Page 19 of Love and Other Paradoxes

Mr. Destiny, aren’t you. Mr. Meant to Be. The words followed him through the next two weeks, as he sat under Dr. Lewis’s glare in two more disastrous supervisions,

as he walked the streets with an ache under his ribs and a gaggle of time travellers following behind him like starstruck

ducklings. He and Diana met up for two more rehearsals. He was starting to wonder if they were overpreparing for what was,

after all, a recital of a twenty-two-line poem. A voice like Esi’s murmured, She’s just using the rehearsals as an excuse to spend more time with you. The thought should have excited him: as the time ticked down towards Valentine’s Day, the moment he had been longing for

drew closer. But instead, he found himself resenting it. Why should they have to fall in love to a deadline? Why couldn’t

they come together spontaneously, at their own pace, like normal people?

“Joseph.” He looked up. They were at the end of another rehearsal, and Diana was watching him with soft concern. “What are

you thinking about, my love?”

My love. She had started calling him that, with no apparent irony. He tried not to read too much into it: she probably did the same

with all her actor friends. My sweet, my darling, my dear heart’s beloved.

She touched his shoulder. “Tell me.”

There was a question in her eyes, one he couldn’t quite translate. And this? said the narrator uncertainly. Was this the moment when Joseph Greene and Diana Dartnell would— He interrupted. “Are we maybe overdoing it with all these rehearsals? It’s just a poem.”

She gave him a look of affronted surprise. “On the contrary. I don’t think it’s possible to overdo it. Your poem is perfect,

and it deserves a perfect performance.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Let’s meet up again on the thirteenth, shall

we? Last chance to get it together.”

She was more right than she knew: that final rehearsal had to be when it would happen. He tried to look forward to it, but

it felt less like anticipating a date and more like being an actor in some strange pantomime. They would both perform their

parts, they would kiss when the stage directions told them to, and the future would play itself out.

He left Whewell’s Court. Vera stood alone and tabardless across the street, watching him with narrow concentration. He ignored

her and took out his phone, looking in vain for a text from Esi. After their disastrous conversation, he had sent her a message

to apologise, but she still hadn’t replied. He was still weighing up whether he should try again when he arrived in front

of his door and found a box.

It sat at an awkward angle in the hallway, as if it had been dropped there by someone in a hurry. More alarmingly, it was

emitting scuffling sounds.

Cautiously, he opened it. Inside was a tiny kitten, looking up at him out of round blue eyes.

Under the kitten was a folded note with his name on. He carefully lifted the kitten’s paw to extract it.

Joseph Greene,

Hi. I love you. I know this is breaking the rules but I don’t care. There’s a poem you’re going to write about Diana and a

cat, and I want it to be this cat. So look after her please. Thanks and I love you and bye,

Beryl (if you could call the cat Beryl, that would also be amazing)

He stared into the middle distance. He imagined a moment in the future, him and Diana at home, bathed in the glow of mutual

adoration. As she leaned down to caress the cat, inspiration would have struck. But not anymore. Now, he would recognise the

moment as a scripted cue. Any chance of writing the poem in a spirit of genuine inspiration was gone.

He ripped up the note and dropped the pieces in the box, surprised at the strength of his anger. He had accepted that he would

never truly write the poems in the book. They were an artefact of physics, their origin as incomprehensible as time travel

itself. But he had consoled himself with the thought that there were other poems, maybe even better ones, still left open

for him to write. This careless gift had closed them down by one more.

Still, he couldn’t exactly leave the kitten in the hallway. He shut the box, tucked it under his arm, and unlocked the door.

In the living room, Rob was filling a balloon with rice. “Great news, Greeney,” he said as Joe shouldered the door closed.

“Darcy’s been eliminated! Squashed by a boulder someone dropped out of a window. Means I’ve got everything to play for.”

“Brilliant. Happy for you.” He put the box down gently on the sofa. It meowed.

Rob cocked his head. “I’m sorry. Did that box just—”

“Meow? Yes.” He took a moment out of his intense existential suffering to enjoy Rob’s bafflement. “I’m experimenting with

making a cat that’s both alive and dead.”

“Classic misconception,” said Rob, pressing his ear to the box. “The point of Schrodinger’s cat was to show the absurdity

of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Under a many-worlds interpretation, reality splits in two, and the

cat in each universe is simply alive or dead.”

Joe opened the box. “Looks like we’re in the universe with the alive cat.”

