He laughed. “Oh yeah? What else do people do?”
“We drink coffee and catch trains and clean mud off our shoes and reheat takeout. We watch television and take selfies and go on vacation and try to recycle.”
“You don’t mean that,” he said. “That’s not all that people do. That’s bullshit.”
“How do you know?” I said. “You’re not people.”
“No,” he said. “You’re right. I’m not people at all. But I want to be for a little while. Come and sit with me. Let’s just sit here like people and talk small.”
Up on that roof, with water ticking in the gutters and the sky the color of pearls, we talked about movies. About favorite foods and songs and colors. We wondered what dogs and cats and seagulls would say if they could speak a language we understood. We tried, really, we did. But it felt so simple. Too simple. So we gave up and instead we talked about books and the ukulele. About Bill Hicks, Gujarati cooking, the end of electricity, the I Ching, the chances of alchemy, the possibility of alien life, Tony Hoagland poems, the smell of cut grass, plastics in the Galápagos, Kintsugi pottery, the northern lights, the sea. After a while we were quiet and I watched a bee find its way into the wall through a gap in the mortar by his head. It hovered and docked like something off a space station. Novo listened. I could see him listening. He closed his eyes. “There were bees inside the wall in my last house,” he said. “I used to lie in bed and listen to them. They sounded angry.”
“Where was that?”
“You wouldn’t know it. It was a long time ago.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said.
“Stop trying to. There’s more to life than what we know we know.”
“I mean, there’d better be. I do hope so.”
I’d left a book up there a few days ago, and the pages were now swollen and damp and all stuck together. I shook it out, laid it flat in the sun. “What are you reading?” he said.
“Just something I picked up,” I said. “About hypotheticals and theories. It’s like a guessing game got turned into a science.”
“Like what?”
“Like time travel and parallel universes,” I told him. “And black holes and quarks and the god particle. I mean. All these wild ideas, before they get broken down into equations and probabilities and stuff.”
“The mechanics of magic,” he said.
“Exactly. Precisely. So this is before the mechanics, when you’re totally feeling your way around in the dark. Like trying to work out what the bigger picture is by studying one tiny drop of paint. Am I making any sense to you?”
“I get it.”
“Gives me loads to think about.”
“Tell me something you think about.”
“Nothing exists in isolation, by itself,” I said. “Things only exist when they are colliding with something else. Like atomically. At the very smallest level. Of everything.”
Novo looked at his hands while I was talking. He pressed his palms together, interlocked his fingers.
“You see, I read that,” I said. “And then I think that if it’s true about atoms, and we are all made of atoms, then it must be true about people too.”
“So,” Novo said. “If you spend your whole life on your own you never really existed?”
“Maybe. I mean, I just think about it. Like, am I only really there when I’m talking to someone, navigating around someone, or moving through a crowd? And am I only visible from the outside, only from someone else’s viewpoint a concrete, solid thing? And would I be nobody forever if I wasn’t colliding with things? I like thinking about stuff like that.”
“So do I,” he said. “What else?”
“Well, if these atoms didn’t move around and collide and stuff, which they do, constantly without a break, then everything would stop. Everything would stay the same.”
“Because?”
“Because the moving about is what makes change. So without it there’d be no such thing as change. And without change there’s no such thing as time, because there’s no difference between the past, the present, and the future if they’re all the same. And that taught me something. I mean, I’m learning something. Because I thought I hated change. You know, like angry with my mum about moving around all the time. But now I’m starting to see what’s at stake, you know? What gets lost without it.”
“Why do we always want something to last forever just because it’s good?” Novo said. “Why can’t it being good be enough?”
“Exactly. If it was all good forever, without changing, it would just be boring, right?”
“Maybe,” Novo said, and I leaned into him, not too much, just a little, and he smiled and stroked my hair.
“There are as many neurons in your brain as there are stars in your galaxy,” he said. “Did you know that? The potential for enlightenment and self-deception is endless.”
“Well, you would know,” I said. “Look at the show you’ve put on since you arrived.”
“All for you,” he said, winking.
The wind reared up suddenly, a violent sea-soaked gust, and something dropped right at me, a slate from our roof, really close. I ducked and moved out of the way quick, without thinking, and I felt it suddenly and only then, how close I’d been sitting to the edge.
I had moved too far out into thin air, my balance tilted, and in that half instant, time stretched out like the longest piece of elastic, so long that I could take note of my own panic, as if from elsewhere, the total certainty of the hard ground way below me. I swiped at the air like it was something I could take hold of. I called out before my throat closed up, I think I called his name, and then I was fighting to get the air into my lungs, fighting to breathe even while I was preparing to fall.
Novo moved faster than anything else in that slowed-down moment as he crossed the space between us like it was never there and reached out over the roof’s edge to grab both my hands. “I’ve got you,” he said, over and over again, “I’ve got you,” and I wanted to cry then, panic rising like lava as he pulled me up, but he put his hands on my face and the feeling cooled down, back to rock.
Above us, instant storm clouds collected, and the straight shape of heavy rain marched across the horizon in dark columns the color of slate. More and more birds filled the sky and then they were gone and the land around us began to disappear, everything lost in the slap of wind and the dark heave and shift of rushing water, like the street and the houses and the whole sky were becoming the sea. It rose up and filled the air with itself, and I could feel the wetness of it deep down in my lungs, the salt on my tongue. The rain was large and soft, kind of slow to start with, then stronger and harder until it hit us in flat, whipping sheets. I kept picturing myself at the top of that fall, tipping backward, the sudden bloom of fear as I tried to grab hold of nothing but air. Novo opened his mouth and turned his face up. Water clung in bright glass beads to the ends of his hair. He bared his teeth and spoke into the side of my cheek, and the sound of all that water swallowed up his voice, so I didn’t hear him, only felt his mouth, so close, his heat on my skin.