Page 37 of Meet Me in Another Life

He points. “On the bridge. All those padlocks. Two tons of them.”

Thora takes out a pack of cigarettes, offers him one. He takesit for later. She lights hers, blows the smoke away from him. “I’ve seen them, yes. Joey plus Bobby forever, et cetera.”

“But have you everlookedat them?” He sits forward. “I mean, really looked at them. Walked all the way across the bridge, following the fence, paying attention.”

“No, I haven’t.” Again, that smile, sending him spiraling through responses: fondness, pride, resentment. “To be honest,” she goes on, “I’ve always found the whole thing a bit stupid.”

“They repeat.” He blurts it out before he reminds himself to slow down. “If—if you walk across and keep your eyes on the locks, after a while, they start to repeat. The shapes, the colors. Even the names.”

Her mouth opens a second before she speaks. “There are only so many brands of padlock. And with people coming here from all over to do the same thing, some names are bound to repeat. That’s just statistics.”

He shakes his head violently. “It’s not like that. It’s not random. I’ve seen the same names, over and over again, in the same order.” He rolls the cigarette between his palms. “It’s a pattern, a message for me. I just need to learn how to decode it.”

She laughs, throwing her head back. The gesture is so familiar it staggers him. Who is she? Why does her presence make him feel partial, fragile, on the verge of crying? “You think it’s a message for you,” she says.

“Yes.”

She looks down at him. “How many people live in Cologne?”

Their roles shift again: she the patronizing professor, he the resentful student. “I don’t know. A million?”

“A million people. How many of them walk across that bridge every day?”

A different reaction, a different self. Brother to sister, weary and superior. “A thousand. Fifty thousand. Does it matter?”

“Why do you think the message is for you, and not for any of the other thousand or fifty thousand people who might happen to walk by?”

Santi puts away the cigarette and sits on his hands. He hates feeling like a marionette, his gestures controlled by memories that can’t possibly all be his. He focuses on what makes him real. “Because no one but me sees what’s wrong with the world.”

She frowns. “What’s wrong with the world, Mr. López?”

That the stars keep changing. That the city repeats itself, over and over. That I’m the only one who’s really here.The answers stop at his lips, destabilized by the fact that his illusion of a constant self dissolves every time she speaks. Was he as unreal as the world, all along? Is he just another dream, being dreamt by a hundred changing Thoras?

She speaks quietly, as if she’s afraid someone will overhear. “Why do you come here to look at the stars?”

He turns toward the glass wall of the Odysseum, sees their reflections watching them. “Because the stars in there don’t change.”

She looks at him with growing disquiet. “You remember different stars?”

“Yes.” He swallows. “Sometimes, when I look up, it’s like I see them all superimposed. Like the light of them all together could blind me.”

“And then you blink, and look again,” she says softly. “And they’re just the stars as they are. And all you know is that things didn’t used to be this way.”

Santi stares at her. He doesn’t know if she is speaking for herself, or if he is witnessing an act of empathic imagination. Rightnow, it doesn’t matter. No one has ever talked to him about this as if they understood.

“That’s why I went into social work,” she says. He focuses on her expression, thoughtful and self-conscious: another letter of an alphabet he’s remembering how to read. “I felt so dislocated, so lost. I thought even if I couldn’t fix myself, maybe I could fix other people who felt like they didn’t fit. Make the world better for them.” Her eyes flick up to meet his. “But I never met anyone who felt exactly the way I did.”

“Until you met me.”

“Until I met you.”

He looks at Thora like a treasure he thought he’d lost in a fire. He knows this woman, better than he knows his own fractured self. It’s someone else’s knowledge, but for a moment he lets himself drown in it, the certainty he so rarely feels in this life. His fingers itch to draw her: a girl resting her feet on the rings of Saturn, head in her hands. Wordless, he pulls his notebook from his jacket and hands it to her.

She leafs through, hesitant at first. “You’d better not show this to anyone in the hostel,” she says dryly. “They’d kick you out sooner than you can saystalker.”

“I’m not—”

“I know,” she interrupts him. “But they won’t.” She keeps turning the pages. “Where did you get all this from?”

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