Page 56 of Meet Me in Another Life

There’s a song, stuck in my head. There’s a tattoo on my wrist. I bite my nails, and I want a cigarette, and I don’t know how much of me is me anymore and how much of me is you. I used to be so sure of who I was. Is that something you stole from me? Or are we both drifting now, both as lost as each other?

Maybe you’re right, to want to forget. Maybe it was easier when we didn’t remember, when we thought each life was our only chance. But when I look back now, I can’t remember not remembering. It all feels like one thing: a path leading us step-by-step to where we need to be.

I know why you’ve resisted thinking about the meaning of all this. I know you like explanations, and you’re afraid there might not be an explanation for what’s happening to us.

I think we are the explanation. I don’t know if that makes sense to you. I’ve never been that good with words.

I wish I could tell you

He trails off. There is too much he wants to say to Thora, not enough space in the words to hold it. He folds up the letter and keeps it under his mattress, always intending to finish it.

Between the daily déjà vu of prison, between visits from his mother that leave him sadder and calls from Aurelia that remind him there is life outside these walls, he turns his mind to the mystery of him and Thora. The police confiscated her letter; Santi assumes they gave it to Andromeda. He imagines her in the chaos of her mother’s secret room, staring up at the map of her madness. He wishes he could go back there, read Thora’s notes, have something to work from. Instead, he is trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing and one hand tied behind his back: the handicap this life has given him, of a brittle mind that can’t focus on details. Still, he tries, writing out the notes he remembers and sticking them on the wall, mimicking Thora’s chaotic display. In the center, he places a drawing he did from memory of one of the photographs: Thora in her youth, but no youth of hers he’s ever seen. She’s astride a horse, her face round and healthy, her eyes creasing up with laughter. On the days his head hurts from trying to work out who they are, what their purpose is, he looks into her eyes as though she could somehow look back. “I need you,” he says softly. “I need you to help figure this out.”

“She your girl?” Jaime asks, coming in sweaty from exercise in the yard. It’s a comfort, having his old friend as his cellmate, even if as far as Jaime is concerned they just met.

“No,” Santi says. “She’s the old lady I stole from to end up in here.”

Jaime laughs. “You’re crazy, López,” he says, swinging himself onto his bunk.

Maybe we’re both just crazy.Thora, last time, under the unchanged stars.Locked in a little room somewhere, dreaming of other lives.

Santi raises an eyebrow. “That’s one possibility.”

He flicks through his memory book, filled with drawings of himself in every lifetime: better selves, smarter selves, who would have had a chance of finding the right path. He thought that made the test unfair, but he was wrong. He pauses on a picture of his old science classroom, Thora upright and self-conscious in the second row. He hears his own voice:If God’s test were easy, it would be meaningless. He will try to pass it with the tools he has been given, the self he is this time. If he doesn’t succeed, perhaps the next version of him will. Each time they reawaken is another chance to get it right.

He closes the book and looks up into Thora’s eyes. She is already taking that next chance. While he languishes here, she’s growing up, the time since her death shaping her into the person he will know next. By the time he gets there, she will be formed, and he will be a novice, doomed to learn everything over again. One comfort: there’s no chance of him living to eighty in this life. The lost years transform into a gift, a promise of finding her sooner.

He doesn’t have to wait. He could follow her, catch her up. He thinks about it sometimes: looping a sheet around a beam, letting gravity take the blame. But he never goes further than thinking. Even though he knows he will come back, sure as he knows the sun will rise, he still believes that killing himself to follow her would be the deepest kind of sin. He is being tested, and it is imperative he not fail.

When he gets out of prison, he moves with his mother into a flat on the outskirts of the city. He picks up odd jobs, painting houses, digging gardens. In his spare time, he works as a volunteer cleaning up litter from the streets of the old town. Working outside soothes him, grounds him in what he is determined to think of as the real. He tries to pursue the puzzle Thora left for him, but his mind glances off it like a fly off a window, repelled by a truth too big for him to see.

The letter he started writing to her, he leaves unfinished. One day, he will know what he wants to say. Then he will write it down, and on his deathbed he will read it over and over until he has it by heart: until the words, in his next life, are the first thing he remembers.

Nothing to Lose

Thora is running away.

She pulls her hood up, leans into the bus window until her breath fogs the glass. She’s been a seventeen-year-old girl enough times to know that traveling alone as one attracts attention. Outside, the fringes of the city slide past, gray and empty as a dream.

She gets off at the end of the line, in an industrial zone with a schematic, unreal look she doesn’t trust. She walks north, keeping the setting sun on her left. The city cannot go on forever. There must be an end to it, as there was a beginning, the invisible line in the air that her plane crossed when she arrived with her parents two months ago.

It didn’t take her long to remember. The first time she walked through the old town, she felt it as a dread dogging her steps, a shadow cast the wrong way against the sun. When the cathedral bells boomed hollow through her bones, she stopped where she was, under the ruins of the clock tower. “No,” she said softly. “Not again.”

Santi wanted to understand why they only remember when they arrive here. To Thora, it’s no mystery. The city is so overlaidwith their shared lives that there is no living here without remembering.

She looked up to the hands of the clock still stuck at midnight. She heard the echo of her own words to him last time.Maybe if we left, we would forget.

She tried the train first. She didn’t even think about where she wanted to go. She just got on the first one she saw and waited for it to leave. Looking out of the window, she wondered how it would be. Would she forget all at once, awaken in a glorious elsewhere with no idea how she had got there? Or would it be more gradual, a kind of healing dementia, stealing her other lives fragment by fragment until even the memory of Santi was gone? A pang tugged at her, but she resisted. Remembering had done nothing but make them miserable. Better to start afresh, even if that meant never meeting at all.

The train hummed to life. Her head snapped up. Her escape, beginning at last.

The hum cut off, the lights flickering out. A disembodied voice announced a fault. The other passengers grumbled and disembarked. Thora sat transfixed, furious, almost laughing.

She tried again and again. Sometimes, the trains got as far as crossing the river before breaking down. One stopped on the Hohenzollernbrücke with the bang of an exploding fuse. Thora sat staring at the shackles of the padlocks on the fence, forty thousand relationships left to rust. When the train pulled into reverse, she felt time unwinding, unraveling her back to where she started.

It was after she got off that train that she decided to trust nothing but herself. She won’t break down. She will walk until the road runs out, and then she will keep walking.

She climbs through a hedge and strikes across a scrubby meadow. She’s beyond the city limits now, in an endless dream offields and fences. She holds down a coil of barbed wire to clamber across. When she lets go, it slices her thumb. She sucks the blood away and walks on.

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