the arrow on Sea.
‘I’ve seen Cal since he died,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a hallucination but he seems so real. I can actually smell apple gum.’
‘Is that possible?’ he asks, and I tell him it is.
‘You can hallucinate sights and smells.’
‘And you’re sure he’s not a ghost? You never thought he might be?’
‘I know he’s not, but I can’t help hoping that he is. Sometimes a television show will come on, one that he loved, and I’ll get so sad because he’ll never know how it ends. I think, if he’s a ghost, then at least he can watch Game of Thrones.’
‘Maybe there’s Game of Thrones on permanent stream wherever he is.’
‘That’s what we think because we can’t imagine what it’s like to not exist.’
He stretches out his arm so I can lie on it, and that makes the thought of not existing slightly less terrifying.
‘You’re warm,’ he says.
‘It’s a warm night,’ I say.
‘Cal believed in them,’ he says, and we’re back to ghosts.
‘Cal believed in all kinds of things,’ I say, and he laughs as if he’s remembering those Sunday-night dinners at our place.
‘He used to love messing with my head, telling me the theories of time,’ he says. ‘Like the growing block universe theory. I still don’t understand it.’
‘The growing block universe theory of time states that the past and present are happening simultaneously,’ I say, thinking about that night when Cal was explaining it to us. He was reading all kinds of books, like Objective Becoming by Bradford Skow. That book told the reader to imagine time as another dimension, a dimension like space. It told them to imagine they could see the universe from above, get outside the universe and look down. If they could do that, then they’d see all the events of their life spread out like they see things in space spread out. I imagined time as like the landscape seen from a plane.
‘Cal believed in the growing block universe. The one that says the past and present are real, but the future hasn’t happened yet,’ I say. ‘He really believed that the past was place.’
‘You don’t think it’s true?’ Henry asks.
‘I’ve never been outside the universe; I couldn’t say for certain.’
Cal was convinced. ‘Think of it like this,’ Cal had said. ‘This house we’re in doesn’t stop existing just because we leave it, and the past doesn’t either.’
‘It’s a nice thought,’ I say. ‘That the things we love still exist somewhere.’
‘He told me about a theory of time where the future existed too, as well as the past,’ Henry says.
‘It’s called the block universe theory. The past, present and future all exist at the same time. We’re just moving forward through time to the next event that’s waiting for us.’
‘If my future already exists somewhere, I don’t want to know. I want to live under the illusion that I have complete control over my life so I’m going with the growing block universe theory,’ Henry says.
‘I want that too.’
I want a lot of things tonight. I want to touch the scar I’ve just noticed on Henry’s chin. I want to kiss him again, but tell him I mean it. I think I knew when I came back to the city that this moment would come. The moment when I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by sadness for Cal, when I’d feel overwhelmed by Henry.
‘If our lives are there, in the future, already mapped,’ Henry says, ‘then who writes them? Because if the future is set, then someone must plan that future, and with seven billion people in the world, that’s impossible. The logistics alone rule it out.’
‘You think we’re ruled by chance, then.’
‘I’m convinced of it.’
‘I want to believe that. Because if we’re not ruled by chance, then Cal was always going to die on that day and he was born with a terrible future.’
Henry tightens his arm around me and says people could go mad looking for the answers. He says he read a story, by Borges, about people looking for the answers, looking for a book that contained them.
‘Did they find it?’
‘The answers don’t exist. You know that.’
I tell Henry about Cal’s last days, about the reasons I felt so cheated. Looking back, those days leading up to his death were beautiful and thick with meaning. The light felt different. Milk gold. He and I spent more time talking about the future than we’d ever done.
I remember one night he came into my room. He said, ‘Shhh,’ and waved for me to