“Do you promise? Is that true?”
“I wouldn’t lie now. I wouldn’t do that.”
“And will I ever see you?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said, wrapping his arms around me, so tight, so held, it seemed unthinkable that soon he would be gone. “I don’t know. But I’ll be everywhere.”
“I’ll always look for you,” I said.
He gave one last sad smile.
“How does it end? Where will you go?”
“You’ll see.” He grabbed my hand. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m tired now.”
I should have known it would have to be like that, the way he left. Something as unstoppable and inevitable and irresistible as sleep. A door between one world and another. The thing that breaks off from this Now and starts a new one over. Nothing you could argue with. Sleep always comes, in the end, and takes you, whether you want it to or not. It’s what you’d die without, even if it also kills you.
At the very end, in my bed, I watched as his astonishing, electric beauty began to calm and empty, his frown dissolving, eyelids softening and going still. Such a privilege to witness. So proud that he would let me see. I felt him starting to go, almost falling anyway, until at the very last moment his whole body jumped, a controlled explosion, that drop that wakes you when you fall somewhere in a dream, that static, Frankenstein jolt. I saw it and I saw the near-miss in his eyes when he opened them, his pupils bottoming out, and I thought, He’s not going. He can’t leave. He’s going to stay here with me.
“Look for me in London,” he said. “I can see it. Dark and all the lights are doubled in the water on the deep-puddled road. The dips and channels are full of fresh rain, the pavements and potholes and the lull of the curb. I am waiting to cross. That’s the start. I can feel the weight of the people behind me, pushing forward, thinking ahead, always ahead. This little island in the road is crammed with them, full to capacity and more coming. A taxi takes the corner close, the bus after it at a wider angle, and then a white van hits a puddle just right and sends the water in a high arc like an opening fan.
“You are next to me, reading a book. I feel you there before I see you. All this noise and downpour and rush hour and thunder and you are standing at the very edge of the curb, older than you are now, separate and quiet, just reading. There are raindrops on your glasses and in the wet they are slipping and you push them back to the bridge of your nose and you aren’t there, not really, not in this darkening street on this grimy, beautiful evening. Neither of us is there. You are no more there than I am. You are lost in that book.
“The island crowd surges forward and the surge pushes you into the road, tips you over the square edge, thoughtless, and the driver trying to beat the lights hasn’t noticed you tipping, your center of gravity shifted already, the start of your fall. Not high, that curb, but dangerous enough. Behind me, somebody sees you. Somebody gasps, and the car chases down the space between you, heads straight for you as you look up from your page and meet reality in that heartbeat, take it all in. I can move faster than any car. My arm is a turnstile, unyielding. I stop you. It’s what I am here for, to stop you. To keep you safe, in your book. It sweeps past, and I pretend that you will remember it, when I’m gone—won’t be long now—I tell myself that you will remember the strong shut gate of my arm.”
I wanted him to say something more, to keep talking, but he didn’t. He looked at me and he opened his arms and I lay against him, and in the end, we closed our eyes at the same time and our breathing fell in together and it was calm and soft and slow.
Neither of us said a word in that Now, while the universe went on expanding beyond belief all around us, because we knew that what we said next would have to be the perfect thing, or nothing at all.
TWENTY-FOUR
I dreamed it was the first of July. I knew it before I knew it, and I was reading in a patch of sunlight, without taking in the meaning of the words. Nine thirty-three and in my dream I was expecting Novo to get here, tall in his black clothes, in his big black car. I was in that Now and I was also watching it, lining it up next to so many others, thinking, This is how it will go. The garbage truck in the road, jaws grinding. Someone’s cat in a patch of sunlight. The gulls and the old happy-ever-after couple and the woman opposite-but-one and Henry this time, the only difference, a Henry I knew better than anyone, somewhere in the house, calling my name. I held my breath and I waited, and every leaf and feather and blade of grass waited with me, for the thing that was about to happen. Red letter, highlighter pen, page corner, clear as glass. But Novo didn’t come, and something was swallowing me at the edges when I woke up, something vast, all that absence.
Alone in my bed, the memory of him was still there on my body, only hours old. His warm breath, the soft meat of his flesh, the inside of his elbows, the taste of his mouth. I heard his voice and his catching laughter. I saw him smiling, saw the glint in his quick, dark eyes.
That’s all I can say about that, hitting overwhelm, falling apart. When you’re swallowed by a whale you can’t talk about it until it spits you out, until it lets you go, and you remember to swim up and try looking for the light.
TWENTY-FIVE
Later, Henry knocked on my door and I didn’t answer but he came in anyway, and he pulled a chair up to the edge of the bed and sat down.
I kept my eyes closed and I listened to him breathing and we were quiet like that for a long time, because I had nothing. I was nothing. I didn’t know what to say.
Novo’s face was filling my head, getting closer and closer until he wasn’t his likeness anymore, just a dark collection of shapes, and I remember thinking, Is that what he is now—not the same, not here, but somewhere else entirely, diffuse, like ink in water? And is that what I have to hold on to, best-case scenario? All I can hope for? I pictured myself destroying everything—this room, this house, this stupid little town—and I breathed and breathed and waited for the film of it to stop playing on a loop in my head.
