Page 7 of Love and Other Paradoxes

He stared at her across the table. Her vision of the universe—unstable, rewriteable, constantly in flux—possessed him. Could

she be right? By walking up to Diana last night, had he knocked his entire future off course?

“Me and Diana,” he said, trying to stay calm. “Do you know for sure that’s not how we first met?”

She made a face. “Of course it’s not how you first met. That’d be ridiculous—”

“Do you know for sure?” he interrupted. “Come on, you must know how we got together. You had to study me in school, for fuck’s

sake.”

“Honestly, I tuned most of it out. But no. I don’t think they ever told us how you met.” She stared at him thoughtfully. “Did

you even get together at Cambridge?”

“You’re asking me ?”

She bit her lip. “You must’ve done. That’s how all the fancy people end up knowing each other, right?”

“Right,” he agreed. “Where else would I have met someone like her?”

“Okay. So you met here. But there’s no way you were supposed to just walk up to her in the street and tell her you’re meant

to be.”

“How do you know?”

She spluttered. “Because I know! No romance in history has ever started like that.”

“And you’re an expert?”

“Actually, yeah. I read a lot of romance.” She sat back, looking embarrassed. “And no, I’m not accepting any comments on that.”

Something clicked in his mind. He started laughing. “It all makes sense. Don’t you see?” He leaned across the table, beaming.

“You’re going to help me and Diana get together.”

Her face was a picture of confusion. “I don’t get it. Why do you think you need help, if you believe it’s meant to be?”

“Because it’s all meant to be. All of it. You were meant to come back in time. You and your—romance expertise, and your knowledge

of the future, and...” He shook his head, delighted. “Now I see it, it’s obvious that’s the only way it could happen. Diana’s

way out of my league. Or that’s what I’d think, if I didn’t know I was going to be with her.”

Esi’s smile started small and grew until it was wide and dazzling. “You,” she said, shaking her head, “are crazy.”

“They didn’t teach you that in school?”

“Maybe. Told you, I wasn’t listening.” Her smile faded. “But—I can’t think like that. Like everything’s going to turn out

the same no matter what.”

“That’s fine,” he insisted. “We don’t have to agree on how this all works. What matters is, we both want me and Diana to get

together. Right?”

She nodded slowly. “Right.”

He tapped the photograph. “And while you’re helping me with that, I can help you find your mum.”

She looked suspicious. “Why would you help me find her if you don’t think I can save her?”

He shrugged. “You might as well try. Worst case, you get to see her one last time.”

Her eyes flicked up to the ceiling. “Okay,” she said. “Deal.”

She slid her hand into his. She had already affected his life so profoundly that it was strange they hadn’t touched until

now. Her palm was cool and soft, as lightly anchored to this moment as the rest of her. He could almost feel the gulf of time

stretching between them. It made him a little dizzy.

She coughed, drawing back her hand. In search of somewhere to look, he focused on the photograph. He felt ashamed of how quickly

he had turned the page, more interested in his own story. Now, knowing how this girl’s story ended, there was a haunting quality

to the picture: her lifted chin, her tense, bare shoulders, the sea of white faces behind her. “Do you know what college she’s

at? Or what she’s studying?”

Esi shook her head. “She never really talked about her time here. It wasn’t easy for her. She never felt like she belonged,

and she had to work twice as hard as the white students to get half as far. I guess she didn’t want to relive that.” She shrugged.

“I went through the stuff she left behind, but either she got rid of anything from here or she never kept it in the first

place.”

“But she still came back twenty-five years later. So whatever she got the award for must have been important to her.” He tapped

the table, thinking. “You could try asking at student registry. They should have a record of everyone who’s studying here.”

“Already tried. They wouldn’t tell me anything. Data protection, apparently.” She folded her arms grumpily. “Didn’t know you

had that back here in medieval times.”

“Okay, so we bypass the official channels. We’ve got her picture. We can make photocopies.”

“Photo—copies?”

“Come on, the clue is in the word.”

“Oh. Right.” She frowned. “You mean, like, put posters up?”

“Aye. And we can ask around. Someone’s bound to know someone who knows someone who—”

“No,” she interrupted. “No asking around, no posters. I told you, I don’t want to affect anything else in her life. Getting

everyone talking about her, sticking her face up all over town? Can you imagine the changes that might set off?” She shook

her head tightly. “I want to find her quietly. If I do it right, she’ll never even know I was here.” In her guarded posture,

he sensed something she wasn’t saying. But the same intuition told him not to push it. “I need to focus on the award. If I

can find out what it is, I can try and change who wins it.” Catching his look, she added, “I know you think that’s impossible.

Just humour me.”

“So was it an academic thing, a sports cup—what?”

“It would’ve been something academic.” She fiddled with her braids. “She was so smart, so focused. I can’t see her caring

that much about anything else.”

“So we’re looking for academic awards that get given out on the twenty-third of June. I can ask my Director of Studies,” he

offered. “She knows about all that stuff.”

