Page 31 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Santi. Santiago López. Santiago López Romero.” She slurs his name but still gets it right. Given that he’s seen her put away the better part of two bottles of wine, he’s almost impressed. “Please stop insulting both our intelligences and turn around.”

Dr. Lišková sits clinging to her empty wine glass like an anchor chain. She hasn’t been crying. There’s another emotion than sadness at work here. Santi thought he had seen her angry before. Now her anger is elemental, incandescent, and it is all turned inward on herself.

“How—how are you?” he asks.

It’s such an absurd question that he expects her to laugh. She doesn’t even smile. “Jules just left me,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “So there’s that.”

Santi wishes for the power of flight, of teleportation, any miracle that would get him out of this conversation. “I thought it was in my control,” Dr. Lišková says. “I thought I could just—choose not to let her go.” As she taps the ash off the cigarette, Santi notices a tattoo on her wrist: stars, in a vaguely familiar pattern. “Maybe if I’d done something differently,” she goes on. “Maybe when I asked her to move back to the Netherlands withme, I could have done it in a way that made her say yes.” She takes a drag on her cigarette. “Maybe there’s a universe where I did, and I’m in our beautiful flat in Amsterdam with her right now, instead of making a fucking idiot of myself in front of my student.”

Santi’s memory fractures. Another moment, another argument. A lock of blue hair against the night sky. He blinks the phantom away. “I don’t think it works that way,” he says.

“Of course you would know how it works.” She tips her wine back, seems upset to discover that it’s empty. She waves the glass at him. “Hey. Can your friend up there stand me another?”

Santi’s fists clench. He looks away, across the square at the graffiti on the clock tower. NOT ENOUGH SKY.

“I did it,” Dr. Lišková says.

For a second, he doesn’t know what she means. Did what? Torpedoed her relationship? Put away enough wine to tranquilize a horse? Then he follows her gaze to the graffiti. “The message?” He stares at her. “You’re saying you wrote it?”

She nods.

It can’t be, but it is. Dr. Lišková, his distant, skeptical supervisor: the kindred spirit he’s been waiting to find. Finally, he understands the feeling of magnetic repulsion between them, matching poles straining for distance. He laughs aloud. “It’s you,” he says. “You’re the other person who remembers.”

The directness of her drunk gaze is overwhelming. “What are you talking about?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jaime beckoning him from a side street. But he doesn’t want to leave, not after what he’s discovered. “The stars.” He’s been preparing for this moment his whole life. Now, the words come too fast, tripping over each other. “I—I remember constellations that don’t exist. Wholeskies that never were. Every time I look up, all I see is what isn’t there.” Dr. Lišková’s fingers go to her wrist. He talks on into the void of her silence, waiting for an echo. “I went into astronomy to find out what it means. You went into astronomy to explain it away. But we both went looking.”

She doesn’t speak. The cigarette in her hand burns down, its long ashen tail like a dying star.

“It’s true.” Santi’s voice breaks on the word. “Tell me you remember. Don’t leave me alone in this.”

Her lips move. Santi feels a rush of premature joy.

“You’re not making any sense,” she says. The cathedral bells toll as she stumbles to her feet. The wine glass wobbles and falls, rolling until it rests in a crack in the table. “I’m going home. So should you. Forget this conversation ever happened.” She shakes her head. “God, I hope I will.”

Santi, lost, watches her walk away.

As he crosses the square from east to west, skirting the fountain toward the tall letters of her graffiti, he looks up. For a second, he swears he sees them all: every star he remembers, overlaid in a dazzling progression toward a meaning he doesn’t understand. In their silver light, the hands on the clock stand frozen at one thirty-five.

A Better World

Thora stands on the fire escape of the hospital’s ninth floor, watching the ash from her cigarette drift down to the street below. The old town of Cologne spreads out before her, a dark mass of crooked buildings broken by cobbled squares. The air vibrates with the sounds of carnival: the beat of a drum, the laughter of afternoon drinkers. A gaggle of people in animal suits runs down the alley, appearing and disappearing like a hallucination. To drown the noise, Thora hums to herself, a tune that’s been in her head since she woke up.

“Thought I’d find you out here.” Her colleague Lily comes to stand beside her.

“Mm.” Thora narrows her eyes, focusing on the ruined clock tower.

Lily waves a hand across her stare. “Earth to Thora?”

“Sorry. Yeah. I’m here. I just... Has it always been like that?”

Lily leans the way Thora is pointing. “Has what always been like what?”

“The clock. Stopped at twenty-five to one.”

“Yes,” Lily says, with an inflection of the obvious.

Thora frowns. “Since when?”

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