“I could go climb a mountain, or spend a lot of that time on a plane trying to fly somewhere important or meaningful. But I guess if that place really was more meaningful, I’d already be there, right?”
“That’s exactly right,” he replies.
“So no, I wouldn’t want to know. Blissful ignorance and all that. What about you?”
“What about me?”
Another laugh creeps out of me. “Would you want to know if you were going to die?”
“No.” He shakes his head, looking me firmly in the eyes. “I just want to live. I want to live in the moment for a while, carefree. I only want to be here. Now. With you. And I wish we’d get caught in another time loop. And we could just stay here.”
I reach across the table, grasping his hand. “Do something. August, find a way. Find a way to fix this.”
“I’m doing everything I can.”
“I know you are. I know you’ll come back to me. If you go, I know you’re coming back. That’s how I’m living my life. Because I believe in you.”
He grips my hand tighter. And I know he’s about to open his mouth and tell me again there isn’t anything he can do—that I can’t expect one man, me, to crack time travel, or science up some interdimensional portals in the next week. So I speak before he can. “Eat. We’re going to have a great night, and none of that exists for us now. This is it. This is our time loop. Fuck time.”
“Okay. Fuck time.” He smiles, lifts my hand, and kisses it. His leg stretches out, and he links his ankle around mine. And so we eat. And we talk. And it’s light, and it’s fun. And by the time we settle down for a movie, it almost feels real. Like we’re not racing against time and reality. Like if we stay here in my tiny apartment, with everything else out there, nothing can touch us.
It feels like we’re cheating.
But just for now, it also feels like we’re winning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BAD AUGUST
DOPPELBÄNGER
August’s right.Desperately Seeking Susanis a much better film in this reality. A thousand times better. And I can see why it means so much to him. It’s another puzzle piece falling into place.
He tells me how he came across it one midnight when he couldn’t sleep, living in our old house in Dagenham. Small room, bunk beds occupied only by him/me/us, and a tiny old-fashioned colour TV sitting on the dresser down below, so we had to peer over the edge of the bed to see the screen. They were a kind enough family who took us in. They did their best for us. But there’s no world in which an orphaned kid feels at home in a new flat in the middle of the night, not knowing really who their temporary family is, how long they’ll be there, or what will happen next.
I wonder what I watched that night. I wonder if I was up at the same time, in the same place. I almost definitely was, but it’s a moment long-since forgotten. Me, a universe away, undoubtedly wishing I’d had someone like him to reach out to.
Maybe I watched my world’s subpar version of this movie. Maybe that’s why I forgot it, why it wasn’t life-changing.
But August tells me how he was sucked into the film, the story, the clothes, the hair, the music, but above all, the friendship. That unrequited something of never being quite close enough to the thing you can’t define, but that you want so badly. That liminal space where you’re free-floating, wanting, but where you still believe you’ll get there. He’s found that in music, in the magic of it all, just the way I’ve found it in science.
There’s such beauty in our smallness, our inconsequential nature—a profoundly calming effect in believing, for a while, that you don’t matter, whatever’s happening to you. That you’re just a number, or a random assortment of particles—that the universe is numb to you, ambivalent. That maybe it shouldn’t all cut so deep.
You can be lost in it. You’re allowed to be lost in it. Just a passing emotion in a storm of atoms. Not unlike a line in a song, when you close your eyes and sink in. It’s just you and the music, or it’s just you and space. There’s no exterior, and there’s no sadness. Only that moment exists.
It’s something we both chased, but we chased it in different directions. I loved music, and he loves science, but that one night, all those years ago, that one slip of a drink, and we parted ways. For a time.
I wonder, if I met me—really me, who went down the exact same timeline—would I be feeling this way? That me would be abrasive. That me would be trying to get the job done. That me would never have held me in the kitchen and let me cry on his shoulder. That me, I realise now, would never have cried.
Three long years, I’ve run, and I’ve worked, and I’ve struggled. I kept on. It’s only August who’s grounding me now, slowing me down.
To think that’s what’s inside me. To think that’s what I could be. Home and warmth and compassion. That I could mean the world to someone, the way he already means so much to me.
It’s profound, and it’s humbling, and it is that liminal space. The floating, discombobulated feeling of being in this strange moment. But then he takes my hand, and he feels like the way out. He feels like the only room I want to be in ever again.
We switched to Coke a while back. He heated them both, brought out some crisps. Then he put onAn American Werewolf in London. He’s leaning back, his pretty head on the back of the couch, telling me it’s another of his favourites.
It’s one of mine too, but I’ve seen it about a hundred times, and he’s far nicer to look at.
