raised an eyebrow.
“He wouldn’t mind. There’s no jealousy between us. It’s been years since we were . . . like that. He told me a million times I ought to find someone else. I just didn’t see the point. I decided a long time ago that my life would end with his.”
So I dragged a chair from the empty waiting room down the hall and set it up in front of the window, next to Zelda’s. We sat facing the ocean, wrapped up in blankets, with our legs up on the sill. The valley below the hospital swirled with fog, like a bowl of dry ice. I was just nodding off when Zelda spoke.
“I’m sorry about before,” she said. “I know why you did what you did. You were trying to save me.”
My journal was across the room, so I put up a hand and slowly finger spelled my question.
W-h-y h-i-m?
“Why Nathaniel? As in why did I fall in love with him?” I nodded. “Oh, I don’t know. Why does anyone fall in love with anyone? I don’t believe we each have some single special person waiting for us out there, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’ve been in love too many times over the years to buy into that old canard. It’s more a question of timing, you know? As if we all have these elaborate locks inside our hearts that are constantly changing shape, and every once in a while, someone happens along with the perfect key. Love is nothing more than a fortuitous collision of circumstances. And then you discover you’ve ended up spending fifty years with someone.”
She reached under my thin blanket and squeezed my arm. “Now get some sleep, Parker Santé.”
She got up and went back to sit at Nathaniel’s bedside. I stared at the fog rolling off the water and listened to the beep of the EKG, picturing the peaks of Nathaniel’s pulse, and I fell asleep imagining the interminable mountain range of Zelda’s heartbeat, stretching back across the centuries and disappearing into the unknowable future.
SUNDAY,
NOVEMBER
2
GOOD MORNING, SAN FRANCISCO
DON’T YOU HATE IT WHEN you have a dream and it’s totally obvious what it means? I’ve always preferred the super random ones—like where you’re riding around some futuristic Tokyo on your hoverbike, but then you realize the hoverbike is a rhinoceros, except no, it’s actually a robot rhinoceros being piloted by Prince, and he starts to sing “Purple Rain” as he flips a switch to activate the robo-rhino ejector seat, and you’re launched up into the sky, watching as Prince’s purple crushed-velvet suit and fluffy white cravat get smaller and smaller, and you should be falling by now but you’re not, because you’ve become a balloon, and you just go on floating out into space until the world disappears and you can hardly breathe because of the lack of oxygen, and then you wake up and you’re like: What the fuck was that?
But the dream I had that night in Nathaniel’s hospital room was so easy to interpret it was almost embarrassing. I was chasing Zelda down these narrow city streets, and even though I’ve never been to Germany, I knew somehow that that’s where we were. And even though Zelda didn’t seem to be going very fast, I couldn’t seem to catch up with her. My legs felt weak, and my heart was pounding like it was about to explode all over my rib cage. It wasn’t until I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window that I understood why: I’d become an old man. The dream-past burst open in my mind, and all at once I remembered that Zelda and I had spent our entire lives together—or my life, technically—and now I was dying of some nameless illness and she was planning to kill herself, to jump off some Gothic German bridge into some icy German river. I would never catch up with her, but somehow I knew there was a way to make her stop running. So I hummed and hummed, the way Dr. Joondeph had taught me to all those years ago, and because it was a dream, a word came.
“Zelda!” I shouted. My voice was weak and quavery and ancient, but she’d heard it, and it had stopped her in her tracks. She turned around to look at me.
“Beep,” she said.
“What?”
“Beep,” she said again. “Beep. Beep.”
Beep.
Beep.
I opened my eyes. The hospital. I tried to sit up, and my body immediately and painfully informed me that I’d just