“IT’S A TERRIBLE THING FOR A MAN TO FIND OUT THAT ALL HIS life he has been speaking nothing but the truth,” Devi said, quoting Oscar Wilde. “But it’s even worse when no one hears him.”
“Oh, I hear you,” Julian said. “I’m just not listening.”
Devi helped Julian pack up his meager belongings. They said goodbye to Mark at the Junk Shop and returned to Quatrang together.
There had to be ritual before true words could be spoken and listened to: a liturgy of tiger water, of sake, of prayer, of garlic shrimp and kimchi. There was communion: with her books, her playbill, the slivers of her crystal.
“You’re not going to be happy with me,” Devi said, his hands gliding over the artifacts, his mouth moving with inaudible words.
“What else is new,” Julian said. “I’ve hated almost everything you’ve ever said to me.”
“There’s no way out of this without you having to make some hard choices.”
“You mean some more hard choices?” Mutely he and Devi regarded one another. How glib Julian had been once, how careless and cavalier. Uncertainly, he waited.
Devi inhaled. “I don’t know what’s beyond the world I barely understand. I myself did not succeed in what I’m about to offer you—obviously—since I’m still here. But the only way you could even try to return to her and your old self in L.A.,” he said, “is if you leave your body behind.”
Julian zeroed in on Devi’s words.
“You travel back in time with your soul only,” the shaman said.
Julian exhaled. “Leave it behind where?”
“In the river. Ghost rider becomes a black rider. Black rider becomes ghost.”
“Leave it behind,” Julian slowly repeated. “You mean . . . die?”
“Yes.” Devi did not equivocate.
Julian fell silent. Is that why the river was black? Because the hollowed-out bodies after the souls had fled were buried in it? All that relentless gnashing and screaming. It wasn’t imagined. It was real.
“To find her again, I must die?”
Devi did not look happy when he said, “L.A. is her last time on earth, and you are already there with her. If you insist on searching for her again, yes, you will have to find her with nothing but your soul.”
Julian’s breathing was shallow, his thoughts smashing against one another. To have something you’ve never had, you must do something you’ve never done. “How do I do it,” he said. Not how would I do it. But how do I do it.
Devi’s shoulders turned in, as if he’d been hoping Julian would call him crazy and storm out. “You go in through the dark equinox. In September.”
“Damn, so Cleon was right! There is a foot tunnel under the Thames. It’s nearly impossible to find, he said. I knew it!”
“Well, you are Mr. Know-it-All,” Devi said. “It is nearly impossible to find. For one, the moon must be new.”
“Why?” Only sorcery opens it, Cleon said. Nothing on that footpath but battle and torment.
“Because the moon is inconstant, always waxing and waning. It lacks fortitude. It lacks devotion. Nothing new can be done under a fickle moon.”
“What else?”
“The tide must be at its lowest point. And you don’t go in at noon,” Devi said. “You need a time when the sun is directly over the equator, and the earth is tilted neither toward nor away. You go in at the exact moment the center of the earth intersects with the center of the sun. The opening on the meridian lasts less than a minute and falls at varying times. Some years, it happens at night, others, early in the morning. And some years, it doesn’t open at all, like when the tide is high and the moon is full. But your bad luck is with you, because this coming September the equinox and solar noon both fall at 12:07 p.m. The moon will be new. The tide will be low. You will have those things to help you. And you’ll need all the help you can get.”
“Once I go in, then what? Is there still a leap, a moongate?”
“There’s a river,” Devi said. “You’ll be on it a very long time. It will feel as if there’s no way out. You’ll panic. It might feel like you’re suffocating.”
How could he leave his body? What did it mean to be on a river with no way out?
“I don’t recommend this course of action,” Devi said, seeing Julian’s raging doubt. “You have another choice. You can make peace with what you’ve got left.”
“And what would that be, Devi?” Julian said. “Please—do tell me.”
“Yes, you never thought you had anything.”
“And eventually I was proven correct.” As soon as Julian said it, he sighed with shame. What a pill he was, always barreling forth with the bitter words of the dying.
He knew Devi so well, he could tell the cook was keeping something from him. “Anything else?”
“Still not enough for you?” Devi twisted his finger nubs.
“Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to guess?”
“Where the chasm is, the breach is,” Devi said cryptically. “It’s the song of the earth, it’s what your soul leaps over. That’s the only way you can climb inside your own life.”
“She is the breach in my life. That’s how I’ve always gotten in, that’s how I’ll get in again. Why the hand-wringing?”
Devi pressed his mangled fingers to his healthy ones. “I told you, you won’t be climbing into her life. You’ll be climbing into yours.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Not much,” Devi said. “Just the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
“Maybe because I enter differently, things might turn out differently,” said Julian, sounding almost hopeful, almost optimistic—until he saw the miserable expression on Devi’s face.
“Devi! What?”
“Nothing.” Devi didn’t look at Julian. “There is another thing you must know. Before you make the choice whether or not to go.”
