Page 72 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora spins, looking for the real Santi, her Santi, but she has lost him in a crowd made entirely of himself. She pushes through, uselessly yelling his name, but there are too many of him and they all remember her, they all have a claim on her. They clutch at her, pulling her down until all she can hear is her name, repeated again and again in a hundred voices. A shudder, a crack splitting her into fragments, and everything stops.

In the Stars

Santi dreams of a message written on the sky.

He’s so close to it—Thora’s hand in his, the stars flickering all around them like candles in the dark—that he can’t make out what it says. As they start to fall, he stares upward, trying to resolve the pattern, to read the truth he missed. But the message won’t come clear. His vision blurs, the stars expanding to globes of light, merging with the flames that always wait at the corner of his eye.

He wakes in sunlight, uncertain who he is. Once, this feeling would have panicked him. Now, he flicks through selves like he’s flicking through transparencies, light superimposing them all into one. Thora lies in bed next to him, which narrows down the possibilities. It’s rare that they are both attracted to each other in the same life, but it still happens. He reaches out and strokes her cheek. She makes an inarticulate noise, burrowing into the sheets.

“Time to wake up,” he says, kissing her frown.

Her voice is muffled. “What do you mean, wake up? This whole thing is probably a dream.”

He smiles. “Oh, so you’re dreaming about me?”

“Who said this is my dream?” She rolls over, sighing. “Anyway, it can’t be a dream. It makes too much sense. If it was a dream, you’d be yourself but also my old physics teacher, and you’d be giving a surprise test I haven’t prepared for while an army of goats tries to break the door down.”

“I was your old physics teacher,” he reminds her.

She makes a face. “If you think that turns me on, you still have a lot of lives to get to know me.” She slides out of bed, pulling on a long cardigan and padding across the floorboards to the kitchen. He reaches for her, protesting, but she’s gone, the sound of the filling kettle presaging coffee. A meow and a clatter echo from the kitchen. “Jesus, Félicette!”

He smiles. “Is she disrupting the space-time continuum again?”

“No more than usual.” Thora pauses in a patch of sunlight, biting her nails. In that moment, she dazzles him, as though she is a window through which comes some rare and incandescent light. Thoughts move across her face like storm clouds. He wants to draw her, to collect this moment in his memory book. He wonders sometimes if his search for meaning has driven him crazy, if he is nothing but a mad old man filling his pockets with bright pebbles from the gutter. He hears the voice of another Thora.Don’t go raking through broken glass looking for diamonds.

“I had that dream again,” he says.

Thora’s face changes. There are parts of her he will never see, his presence irrevocably altering how she is at rest. She turns as she pours the coffee. “The one where we’re in the stars?”

He nods, looking up at the ceiling. “I really thought we’d found the answer.” He returns to the idea he has clung to since his time on the streets, like a talisman worn smooth with rubbing.The key is to know who you are. Only then will you know where you’regoing.Does it feel true because it is, or because he wants it to be? He rubs his eyes, trying to dispel the blur from his dream. “I’ve been so sure, so many times, and it’s always ended the same way.” The same way, or worse. He looks down at his hands, remembering where his certainty once led him. A knife in Thora’s heart.

She comes back to bed, a mug in each hand. “This time, I was sure too.” A ghost of a smile crosses her face. “Both of us sure of the same thing. When has that happened before?”

Santi ponders the strange convergence of their perspectives: the moment they looked at each other and knew absolutely where they had to go. It felt like it meant something. But he’s had that feeling too many times to trust it.

Thora tilts her head back against the wall. “I don’t know why I thought it would work. It’s literally the same thing I tried before, just in a different direction. If we can’t escape by walking out of the city, why did I think we could escape by making it to the stars?”

Santi hears the bitterness of failure in her voice. Even though he feels it too, he doesn’t want her to blame herself. “We don’t know for sure it wouldn’t have worked,” he points out. “We fell before we actually made it.”

She snorts. “Santi, we can’t catch a train to Düsseldorf. How do you suggest we try and leave the planet? Build a very large ladder?” Her face changes, as if her words have struck against something in her memory. She clutches his arm. “Unless.”

“Unless?”

Thora looks at him, her face alight. “You think everything in here means something. Stands for something.”

“I did,” he admits. His own use of the past tense jolts him. Is he really letting go of his long-held conviction? How could all of this be meaningless, after everything they’ve been through?

Thora’s fingers tighten on his arm. “Here, in the city. What stands for the stars?”

Santi thinks about what the stars mean to him. Elsewhere; transcendence; the hope of discovery, of revelation. “The cathedral?” Thora shakes her head. “The university? The top of the clock tower?”

Thora’s face screws up in amusement. “You’re really overthinking this.”

In a rush, he understands. How could he not have seen it before? “The planetarium.”

A laugh escapes her, bright and joyous: a Thora he hasn’t seen for lifetimes. In seconds, she’s out of bed and on her feet. “Come on then,” she says, pulling on her jeans. “What are we waiting for?”

He dresses quickly. As he follows her to the door, a wave of weakness runs through him. He catches himself on the wall.

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