“Talk to me,” Henry said.
“You’re the only person who knows,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You’re the only one I can talk to.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I’m so tired,” I told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.”
“I know,” he said.
“He’s gone, Henry. I sent him away. I have to carry that forever now.”
A lost cause, lifelong burden, same as my stupid, sad name.
“I know, Jude.”
I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling and my tears ran straight down onto my pillow, pooled quietly in the cups of my ears.
“What happens next?” I said. “What am I supposed to do now?”
Henry shifted in his chair. He cleared his throat and spoke quietly. “Time will pass unbearably slowly,” he said. “The days will feel worn out before they start and lead-heavy and there will be no room for the size of what you feel.”
“Nothing compares, you said.”
“No, Jude. Nothing will. And you will feel like there will always be something wrong with you—the same hurt, the same lack—and that the feeling will last forever, until you stop feeling anything at all.”
I sat up. “Help me,” I said. “I made the wrong decision.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Well, it feels like that. I don’t know what to do.”
“Why did you let him go?” he asked me.
“What?”
“You wanted to fall with him.”
“Yes. Of course I did. I still do. I still want it.”
“So what stopped you?”
“You did,” I said. “You told me the truth. I couldn’t trap him. I couldn’t do that, not to him.”
I lay on my bed and looked up at the sky and I remember thinking it had no sense of occasion, no business being so blue.
“But I can’t do this either,” I said.
“You will be sad,” Henry said. “Of course you will. For a long time, Jude. And you must be.”
“I’ll never not be. And what about him?” I said. “I worry about him. How he is feeling. He’ll be so lonely, Henry. He’ll be the loneliest.”
Henry sighed. He patted my arm. “Didn’t he tell you that he’s always known you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you he’s found you before? The other times you met?”
“Yes,” I said. “He told me.”
“And did you know that he was there? At the time?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t know him until this time.”
“So how can you be sure that he’s not here right now?” Henry said. “I mean, here, in this room, right now, for the smallest possible fraction of a second? How could you know that he will never be with you again?”
“Is that possible?”
Henry laughed, just a little. “You and I both know for a fact that everything is.”
“You promise?” I said.
“Trust me, Jude,” Henry Lake said. “The worst has already happened and you are still here. Still breathing. You did the right thing.”
I was quiet then. I hated how awful doing the right thing made me feel.
“Those pins on the map,” he said. “They were places Dulcie and I could only talk about, at the end. Could only dream about seeing. The grief she felt, every day, when she saw what was going to happen to me, without her. I had her. A whole lifetime. And now I’m stuck. I can never move. Never change. Only grow older and never die. And I would do it again. I would give her everything. I had no choice. But she did. She just didn’t know what it would cost me.”
I listened. I wanted what he said to filter through what had set inside me, like the way water drips through rock and changes it. I wondered if it would take as long.
“The catch,” I said. “The downside.”
“Novo came for you,” Henry said. “He would have given up his life. Same as I have. But you saved him, Jude. You saved him. You freed him. And yourself too. I have never been prouder of anything or anyone in my endless life. And one day, yes, I promise, because of that, you are going to be fine.”
TWENTY-SIX
Henry Lake was right. Of course he was. I survived the equation of love plus loss. I am fine. I’m still here. Still bleeding. It starts off in a parallel place, recovery. Like when you’re lying in bed and everything is bone-heavy and the sky has no business being blue and you don’t see the point of any of it but you picture yourself, a part of yourself, getting up and eating breakfast and getting on with your day like you ought to, and then one day you do it. One day you actually do.
He offered me a way out before I wanted one.
“I’m a rich man,” he told me, a few months after Novo, when everything still felt like a bruise and it was all I could do to get out of bed in the afternoon and put one foot in front of the other. “I’m a rich man with nowhere to go. All I have are these pins on a map. When you’re ready, if you are ever ready, come to me and I’ll help. We can plan your next adventure.”
There was a morning.
I walked out of town alone on the coast path and when it got narrow I put one foot in front of the other and I smiled to myself that I could do this, that I had come this far without Novo and that this was happening. Life was happening again. Just to me. On my own.
Up at the top, a different wind bit and different old people sat in the still dim of their cars, looking out at the view. The ice-cream van hunkered down against the cold blasts, its generator humming and grumbling. I ducked round the side of it in the little carpark, climbed over the fence, and half slid, half scrambled down that same path to the wide gray ledge flecked with bird shit.
The sea to my left was vast and quick and rhythmic, and below me it rolled and slapped with the same rhythm, the whole world on a loop, filling and receding in that narrow deep well, that perfect blue-green O that Novo had brought me to, backlit by pale sand, like the seabed itself was a source of light.
I was scared this time, because I was alone, and he couldn’t save me. But I pretended not to be. I told myself I wasn’t. I told myself that the time with him in it was still happening somewhere. We were still in it. I could be without him, be without the object of love and still have the love. Mine to keep. That’s what I told myself.