“Is it even a choice?”
“Yes, Julian, it most certainly is,” Devi said. “And you must make it in the here and now. What do you want to be? A happy pig or an unhappy Socrates? That’s your choice. Because after this, there are no more do-overs.”
Julian rocked back. “Sounds like a false choice to me.”
“Memory is retained by the body,” Devi said. “Not by the soul. And only your soul can make it out of the cave.” He took a breath. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“No.”
“If your soul manages to make it out, and there are no guarantees, there is a good chance your memory will be wiped clean.”
“Wiped clean of what?” Suddenly Julian had a hard time inhaling. “What, like everything? Like . . . her?”
“Maybe.” Devi didn’t meet Julian’s eye.
Adamantly Julian shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. That won’t happen.”
“Okay.”
“I will never let that happen.”
“Like you have a choice.”
“You just said I did. Literally just now.”
“Okay. So you’ve answered one crucial question. You’d rather be an unhappy Socrates.”
“That’s right. One hundred percent.”
They let it go and did not talk about it again for days.
Julian was the one who brought it up after one exquisitely long acupuncture session when he thought he was sufficiently calmed to resume the crazy conversation.
“How would you even know something like that?” He swung his legs from the table to sit up, not wanting to be lying down when contemplating his own extinction. “You said yourself you failed to do it right.”
“That’s not what I said, but there are many reasons I know it.” Devi remained on his little stool in the corner of the small room in the back of Quatrang. “And I’m not the only one who knows about memory. You know who else knows it, even better than me? You.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t know it.”
“No? You’ve seen her soul, Julian. You’ve found her half a dozen times. One soul, different bodies. Did she know you?”
“That’s not the same thing!”
“No?” Devi said it so quietly.
“And she did know me. The last time she actually knew me.”
“Yes, at the very end, the veil between life and death had lifted, and her soul saw you clearly for a briefest moment.”
“Exactly.”
Devi took the stubborn silence that followed as an opening. He looked up; he raised his voice. “It wouldn’t be so bad. Yes, you might forget her name, her face, the days of your love. But you’d also forget her death and your grief. All of it would take on a patina of a dream. The details will grow blurred.”
“Without detail nothing can be known, not the flower or the woman,” Julian said.
“It’s true, you might not know the woman. It doesn’t sound ideal. But think!”—Devi leaned forward, his eyes glistening—“What you’ve been through will fade from you, as time makes all things fade. There’s hope in that, don’t you think? Because if you forget,” the cook said, “you might live again.”
Julian jumped down from the table. “No,” he said hoarsely. “No. I don’t want to live again. Memory is all I have, Devi. The time I spent with her, what she and I have been through together. It’s all I’ve got.”
Devi started to say something, began to point, but Julian cut him off with, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” and went upstairs, to the empty rooms where Devi’s mother once lived.
An hour later, he stormed back downstairs like a rain cloud. Devi was out front, slicing up cabbage and onions for tomorrow’s lunch.
“Devi,” Julian said, stopping the cook from his task. “Don’t you see how impossible it is what you’re saying?” His hand was on his chest. “If I go back without my memories, then how will I know it’s her when I see her again?”
“You might not,” Devi said. He pointed outside Quatrang, to Great Eastern Road. “There’s London. Go live with your memories.”
Julian was shaking. No, no, no, no.
Devi put down his cleaver and wiped his hands on his apron. “All right, so you won’t know the hour of her death. Why does that make you so upset? All that means is that you will once again live like the rest of us. Like you did the first time with her in Los Angeles. Do you remember yourself? I know it must feel as if a different man had lived that life, but do you remember how happy you were? Why would you not want that? To live and not suffocate under the weight of your useless knowledge?”
But Julian was suffocating now. How could Devi not see it?
“It’s mercy, Julian!” Devi said. “Nothing but mercy. Recall what you’ve been through, how you have suffered. You haven’t forgotten that yet, have you? To live joyfully is better than to remember everything, yet live not at all. How could you of all people not agree? To not know the future—it’s God’s gift to us. Your life returned to you. Your free will returned to you.”
Julian’s throat was constricted, his heart was erratic. “Will she still die?”
“As we all must,” Devi said, “but with any luck you won’t know about it. The times you’ve gone back to her, you knew she would die, yet you still went back. Isn’t that what you just told me? No matter how hopeless, you tried again. And how did that work out?”
“Devi,” Julian said, unwillingly creeping up to something so painful, he didn’t want to give voice to it. “But if I won’t know the outcome, how will I save her?”
“How did you save her when you knew the outcome?”
Julian put his hand on his throat. He wanted to rip open his windpipe. He couldn’t breathe. “But if I meet her, and she still dies, what will be different about it?”
Devi sat motionless. “Who said anything would be different?”
