Page 29 of Love and Other Paradoxes

They left college. He could have asked her to stay, spend the rest of the Ball with him, but it would only have been delaying

the inevitable. They headed for King’s Lane, where her steps had always been taking her. Fireworks trailed in neon colours

across the sky, like a celebration happening in another universe. As he watched the starbursts reflecting in her eyes, she

slid her hand into his.

They walked along like lovers, not like two people who should never have met and were about to end up on opposite sides of

a cosmic portal. He tried to hold on to her lightly, but the feeling of her hand in his was a torment: an apology that meant

nothing, a promise there was no way she could keep.

“So help me visualise it,” he said, feeling like if he didn’t say something, he would fly to pieces. “You step through, and

then—what? What’s on the other side?”

She walked slow and swaying, her hip brushing against him. “There’s a gift shop. And an exhibition, about you and your poetry

and Diana.” Still waiting for him in the future, no matter what he had decided. The idea sent a chill through his heart. “There’s

also a statue.”

He stared at her, his train of thought completely derailed. “A statue?”

“Yeah. A giant statue of you doing this.” She posed briefly with her chin on her fist, her expression comically serious.

“Jesus. Really?” Once upon a time, the image would have thrilled him. He remembered a young man in a library, staring up at

a poet made of stone. It made him feel ashamed, and relieved, and a little sad.

They turned left down the grey concrete alley of King’s Lane. Esi stopped opposite a blank patch of wall. He squinted. “Is

it invisible?”

She smiled sadly. “I told you. There’s a password.”

He was desperate to delay her. “Do Shola and your housemates know you’re leaving?”

She shook her head. “They think I’m going on holiday. I booked leave from work and everything.”

The silence of the unspoken descended. Too much to say, and too little time left to say it. She let go of his hand. “This

is where I walk away.”

The words weren’t new. His vision doubled. A different Esi, anxious and unrooted, facing him on a crowded street. He knew

what he had said then, what he was supposed to say now. Okay. But the new version of Esi overlaid her, a hundred times more familiar and complicated and beloved, and he refused to let

her go.

With his heart in his throat, he said, “You don’t really want to leave.”

A smile of recognition trembled on her face. “What are you talking about?”

Another echo: the two of them in his college bar, her storming out, him asking her to stay. He began to understand. There was no past that was separate from the present. All their moments collided into this one, forming their path as they walked it. He smiled back at her. “You didn’t say threshold .”

A hole opened up in the universe.

He saw it out of the corner of his eye: a gap in reality, wrong as a galaxy trickling through an hourglass. Slowly, he turned

his head to look at it. His eyes refused to focus: whatever the wormhole really looked like was beyond his mortal senses to

process. What he saw was a fractal disc, radiant with silver light, that was both sinking into and surging out of the wall.

If he shifted his head an inch to the left or right, it disappeared.

“Fuck me,” he breathed.

“You guessed the password.” Esi was gazing through the portal, as if she could already see herself on the other side.

The door was open: all she had to do was step through. Urgency gripped him. “Esi. Wait.” He touched her arm, drawing her attention

back to him. “Listen to me. I mean it. I don’t think you want to do this.”

Her expression was indefinable: hope and longing and fear, all woven together until he couldn’t tell which one was uppermost.

“But this is the whole reason I came here,” she protested. “To fix my future. To fix myself.”

“No. You came here to save your mum, and you’ve done that.” He stepped forward, taking her hands. “And you’re not the same

person you were when you arrived. I’ve seen you start to let people in. I’ve seen you start to take up space. Is that why

you didn’t say goodbye to Shola? Is there part of you that’s maybe thinking about changing your mind?” He barely dared to

ask the question, so afraid of what the answer might be. “Do you really still want to be someone else?”

Her eyes pinched shut. He could almost see the decision tugging her in opposite directions, towards a long-cherished dream or an uncertain future. He had no right to tip the scales: he was afraid of saying too much, of inviting a rejection that would hurt worse than any he had experienced in his life. Maybe he should hide his feelings, let her do what she would have done if they had never met. But they had met, and made a million tiny changes to each other, and she deserved to know how he felt about her, regardless of what she

decided to do with it.

He cleared his throat. “Also, and this really shouldn’t sway your decision either way, but—I’m completely in love with you.”

It was amazing, how easy it was to say. No need to agonise over the right words, to hide behind the constructed facade of

a poem. He was just sure, as he had never been before.

Joy flooded her face. Then doubt moved in to replace it. Her mouth moved wordlessly. “But you and Diana—you’re meant to be.”

“Maybe. But you know what? I’ve had it with meant to be . You and me, we’re the opposite of meant to be. We’re barely even supposed to breathe at the same time. But here we are.”

He caressed her face, trying not to hang the universe on how she leaned in to his touch. “And I know, I’m being selfish. ‘Hey,

I love you, give up your dreams and stay with me in the nineteenth century, where phones still have physical buttons and you

have to look at the internet on a computer.’” She laughed, bowing her head. He tilted her chin up until she met his eyes.

“But the truth is—I don’t want you to forget me.”

“I don’t want to forget you either. I want to remember it all. How I fought so hard to save her, and I did it. How I made

a life here.” She shook her head wildly. “I don’t want someone else to come out of the river. I want it to be me.”

His heart kindled with hope. “So stay.”

“I can’t.”

The two words he had least wanted to hear. The ground dropped out from under him. “You don’t feel the same.”

“It’s not that! Fuck, I love you, I’ve loved you for an embarrassingly long time, but—Joe, my whole family is through there.

I can’t just abandon them.” She buried her face in her hands. “I can’t stay. And I can’t go.”