I leaned into the void and instead of diving I jumped and the water when I hit it was still the earsplitting cold of feedback and sheet ice and sharp metal. And my heart stopped, my chest locked, and my brain seized, and I thought again, I have forgotten how to breathe, if I was thinking anything at all. And then like a cork I came back to the surface and the ear split was my own voice this time, laughing and squealing, shouting at all of it, telling myself, “Again! Again! Oh my GOD, Jude! AMAZING. Let’s do it again!”
And that’s when I knew that I could go anywhere. Be anywhere. And that I had to. Because by letting him go, I had set us both free. Both of us. Not just Novo. And that freedom is the antidote to heartbreak. The only known cure.
I went straight home to tell Henry, and Mum was on her way out to work. A changed woman, my mum. A good job. A town full of friends. This last move had been the best thing for her.
“Good swim?” she said, messing up my salty hair. “The suntan on you, Jude. You look good. You’re looking better.”
“I’ll walk with you,” I said, and she put her arm around my waist, and we went down the path together and opened the gate. Across the road, Mrs. Midler’s house had new owners. They didn’t know a magic boy had scaled the face of it like a lizard. They had no idea I had watched him sit on the highest windowsill, and followed him into town, and that everything else had sprung from that moment, everything I felt and thought and was.
“What’s your plan?” Mum said, and she meant, like, that afternoon, but I told her anyway.
“I’m going away,” I said.
“Really? Where?”
“You know. Traveling. I want to see some World.”
She looked at me for a second. “Good idea.”
Passed the war memorial and the charity shop. Mum smiled at me. “Henry will be pleased,” she said.
“What did he tell you?”
“He’s been waiting,” she said. “He wants to help you.”
And that was it. It was that easy. When I started out, I was just walking. I had no idea what I was doing, honestly, only a need to shut the door behind me and go, because it was time, now I’d decided, to get on with the business of living. Mum and Henry waved me off at the door, still drinking the champagne that Mum had splurged on, her chanting, “Postcards, postcards, POSTCARDS!” at me, all the way up to the corner of the road, where I turned and waved, and blew kisses and stepped on my own out into the world and kept going.
I took a bus, sat at the back, watching the raindrops gather and collect in quick lines on the windows, the kid desperate beyond everything to get out of its stroller, the old man muttering to himself, and the girl in tears on her phone. At the station, I stood on the freezing platform and waited for whatever train would be coming from the left, trusting my instincts over my sense of direction. Trusting my gut. Even now, the way I feel isn’t swallowing me up if I keep moving. It’s the only cure I’ve found for what I’ve lost. Going somewhere. Anywhere. All the time. In my head I see stampedes of horses, torrents of water, jet planes, spacecrafts, all light speed and hurtling. I think about Superman, flying round the earth so fast that he slows it down on its axis, stops time and all that. It’s ridiculous, impossible, I know, but I can’t help it, because ridiculous and impossible have been given whole new definitions for me.
At the airport, I couldn’t sit still. Part of me wanted to run home and never leave, like Henry. The rest of me smiled at everyone, deligh
ted with this brand-new self, this healing of wounds and shedding of skin. After takeoff, I relaxed, almost, breathing out into the cabin, making my donation to the noisy, communal air. The way I feel about Novo was in everyone’s overhead bin then, everyone’s seat pocket, everyone’s lungs. I thought, We are all in it now, the traveling toward a life, five hundred miles an hour, at thirty-five thousand feet.
It’s love, I told myself. It’s love, for god’s sake, and who doesn’t want to be a part of that?
TWENTY-SEVEN
And so I travel. The windows on this train fill the space between the bunks, big as flat-screen TVs. If I lie on my front I can look out at everything we’re passing, once it’s light enough. The man across from me is stretched out on his side like a prince, curvaceous and plump. He frowns and pouts and looks down at one of his three phones. In my head I list all the old-school stuff that used to fill the world with weight and object and now fits inside a phone instead. Barometer. Calculator. Camera. Notebook. Telescope. Newspaper. Calendar. Radio. Map and compass. Watch. Wallet. TV. Voice recorder. Heart-rate monitor. Bank. I’m not tired of it yet, and I’m not nearly done. “Unbelievable,” Novo said once. “What a compact time to be alive.”
When the boy comes through with the chai, the prince flicks at him with the back of his hand, curls his lip, and doesn’t speak, but the boy knows what it means and pours him some and takes the money in silence, eyes down. I have some too, half a tiny cup. I thank him and my voice is louder than I expected in the quiet train. Conspicuous.
I was lucky to get a bed. My ticket didn’t count, apparently, didn’t exist. I handed my booking in at the desk, once I’d found the right one (third time lucky, up a flight of stairs, foreign tourists only, who knew?). Behind me and below me, Mumbai Central Train Station swarmed and hollered and sprawled. The upstairs waiting area was quieter, hushed even, like a library. I waited my turn, melting already in the winter heat, pretty sure that the only people who actually wait in line for anything in Central Train Station are the foreign tourists, and that’s why we get a room of our own, because otherwise we are never, ever going to get it together to leave. I used to hate waiting in line. But these days, there are plenty of Nows in a wasted hour for me.
Hello Now Page 10
