After Richard came Derek. Then another Martin. I didn’t like Nigel very much—he didn’t last long—but Nick and Peter were both excellent choices, I felt.
For my part there was Annette, in whom I was quite absorbed for a full semester; where Tabitha had taught me a lot about fucking, Annette patiently and with considerable skill and versatility taught me virtually everything I know about lovemaking. She was also a very dear friend; Jus had to put a lot of effort into consoling me when Annette and I broke up.
And then there was Jennifer. I adored Jennifer and probably we could have spent the rest of our lives together, a perfect match; but she wasn’t the other half of me. I told Jus this one night, and over the next few weeks we combined our ingenuities to let Jennifer down as lightly as was possible, so that in the end she thought it was her idea for us to go our separate ways after graduation.
Because graduation was where Jus and I had got to in our shared academic career.
My relationship with Jennifer—more specifically, the realization by both Jus and myself that it would be wrong of us ever to expect anyone else to substitute for, to approximate for, the other halves of the Jusjohn organism—brought about in both of us what used to be called a paradigm shift.
We talked the last of it through one afternoon after we’d got home to Lampitt from college for the final time. Neither of us had jobs in prospect, and our parents were contentedly permitting us to be lethargic for a few months about chasing opportunities—my dad might have thought differently, but he’d died during our previous semester at Rembrandt. We were sitting by the edge of the Greenemill River, watching butterflies—this was in the days before the river got so polluted by the Sharplet Chemicals plant, which had just started construction a few months earlier.
Jus slowly twirled a pale blue flower between the fingers of her two hands, hoping a butterfly would be attracted to it.
“You know something, darling?” she said.
“Know what?”
I could see on her face that she was taking her thought to completion before speaking it. I almost knew what the thought was.
“We’re virgins,” she said at last.
“Yes,” I said.
In strict dictionary terms, of course, neither of us was—Tabitha and Martin and Jennifer and the others, even Nigel, could have told you that (and Nigel probably would, in great detail for the full length of a bar-propping evening)—but in truth that’s what we were.
We were virgins to one another.
The two parts of the Jusjohn creature had experimented both physically and emotionally, but they’d done so separately—independently.
I lay back flat on the cool, slightly damp grass, my hands behind my head, and gazed at a couple of small white clouds and a dissipating jet-trail that ran alongside them.
“We should maybe someday do something about that,” she continued.
“Someday,” I agreed.
It wasn’t really so important, after all. Because in another way we weren’t virgins to each other at all. No two people, it seemed, had ever been so closely and steadfastly entwined; even that was understating it, because we weren’t two people, just one.
She waited a few moments before speaking again. “John, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. I thought maybe we could do that without physically living together, especially when I was with Peter, but then…”
“It was the same as with me and Jennifer,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Could have been a marriage made in heaven. Really it’d have been the wrongest thing you and I ever did, if we’d let me marry her.”
“Yes,” said Jus again.
A green butterfly meandered briefly above my nose and then sailed on breezes only its wings could detect towards Jus. I raised my head and followed its indecisive flight. It pirouetted around the blue flower, which she was now holding determinedly still, and then landed on it.
“Look,” she breathed.
“We’re making love,” I said, just as softly.
In a minute or less the butterfly tired of the bloom—at least, that was the way someone else might have seen it. In reality, it had pulled us back into the unity of the Jusjohn, it had made our love for us; the fine and delicate task done, it was free to grace other flowers, other lovers.
Neither of us spoke for a long while, then:
“There are practicalities,” she said. “If we’re going to get married, I mean. Parents to tell, that sort of thing.”
I chuckled. “It’s hardly going to be a surprise to them. They think we’ve been living together—I mean ‘living together’—these past three years.”
“Yes, but they’ll still want the formalities to be observed. And they’ll want to be able to think they helped us fix the date, and gave their blessing, and—oh, all the usual shit.”
She stood up and brushed with one hand at the back of her jeans. With the other she threw the blue flower down onto the slowly moving water of the Greenemill. It floated a few yards downstream, and then was taken by the eddy formed around a moss-covered rock that broke the surface. As we watched, the abandoned bloom bobbed once, bobbed twice, and then was pulled under.
“Take my hand,” she said, “as we walk back to tell the others. I want your hand in mine.”
And, still, “Jus” is the name this stranger has just used to the woman behind him in the room, the woman who seems clearly to be the mother of his child.
The child whose father is called John Sudmore and has my voice.
He’s speaking to me again, but I can’t hear his words through the cacophony of my memories. And then the memories in turn are superseded by the rush of my thoughts.
I can believe in many things, but one of these is not that there is a creator god—still less one who, not satisfied with having brought his universe into being, continues to tamper with its course of events. Nor can I accept the idea espoused by some of the quantum scientists that each and every moment of our universe sparks off a myriad other universes, each defined by a single one of all the different outcomes of all the different events a moment can contain. Yes, I can conceive that this might happen, that the passage of every instant of time is characterized by near infinite creation; but surely all those other possible universes that are generated are like pairs of virtual particles—springing spontaneously into existence but then instantaneously returning to the base level, the nothingness, as they annihilate each other. In the case of universes, the base level is the universe we know, can see, can test, can probe. The almost infinitude of individual alternative possible existences persist for barely a quantum of time before they all converge back upon the base level. In short, I can no more believe that the universe creates and re-creates itself than I can believe in the creator god.
So the idea that I might have somehow dialed into an alternative reality, where there’s an alternative John Sudmore who married an alternative Justine Parland, does not even enter my mind as a possibility; well, as a possibility, perhaps, but one to be instantly dismissed.
Yet I do believe in creations, and I do believe in gods.
I believe in all the little gods we are.
I believe in the power each one of us has to create a future so forcefully that it imprints itself irrevocably upon the fabric of spacetime, or whatever it is that forms the substrate of reality.
And I believe that my younger self did that, creating for himself a future that, while it was not my future, was nevertheless so vital that it has played itself out… somewhere else.