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