Page 28 of Meet Me in Another Life

Santi lies on his back, the grass of the Uni Park tickling his neck, the air thrumming with a summer storm on the way. Here, in the green belt separating the city from the suburbs, the sky is dark enough to show him a scattering of lights. One set of stars, steady and constant, as if they are the only stars there have ever been.

He closes his eyes. Different stars, in different patterns, burned into his memory. When he lets himself see them all at once, the sky becomes crowded, impossible: a sea of blazing light.

Santi has always trusted in fate: that there is one way things have to go. He isn’t literal enough to believe that the future is written in the stars—he’s doing a PhD in astronomy, after all—but his memories of other skies still unsettle him. The idea that there are other possible configurations for the universe, that God could be running them all in parallel, cuts against everything he believes. The only way he can reconcile what he remembers is to think that it’s a message, one he’s not yet ready to understand. He watches the world like a detective, like a poet, waiting for the meaning to come clear.

In a square in the old town stands a ruined clock tower covered with graffiti. Over the other scrawls, someone has written in ragged black letters: NOT ENOUGH SKY. The first time Santi saw it, he stopped in his tracks. He was used to the city’s verbosity, slogans in a dozen languages blooming over its walls. But those three words felt like his own thought, transmuted through someone else’s mind, spoken directly back to him.

Sometimes he wonders if that’s the only reason he hasn’t gone mad. He is not alone. Someone else is dislocated in the same way that he is, and one day, he will meet them face-to-face.

When he opens his eyes, the stars are gone. He blinks, but it’s just the storm clouds moving in. A raindrop hits his cheek, then another. By the time he gets to his feet, the rain is sluicing down like a river. Thunder rolls, chasing him across the grass to the Physikalisches Institut. He holds up his card until the doors open. Inside, he shakes the rain out of his hair. It’s after midnight: the building is quiet. He still isn’t surprised when he reaches the glass door of the lab and sees a lone figure inside.

“Hi, Dr. Lišková,” he says as he walks in.

His supervisor looks up, blue eyes wary. She’s wearing the same clothes as when he last saw her two days ago. Santi wonders if she slept here, curled up under her desk to the quiet humming of the computers. He spends most of his days with her, but his knowledge of her is entirely one-dimensional: he doesn’t know where she lives, or even exactly how old she is. Her hair is streaked with white, but her face doesn’t have the lines to match. Either she’s gone prematurely gray, or she deliberately dyes her hair to look older. He wouldn’t put it past her.

“You’re soaked,” she says.

“Yeah.” Santi grins, running a hand through his wet hair. “It’s apocalyptic out there.”

“Just don’t drip on any of the priceless equipment.”

Part of Santi enjoys the unimpressed look she gives him. He is a little in love with her, but then he is in love with everyone: Héloïse, the pretty French girl who works in the campus coffee shop; Brigitta, the barmaid at Der Zentaur, with her Germanic stare and her careful hands.

He checks the simulation he set running when he left the lab. A mass of red error messages greets him. He swears and traces the first one back. Spotting his mistake, he laughs.

“What?”

“I gave the simulation an input it wasn’t expecting, and—” He turns to Dr. Lišková. “Looks like I broke gravity.”

He’s surprised to see the ghost of a smile on her face. “Comes with the territory.”

Humming under his breath, he starts fixing the problem. He’s lost in his model universe when Dr. Lišková’s voice jolts him out. “Can you stop?”

This time, when he turns, she is glaring at him.

“What?”

“Humming. It’s driving me up the wall.”

“Okay. Sorry,” he mutters. He turns back to his computer, but his concentration is broken. It all feels futile: tinkering with a crudely simplified model of the cosmos in the vain hope it will give him the answer he’s looking for. He sighs and stretches, wincing at the familiar pain in his neck.

“What is it now?” snaps Dr. Lišková.

Santi doesn’t understand her sometimes: the push and pull of her, like part of her wants him to stop existing while another is always looking for a reaction. “It’s nothing,” he says. “Just my neck.”

Her brow furrows. “Aren’t you a little young for aches and pains?”

“Perk of doing a PhD, I guess,” he says with a grin she doesn’t return.

“I have a PhD, and my neck’s fine. You must have terrible posture,” she retorts, turning back to her screen.

Santi stares at her until she looks at him. “Is it worth it?” he asks.

Her eyes flick away. “If you don’t know that by two years in, I can’t help you.”

Santi spins his chair back to his computer. “I don’t know. When I was a kid dreaming of studying the stars, I thought I’d spend more time actually looking at them.”

“Actually lookingisn’t science.”

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