The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

  So, this was it. This was her life. Her root life.

  And it was a blank page.

  Nora stood there a moment, with her old school pen in hand. It was now nearly one minute after midnight.

  The other books on the shelf had become charcoal, and the hanging light bulb flickered through the dust, vaguely illuminating the fracturing ceiling. A large piece of ceiling around the light – roughly the shape of France – was looking ready to fall and crush her.

  Nora took the lid off the pen and pressed the open book against the charred stack of bookshelves.

  The ceiling groaned.

  There wasn’t long.

  She started to write. Nora wanted to live.

  Once she’d finished the inscription she waited a moment. Frustratingly, nothing happened, and she remembered what Mrs Elm had once said. Want is an interesting word. It means lack. So, she crossed that out and tried again.

  Nora decided to live.

  Nothing. She tried again.

  Nora was ready to live.

  Still nothing, even when she underlined the word ‘live’. Everywhere now, there was breakage and ruination. The ceiling was falling, razing everything, smothering each of the bookshelves into piles of dust. She gaped over and saw the figure of Mrs Elm, out from under the desk where she had been sheltering Nora, standing there without any fear at all then disappearing completely as the roof caved in almost everywhere, smothering remnants of fire and shelf stacks and all else.

  Nora, choking, couldn’t see anything at all now.

  But this part of the library was holding out, and she was still there.

  Any second now, everything would be gone, she knew it.

  So she stopped trying to think about what to write and, in sheer exasperation, just put down the first thing that came to her, the thing that she felt inside her like a defiant silent roar that could overpower any external destruction. The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbled hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person present tense.

  A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing.

  Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse.

  I AM ALIVE.

  And with that, the ground shook like fury and every last remnant of the Midnight Library dissolved into dust.

  Awakening

  At one minute and twenty-seven seconds after midnight, Nora Seed marked her emergence back into life by vomiting all over her duvet.

  Alive, but hardly.

  Choking, exhausted, dehydrated, struggling, trembling, heavy, delirious, pain in her chest, even more pain in her head, this was the worst life could feel, and yet it was life, and life was precisely what she wanted.

  It was hard, near impossible, to pull herself off the bed but she knew she had to get vertical.

  She managed it, somehow, and grabbed her phone but it seemed too heavy and slippy to keep a grasp of and it fell onto the floor beyond view.

  ‘Help,’ she croaked, staggering out of the room.

  Her hallway seemed to be tilting like it was a ship in a storm. But she reached the door without passing out, then dragged the chain lock off the latch and managed, after great effort, to open it.

  ‘Please help me.’

  She barely realised it was still raining as she stepped outside in her vomit-stained pyjamas, passing the step where Ash had stood a little over a day before to announce the news of her dead cat.

  There was no one around.

  No one that she could see. So she staggered towards Mr Banerjee’s house in a series of dizzy stumbles and lurches, eventually managing to ring the doorbell.

  A sudden square of light sprung out from the front window.

  The door opened.

  He wasn’t wearing his glasses and was confused maybe because of the state of her and the time of night.

  ‘I’m so very sorry, Mr Banerjee. I’ve done something very stupid. You’d better call an ambulance . . .’

  ‘Oh my lord. What on earth has happened?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll call one. Right away . . .’

  00:03:48

  And that is when she allowed herself to collapse, forwards and with considerable velocity, right onto Mr Banerjee’s doormat.

  The sky grows dark

  The black over blue

  Yet the stars still dare

  To shine for you

  The Other Side of Despair

  ‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

  It wasn’t raining any more.

  She was inside and sitting in a hospital bed. She had been put on a ward and had eaten and was feeling a lot better. The medical staff were pleased, following her physical examination. The tender abdomen was to be expected, apparently. She tried to impress the doctor by telling her a fact Ash had told her, about a stomach lining renewing itself every few days.

  Then a nurse came and sat on her bed with a clipboard and went through reams of questions relating to her state of mind. Nora decided to keep her experience of the Midnight Library to herself because she imagined that it wouldn’t go down too well on a psychiatric evaluation form. It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren’t yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service.

  The questions and answers continued for what felt like an hour. They covered medication, her mother’s death, Volts, losing her job, money worries, the diagnosis of situational depression.