Esi nodded. He sensed a change in her bearing, as if a deep, thrumming tension had been released. He remembered what she’d

said. I’ve been trying to stay out of people’s way. Until now, she’d been alone in this. “Okay,” she said decisively. “Now we need to figure out your next move with Diana. I’m

guessing you haven’t seen her since...”

“Since our legendarily romantic first encounter?” She smirked. “No. But the good news is, I’ve got a reason to see her again. I got into this poetry workshop, and she’s the one performing my poem. Which means I’m going to meet her at the ADC Theatre on Friday.”

“Friday as in three days from now?” She looked him up and down, as if calculating how long it would take to transform him

into someone Diana might find appealing. She sighed. “Let’s be clear about what I can offer. I can’t give you any inside information.

I probably know less about you and Diana than anyone else on this trip. But I can help make sure the next time you see her,

you don’t act like such a nozz.”

“Nozz?”

“You know what you did. Figure it out.” She hid her smile. “The good news is, Friday’s my day off. What time’s your poetry

thing?”

“Five p.m.”

“Let’s meet a couple of hours before to talk it through. And get you some better clothes. What kind of budget are we working

with?

A laugh escaped him. “Basically none?”

“That might be a problem. If you’re going to impress her, we need to go high-end.”

“What about charity shops? My friend Holly’s always talking about finding cheap designer stuff on Burleigh Street.”

Esi looked sceptical. “Guess we can give it a try. In the meantime, we should stay in touch. Do you have a phone?”

“ Do I have a phone ,” he scoffed, taking it out. “Come on. It’s 2005.” Like all his phones, it was a hand-me-down from Kirsty, but she had got bored of it faster than usual, so it was surprisingly up-to-the-minute: a Motorola flip model with an etched keypad and a second screen on the outside. He was quite proud of it. Esi’s was a chunky, old-fashioned Nokia, the kind he used to have in high school. “Wow,” he said. “Vintage.”

She looked at her phone, then at his. “I literally can’t see the difference.”

“Mine has a colour screen,” he protested.

“Wow. Are you sure it’s not you who’s from the future?”

They exchanged numbers, Esi grumbling about the stupidity of devices with physical buttons, and left the café. At the corner

of Bene’t Street, she turned left. “See you Friday.”

“See you.” Something occurred to him. “Wait. What about the time travellers? Won’t the tour guide freak out if she sees us

together?”

“She won’t. Burleigh Street’s outside her range. 0.5-mile radius, remember?”

He shook his head, smiling. “For someone who doesn’t respect the terms and conditions, you certainly have them memorised.”

She hissed, drawing back into the shelter of the cash machine. “Not well enough. Looks like I overshot lunch break.”

He peered round the corner. The woman in the tabard was waiting outside the entrance of college, looking as bored as usual.

“That’s Vera,” said Esi. “The tour guide.”

“Vera?” He did a double take. “All the Veras I know are over a hundred.”

“Guess that means it’s due for a comeback.” Behind Vera, a girl in a cropped Fair Isle jumper and a boy in wide, flapping

trousers were anxiously watching the gate. Esi shook her head. “I’ll leave you to your fans. Bye, Joseph Greene.”

The formality of his full name made him laugh. “Bye.”

As she sidled away up Bene’t Street, he went on towards college. He tried to compose his face into a poetic expression, but he was so conscious of the time travellers staring that it made him forget how to walk. He tripped, catching himself on the steps. Cheeks burning, he scrambled up and hurried through the gate. So much for living up to his own legend.

He checked his pigeonhole, finding a green feather, a paperweight in the shape of a cat, and a scribbled note that said LOVE . Before, he would have binned them or left them in the blank pigeonhole of a student who’d dropped out, but now, they were

precious mementos of his future. He pocketed them and headed up the staircase, past a man running down with a plastic sword

and a look of bitter disappointment. Joe entered the living room to find Rob posing for a picture, a Highland cow in one hand

and a London bus in the other.

He stared. “What are you doing with Hamish and Clive?”

“Celebrating,” said Rob with a grin. “These two just helped me foil an attempted assassination.”

“How?”

“Stunned him with the Highland cow and then ran him over with the bus.”

“Great. Congratulations.” He looked back, reconfiguring his impression of the man on the stairs. “So that was your nemesis?”

Rob snorted. “You think I could get Darcy with a basic combo like that? No. Next time we meet on the battlefield, I’m going

to have to whip out something truly unprecedented.” He threw Hamish and Clive at Joe, who completely failed to catch them.

“How about you? Did you submit to that poetry thing I told you about?”

“Aye, I did.” He went on into his bedroom.

Rob followed him expectantly. “And?”

He let himself smile. “I got in.”

Rob’s face lit up. “Nice one, Greeney! So who did you write a poem about?”

“Oh. Uh—just this girl.”

“‘Just this girl,’” Rob proclaimed, hand on his heart. “There’s the competition-winning eloquence I’d expect from our future

poet laureate.” He went to sit on Joe’s bed. “Does ‘this girl’ have a name? Or does her perfection defy our mortal labels?”

