Page 36 of Meet Me in Another Life

In his dream, he’s running through the hospital, endless branching corridors all leading to darkness. It’s a normal dream, routine even, until he sees her, pink-haired, standing in an impossible shaft of sunlight. Even in the dream, he knows it’s not right. The woman he met was blond. This is a different Thora: older, gentler, scarred by sorrow.

She looks as surprised as he is to find herself in his dream. “Mr. López,” she says. Then, hesitantly, “Santi?”

The ground shakes. Santi falls. A tearing like the universe breaking in two. A rip opens up in the floor. Thora is on the other side. He reaches out, almost meeting her grasping fingers. Gravity takes them, and they fall apart, two planets pulled by the force of separate suns.

He opens his eyes to a cracked white wall. He has no idea where he is. Panicked, he searches through a kaleidoscope of remembered images: sun-yellow curtains, an open window, the cornice of a high-ceilinged apartment. Finally, it comes: he’s in the hostel. He reaches for his notebook, finds what he scribbled half-conscious as he woke. A lightning-shaped hole, two figures falling.

He sits up, feeling the old pain in his neck that he puts down to his year on the streets. He turns to face the grid of images on the wall, linked with pinned-up lines of red string. The ruined clock tower in the old town; a time-lapse photo of a starry sky, constellations blurred into streaks; the imprint of a bird on a window, ghostly feathers on glass. Together, they form a map that he hopes will one day lead him to meaning.

He looks down and starts to draw: image after image of Thora, old and young, her hair all the colors of the rainbow. The ruled lines of the notebook cut each picture, interference on a transmission coming from impossibly far away.

He tucks the notebook into his jacket and follows the rising sun outside. His shoulders tense as he passes through reception, but the person behind the desk isn’t Thora. He stops to pet the skinny black cat that haunts the hostel door. She meows at him plaintively, as if she’s trying to remind him of something important.

He begs a slice of burek from the Turkish café across the street. He eats half and keeps half for later, dropping the crumbs for the parakeets. The birds are talking in the trees, muttered fragments of conversations he’s heard before. This world is overlaid with itself, parts reused to patch up what is worn out. He wonders if he is made of fragments too: if somewhere he can’t see, his skin flashes feathers. If he jumped from the top of the clock tower, would a fragment of feather be enough for him to fly?

He walks on, into the city’s tangled heart. Sooner than it should, the cathedral looms, a vision of darkness against the sky. Santi still remembers how his throat went dry the first time he stepped inside: how the space between him and the vaulted ceiling gave him the illusion of movement, as if the whole thing were about to lift off and carry him to the stars. He should have taken it as a warning, not a promise. He should have left the city then, while he could still afford to. Now, he’s stuck in the labyrinth, wandering in circles until he finds a thread to lead him out.

He walks on across the Hohenzollernbrücke, averting his eyes from the padlocks. Inside the Odysseum, he holds up his hostel card until the clerk waves him through the turnstile. A tremor of meaning follows him into the room of false stars. The museum is quiet. One other person stands next to him on the gantry, staring up at the velvet dark studded with random lights. He knows before he looks that it is Thora.

There is a message here, a code for him to decipher. As usual, he can’t concentrate hard enough to understand. Thora stands next to him without looking at him, following the unwritten rule of public spaces. Santi savors the asymmetric knowledge it gives him. Alone, together, they look up at the map of a cosmos that never existed. Her hand moves as if to catch hold of the glowing lights.

“Why are you with me?” she says quietly.

Santi’s heart jumps. Then he sees the phone cradled in her other hand, hears a woman’s voice on the other end. He listens, eyes fixed on the stars.

“I mean, what did I do?” Thora asks. “When was the moment you decided—this is it, it’s working, I’ll stay?”

Santi hears the distant echo of an answer. Whatever it is doesn’t satisfy Thora. She turns, paces away from him. “There must havebeen a moment. There must have been something I did that made it different.” A pause. “Not different. I mean...” She puts a hand to her head. “Sorry. I just—I had a really weird day yesterday. Yeah. I’ll tell you about it when I get home. Okay. Love you.” She hangs up. She breathes into her hands, then lifts her head to the velvet sky.

Santi can’t hold back any longer. “You’re a stargazer too.”

She turns. When she recognizes him, he sees fear in her eyes. “Mr. López. I—didn’t know it was you.”

He realizes: she thinks he followed her here. Something in him responds by wanting to reassure her. “I come here a lot,” he explains, although what kind of explanation is that?

“Do you now,” she murmurs.

He can tell she doesn’t believe him. It brings a different emotion, belonging to a different person: anger, at how dismissive she can be. He hears his voice adjust, a stranger speaking through him. “What are you doing here?” Because he has to know, has to unravel this before it unravels him.

“They gave me the day off, after—yesterday. This place calms me down, when I feel—” Mid-sentence, her attention snaps back, as if she’s just caught sight of herself. Every second of this interaction is another stain on the carefully controlled relationship her job requires them to have. If she were anyone else, Santi would expect her to walk away. But he has already learned that his expectations are no map for her territory. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she says. “Guessed your name, told you what it means. They—they told me that’s one of your triggers. Thinking people know more about you than they should.”

Her words let another ghost in to possess him. This one is wry, certain, her equal. “But you do, don’t you?”

She takes a breath. “I don’t want to lie to you,” she says. “I dofind you—familiar.” She meets his eyes with frank annoyance. “But that doesn’t mean you’re right. All it means is that this kind of delusion can happen to anyone.”

It’s so unexpected, so off-script, that he laughs. “Why did you tell me that? You’re supposed to just tell me it’s all in my head.”

She looks at him seriously. “I want you to trust me.”

He doesn’t know what to say. But what comes out, surprising him as much as her, is the truth. In all the different versions of him she brings out, there is one constant. “I do.”

She nods, looking away. Visibly, under her breath, she says,Fuck it. “Can I get you a coffee?”

She buys him a black coffee without asking how he takes it. They head out the back way, past a closed-off room marked “Under Construction” into a playground filled with fiberglass models of the planets. The breeze off the river is cold. Thora pulls a mustard-yellow scarf out of her bag and wraps it around her neck before climbing up to sit with her feet on the rings of Saturn. She offers Santi her hand. He clambers up to sit next to her, on the same planet as another person at last. Two meters and four hundred million miles away, two small children battle to throw each other off Jupiter. Santi feels a strange sense of loss. Beyond the riverfront plaza, the Hohenzollernbrücke stretches over the water, tying them back to the city.

“Have you ever looked at the locks?” he asks.

Thora raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”

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