  ‘Have you ever tried anything like this before?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘Not in this life.’

  ‘And how do you feel right now?’

  ‘I don’t know. A bit strange. But I don’t want to die any more.’

  And the nurse scribbled on the form.

  Through the window, after the nurse had gone, she watched the trees’ gentle movements in the afternoon breeze and distant rush-hour traffic shunt slowly along Bedford ring road. It was nothing but trees and traffic and mediocre architecture, but it was also everything.

  It was life.

  A little later she deleted her suicidal social media posts, and – in a moment of sincere sentimentality – she wrote something else instead. She titled it ‘A Thing I Have Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)’.

  A Thing I Have Learned

  (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)

  It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

  It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

  But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

  We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

  Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of
grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

  We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

  We only need to be one person.

  We only need to feel one existence.

  We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

  So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

  Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.

  The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

  Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No.

  But do I want to live?

  Yes. Yes.

  A thousand times, yes.

  Living Versus Understanding

  A few minutes later her brother came to see her. He’d heard the voicemail she’d sent him and had responded by text at seven minutes after midnight. ‘You okay, sis?’ Then, when the hospital contacted him, he’d caught the first train from London. He’d bought the latest issue of National Geographic for her while waiting at St Pancras station.

  ‘You used to love it,’ he told her, as he placed the magazine beside the hospital bed.

  ‘I still do.’

  It was good to see him. His thick eyebrows and reluctant smile still intact. He walked in a little awkward, head cowed, hair longer than it had been in the last two lives in which she had seen him.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been incommunicado recently,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t about what Ravi said it was about. I don’t even think about The Labyrinths any more. I was just in a weird place. After Mum died I was seeing this guy and we had a very messy break-up and I just didn’t want to have to talk to you or, recently, to anyone about it. I just wanted to drink. And I was drinking too much. It was a real problem. But I’ve started getting help for it. I haven’t had a drink for weeks. I go to the gym and everything now. I’ve started a cross-training class.’

  ‘Oh Joe, poor you. I’m sorry about the break-up. And everything else.’

  ‘You’re all I’ve got, sis,’ he said, his voice cracking a little. ‘I know I haven’t valued you. I know I wasn’t always the best, growing up. But I had my own shit going on. Having to be a certain way because of Dad. Hiding my sexuality. I know it wasn’t easy for you but it wasn’t easy for me either. You were good at everything. School, swimming, music. I couldn’t compete . . . Plus Dad was Dad and I had to be this fake vision of whatever he thought a man was.’ He sighed. ‘It’s weird. We both probably remember it in different ways. But don’t leave me, okay? Leaving the band was one thing. But don’t leave existence. I couldn’t cope with that.’

  ‘I won’t if you won’t,’ she said.

  ‘Trust me, I’m not going anywhere.’

  She thought of the grief that had floored her when she had heard about Joe’s death by overdose in São Paulo, and she asked him to hug her, and he obliged, delicately, and she felt the living warmth of him.

  ‘Thanks for trying to jump in the river for me,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I always thought you didn’t. But you tried. They pulled you back. Thank you.’

  He suddenly knew what she was talking about. And maybe more than a little confused about how she knew this, when she had been swimming away from him. ‘Ah, sis. I love you. We were young fools.’

  Joe nipped out for an hour. Picked up the keys from her landlord, collected his sister’s clothes and phone.

  She saw that Izzy had texted. Sorry I didn’t get back last night/this morning. I wanted a proper discussion! Thesis antithesis synthesis. The whole works. How are you? I miss you. Oh, and guess what? I’m thinking of coming back to the UK in June. For good. Miss you, my friend. Also, have a TON of humpback pics coming your way. xxx

  Nora made a slight noise of involuntary joy at the back of her throat.

  She texted back. It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.

  She went on the Facebook page of the International Polar Research Institute. There was a photograph of the woman she had shared a cabin with – Ingrid – standing with the field leader Peter, using a thin measuring drill to gauge the thickness of sea ice, and a link to an article headlined ‘IPRI research confirms last decade warmest on record for Arctic region’. She shared the link. And posted a comment: ‘Keep up the great work!’ And decided that when she earned some money, she would donate.

