Page 95 of The Bargain

Mr Mazzati, the idealistic fool, simply believes in me.

“There’s a bursary, which might seem quite significant, but I wouldn’t rely on it too much,” Mr Mazzati rushes on. “It’s Harvard we’re talking about—it’ll mostly go towards tuition fees and textbooks. You’ll need to get a part-time job, but that’s absolutely doable. They’re always looking for research assistants in the labs, and I have a couple of professors in mind who are on the lookout for assistants. I’ve already contacted a few of them.”

The words on the letter barely seem real, like incomprehensible runes forming a message I don’t have the ability to fathom. I keep looking at the letter, Mr Mazzati’s words washing over me, wrapping me into a dream-like fugue.

I can almost picture it—the future he’s describing.

Studying physics at Harvard, my tuition fees paid. A part-time job in a lab, working with professors who know me only as a promising young student, not the charity case poster boy for the failing British care system. Studying physics, standing on the shoulders of the giants I’ve been reading about all my life. Picking Desdemona up from tennis practice after classes, my arm thrown over her shoulders while we buy coffee to warm up against the cold Cambridge wind. Carrying her books, lending her my jumper, holding her hand. Being the Harvard fuckwit she sneaks into her dorm room, lining the graceful curve of her spine with wet, slow kisses while she lies naked on her stomach, case files and law books spread across a bed that smells like both of us.

My throat is so tight I have to suck in a breath sharp and thin as a needle.

Fuck.

“You alright, Elias?”

Mr Mazzati’s hand falls on my shoulder and just like that, the spell is broken.

The images dissipate like smoke, leaving only a faint shadow in my mind. Things that could be but probably won’t. Things that might have been, had I been anybody but myself. Things that should be, was life not an unforgiving bitch.

The dream fades, receding, but my heart is still hammering, my throat still constricted.

“I know it’s a lot,” Mr Mazzati says, calmer now, as if my expression has sobered him up. He pushes his thick glasses up over his nose. “You might think this is too good to be true, but it’s not. You’ve worked hard, and you’re a bright young man. Whatever your life has been thus far—whatever decisions you’ve made and whatever decisions have been made for you—they’re just your past, and a very short past, at that. You’re going to realise one day that life is very long, and that these eighteen years have been very short. Whatever you decided yesterday has already happened—but what you decide tomorrow is still up to you.”

He smiles, and I have the sudden unsettling awareness that he’s a real person, not just a teacher. His hair, dark like mine, needs a fresh cut. His shirt sleeves are rolled back, and there’s a red pen tucked into his lanyard that’s left a red mark on his chest. His shoes are scuffed, and he has a tattoo of a lowercase phi on his wrist.

I’ve always thought of him as old, but he can’t be more than thirty.

“Right now,” he says, “the future probably seems far away. But it’s not. It’s close, within your reach, and the things you want are within your grasp, so take them and hold on hard. I think you know that, but I worry sometimes that you might refuse to acknowledge the things you want for fear that you might not get them. None of that, eh?”

My heart is beating so fast I’m suddenly terrified it’s going to burst. Fuck, I don’t want to feel inspired by his words. I don’t want to be the underprivileged loser he saves, the necessary secondary character to his story. Mr Mazzati is right, I am smart—too smart to fall for this bullshit.

And yet…

When he finally dismisses me, after I’ve thanked him and left his office, I find my feet moving against my own accord. Because even though this is probably too good to be true, the only thing I want to do right now is to find Desdemona. Show her the letter.

Smile down into her clever brown eyes and say: “Yea, alright. I’ll be your Harvard fuckwit. Somebody’s got to be, right?”

Who else, but me?

My heart, which has always felt small and tight and hard, the chip off an ancient fallen meteor, has split wide open, revealing an infinite cosmos, an entire universe blooming with stars. Fuck, is that what hope feels like?

I can see why people become addicted to it. Make fools of themselves for it.

I’m about to do the same damn thing.

“Events don’t have a definite order,” Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time. “There’s no beginning or end.” Meaning life is just a series of things that have always happened and never happened simultaneously.

Desdemona has always existed, and at the same time, she has never existed. In the grand, empty continuum of my life, she is a blaring sun, omnipresent—and she is the gaping darkness of her own absence.

I should know this—I’ve just been accepted by one of the world’s most prestigious physics scholarships, after all.

But as Einstein said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.”

And he wasn’t even sure about the universe.

Desdemona finds me before I find her. At first, I head to the tennis court, where she usually trains after classes on Thursdays. Her tennis partner, Zafira, is there in her training clothes, stretching while reading something on her phone, her breath puffing white in the bright floodlights. When she sees me, she looks up, eyes widening in surprise.

“Where’s Dess?” she asks.