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,