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  Below us, someone smacked flies against a window and the woman opposite-but-one weaved her way up her yard with a long drink to where a deck chair sat cowering under a tree.

  “Poor Henry,” I said. “He’s so lonely without her.”

  “Do you think it speeds up?” he said. “Getting old? Like, the longer you live, the smaller a part of your life a year is? Does time just get quicker and quicker and then stop when you stop or whatever?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out in the end.”

  “Maybe not.”

  I said, “How old is Henry, do you think?”

  Novo didn’t answer me.

  The old gardeners were doing something with a climbing rose, shout-whispering at each other, bicker-bicker, like irritated snakes. Together we watched them. “Were those two in love once, do you think? Are they still?” he asked.

  “I have no idea, Novo. So far, they just seem to fight a lot. I’m not sure they even like each other.”

  The look on his face was something sweet and tinged with envy, and he said, “Their garden is beautiful though, isn’t it? I wonder if a whole life together feels as good as that.”

  I smiled at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I’m just . . . People usually just talk about smaller things than that.”

  “Than what?”

  “Than that.”

  “Oh. You want to talk about smaller things?”

  “No. I didn’t say that. I just said that people usually do. People talk about politics and football and what they did over the weekend.”

  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 h
orizon 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.

  And then, just as instantly, the clouds passed and the rain cleared and the sun was out. He looked down at himself, at his feet on the roof. I leaned into him, put my head in the middle of his chest. He was burning up.

  He wiped his eyes, pushed his wet hair off his face.

  “Novo,” I said. “Tell me something.”

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  He thought for a minute.

  “Like, really. Where are you from?”

  I could see it, him weighing things up, choosing the right words. “I’m out past those equations,” he said. “I don’t live in one place. Time and space are the same to me.”

  “But you’re real.”

  “Yes. Course I’m real.”

  “Are you only real to me?”

  He put his arm around me. Warm. So heavy, the weight of him. Rock solid, strangely enough.

  “I’m not your imaginary friend,” he said. “You didn’t make me up.”

  “Oh, I hope not.”

  “But I came here for you.”

  “You did?”

  “I’ve come for you before, Jude. More than once.”

  “What do you mean? Have we met before?”

  “You’ve seen me.”

  “I have? Like I’m seeing you now?”

  He shook his head. “I move fast,” he said. “Speed of light has got nothing on me. You might have seen me for the infinitely smallest possible particle of a second. Almost nothing.”

  “But—”

  “I can’t control it,” he said. “But we are connected. You pull me.”

  “How?”

  “Do you want a scientific answer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We resonate. Our cells speak the same language. At the same frequency.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “You pull me,” he said again. “It’s called love, Jude. I will always find you.”

  I put my hand to his face, stroked his cheek, touched his jaw. “I never believed in all that.”

  “In what? Love? What if it’s not a question of belief?” he said. “Just equations. Like your physics.”

  “Is it?”

  “I wait and wait for you, between times,” he said, while the day carried on as normal, minute by minute, and people everywhere told stories and paid their bills and rode their bikes and tried on sneakers and thought about what to have for lunch. It didn’t make any sense. I tucked my head into the crook of his arm, put my hand on his chest, the tips of my fingers on the pulse at his throat. Novo traced a line down the middle of my forehead, down my nose and over my lips and past my chin. “I’m always with you,” he said. “Even when I’m not.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “A satellite to a planet,” he said. “A moon. If you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  “Why me though?” I said.

  “Why would you even ask that?”

  “Because I want to know. What’s so special about me? I mean, aren’t there other bodies somewhere else, resonating in other times, with the same frequency?”

  “No,” he said. “There’s only you.”

  “How come?”

  “I am a lost cause,” he said. “The original.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’re my patron saint.” His smile breaking, the unsticking of his mouth, the clean shine of his teeth. He closed his eyes like a cat at the top of that smile. How does the rest of the world even function without seeing that?

  “You’re different,” he said. “Be different.” And then he moved closer and kissed me. Soft, that kiss. So careful. So forever-destroyingly kind. I kissed him back, and the black-dark center of his eyes was fierce and open and hungry, and the quiet between us was something wonderful.

  “Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t leave.”

  “Easy,” he said, and he kissed me again. “Done, Jude. I’ll do whatever you say.”