“Listen,” he said, simultaneously trying to process that she had said she loved him. “We’ve never really known how this works.

All this time, we’ve just been hoping. Imagining what we want to be true. The only way to really find out is to walk through.”

He offered his hand. “Together.”

She gazed at him, terror written on her face. “What if I forget you? Or—what if you can’t even go into the future? What if

it causes some kind of paradox and you disappear?”

He contemplated the weight of what she was saying. Not to be the famous poet Joseph Greene. Not to be any Joseph Greene at

all: to vanish from existence, hand in hand with the woman he loved. He shook his head wordlessly. “I don’t care. I’m not

letting you do this alone.”

She made a strange sound, between a squeak and a hum. Then she leapt into his arms.

She kissed him with hot, bottled-up fury, like she had been waiting all this time to give herself permission. He staggered

back against the wall, taking the warm, living weight of her, gasping into her mouth. He kissed her, and kissed her, and if

this was the way his world would end, it was an ending he could live with.

They broke apart, staring at each other as if they could pour a lifetime into the space of a moment. Hand in hand, they turned to face the wormhole. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” she said, and they walked together into the future.

Splintering light, and a magnetic hum in his ears. The universe stretched, shuddered, broke into kaleidoscopic fragments.

For an instant, he saw the wormhole as it really was, and his mind flew open, like a gale blowing through a shattered window.

Then he was on the other side, under the soft glow of security lights, looking up at a statue of himself.

They had dressed him in a loose shirt and knee-length breeches, as if they couldn’t imagine a poet wearing modern clothes.

The pose was exactly as Esi had shown him, down to the self-serious expression on the lifeless face. He had gazed up at the

statue of Byron so many times, but he had never imagined what it would be like to see himself turned into a symbol of deathless

art. It turned out the answer was extremely uncomfortable . He averted his eyes, taking in the rest of the exhibition: panels with quotations in foot-high italics, photographs of him

and Diana blown up to larger than life. A hologram of the two of them kissing, the same moment of tenderness repeated again

and again until it became uncanny.

“You didn’t mention the hologram,” he murmured to Esi. Then he remembered. They were on the other side of the wormhole: she

might not be his Esi anymore.

He turned to her in panic. She stood by his side in her shimmering dress, forget-me-nots studded in her hair. But her expression

was blank, confused, as if what she was seeing made no sense to her.

“Esi.” She looked at him with glazed incomprehension. His heart froze. He didn’t know how to ask her. “Are you—did you—”

She shook her head. “I didn’t change.” Before he could process his relief, she gestured at the exhibition. “None of it did. You’re still going to end up with her. Nothing you just said made any difference.” Her eyes shone with furious tears. “It means you were right all along. Any changes we think we’ve made, they don’t matter. Whatever we do, we end up in the same place.”

“No. No way.” His heart rebelled. He jabbed a finger up at the statue. “I’m not turning into that fucking nozz—” The words

caught in his throat. He walked closer. There, on the right shin, subtle but undeniable: a scar.

Esi’s eyes followed his to the statue, then down to his left leg. Below the hem of his kilt, his own, fresh scar showed like

a reversed reflection.

They looked at each other. Without speaking, they ran through the exhibition. All of it was familiar, like a story told and

retold to death: the quotations from the poems in Meant to Be , the photograph of him and Diana on the day they met, the look in their eyes, the precise angle of their heads tilted towards

each other.

“It’s all exactly the same as the book,” he said in disbelief. “It’s not like the changes don’t matter. It’s like they never

happened.”

“But how?” Esi asked him, bewildered and terrified. “How can the past change and the future stay the same?”

Not the future . A future . Vera, shooting him an amused look. The Retroflex logo, the shadowy second R branching off from the first. Rob peering into a cardboard box, trying to explain Schrodinger’s cat. Under a many-worlds interpretation, reality splits in two. He looked back at Esi, revelation thundering through his veins. “Because it’s not the same future.”

“What?” Her eyes were wild. “What are you talking about?”

“Vera told me. She said Retroflex doesn’t change the future. They change a future.” He walked out of the exhibition, back to the wormhole. Where it met reality, the edges splintered, warping the straight lines of the brickwork into forking paths. “Whenever I’ve asked Rob about time travel, he’s gone off on a tangent about parallel universes. Or, I thought it was a tangent. But this is what he was talking about.” He shook his head in wonder. “When you first went through the wormhole, you didn’t just step into the past. You stepped into a whole new universe. We can change the future of the new universe—we already have—but the future of the original universe stays the same.”

Her voice trembled. “So what does it mean?”

There were a hundred ways he could answer that question. But he knew what she needed to hear. “It means you saved your mum,

in my universe. And it means you get to keep being yourself in this one.” She drew in a great, shuddering breath. He took

her in his arms. As he held her close in that dark, glowing space, he realised it meant something else too. The Joseph Greene

in this universe was a different Joseph Greene, one whose life was already written. None of this—the exhibition, the statue,

the absurd, thrilling immensity of it all—was in his own future. He took it in, and with a bittersweet pang, he let it go.

“And it means we were both wrong.” He stepped back, taking her hands. “There was never any one future, to break or be bound

by. There’s infinite futures. All of them are real. All of them will happen. We just have to choose which one we want to happen

to us.”

He hadn’t realised he was asking her a question until he found himself breathless, waiting for her answer. She looked like

she was about to speak. Then a sound came out of the darkness behind her.

She turned, sliding close to him. “What was that?”

Behind the statue, a shadow was walking towards them. As it came out into the light, he was astonished to see that it was Vera, wearing a high-waisted dress that made her look like she’d just stepped out of a costume drama.

She stared at the two of them in utter confoundment. “What the fuck are you doing here?”