Page 3 of Love and Other Paradoxes

He pelted away, Esi’s footsteps ringing behind him. He sprinted past Great St. Mary’s, narrowly avoiding a crocodile of tourists

who were staring up at the tower instead of watching where they were going, and skidded down the narrow alley of Senate House

Passage. High walls closed him in: if she caught up with him here, he’d have nowhere to run. He slalomed through a gauntlet

of bikes, dodging a group of first-years in college scarves who were walking four abreast. He risked a glance over his shoulder.

Esi was closing in, pacing relentlessly through the gap his chaotic flight had made. He burst out of the passageway, slicing

right then left, where chalk scrawled on bricks read, TO THE RIVER .

The twists and turns had slowed her: she didn’t know this part of town like he did, and he used it. Instead of crossing the

humped bridge, he slipped down the jetty on the right, hoping she would race on across the river. But he had misjudged her.

Before she charged onto the bridge, her head turned in restless, searching attention, and her eyes locked with his.

He was trapped between her and the green water. He could jump in and swim for it, but the book would get wet. He looked frantically

between it and the river.

“And this,” he heard from his left, “is Garret Hostel Bridge. Named, of course, after Dr. Garret Hostel, the original inventor of the swan.”

His heart leapt. Rob, in his green waistcoat, poling a shallow wooden boat along the sluggish river. Nestled under blankets

inside was a group of tourists who seemed unmoved by his invented facts.

“Rob!” he yelled. “Can I get a lift?”

Rob nearly fell off the punt. “Greeney! Um, normally, yes, but these people have, you know, actually paid for a tour—”

He didn’t wait. He flung himself out like Frodo at Bucklebury Ferry and landed heavily in the boat, one foot squashing a punnet

of strawberries. He staggered to the front and sat down, as the punt rocked madly and the passengers shouted and Rob steered

them out from the sudden embrace of a willow tree, announcing loudly that everything was fine.

Joe looked back at Esi leaning over the water. For a second, he thought she would jump in and swim after him. But she just

stood, chest rising and falling, hands balled into fists at her sides. As the punt crawled away up the river, he had the time

to see that she didn’t look angry: she looked terrified.

“And what’s this?” Rob resumed in his tour-guide voice, as if nothing had happened. “A spooky Halloween treat for us all.

A visit from Joseph Greene! Who, while he may appear to be a living, breathing undergraduate, is in fact dead to me .”

Joe smiled uncertainly at the tourists. “Can you drop me off at the Mathematical Bridge on the way back?” he asked Rob in

a stage whisper.

Rob ignored his request and pulled directly into the bank. He prodded Joe with the wet, dripping end of the punt pole until he stumbled out. “Begone, foul spirit!” Rob shouted, propelling the punt smoothly back into the middle of the river.

Joe straightened up, hugging the book, and ran.

He took an indirect route back to college, checking constantly over his shoulder. The book was a burning coal against his

chest; he didn’t dare look at it, in case what he’d seen had been nothing but an illusion, his mind inventing the future he

had dreamt of. As he climbed the staircase, he kept going back, like a talisman, to Esi: her quick, desperate breaths, the

terror in her eyes as she had watched him drift out of her reach. If she cared about the book that much, it had to be exactly

what it seemed.

By the time he got to his bedroom, his brain was a fuzz of static. He placed what was in his hands down on the desk in front

of him.

Poems . By Joseph Greene. His eyes skittered off the words, then came back to rest on them. He felt them settle at his heart, sparking

a tiny, glowing light. He lingered on the face of the man on the cover, familiar and uncanny at once: the dusting of silver

at his temples, the frown lines between his brows. The eyes of the poet—he couldn’t yet think of them as his own—were focused

with single-minded intensity on the woman in his arms. Joe had never looked at anyone like that. It was unnerving, like seeing

a picture taken while he was possessed, consumed by a feeling he couldn’t remember.

He touched the slim hardback. It seemed to vibrate, with a potential frantic and invisible as radioactivity. The cover was a promise, but he didn’t know how it would translate into reality. Until he opened the book, everything was possible. He had the strange, superstitious urge to fling it out of the window. But he already knew he wouldn’t. From the moment he had seen it lying on the road, the only future that existed was the one where he read it.

He took a breath and turned to the first page.

The book began with an Introduction. It was the kind of thing he would usually have skipped—overwritten, academic, promising

to “put the poems in context”—but right now, he felt like he needed all the context he could get.

Meant to Be was a collection of poems about someone called Diana Dartnell. She was an actress, the Introduction told him, the most celebrated

of her generation. And she and Joe had been—were going to be—lovers. Epic, till-death-do-us-part, legendary lovers. They would

adore each other, and the words he wrote to immortalise that passion would be read, shared, recited at weddings, taught in

schools. Remembered. He skimmed over the words, hardly daring to believe it, wanting to with every fibre of his soul.

He turned back to the cover, to the woman who was destined to be his muse. Her graceful black-and-white profile was somehow

familiar, as if their souls had already met.

He read on with strange vertigo. The Introduction was a portrait of his life seen from the air, rendered flat and distorted. It talked about a childhood he didn’t recognise, spent in poverty (his parents were solidly lower-middle-class), where his only solace was to roam the Scottish Highlands in search of inspiration (he was from the East Neuk of Fife, sixty miles from the nearest real mountain). It sketched his time at Cambridge with the breathless exuberance of a prospectus, but made no mention of Rob. Diana, of course, had gone to Cambridge too; she would graduate with a 2:2, while he would somehow manage a 2:1. He felt a mixture of surprise and relief. The only other person from their student years who merited a mention was Diana’s ex-boyfriend Crispin, to whom she would later be briefly and unhappily married. The implication, that the perfect love story would be interrupted by a breakup and a marriage to someone else, struck a strange, sour note. Reminding himself that the course of true love never did run smooth, he kept reading, scouring the pages to find out when he and Diana would meet—today? Next month? After exams, in the delirious sunshine of May Week? But the Introduction was frustratingly short on details, as if their story was so well-known it didn’t need to be told.

He turned the page to a spread of photographs. Here he was as a student, on crutches with his right leg bandaged. The caption

told of a collision with a bike that would happen in his third year ( This year , he thought, with a shiver of foreboding), leaving him with a permanent scar. Here, in another photograph, was Diana, the

same age or a little younger, arm in arm with a friend at a party. The other girl caught his attention—her expression anxious

but determined, the camera flash picking up the dark shine of her skin—but he soon moved on to the last picture, which was

of him and Diana together. They were older now, in their midthirties, but their eyes were locked, their hands entwined, as

if they were still in the first flush of new love.

He raced through the rest of the Introduction in feverish haste: how his poetry about Diana had catapulted him from relative

unknown to national treasure; the awards and honours that had followed; the poems’ enduring legacy as a testament to obsessive

love, taking their place in the canon alongside the likes of Shakespeare and Byron (he reread this part several times). Finally,

he was heartened to learn that their love story had a happy ending: at the time of writing, he and Diana were still living

together in London.

The time of writing. He flicked back to the copyright page. Retroflex Special Edition , it said, with a logo of a capital R that looped backwards to draw a second, faded R behind it. The year of publication was 2044. He did some quick arithmetic. “Sixty,” he murmured. Here and now, his heart

hammering, his blood fizzing in his veins, the idea that he could ever be that old seemed impossible.

He had finished the Introduction. Overleaf were the stark words:

THE POEMS

He turned the page, his heart beating like a countdown.

Those poems aren’t going to write themselves , Rob had said, an hour and several lifetimes ago. But they had. Here they were, laid out on page after page in neatly printed

stanzas. And they were good. They were better than good: they were the poems he wished he could write, the ones that always

disintegrated somewhere between his mind and the paper. These, miraculously, had made it there intact. The more he read, the

more he forgot what he was reading and sank into the poems’ reality: a reality centred around one woman, her beauty woven

so vividly through the words that by the end, he longed for her with the rich, impossible yearning you feel for a character

in a book.

He closed Meant to Be and sat in the afterglow. He had never been in love, but now he knew how it would feel, and why he needed that experience

to write the poems that would realise his potential. The poet wrote about love as a transformation, a tearing apart of the

self and remaking it as something infinitely better. He wanted to step into the furnace of that feeling and come out changed

into everything he had longed to be.

He opened the book and read the poems again. And again, and again, until he no longer had to look at the words to hear them resonating inside his skull, as if they had always been there. He wondered if he was the first poet in history to learn his work by heart before even writing it.

And the worry crept in, starting in his gut and working its way up to his fingertips, tingling where they touched the pages.

