This was everything. Everything he asked her to give you.

There was no negotiation.

So you took his incomplete body and got on the next ride back. You spent a month traveling through the stars with his incomplete body. You pressed his lips to yours, intertwined your legs with his, completing his body with your own. You could spend a lifetime in this way, connecting with him in a way you never could when he was whole.

When you arrived home, you laid him down on the bed the way he did for you whenever you needed to come back, like after the skywalk. You held his right hand in your left. You imagined holding his left hand in your right. You filled in the empty spaces with your memory of his body. Yes, you completed him, you thought.

“I love you,” you said.

But love was a series of questions that he could no longer answer without a heart.