Words in Deep Blue(51)

‘Cal believed in the growing block universe. The one that says the past and present are real, but the future hasn’t happened yet,’ I say. ‘He really believed that the past was place.’

‘You don’t think it’s true?’ Henry asks.

‘I’ve never been outside the universe; I couldn’t say for certain.’

Cal was convinced. ‘Think of it like this,’ Cal had said. ‘This house we’re in doesn’t stop existing just because we leave it, and the past doesn’t either.’

‘It’s a nice thought,’ I say. ‘That the things we love still exist somewhere.’

‘He told me about a theory of time where the future existed too, as well as the past,’ Henry says.

‘It’s called the block universe theory. The past, present and future all exist at the same time. We’re just moving forward through time to the next event that’s waiting for us.’

‘If my future already exists somewhere, I don’t want to know. I want to live under the illusion that I have complete control over my life so I’m going with the growing block universe theory,’ Henry says.

‘I want that too.’

I want a lot of things tonight. I want to touch the scar I’ve just noticed on Henry’s chin. I want to kiss him again, but tell him I mean it. I think I knew when I came back to the city that this moment would come. The moment when I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by sadness for Cal, when I’d feel overwhelmed by Henry.

‘If our lives are there, in the future, already mapped,’ Henry says, ‘then who writes them? Because if the future is set, then someone must plan that future, and with seven billion people in the world, that’s impossible. The logistics alone rule it out.’

‘You think we’re ruled by chance, then.’

‘I’m convinced of it.’

‘I want to believe that. Because if we’re not ruled by chance, then Cal was always going to die on that day and he was born with a terrible future.’

Henry tightens his arm around me and says people could go mad looking for the answers. He says he read a story, by Borges, about people looking for the answers, looking for a book that contained them.

‘Did they find it?’

‘The answers don’t exist. You know that.’

I tell Henry about Cal’s last days, about the reasons I felt so cheated. Looking back, those days leading up to his death were beautiful and thick with meaning. The light felt different. Milk gold. He and I spent more time talking about the future than we’d ever done.

I remember one night he came into my room. He said, ‘Shhh,’ and waved for me to follow. We went to the water, and walked along the edge, and saw a silver fish, too big for the shallows. We pushed it gently out to sea. The silver against the dark velvet-blue seems unreal to me now, but it happened.

Cal told me the night that we saw them he couldn’t sleep for thinking about all the things he wanted to see – the Midnight Sun and its opposite, the Polar Night. He wanted to see the sun stay below the horizon. He wanted to see the light reflected off the sea and the snow, see everything coated in blue.

I tell Henry how we talked our way over the whole world, all the places we wanted to dive – Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, Malaysia, Japan, Antarctica.

‘After, at the funeral, I thought that it was so cruel, that in the month before he died, he thought so much about the life he wanted to have.’

I look up and see that tear-shaped sun. We’re exactly where we were before. Exactly in alignment.

‘I don’t know how to talk to you about this,’ Henry says, ‘because I’ve never been where you are. But I will be where you are, at some stage in the future, because it’s impossible for me not to be. And it seems to me as though you’re looking at it the wrong way around.’

‘There is only one way round,’ I say, letting him know that I want him to stop talking.

‘Listen,’ he says, taking my hand. He tells me he thinks that maybe Cal got lucky. That his last days seemed so beautiful, the way I’ve described them, filled with golden light. ‘Maybe he didn’t get screwed over by the universe. Maybe it was trying to cram everything in for him.’

‘Not very scientific,’ I say.

‘Sometimes science isn’t enough,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you need the poets.’

It’s in this moment, this exact moment, that I fall in love with him again.





Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Letters left between pages 4 and 5

2 January 2015



Dear George

Happy New Year! Did you do anything? I spent the night on the beach with my sister watching the fireworks. We listed our New Year’s resolutions (my secret one is to try to tell you who I am). I told her I’d like to have a girlfriend, which is true. I would like to have a girlfriend, but only if that girlfriend is you. I know you can’t agree to that without knowing who I am – I’m working on having the courage.

My biggest fear is that I tell you and you’re so disappointed that I never hear from you again. My second biggest fear is that you laugh.

I have to tell you soon because my friend is moving interstate, and this friend has been leaving my letters and collecting yours for me. I moved out of town a while back but I never said because I thought you’d guess who I was.