At the counter, I handed over the paper. An eye roll, a headshake, a sigh. The ticket man scratched his belly and didn’t bother looking up from his screen. He’d clearly had this conversation too many times already, with too many clueless travelers like me.
“Waiting list status,” he said. “No berth, no seat,” and he didn’t tell me why, because he didn’t have to.
I swear it wasn’t unwelcome, this feeling that my plans were falling apart already. I’m half-sunk into the unknown on purpose, have been from the beginning, soft and accommodating, like a bog. The man said I should come back later, give it three hours and there’d be room. So I took his advice. Three hours to kill, no different than the ones I’d been killing at home all that time since Novo left. Mum told me once that when I got to be her age I wouldn’t get over how much time I’d squandered—how much I’d give to claw some of it back. According to her, there are about six hundred thousand hours in the average lifetime, and I’d already spent way too many of mine sulking around in my sweats and beached on the sofa. True enough. I couldn’t argue with that. But I had my reasons. I told her if that’s what she thought, it was a mystery she ever bothered ironing pillowcases or vacuuming the crap out from behind the cooker. When she laughed, I didn’t raise the possibility that there was also such a thing as an extraordinary lifetime, the opposite of average, not straight, start to finish, like an arrow, but numberless and infinite like a wheel.
To use up three of my hours, I took a cab driven by an economics student called Dev to Rampart Row and drank a fresh lime soda, sweet and salt, no ice, at a tourist bar, all winter-scene murals and plastic tables and cooled air. I sat near the door to watch the street—wiry dogs and car horns and hot traffic, whole families on mopeds, women at the back, sari skirts dancing like flags in and out of the wheels. I saw a man sitting up against a blood-red wall, legs straight out in front of him, the stumps of his feet all bandaged and seething with flies. Two little girls walked past him, oblivious, breathing secrets into each other’s ears, covering their mouths with their hands when they laughed.
I felt my heart in my chest then, still there, still beating, in spite of everything, and I thought about how many times it’s done that since it was made, how many more beats it will make before I’m finished, the exact number, written down on a scrap of paper for me to read. What kind of a difference would it make in the world if that was a number we all knew? And what does it change, what kind of person does it make you, if you know for sure that the number is infinite, that you and your beating heart are never ever going to stop?
But still. I’ve done it. I’m on the other side of the world going somewhere. I’m not stuck on the sofa at home, staring into space. I’m here on this train staring out of the window. Always moving, always learning, living a life, as instructed. The only way.
This train bumps and thrums like a heartbeat, soothing, actually, pulling me down to sleep. I think about other numbers. How many stops between Mumbai and Madgaon. How many miles an hour this thing will go while I am sleeping. How many minutes it will wait at each station and how many people will get on and off. The number of days I knew Novo for, and all the useless days before I knew him, and all the endless days since. The number of nights we spent awake and talking, just talking, as if no one had ever quite heard our voices before. The weight of all he did and didn’t tell me. The sheer volume of our laughter. How many people he will see in his own lifetime, compared to mine. How long it will be, if ever, before I forget about him and about how this feels, before I’m whittled down and worn out by experience and disappointments and other loves (not like this one, nothing like this one) and can throw in the towel and say, “I knew a boy once.”
I put my face up against the window, keep the light out with my hands, and try to see what we are moving through, what kind of place—a suburb, a slum, a farm, a forest, a river. It’s too dark out there, black-dark, but this is not all I’ve come down to— looking and looking and the whole time not seeing a thing. My eyes are open. I drink this stuff in. Something tells me the world is full of magic and I will learn how to love everything in it, except for Novo, because that is the only way to love him, in the end.
My name is Jude, I tell myself, and I let him go, that magic boy, and we are both free.
The lack of him feels as real and as solid as his body beside me once did.
Hello Now, I tell him, wherever you are.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I used to think everything in life was a choice, but love was never a choice for me. Novo arrived, dark and unfathomable in that beginning, like looking over the pier at night and not knowing how far down the water is. And still, somehow I knew him. I knew who he was without even trying, and even though that’s impossible, even though I shouldn’t believe it, that right there is my truth. I could have told you straightaway that Novo wasn’t born like the rest of us, but forged in some mythical foundry out of horses and squid ink and velvet and sail rope and butter and gold. And here he was, contained in that body like a genie in a bottle, looking the lesser flesh-and-blood mortal that was me straight in the eye. A shot glass, a cold blast, a breath of fresh whatever. Novo, Novo, Novo, the perfect name for the one who still wakes up time after time, brand spanking new.
In the end, I could have watched him all day. I could have spent my whole life doing it, gladly, you know? Watching him do the ordinary things that he gilded just by doing them. Novo making a cup of Lapsang tea with honey so that it was the only color, the only level of sweetness and smoke that a cup of tea should ever be, and I could never imagine drinking anything else. His fierce frown, and the way his mouth opened ever so slightly when he thought of something to say, while that something was his still, and he hadn’t given it up yet. He was so definite about everything, so purposeful, so sure. God. His way of holding a glass. Or a knife. Or a pen. I am mad jealous of the things Novo touches now. I envy the air his hands move through when he’s telling a story. Wherever he may be.