“And after she dies, will I move to London again? Will I seek you out again, find a way to travel back in time again? Will I make the same choices? Will I lose everything—again?” Julian made a wretched sound of an animal in agony. “Without memory, will I just keep circling the same drain over and over, again and again and again?” He crossed his hands over his chest. “Oh my God,” he gasped. “Is this even my first time around?” In horror he stood frozen. “I just realized. This may not be my first time around.”
He slept twenty hours each day to fast forward his life one year when there would be light again for 49 days and then darkness. He slept inside his wound, he lived inside her death, while on the outside other men laughed in bars.
What will you be having today?
How are you today?
But now the counter was empty, and the guy who cleaned the glasses and the guy who poured his whisky to the one refused to serve him anymore. Because they knew that he had been there, he’d sat there and cried there, he’d drunk, died, and despaired there all before.
Julian doubled over.
It was some time before he could straighten out, even longer before he could speak.
Devi’s stony face confirmed or denied nothing.
“I don’t want to believe we are in an endless loop with no way out,” Devi finally said. “That to me is the definition of hell. Even if I knew it to be true, I would still refuse to believe it. Which is why, like you, I kept hope alive during your travels. But I have no answer about how to break out of the vicious circle.”
“By making different choices, I reckon,” Julian whispered.
He crept to a stool, sank down on it. “Don’t you see, I can’t not know who she is,” he said in a guttural voice, slumped over the counter. It was dark in Quatrang, the lights dimmed, the clocks whirring. “How could I help her, then? And what if I walk by her? What if I miss her? I go to La Traviata instead of The Invention of Love. I meet her at the grocery store, my old lover, now a stranger, and pass by her as if she is nothing to me.”
Devi didn’t say okay. What he said was, “So stay. Stay here. That would be quite novel.”
Julian didn’t want to stay, to go, to think, to feel. He didn’t want anything. He wished he had never asked for Devi’s help, never returned to Great Eastern Road.
“You say you can’t bear to not know who she is,” Devi said. “But how did you, knowing everything, endure your limited days with her?” It took Devi a few moments to collect himself, and when he spoke, he stuttered. “If I knew for certain that all I would have with my son is two months, and that no matter what I did, he would still die, I would go mad. And you are not as sane as I am.”
“You are literally describing to me my life,” Julian said. That’s how he had just lived with Mia through their last underground days, their moorlands sojourn, through bombs and mines and blindness and Pink Gin love. Like he would go mad.
“I know.” Devi curved inward. “I don’t know how you did it. It nearly killed me just the once. I have not been whole since, and never will be.”
That’s what death did. It fractured the living. Through centuries of torment, Julian had been flopping around like an electric wire, begging her soul to love the manic him, the desperate him, the terrified him. He had all knowledge and all prophecy, and where did it get him?
And yet . . . Julian couldn’t bear to forget who she was and what she meant to him.
He thought back to L.A., faded so far into the past, it felt like someone else’s life.
Julian thought about his emptiness, the crater he lived in. If he remained in London, she would stay by his side, at least for a while, be alive in his memory, the way Devi’s son was alive.
But the thought of his days stretching out before him with everything and everyone he once loved fading into nothingness filled Julian with a sorrow too deep for words.
He groaned, his life emptied from his lungs. “I don’t want to live my life without love,” he whispered, his body coiled into itself. “I don’t want to be a happy pig. Yes, there is suffering. But there is love. Even in her absence, like now, I still remember how I loved her.” Julian sat up a little straighter, getting at something, reaching for something. “More than remember. I still love her.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Devi said.
But Julian was trying to grasp at something else, at an answer to a vague question of profound faith. He was trying to grasp at revelation. “Devi, do you know what trace decay is? Multiple studies in neuroscience have shown that memories leave an actual physical and chemical change in the brain. Forgetting occurs when this trace fades, or decays.”
Devi nodded. “That would explain why memory might stay behind with the body when the soul leaves.”
“Yes, but listen,” Julian said. “What if love is the memory of the soul? What if love has left a trace of her inside me? Inside the me that’s not my body.” He jumped off the stool. He was filled with grim agitation. “What if an imprint of the people you love is carved into your soul like into walls of a cave? Like the negative of a photograph, it might fade, but it never disappears. Like your son from you. Like Ashton from me. Like Mia.”
Devi bowed his head in acceptance of this possibility.
“Maybe that’s why some people look more familiar than others,” Julian said. “Because in one form or another, we knew them. We loved them.”
“Does that comfort you?”
“Doesn’t it comfort you?”
“Sometimes I wish I could forget,” Devi said.
“You don’t mean that.”
Minutes drifted by, the clocks ticking ticking ticking.
When Julian spoke again, he was calmer, determined, resigned. “You’ve been wrong about so much. You said I would never return. You said I could never go again. You said she wouldn’t know me. You told me Cleon was a fool, not the smartest man in the sewers. You’re wrong about this, too. I’ll remember. I know I will.” His voice broke.
“You’ll remember it like a fairytale from childhood, my son,” Devi said with deep tenderness. “Like a long-ago dream not lived.”