Joe smiled dreamily as he sat down to check his email. “Her name’s Diana.” There were no further communications from Love

Poems for Tomorrow, but there was one from Dr. Lewis, his Director of Studies. The subject line was a question mark. The body

of the email was empty. “Why is Dr. Lewis sending me blank emails?”

Rob looked over Joe’s shoulder. “Maybe she’s wondering why you’re not at your supervision.”

“What?” His heart skipped. He checked his watch, cross-referencing against his crumpled mental timetable. Rob was right: he

had been supposed to meet Dr. Lewis forty-five minutes ago.

He leapt up from the desk, banging his knee. “Fuck! How do you know my schedule better than me?”

Rob watched him scramble to gather the neglected philosophy books from the windowsill. “I’m an Assassin. It’s my job to know

everyone’s schedule.”

“Assassin’s not a job,” he retorted, running for the door.

“Neither is poet!” Rob shouted after him.

He thundered down the steps, then ran through to the next court and up another flight of stairs to arrive panting by the door

marked Dr. J. Lewis .

“Don’t waste more time knocking,” a resonant voice said from within. “You’re already late.”

He stepped inside. Dr. Lewis’s rooms were like an eccentric, disorganised museum: from her collection of replica Benin Bronzes, staring regally down from sixteenth-century West Africa, to her sousaphone, which she played in a jazz band on the weekends, to the bust of Wittgenstein with a suction cup dart affixed to one side of his face. In a throne-like armchair sat his supervisor, her usual brightly patterned dress contrasting with an expression of steely disappointment. “What happened?”

His insides cramped with guilt. Dr. Lewis knew better than him what it was like to come to Cambridge from a nontraditional

background, and it meant she was usually willing to cut him some slack. But today, it looked like her patience had run out.

He fumbled for an excuse. I was having coffee with a time traveller , while valid, would pose more questions than it answered. A fragment of his conversation with Esi came back to him, along

with a vivid image of her face. We can’t change it. “Determinism.”

Dr. Lewis pushed back her salt-and-pepper locks. “That’s your excuse for missing our appointment? Determinism?”

He nodded.

She took off her glasses. “Aristotle save me,” she murmured. When she looked up, her eyes were bright with anger. “You know

what my problem with this place is? Well, one of my many problems. Students who think they have the right to waste my time.

Worse, the ones who try to look clever while doing it.”

He panicked. “No,” he blurted out, “it’s not an excuse. I—I saw something that proved to me that the future is already written.”

She sat back, like she was taking what he said at face value. “Okay. And, what, that means you were predestined to be late

today? You had no control over your actions, so you can just chalk it up to fate?”

He squinted, sensing he was walking into a trap. “Yes?”

“No. This is typical of you, Joe. You have a tendency to make leaps of logic that aren’t justified by the evidence.” She cleared her throat. He recognised the signal that his line of thought was about to be vivisected. “Imagine you know your future.”

He resisted the urge to scream with laughter. “Okay.”

“Now, imagine that future includes you graduating with a First.”

“2:1,” he corrected her.

She frowned. “If you insist. Great , you think, I’m predestined to get a 2:1 . Now, how do you respond? Do you think, Well, fate’s got this covered, looks like I can relax ?” She leaned forward. “No. You can’t. Because hard work is the only mechanism that’s going to get you there. Determinism

isn’t going to take control of your legs and march them to the library. It’s not going to read the books for you, or put in

the long, hard, deliberate effort that turns reading into original thought.” She waved her hand in parenthesis. “Not to mention,

unless you’re a white man who went to Eton, the much greater effort of persuading everyone else to take you seriously.”

He stared over her shoulder, the cogs in his brain turning. “You’re saying, even if you’re destined for success, you still

have to do the work.”

“I’m saying more than that. I’m saying determinism makes the work necessary.” He looked at her blankly. She sighed. “I see

too many students here who think they know the future. They think a good degree is something they’re entitled to, not something

they have to work for. You know what happens to those students?” She handed back his essay, covered in red pen. “They fail.”

He knew what she was trying to say. But he wasn’t like those students. He didn’t think he was entitled to a good degree because

he’d gone to the right school, or because his parents had a lot of money. He was entitled to one because of the physical laws of the universe. It was a completely different situation. “No, I get it,” he said. “I’ll do better.”

“Glad to hear it. Any other questions?”

He remembered what he’d promised Esi. “Yeah, actually. Are there any academic awards that get given out on the twenty-third

of June?”

Dr. Lewis looked bemused. “The twenty-third of June?” She leaned over to her side table and leafed through an academic calendar.

“That’s in May Week. Too early for any university-level awards.” She pursed her lips. “I suppose some societies might give

out awards then.”

“Societies. That’s a good idea. Thanks.” He folded his essay in half and left.

“Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?” Dr. Lewis’s voice followed him down the stairs. “Work first, Mr. Greene.

Awards later.”