The Midnight Library - Matt Haig Page 0,49

death as an option. I like never having to settle.’

‘I think my situation is different. I think my death is more imminent. If I don’t find a life to live in pretty soon, I think I’ll be gone for good.’

She explained the problem she’d had last time, with transferring back.

‘Oh. Yeah, well, that might be bad. But it might not be. You do realise there are infinite possibilities here? I mean, the multiverse isn’t about just some universes. It’s not about a handful of universes. It’s not even about a lot of universes. It’s not about a million or a billion or a trillion universes. It’s about an infinite number of universes. Even with you in them. You could be you in any version of the world, however unlikely that world would be. You are only limited by your imagination. You can be very creative with the regrets you want to undo. I once undid a regret about not doing something I’d contemplated as a teenager – doing aerospace engineering and becoming an astronaut – and so in one life I became an astronaut. I haven’t been to space. But I became someone who had been there, for a little while. The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big . . . You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.’

She sipped her coffee. ‘I understand.’

‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely.

‘You’re quoting Camus.’

‘You got me.’

He was staring at her. Nora no longer minded his intensity, but was becoming a little concerned about her own. ‘I was a Philosophy student,’ she said, as blandly as she could manage, avoiding his eyes.

He was close to her now. There was something equally annoying and attractive about Hugo. He exuded an arrogant amorality that made his face something to either slap or kiss, depending on the circumstances.

‘In one life we have known each other for years and are married . . .’ he said.

‘In most lives I don’t know you at all,’ she countered, now staring straight at him.

‘That’s so sad.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’ She smiled.

‘We’re special, Nora. We’re chosen. No one understands us.’

‘No one understands anyone. We’re not chosen.’

‘The only reason I am still in this life is because of you . . .’

She lunged forward and kissed him.

If Something Is Happening to Me, I Want to Be There

It was a very pleasant sensation. Both the kiss, and the knowledge she could be this forward. Being aware that everything that could possibly happen happened to her somewhere, in some life, kind of absolved her a little from decisions. That was just the reality of the universal wave function. Whatever was happening could – she reasoned – be put down to quantum physics.

‘I don’t share a room,’ he said.

She stared at him fearlessly now, as if facing down a polar bear had given her a certain capacity for dominance she’d never been aware of. ‘Well, Hugo, maybe you could break the habit.’

But the sex turned out to be a disappointment. A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it.

I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.

It probably wasn’t the best sign of how their nocturnal encounter was going, that she was thinking of Existential philosophy, or that this quote in particular was the one that appeared in her mind. But hadn’t Camus also said, ‘If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there’?

Hugo, she concluded, was a strange person. For a man who had been so intimate and deep in his conversation, he was very detached from the moment. Maybe if you lived as many lives as he had, the only person you really had any kind of intimate relationship with was yourself. She felt like she might not have been there at all.

And in a few moments, she wasn’t.

God and Other Librarians

‘Who are you?’

‘You know my name. I am Mrs Elm. Louise Isabel Elm.’

‘Are you God?’

She smiled. ‘I am who I am.’

‘And who is that?’

‘The librarian.’

‘But you aren’t a real person. You’re just a . . . mechanism.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘Not like that. You are the product of some strange interaction between my mind and the multiverse, some simplification of the quantum wave function