  It was agreed that Nora could go home. Her brother ordered an Uber. As they were pulling out of the car park Nora saw Ash driving into the hospital. He must have been on a late shift. He had a different car in this life. He didn’t see her, despite her smile, and she hoped he was happy. She hoped he only had an easy shift of gall bladders ahead of him. Maybe she would go along and watch him in the Bedford half-marathon on Sunday. Maybe she would ask him out for a coffee.

  Maybe.

  In the back of the car, her brother told her he was looking for some freelance session work.

  ‘I’m thinking of becoming a sound engineer,’ he said. ‘Vaguely, anyway.’

  Nora was happy to hear this. ‘Well, I think you should do it. I think you’d like it. I don’t know why. I’ve just got a feeling.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I mean, it might not be as glamorous as being an international rock star, but it might be . . . safer. Maybe even happier.’

  That was a tough sell, and Joe wasn’t entirely buying it. But he smiled and nodded to himself. ‘Actually, there’s a studio in Hammersmith and they’re looking for sound engineers. It’s only five minutes from me. I could walk it.’

  ‘Hammersmith? Yes. That’s the one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, I just think it sounds good. Hammersmith, sound engineer. It sounds like you’d be happy.’

  He laughed at her. ‘Okay, Nora. Okay. And that gym I was telling you about? It’s right next door to the place.’

  ‘Ah, cool. Any nice guys there?’

  ‘Actually, yes, there is one. He’s called Ewan. He’s a doctor. He goes to cross-training.’

  ‘Ewan! Yes!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You should ask him out.’

  Joe laughed, thinking Nora was just being playful. ‘I’m not even one hundred per cent sure he’s gay.’

  ‘He is! He’s gay. He is one hundred per cent gay. And one hundred per cent into you. Dr Ewan Langford. Ask him out. You have to trust me! It will be the best thing you ever do . . .’

  Her brother laughed as the car pulled up at 33A Bancroft Avenue. He paid, on account of Nora still having no money and no wallet.

  Mr Banerjee sat at his window, reading.

  Out on the street, Nora saw her brother staring in astonishment down at his phone.

  ‘What’s up, Joe?’

  He could hardly speak. ‘Langford . . .’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Dr Ewan Langford. I didn’t even know his surname was Langford but that’s him.’

  Nora shrugged. ‘Sibling intuition. Add him. Follow him. DM him. Whatever you have to do. Well, no unsolicited nude pics. But he’s the one, I’m telling you. He’s the one.’

  ‘But how did you know it was him?’

  She took her brother by the arm, and knew there was no explanation she could possibly give. ‘Listen to me, Joe.’ She remembered the anti-philosophy of Mrs Elm in the Midnight Library. ‘You don’t have to understand life. You
just have to live it.’

  As her brother headed towards the door of 33A Bancroft Avenue, Nora looked around at all the terraced houses and all the lampposts and trees under the sky, and she felt her lungs inflate at the wonder of being there, witnessing it all as if for the first time. Maybe in one of those houses was another slider, someone on their third or seventeenth or final version of themselves. She would look out for them.

  She looked at number 31.

  Through his window Mr Banerjee’s face slowly lit up as he saw Nora safe and sound. He smiled and mouthed a ‘thank you’, as if simply her act of living was something he should be grateful for. Tomorrow, she would find some money and go to the garden centre and buy him a plant for his flowerbed. Foxgloves, maybe. She was sure he liked foxgloves.

  ‘No,’ she called back, blowing him a friendly kiss. ‘Thank you, Mr Banerjee! Thank you for everything!’

  And he smiled broader, and his eyes were full of kindness and concern, and Nora remembered what it was to care and be cared for. She followed her brother inside her flat to start tidying up, catching a glimpse of the clusters of irises in Mr Banerjee’s garden as she went. Flowers she hadn’t appreciated before, but which now mesmerised her with the most exquisite purple she had ever seen. As though the flowers weren’t just colours but part of a language, notes in a glorious floral melody, as powerful as Chopin, silently communicating the breathtaking majesty of life itself.

  The Volcano

  It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life. The one she began and ended with.

  This biggest and most profound shift happened not by becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals.