Page 6 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“I don’t understand,” he went on. “The leaflet says—”

“I know what the leaflet says.” She looked over his shoulder. “Just—please tell me you haven’t read the book.”

He laughed in her face. “Of course I have! You’re telling me if someone gave you a book about your future, you wouldn’t read

it?”

“I didn’t give it to you. You took it.” She closed her eyes in despair. “Yeah, I’d read it,” she added quietly.

The wind spiralled, sending red leaves skittering around their feet. “Look,” he said. “Can I get you a coffee?”

She looked at him like he’d offered to get her a hamster. “What?”

“Just—my friend Rob says I’m the worst person to talk to about time travel in the best of circumstances. And this is not the

best of circumstances, because I’m extremely hungover just now. So ideally, I’d want some caffeine in my system before we

get into closed timelike whatevers. If that’s all right with you?”

“I guess I can’t just let you walk away with all that future stuff in your head.” She hesitated. “Fine. Let’s get a coffee.”

He dithered over where to take her, until he remembered she wasn’t his destined beloved and he could take her anywhere he liked. He decided on Indigo, a tiny café up the narrow side street of St. Edward’s Passage. “This is on me, by the way,” he said as they stood at the counter. “Least I can do for my biggest fan.”

Stone-faced, she scanned the price list. “Large mocha,” she said, “extra marshmallows,” and stamped away upstairs.

He ordered a latte for himself, and carried the drinks up the creaking steps. The tables were proportionally tiny: when he

sat down opposite Esi, he was startled by her closeness. She leaned in farther, her eyes flickering down to his cheek. His

heart stuttered.

“You’ve got something...” She squinted, her finger hovering near his face. “It looks like banana written backwards?” He flushed, rubbing at his cheek. She was trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. “The Shakespeare of our

time,” she murmured.

He cleared his throat, feeling as awkward as if he were on a first date. “So. See this.” He took the book out of his pocket

and extracted the leaflet. “It says, ‘anything you do in the past has already happened.’”

“Sure. That’s the official line.” She leaned back in her chair. “I think it’s bullshit.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Why?”

“The terms and conditions.”

He laughed. “I was expecting something a wee bit more dramatic.”

A brief smile lit her face. “Stay with me. It gets good. So, here’s what they make us agree to.” She counted on her fingers.

“Time travellers may not carry any future technology. Time travellers must stay with the tour guide at all times. Time travellers

may only enter the wormhole between local hours of nine a.m. till twelve p.m., and one p.m. till five p.m. each day—”

“Wormhole?” he interrupted. “There’s a wormhole?”

She gave him a deadpan look. “What did you think, we got the bus?”

He spluttered out a laugh; she looked pleased despite herself. “Give me a break!” he protested. “I’m still trying to process

the fact that I’m a tourist destination.” He took a gulp of coffee. “So where is it, this wormhole?”

Esi picked a marshmallow off the top of her mocha and popped it in her mouth, briefly closing her eyes. “King’s Lane.”

King’s Lane was a concrete alley, attached to the Gothic splendour of King’s College like a tin can to a thoroughbred’s tail.

No one went down King’s Lane for any reason but to relieve themselves at the end of a night out. “I’m sorry. You’re telling

me there’s a wormhole to the future, and it’s in Piss Alley ?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Sure, just announce it to everyone.”

“It’s fine. This is Cambridge. They’re just going to assume we’re rehearsing a play.” She rolled her eyes, and he smiled.

“Why, are you worried folk might try and walk through?”

“They can’t,” she said impatiently. “It’s hidden. There’s a password you have to say to reveal it. And no, I’m not telling

you what it is. I’m not even going back through myself until I’m done making my change. Anyway, can I get back to my point?”

“Right. Sorry,” he said graciously. “You were reciting the small print.”

“A lot of it’s about the target. That’s you,” she explained, wiggling her fingers at him. “Time travellers may not follow

the target into any private premises, or beyond the radius of 0.5 miles of the wormhole. Time travellers may leave gifts for

the target, but said gifts may not contain any text or media originating from the future. Time travellers may not interact

with the target directly—”

“Sorry, just to check,” he interrupted her. “You agreed to these terms and conditions?”

“Obviously. Otherwise they wouldn’t have let me on the trip. But I ran away from the tour guide the first chance I got, and

now I’m just trying to stay out of her way.”

“And the company—they haven’t sent out a search party? They’re okay with you just disappearing?”

“I don’t know if they’re okay with it. Honestly, I don’t care. That’s not the point. The point is...” She leaned across

the table, her gaze locked on his. “They don’t want us getting anywhere near you. It’s like they’re trying to stop us doing

anything that might change your future. But if the leaflet’s true, nothing can change your future. So why do they need us

to agree to all that?”

He followed her logic. “So you think time travel can change the future, they’re just pretending it can’t?” She nodded. “But—that can’t be right. People would know if the future

was changing. They’d notice .”

“Would they?” She lifted her chin. “What if it was changing all the time, but our memories were changing too? No one would

even realise it was happening.”

He felt a hallucinatory lurch at the thought. If she was right, his entire life could be being rewritten from moment to moment,

his sense of a persistent self nothing but an illusion. And it was worse than that. His glorious future could dissolve at

any second.

It wasn’t true. He couldn’t let it be true. He sat back, crossing his arms. “Nah.”

She looked affronted. “What do you mean, ‘nah’?”

“I mean, nah, I don’t buy it. There’s plenty of other reasons they might have those terms and conditions. Maybe it’s about respect. Maybe they just want to give me a wee bit of privacy. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theory.”

She choked out a laugh. “Conspiracy theory?”

“And no company would do that. Imagine, if time travel could really change the past and they knew it. They’d never take the

risk. They could write their customers out of existence. They could write themselves out of existence. Flimsy terms and conditions aren’t going to be enough to protect against that.”

She made a soft, frustrated sound. “You’re sitting there with a book of poems you haven’t written yet, and you’re seriously

trying to tell me time travel can’t change the past?”

His coffee was starting to get cold, but he didn’t care: he was too absorbed in their argument. “No, I get it. I had the same

thought. But think about it. What if you were always meant to come back in time?” He leaned across the table, holding her

gaze. “You’d always have dropped the book. I’d always have read it. It would always have been part of my story.”

She didn’t lean away. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying—maybe it doesn’t change the future. Maybe it creates it.” He laid his hand on the book. “Honestly, before, I never

really believed all this stuff was possible. I wanted it—Jesus, I really wanted it—but did I actually think I could get there? Not in a million years. Now? I know I can. Because look. It happened.”

She was watching him intently, but he didn’t register her expression; he was in full flow, as if he were in a supervision

with his Director of Studies but it was going well for a change. “So the company line makes sense to me. And it’s not miles

off from how some philosophers have thought about time travel. The past can’t change,” he finished triumphantly, “because

any attempt to change it would always already have happened.”

Her face crumpled. She covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes filling with tears.

He reared back. “Jesus. Fuck, I’m sorry. Did I—What did I say?”

A tear spilled from her eye, and she dashed it away. “You know it all, don’t you? This was stupid. I should never have talked

to you.” She got up, chair screeching across the floorboards.

His mind raced, trying to understand. She was here to change something: something so important she had almost jumped into

a river to stop him from messing it up. “Esi, wait.”

She turned, red-eyed. He felt the trembling weight of the moment: what he said next could hold her here, or push her away.

He made a wild, desperate guess. “You’re here to save someone.”

She closed her eyes. The tears spilled over as she nodded. He watched her carefully as she came back to the table. “Who?”

“My mum.” She sat down, scrubbing wildly at her eyes. “I told you I was a bomb crater, right? She was the bomb.”

He swallowed. “What happened?”

“Car accident. She was driving, and a truck sideswiped her. Wrong place, wrong time.” She looked down, picking at the backs

of her hands. “I was eight. Old enough to understand she was gone, not old enough to handle it.”

He shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Everyone’s sorry.” She rubbed her sleeve across her eyes. “My sisters, they were younger. After a while, they didn’t even remember her. I ended up being more of a mum to them, in the end. Well, me and my aunties. And my dad—he grieved, but his friends from church carried him through. Me—it broke me.” She looked up, and he felt for an instant the full force of her loss. “People throw that word around, but I mean it. When my mum died, the person I was meant to be died too. And all that’s left is—this.” She made an angry gesture at herself.

He wanted to say something—that she shouldn’t talk about herself like that, that her mum would have wanted her to move on—but

in the face of her grief, all his words sounded useless. “But—that’s got to still be in the future, right? The book’s from

2044. If that’s when you’re from, there’s no way you’re eight in the present.”

“No. I’m not even born.”

“So why come back to now?”

“When it happened...” She took a breath. “She was driving back here. Back to Cambridge, for the twenty-fifth anniversary

of an award she’d won on the twenty-third of June, 2006.”

He saw it like a warped perspective coming into focus. “She’s a student here.”

She nodded. “Same year as you. When Retroflex said they were launching a trip to see you, I knew that was my chance. Right

place, right time.” She pressed her palms to her cheeks. “So. What they say, about how the past doesn’t change? I can’t think

like that. What happened to her—what’s going to happen...” Her eyes met his, burning. “You can’t tell me that was meant

to be.”

He looked down at the leaflet. He wanted to believe it for himself so badly. Now he understood why she was so desperate to

believe the opposite. “I’m not saying it’s meant to be . I don’t think it’s right, or that God wants it, or any of that shite. I just think—maybe it’s how the universe works. What’s

going to happen happens, and we can’t change it.”

Her red-rimmed eyes met his. “Do you know that for sure?”

“Fuck no.” He laughed. “I’m a philosopher. Knowing stuff isn’t our strong suit.”

She swirled the dregs in her mug. “And I don’t know the future can change. But I believe it. Because I have to. I’ll find her, and I’ll do whatever it takes to stop her winning that award, so she’s got no reason to come back here on that day.”

“And then what? You go back through the wormhole into the future?” He rubbed his temples, wincing. “But—a different future

from the one you left?”

“A better one. The future me and my family were supposed to have.” She looked down at her hands. “And I’ll be the me I was

always meant to be.”

“Okay.” He sat back. “So do it. I might not agree that it’s possible, but I’m not going to stop you trying.”

She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Have you heard of the butterfly effect?”

“Aye, it came out last year. The guy who goes back in time and rewrites his childhood, but he keeps making everything worse?”

She looked at him blankly. “Oh. I thought you meant the film. Guess that one didn’t stand the test of time.” He frowned. “The

butterfly effect. What, a butterfly flaps its wings and ends up causing a hurricane?”

“Tiny changes build up.” She interlocked her thumbs, spreading out her fingers. “I need to stop my mum winning that award. But I can’t change anything else. If I make the wrong change, even a small one, the consequences could be huge. She might not meet my dad. She might stay here and do a PhD, or she might move back to Ghana, or—or some other accident might happen that I can’t save her from.” She looked at him, her expression solemn. “Since I got here, I’ve been trying to stay out of people’s way. Affect as little as possible. This”—she gestured between the two of them—“this is a huge risk. I could be making a million tiny changes, just by talking to you. But I had to make sure you’re not going to do any thing differently because of the book. You have to act like you never read it. Do whatever you were going to do before.”

He rubbed his face, smearing the words from his drunken poem. “Uh-huh.”

She was looking at him uneasily. “What?”

He gave her a slightly edited rundown of the events of the previous night. Her face steadily fell, until she looked almost

as appalled as when she’d first seen him in the coffee shop.

She pinched her forehead. “I’m sorry. I want to make sure I understand. You walked up to Diana Dartnell dressed as a railway

accident and told her you’re her destiny?”

Through her words, he saw himself from Diana’s perspective: a drunken imbecile, acting like she owed him her attention. He

winced. “I truly wish that summary was less accurate.”

Esi made a grinding noise in her throat. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. All I had to do was come here and change one

thing, and now it’s fucked and it’s all my fault —” Her head snapped up, braids flying. “You’ve got to fix this.”

Her terror cut through his shame. “I don’t understand. Why would anything I do affect your mum?”

She grabbed the book and opened it, turning to the page with the photographs. She tapped the girl with her arm around Diana.

In a rush, he saw past the differences—the cool tone of her complexion where Esi’s was warm, the shining fall of her straightened

hair—to the likeness in her cheekbones, her eyes, her nervous smile. “Because they’re friends. Her and Diana Dartnell. Not

in the future, but—here and now.” She looked up in desperation. “If you and Diana don’t get together when you’re supposed

to, that changes Diana’s path. Which changes my mum’s path.” She mimed an explosion with her fingers. “My one change gets

butterfly-hurricaned into nothing.”