Page 38 of Meet Me in Another Life

He looks at her. “I dreamt of you. But not as you are.”

A grin spreads across her face. “Just the idea,” she murmurs. “That I could be all these different people.” She turns the page. In this picture, she’s younger, haloed by stars, blue hair flying in the night wind. “What am I doing here?” She rotates the book, squinting. “Is that the clock tower in the old town?”

Santi nods, fingers digging into the surface of the planet. “You were sitting at the top,” he says. “Watching me fall.”

Thora looks up at him. “In your dream. Were there different versions of you as well?”

“I don’t remember.”I don’t want to remember.But he’s starting to understand: every one of her ghosts drags one of his own out with it, until he’s drowning in reflections, none of them exactly right. He has worked so hard to hold himself together, to fight the catastrophic falling-apart that drove him away from Héloïse and onto the streets. Now he feels it happening again, his center dissolving, his edges bleeding out to nothingness.

He climbs down from Saturn. He needs to get his feet on the earth. “I—I have to go.”

Thora looks down at him, uncomprehending. “Okay. Can I walk with you?”

He recognizes another constant: she never really understands him. It’s stabilizing enough to make him nod, offer his hand to help her down. Maybe there is a clue here, a direction for his map of meaning, if he can hold himself together long enough to find it.

They walk across the bridge into the city that seems to Santi to repeat again and again, the same angle of walls meeting, the same pattern of cobbles, haunted by itself. It’s how he feels, walking by Thora’s side. With every step, he lurches between selves: an angry young man in an argument with an older woman, a father trying to make a connection with a sullen daughter.

“It’s lucky I work in the hostel,” Thora says brightly, as they turn down the river path toward the old town. “It’ll make it easier for us to keep talking about this.”

Santi thinks of the hostel, his hard-won sanctuary, turned into a laboratory where he will be dissected day by day. The staff there may not understand him, but they have helped him. In anotherworld, Thora could have been one of them. But in this one, she knows him too well.No one can be everything to someone, he thinks, and wonders why the thought makes him buzz like a bell struck sideways.

As they reach the old town, a gap between the buildings shows them the clock tower. Santi is sure it shouldn’t be visible from here: as if the gravity of the two of them together is warping the world. Thora takes the alleyway to the square, and Santi follows. They stand side by side at the foot of the tower. The clock is frozen at five minutes past midnight. Santi is still sure he can hear it ticking.

“I guess doomsday already happened,” says Thora.

Santi can’t shake the feeling that doomsday is yet to come. “Maybe we’re waiting for the next one.”

Thora frowns. “But the clock’s stopped.”

Santi shakes his head. “I don’t think it has.”

Thora throws him a puzzled look. Before he can try to explain, someone grabs their shoulders and turns them around.

“Excuse me.” A long-haired man in a blue coat looks between the two of them in shifting delight and confusion. “I—I need to tell—” He cuts himself off, starts again. “You’re—you’re here.”

Thora looks at Santi. He reads her unspoken question.Do you know this man?He shakes his head, uncertain.

“I’m sorry, we don’t...” Thora frowns. “What did you say?”

The man looks at Santi. “You’re here.Here.”His face crumples in distress. “I—I need to tell you—you—”

Thora tries to meet his eyes. “Listen. Do you need something to eat? A place to stay?”

The man looks at Santi in despair, as if he doesn’t understand what Thora is saying. “You’re here,” he says again, hopelessly. “Here.”

Santi shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says, although he doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for.

The man wrings his hands and turns away, wandering off across the square.

Thora watches him go, biting her nails. “I’ll call the hostel later. Ask them to keep an eye out for him.”

Santi’s eyes follow the man’s vague progress, his blue coat flapping in the wind. There is too much meaning in the world, more than it can hold.

“He’s right, anyway,” Thora says.

Santi looks at her, puzzled.

“Wearehere,” she says. “Both of us. Whatever that means.” She presses her hand to the wall of the tower, scrawled with messages in the city’s hundred voices. “I guess that’s what all these people were trying to say.” She pulls a marker from her jacket. WE ARE HERE, she writes in an empty space.

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