Wasn’t that a paradox? Shouldn’t the space-time continuum be collapsing right now? He lowered the book, half expecting to

see the walls dissolving, but they looked as solid as ever. It wasn’t until he caught sight of himself in the mirror, so different

from the suave figure on the book’s cover, that he thought of something even worse. By reading about his future, had he inadvertently

changed it?

Horror rushed through him. He flung the book away. It hit the edge of the bed and rebounded, falling open. A leaflet fluttered

out.

He picked it up. At the top was a drawing of a friendly hourglass with googly eyes, and the heading FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS .

—Is it really safe to travel through time?

Yes! Stick with your tour guide and follow the terms and conditions, and you’ll be just fine.

—What if I cause a paradox and become my own grandfather?

That’s between you and your grandmother!! But seriously, don’t worry—it’s impossible for anything you do in the past to cause

a paradox, because anything you do in the past has already happened .

—So I can’t step on a butterfly and accidentally change the future?

No! It’s pretty deev if you think about it. You were always meant to go back in time. In a way, you already have. And once

you’re done, you’ll return to the same future you left. Simple!

He fell backwards onto the carpet, drowning in waves of relief. The future he’d read about was safe. Nothing could change

it.

When his heart had slowed its pounding, he got up. He paced to the mirror and stared at his reflection: flushed, wide-eyed,

like he had woken up from a dream to find it was still happening. He held the book up next to his face, mirroring the image

of the poet. He turned his head to match the angle, arms awkwardly open to embrace an invisible Diana. The resemblance wasn’t

perfect: aside from the obvious problem of the missing muse, there was something in the depths of the poet’s eyes that he

couldn’t replicate, no matter how he squinted. Not the poet , he reminded himself. “Joseph Greene,” he said aloud, imbuing his name with an English-accented gravitas that matched the

serif font on the book’s cover.

Like tilting a hologram, his perspective shifted. He saw himself from the outside, and what he saw was hilarious. He burst

out laughing, falling onto his bed, pressing the book to his face. “It’s fucking real,” he said into the pages. “It’s going

to happen.” He laughed and laughed, a joyous convulsion that took all the coiled-spring energy the poems had wound into him

and flung it back out into the world.

When the laughter was over, he sat up. He took in the familiar detritus of his room: the Highland cow, the bus, and the penguin scattered across the floor; the philosophy books sitting unread on the windowsill; his threadbare coat, hanging where he had flung it over the back of his chair. Something pink was sticking out of the pocket.

It didn’t feel like a decision. And, after all, it wasn’t. Anything you do in the past has already happened. He got up, his body moving without his direction, and spread the flyer out on his desk. Love Poems for Tomorrow. He had imagined

the audience in the ADC Theatre, sitting rapt as they witnessed the beginning of his future. He had given that vision up because

he hadn’t experienced a love worth writing about. But his future self didn’t have that problem. He had fallen in love and

risen out of it better, more interesting, ready to write the poems he was always meant to write.

He opened the book again. He leafed through, considering each poem, finally settling on one about a kiss, exuberant without

being juvenile, sensual without being embarrassing. He opened his laptop, minimised the MSN Messenger window he mainly used

for asking Rob to make him tea, and brought up his university webmail. In the body of a new email, he typed out the poem,

word by word, constantly checking to make sure his imperfect younger self hadn’t introduced an error. It was a strange, meditative

process, flicking back and forth between the printed page of the future and the glowing screen of right now. He felt the words

passing through him, like he was a conduit for something greater, taking dictation not from the muse but from a better version

of himself.

He read it through and nodded in satisfaction. In the “To” field, he typed the email address on the flyer. As he hovered over the Send button, a tremor of doubt assailed him. He tried to reassure himself. They were his poems. The fact that he hadn’t techni cally written them yet was beside the point. But he couldn’t shake the idea that he was doing something wrong, if not morally, then metaphysically. His gaze flicked to the philosophy books on the windowsill. Maybe if he had actually read them, he would have a better idea of the implications of what he was about to do.

The living room door banged, announcing Rob. “Greeney, what have I said about hijacking the punt when I have paying customers?

I had to tell my manager you were a tragic wild boy raised by swans or she would have sacked me.” His footsteps came closer.

“What are you doing back there? Are you actually working? This I have to see.”

Joe panicked, closed his eyes, and clicked Send.