The kitten looked up reproachfully. Rob lifted it and held it next to Joe’s face. “The resemblance is uncanny.”

“Don’t get attached. I’m taking her straight to Cats Protection.”

“No!” Rob held the kitten close, until she squirmed out of his arms and jumped down to the sofa. “We’re keeping her.”

“We can’t keep a kitten. We’re not allowed. It’s in the student handbook.”

“Byron kept a bear in his room,” Rob pointed out. “He didn’t care about the student handbook.”

“He deliberately kept a bear because the student handbook said he wasn’t allowed to keep a dog. That was in 1806. They’ve

tightened up the wording since then.” His thoughts returned to the ripped-up note and the pit of despair it had sunk him into.

“Also, I’m not Byron.”

“Not yet. But you need to act like the poet you want to be, not the poet you are.” Rob scratched the kitten’s ears. “Where

did you get her?”

“Oh, the usual. Through a wormhole from the future.”

Rob laughed in a very funny, Greeney sort of way. “Doesn’t look very futuristic.”

“Turns out kitten technology isn’t going to change that much.” He tickled her under the chin. She purred and pushed against

his hand.

“Does she have a name?”

“I’m reliably informed that I’m terrible at naming cats.” His heart cramped, remembering Esi’s repressed laughter as she looked

down at Jeely Piece rubbing against her ankle. “Definitely not Beryl,” he added resentfully.

Rob stared at the cat, who stared back. “Bear.”

Joe couldn’t help smiling. “See what you did there.” He took the kitten and looked into her watery blue eyes. “Bear, Jeely

Piece is going to murder you. If the porters don’t get to you first.”

Rob scoffed. “I’m an expert at concealment and subterfuge. The porters won’t notice a thing. Can’t help with Jeely Piece,

though. That cat is a law unto himself.” He looked up at Joe hopefully. “Can I use her as an attack animal?”

“What would that involve?”

“Oh, just throwing her at people. Gently,” Rob added, seeing the look on Joe’s face.

“Absolutely not. Is that the real reason you called her Bear? Like writing GUN on a banana?”

“It was a multipurpose name. Anyway,” said Rob, with an air of changing the subject, “how are you doing? Isn’t your poetry

thing soon?”

“Tuesday.” He couldn’t believe it was nearly here. He had thought that by now, he would have become a different version of himself: more certain, less confused, closer to the man on the cover of the book. But if anything, he felt like he had got further away. He was caught in the void between who he was and who he was meant to be, no longer firmly anchored to either.

“You don’t seem very excited.”

Joe rubbed his knuckles against Bear’s tiny ears. “I don’t?”

Rob laughed hoarsely. “If I’d told you four months ago you’d be having one of your poems read at some fancy literary event,

I think your head would have exploded. I’d still have been cleaning bits of Greeney off the walls.”

He thought about explaining that the poem wasn’t really his: strictly speaking, it was no one’s, because it had appeared by

magic from the future. But as usual, he suspected Rob would be more interested in the physics of how that could possibly have

happened than in the ways it was turning Joe’s life upside down. He rubbed his eyes, feeling the future boxing him in: the

mug in his pigeonhole, the cat on his doorstep, his union with Diana looming closer and closer, nothing either of them could

do to actively choose it. “Do you think all our actions are predetermined?”

One of his favourite things about Rob was that you could ask him a question like that, with no context whatsoever, and he

wouldn’t even blink. “Oh yeah. Physics-wise, it’s pretty likely.”

“How do you cope with that?” He searched for an example that would make Rob care. “Like, you’ve been trying to murder Darcy

since your duel in first year. What if you knew it was never going to happen? Would you still keep trying?”

Rob looked at him like he was insane. “Of course. Because it’s not just about the outcome. I’m in the Guild because I enjoy

it. I love making weapons, I love staking out a target, I love the chase and the kill and writing up the report. I’d do it

all, even if I knew it’d come to nothing.”

Joe felt like he was trembling on the edge of a profound truth. On impulse, he checked his phone: still no reply from Esi. “And what if you knew the opposite?” he said. “That you were certain to win? What would you do then?”

Rob shrugged, as if it was perfectly straightforward. “I’d pretend I didn’t.”

Joe went into his bedroom and closed the door, wondering vaguely if Rob might be a genius. He took Meant to Be out from under his pillow, dropped it into his desk drawer, and slammed it shut. No more voice of the narrator. No more idea

that a narrator even existed. He would go to Diana and meet her on her own terms, here and now, and he would see what was

going to happen.