Page 57 of Meet Me in Another Life

North, always north. The setting sun throws her shadow sideways across the fields. Darkness falls, revealing the stars, but she doesn’t look up. When she glances behind her, the city never looks any farther away, no matter how many hedges she crawls through, how many fences she climbs. Thora imagines the great mass of Cologne tearing loose from its foundations, edging along in her wake on flat concrete feet. She walks faster, breaking into a half-run. She’s pushing down the next fence when she sees a dark stain on the wire. Her blood.

She stops, laughing in despair. The same field. She’s been crossing the same field, over and over.

“This is fucking absurd,” she shouts. “Why am I trapped here? What did I do?”

No one responds. But even unanswered, her instinctive question feels like a revelation. This is a punishment, designed specifically for her. What could be worse than a world with no elsewhere?

She lies down, flat on her back on the cold ground. Out here, far from the city lights, the stars look like silver paint sprayed on the inside of a solid dome. She could stay here, wait to die of thirst or exposure. She hasn’t experienced either of those before. She suspects they would probably hurt.

Or, she can keep trying.

She gets to her feet and calls her mum.

In the passenger seat of her mother’s car, Thora looks through the window, through the world, recognizing it for the simulacrum ithas always been. She remembers the holes she saw in other lifetimes, without understanding what they meant: her childhood window that looked onto the impossible, the mirror behind the bar in Der Zentaur that showed her a view from the sky. Perhaps, somewhere at the city’s edge, one of those holes waits to let her out.

“Thora. Are you listening?” her mother asks, in the falling question inflection she carried over from Icelandic.

Thora blinks. “Yes.”

“Then answer me. Where were you going?”

“Nowhere,” Thora says, looking out at the city streaming past. “Absolutely nowhere.”

Her mother’s fingers tense on the wheel until they turn white. Thora has learned how to dissolve the bitter pill of her anger, just as she has learned to defuse her father’s scorn. But right now, she doesn’t want to. Why should it always be on her, to change to fit their constancy? Why should she be the only one cursed to remember?

“You are such a teenager sometimes,” her mother says under her breath.

Thora stares at her. She wants to tell her mother she is no such thing: she is ageless, immortal. But her mother doesn’t know that. She just hears the same sullen daughter she’s known lifetime after lifetime. Thora’s weary mother-self comes back in a wave of reluctant empathy, remembering Estela at the same age. Is this how her life will be now? Feeling every age at once, unable to honestly inhabit a moment without drowning in reflections?

“Sorry,” she says. “I won’t do it again.”

But of course, she does: carefully, gradually, so as not to risk her parents finding out. She spends her weekends mapping the limits of the city, pushing at the fringes where reality blurs. Shestumbles into endless woods, crosses and recrosses the same road, wades through water that deepens into shallows, stranding her back where she began. She hunts obsessively for a hole that will lead her out of the lie. But her jailers have built her cage too well. If there are gaps between the bars, none are wide enough for her to escape.

She is nineteen, crossing a scrubby field, when she sees the setting sun cast her shadow due east. The circle closes. She has tested every inch of the city’s boundary and found no way out.

Something in her snaps. She throws her head back and screams, pulling at the barbed wire until her hands are bleeding. “Let meout. Fuck you, fuck you, let me out!”

The wind blows her voice away. There is no one to hear her.

Not yet.

In her memory, Santi sits awkwardly by her hospital bed. He looked in his mid-thirties. She counts forward to his possible deaths—days, months, or decades after hers—and backward to her birth. He could already be here. Or, she could have as many as thirty years left to wait.

She wraps her bleeding hands in her father’s scarf and catches a bus back to the university. In her dorm room, she dresses her wounds, looking past her reflection into the mirrored darkness of the prison where she awaits her cellmate’s arrival. When she’s finished, she rides her bike to the old town. She wonders, as she props it against the railings of the courtyard by the clock tower, if the Santi she met in the hospital still lives, just the other side of where her fingers can touch. She thinks of him as she saw him last: scruffy, tired, the signs of a hard life etched on his face. She adds nineteen years, imagines him standing now beside her, looking up to where the hands of the clock clasp as if in prayer.

She takes the spray can from her backpack. NOTHING TOLOSE, she writes, big enough to be seen across the square, across the distance between worlds. When he sees it, he’ll know what it means. That she’s finally ready for them to find a way out of this together.

When enough time has passed after painting her message that she’s sure he’s not already in the city, she relearns enough Spanish to call the hospitals in the town he is usually born in. She’s sure she becomes a local joke, the foreign girl with the bad accent who keeps asking for the child who doesn’t exist. Spain isn’t the only possibility: in some lives, his parents move to Cologne before he is born. Every week, she flicks through the local paper to the birth announcements, scours them like a hurricane survivor haunting a missing-persons board. After a few years, she stops expecting to find him there. It becomes a game to her, a quirk to her friends, used to her leafing through theStadt-Anzeigerand reading out the most ridiculous names as they drink coffee at her big kitchen table.

She’s a doctor now, training to be a surgeon. It was her plan before she remembered, and a resentful part of her didn’t want to give it up. She leafs through the paper as Lily laments over the same guy she’s been obsessed with for lifetimes, feeling five hundred years old.

Lily leans over her shoulder. “Dennis,” she says. “Imagine that. Baby Dennis.”

Thora gives her a look. “Where did you think all the adult Dennises came from?”

“Made in a factory,” Lily says, but Thora barely hears her, because there he is, in a small announcement at the top of the page: Santiago López Romero.

Her ears fill with thunder. He’s here. He’s alive.

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