  We stayed out on the roof while it got dark. We stayed out all night. And later, I looked across the street for the hundredth time at his house. Doors shut, lights out, still and silent. Sunk-sunset glass above the front door, like a protractor, cataract film on all the windows, part salt air, part grime and neglect. Hard to believe Novo had scaled that wall like a lizard a few hours earlier. Hard to believe any of this at all. The house was empty now, and he was here with me. Mrs. Midler’s brand-new ghosts must still be everywhere—lost lists behind the radiators, years of cooking fumes in the kitchen, cobwebs strung like bunting down the hall. I wondered how they’d like sharing their space with this new sudden spell of a boy. I wondered if they were jealous now, of me. He sat up next to me. What did we both see? The farm-dog wind, herding litter into chosen corners. The hung moon, and clouds moving blankly under the stars. Streetlights reflected in old puddles, and the huddled outline of sleeping gulls. Someone’s TV flashing like lightning behind a closed curtain, a living-room storm. And each other, leaning, breathing, waiting. I had no idea for what.

  In the end, he put his arms around me, shook his head a little, and smiled, pulling me back down to sleep. The streetlight closest to him buzzed half-heartedly, flickered, catching then losing him, over and over. There, and then gone, a way of life that boy was long used to. The far edges of the sea were on the horizon where they belonged. The moon was high and bright, and I saw it so clearly then. I pictured it, or I thought I did, the join between what was real and what wasn’t, for him. The fault line that he lived on, a fluid, changeable place, like the line between the dry land and the sea.

  It didn’t occur to me then that I might one day have to draw that line for myself.

  SEVENTEEN

  Early morning was damp and smelled of the sea. The palm trees shivered in the breeze, tropical creatures, misfits waiting for the sun to come up. Novo wanted to go diving. We had to get our timing right because of the tides. Sometimes the caves were there and sometimes they weren’t. He said they filled and emptied with the sea.

  Everything seemed deserted. Like the whole world was asleep except us. I wondered if Mum and Henry even noticed I was gone.

  I said, “Are we actually the only ones up?” and he said, “Maybe.”

  “It feels weird, doesn’t it? This early in the day I always pretend the world’s ended, or something dramatic, like everybody’s been wiped out by a plague in the night and it’s all up to me now, like I’m in my very own sci-fi film. I don’t even like sci-fi films. But I can’t help it.”

  He smiled. “And now it’s happening. Just you and me.”

  “What are the rules?” I said.

  “Rules?”

  “I mean, what is really happening, and what isn’t?”

  “Rules are for fools,” he said, and I told him, “That’s a cop-out.”

  “I know you have questions,” he said. “I know you’re full of them. And questions are better than answers.”

  “What does that mean
?”

  “Questions are infinite. Like us. An open door. All potential.”

  “And answers?”

  “They’re a full stop, aren’t they? A red light. An ending.”

  He looked at me. “We are here. We are real. Does it feel real to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “So why are you asking? You want it locked down? You want the open door shut?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just trying to navigate.”

  “And so am I.”

  No point in asking if that was a spell or not. Love is pure magic, whoever’s tricked you into it, right? I doubt it helps, finding out who’s in charge.

  Novo hugged me for so long, I was the one who leaned back out of it first. I was the one who felt self-conscious suddenly. I pulled away and instantly regretted it, and then I kissed him, under his chin, to feel better, and he took my hand.

  We walked out of town on the coast path. Novo walked fast—long legs, big strides—and I had to work to keep up. When the path got narrow I slotted in behind and watched him move and smiled to myself that we were both there, that this was happening and he was even in that Now, right then, with me. Up at the top, the wind bit and old people sat in the still dim of their cars, looking out at the view. We ducked round the side of an ice-cream van in the little parking lot, climbed over a fence, and then half slid, half scrambled down, cutting our own path through the tough, determined shrubs that clung to the flat face of the rocks. On a wide gray ledge, flecked with bird shit, we stopped and stripped, zipping each other into our wetsuits.

  The sea to our left was vast and quick and rhythmic, and below us it rolled and slapped with the same rhythm, filling and receding in this narrow deep well, this perfect blue-green O, backlit by pale sand, like the seabed itself was a source of light.