Page 10 of Meet Me in Another Life

She doesn’t look up.

He tries again. “You’re supposed to be outside.”

“I want to stay here.”

Officially, he should send her out: he can’t shelter a child from the natural order of things. The lions take down the gazelle and it lies twitching and eviscerated. But, fresh from his anger with her parents, he rebels. When he sits down next to her, she flinches in surprise. She bows her head and starts violently coloring in.

“What are you drawing?” Santi asks.

She looks up, a flash of blue like a shy tropical fish. “Hades.”

“Wow.” Santi looks at her drawing: a lot of black, with fragments of exploded buildings and what looks like a rabbit with a baby’s head. “You like the Greek myths?”

Her expression is noncommittal. “My mum and dad got me a book about them.”

First blood to her parents and the classical education. “They’re good stories,” Santi says. “It’s interesting to see how people used to explain the world, before they had scientific ways of figuring out what was really happening.” Second blood to Santi and the stars.

“Yeah,” Thora says. “Like, in ancient Greek times, they thought people went on after they died.”

Santi frowns. “You don’t think they do?”

She gives him a look of flat scorn. “You’re ascienceteacher,” she says, and goes back to drawing her hellscape.

Santi leans back, weighing his words carefully. “Science can’t tell us much about what happens to people after they die.”

She looks up at him in challenge. “Yes, it can. We go moldy and decompose, like in the bread experiment we did last week. And then we’re skeletons.”

“You’re right,” he acknowledges. “But that’s just what we can observe. How do we know there isn’t some other part of a person that goes on? A part we can’t observe?”

Thora chews her pencil. “I guess we don’t,” she says, lookingannoyed. “Unless we could talk to someone who had died and ask.”

“Well, I’ll probably die before you,” Santi says. “I promise, if there’s anything after, I’ll try to come back and tell you about it.”

“Thanks.” She grins, all suggestion of shyness gone. At this age, she seems to transform from moment to moment. But it’s an illusion: the person Thora will come to be is in there. All he can do is help her emerge.

He stands up. “In the meantime, I was planning a class trip to the Odysseum.”

Thora looks up, breathless. “The adventure museum?”

He nods. “What do you think?”

The joy on her face is almost enough.

The Odysseum is on the other side of the river, tied up in a knot of conference centers and autobahns. As Santi leads a straggling group of children across the Hohenzollern bridge to the boom of the cathedral bells, he reminds himself why he is doing this.For Thora, he thinks with determination, as two children try to pry one of the padlocks from the fence and a third hangs back to poke at a dead pigeon.

“Keep up!” he yells, clapping his hands. By the grace of God, he shepherds them safely down the steps, through the playground scattered with fiberglass models of the planets, into the humming lobby of the museum. He pays for admission and ushers them one by one through the turnstile. “Meet in the cafeteria at three,” he manages to tell them before they scatter like loose marbles. Among them he sees Thora in a mustard-yellow scarf, running off on her own. Part of him wants to trail her through the museum, be thereto answer her questions, but he knows nothing would be so likely to put her off. He needs to let her find her own way.

Instead, he wanders on his own hyperbolic path through the exhibits. He has been here so many times that if a bomb hit the museum, he could reconstruct it room by room: the curving walls of the faux-planetarium, dotted with lights that correspond to no Earthly constellations; the empty spacesuits lined up like celestial knights. He catches his distorted reflection in the mirror of an astronaut’s helmet. Thinking of Thora’s drawing, he smiles. Behind him, made tiny by the curve of the gold-coated plastic, an alien figure appears.

“Hello, Thora.” He turns. “I like your scarf.”

“It’s itchy.” She tugs at it discontentedly. “My dad knitted it.”

Santi tries to imagine the trembling, muscular philosopher knitting. He blinks. “My mother does crochet,” he offers.

Thora looks baffled.

“Ah yes, I should have explained. Scientifically speaking, it’s necessary even for ancient people like myself to have mothers.” He gives her a tired smile. “Don’t you want to explore the museum?”

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