Here are three words that don’t even begin to cover it: I miss him. But then I missed him from the moment we met, because even before it started I knew it would have to end. I was certain of that, without having to ask. Just like life, how we all know we’re going to die at some point, but we go ahead and feel the thing anyway, and do our best to make something of it before it runs out, so it’s not for nothing.
Until we find ourselves at another beginning. Another Now.
That first day on the beach, when it had only just begun and was still already on its way to being over. That’s what started it. A roller coaster right at the start—no time for second thoughts, locked in, holding on, paid up for the ride—and quick when you look back. So quick you want to do it all again.
I remember.
“Hello Now.”
And I said, “What?” because all life was so loud in my ears suddenly, I didn’t think I’d heard him right.
“Oh, and look,” he said, smiling, not just at me, but at all of it. “Here’s another Now. Hello to that one too.”
He took that stupid, half-dead, not-even-functioning phone out of my hands and said that instead of pinning it down for later, maybe I should just try being in it for once. He said there was a Forever in every Now, if I was only willing to see it. “You’re missing it, Jude. You’re missing it the whole time.”
And that’s how he nudged me out of the real world and over into that moment, that particular Now, with the tide going out and the birds breaking the surface of the water, and the unrepeatable light and the warmth of us on that cold sand, not touching, not yet, but near enough, and like I said never-ending, already done.
“Hello Now,” Novo said as I moved atom by atom toward him, irreversible, and I said it back, and he said it again and we were like the flat, constant waves then. Hello Now, Hello Now, Hello Now.
Novo
I am in a great room lined with doors. I have no idea how I got here, n
o memory of the door through which I entered. The room is so long that I can’t see where it ends. I can’t be sure that it does. Each door is identical to the next, and there are so many it will take a lifetime just to count them.
All I can think of is escape.
The first door I try stands over a canyon so deep that I can feel the pull of the fall, the hum of it in the doorframe, the high air pushing against me as I force it closed.
The second door shows me an empty cell just large enough to crawl into, too low for me to sit up, too narrow to turn around, too dark to see.
Through the third I see a room alive with the glint and whistle of flying knives, so many and so effortlessly sharp that anyone passing through it would be cut into fine slices.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth doors open onto solid walls.
The seventh to an explosion.
At the next, a pack of starved dogs lunge at me, their teeth and claws savaging the door’s skin as I slam it, a finger’s width from my face.
Behind other doors flames that burn hot on my skin, a stampede of frightened horses, a floor slick and writhing with a million dying fish.
One door leads to another endless room lined with doors, and I shrink from the sight of it with exhaustion and horror.
Whole days and nights will pass as I open these doors and close them again. Time changes. Even without windows or a view of the world I know that the sun somewhere is rising and setting, and that the moon shows more and then less of its face.
I will grow weak and tired. My clothes will fall from the bones and angles of my body like I just hung them out to dry.
And as my strength fails, I know finally that there is no end to it, no escape, and that all I can do is choose or keep searching.
And the next door moves just before I can touch it, opened from the other side by a gust of air. By something I can’t see.
This is my door. I know it without question.
I go through.
And when it happens, I don’t feel it. I never feel it. I just sleep. And they wash away, the things I’ve held on to, all of them. I let them go, leave them unchanged, and they are clean and new and nothing and then I am back. Never the same place—sometimes the cut and pulse of human traffic, sometimes a vast empty space. Anywhere and Always. The hot bite of dust, a blanket of snow. Soft opening of a morning or deep, sharp night. Sometimes before Now, and during, and also after, just the land holding bodies and the birds rising up over the sea. Square one, in all its different disguises. Always moving. Always alone.
I never forget what I am looking for, over and over, somewhere in that black-hole sleep. The one that keeps me. The one I can keep. My hook. A face at a window, the air in a bubble, a bird in a cage. Consequence. Purpose. Belonging. Your feet in the grass, Jude. Your face at a window. Your hands, your mouth, your smile.
A street. Here. Now.
Will it be this time? Will it be never? I will know my name and my age, my own hands, all my histories, same as ever. Quiet facts come to me like old finger drawings on glass, only traces. These trees. This house. This beginning. I stand at the side of the road, taking it all in, hoping and hoping. And I wonder, not for the first time, if it has some kind of start, this life, and who’s controlling it, and if it is ever, ever going to stop.
I will remember everything. I will write it down in my memory and keep it. And then I will sit, unnoticed, pretending not to wait.
Acknowledgments
THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU to
Rachel Denwood, Veronique Baxter, and Liza Kaplan
Chrissy Philp
And Gabrielle Walker, who read way too many uncooked versions, and is still talking to me anyway.
About the Author
Jenny Valentine is an award-winning writer for Young Adults. Her debut novel, Me, the Missing, and the Dead, was a Morris Award finalist in America and won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom under the title Finding Violet Park. Fire Color One, Jenny's follow-up, was a finalist for the prestigious Carnegie Medal. She is also the author of the novel Broken Soup and Iggy and Me, a series for younger children, and served as the Hay Festival International Fellow in 2017. Jenny's work has been published in 19 countries, and she works to empower and give a voice to young people. She lives all over the place and has two daughters.
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