Page 3 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora ponders his words as she reaches the first gap in the stairs. Why not risk your life for curiosity? For her, it’s a question that has never needed an answer. She jumps across, a thrill running from her scalp to the tips of her toes. As she climbs higher and the gaps get wider, she hunts for hand- and footholds in the wall, using the holes in the brickwork as stepping stones to take her higher. Before long, she’s absorbed. The party, the terrible first impression she made on Santi, her fear of stepping onto the wrong path, all fall away. Now, the only path is vertical, and it leads her to the top of the tower, chasing the shrouded stars. She doesn’t think about the drop, not even when the gaps in the wall show her night sky veiled with wisps of cloud. The wind whistles through, flicking her hair over her eyes. When her feet find the steps again, she turns to watch Santi climb across after her. It’s much scarier to watch than it is to do. Music rises on the air: a melody whose source she’s not sure of until she sees Santi’s lips moving.

“Are yousinging?” she says in disbelief.

He leaps to the other edge of the gap, dusting off his hands. “Yeah.” He continues past her, up the final twist of the spiral. Thora thinks about what it means: he’s not afraid. Not of falling, not of making a wrong choice. For a moment, her envy of him is absolute.

She follows him up through a hatch onto a wooden platform. Arches on three sides give onto views of the city. On the fourthside is the back of the clock, gears clogged with rust. Heated by the climb, Thora unwinds her scarf and hangs it on a rusty nail. At the edge, she sits down and tilts her head back. Cleared of the city lights, stars spray across the sky like blood-splatter from a god’s violent death. “Isn’t it weird how reality sometimes looks unrealistic?” she muses. “That shouldn’t be possible. I mean, what are we comparing it to?”

“Something more real that we can’t remember,” Santi says, sitting down beside her. He follows her gaze upward. “When I was a kid, I used to think the stars were holes in the wall between us and heaven.”

Thora smiles. “I thought they were stuck on the inside of the sky. Like the glow-in-the-dark ones I had on my bedroom ceiling.”

“I had those too!” Santi grins. “Did you bring yours here?”

Thora looks at him warily, wondering if he’s trying to catch her out. She takes a risk. “No. But I got new ones from the Odysseum.” She points to the floodlit glass of the adventure museum across the river. “It’s amazing. The gift shop has European Space Agency badges. You should go.” She laughs. “If you don’t mind being the oldest person in there by like—ten years.”

“We’re supposed to grow out of all that.” Santi speaks quietly. “Little kids all love the stars. They all want to be astronauts. Explore the universe, see what no one else has ever seen. But then we get older and—we stop looking up. We keep our eyes on the ground and decide to be something realistic.”

“I never did.” Thora can’t believe she’s telling her biggest secret, the tender heart of her, to this boy she just met. She runs through his likely responses: laughter, fake interest, well-meaning advice to let go of what’s never going to happen.

“Me neither.” He tilts his head to the stars. “I want to go up there. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

For the first time since she arrived in the city, Thora relaxes into a genuine smile. “Why do you want to go?”

He looks at her like it’s obvious. “I want to see God.”

Thora laughs, because of course he’s joking. He looks back at her calmly, not offended but not laughing along either.

She frowns. “You think God lives in space?” He cracks a smile. She pursues it. “You know all that stuff about heaven being up, it’s—probably a metaphor.”

“There is no up in space,” he says seriously.

“So in space, you wouldn’t be short? That’s convenient,” she says without thinking.

He looks hurt. She wants to go back, to try again, but in this universe, time only moves one way, tumbling her with it. “As for me,” she says, “I want to go to space because in space, no one can hear me say the first stupid thing that comes into my head.”

He doesn’t exactly smile. “Why do you really want to go?”

She sighs. “I want to get as far away as possible from—all this.” She gestures vaguely at the tower, the city, the planet.

“All this?” He stands up, swaying—she reaches out, but he catches himself on the arch. “What’s wrong with all this?”

“Nothing.” She shrugs. “It’s fine. It’s here. I’ve just always wanted—elsewhere.”

“I know what you mean.” Santi looks out at the city. “Still, here is pretty amazing.”

For the first time since she climbed up, Thora looks down. Santi is right: the city by night is a marvel, a planet riven by glowing fissures. Directly below, the cobbled square gleams, the fountain in the center a puff of silver mist. To her left, the twin spires of the cathedral point like Gothic rockets to heaven. From the square at its feet, mismatched buildings trail down toward the river. Thora breathes out a smoke-cold breath and inhalesthe city, bomb-scarred and rebuilt, endlessly under construction. Her eyes follow the Hohenzollernbrücke stretching across the Rhine, lights reflected in the water like another version of it lies there drowned.

She points down at the bridge. “You know that whole thing’s covered in padlocks?”

“Yeah, I walked across. It’s impressive.”

Thora snorts. “It’s stupid, is what it is. What couple says,Hey, let’s celebrate the uniqueness of our love by doing the exact same thing thousands of other couples have done?”

“Not just couples,” Santi says. “I read the messages. There are locks there with the names of parents, children, friends.”

“That’s even worse! Great, let’s make every human relationship equally trite!”

He throws her a teasing look. “You don’t think that’s beautiful? How universal it is?”

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