Somewhere that I’ve just accidentally phoned.
None of this can I even attempt to explain to the man who’s now back on the line speaking to me. He’s inquisitive as to who I might be in relation to himself; his suspicions assuaged, now he’s trying to work out if maybe we could have had a common ancestor. Do I have a great-aunt who was called Julie Petersen before she married and became Julie Halstread? Was my father’s name Clive?
Of course, the answer to both questions is “yes”, but I’m not going to tell him that.
Instead I babble: “Look, I’m terribly sorry to have disturbed you. I got a wrong number and then… well, I don’t know what came over me, claiming I had the same name as you, and all that stuff. Must be the heat. Heat and boredom—the twin curses of telemarketers. Make us do funny things sometimes.”
And so on. I’m hoping Mrs. Baldeen isn’t picking up too much of this.
He says nothing for a moment, and to fill the silence I speak again, unable to stop myself.
“Give my love to Jus.”
I put the phone down as quickly as I can, even though he’s talking once more, his curiosity now fully aroused.
I swivel my chair and stare straight into Mrs. Baldeen’s eyes, which are cold and gray. They remind me of the way I see the world. I could never explain to those eyes why it is I can believe in the little gods—the little creator gods who are us.
And now I’m back walking home across the fields with Jus’s hand in mine, birdsong in the air, long grass and occasional tough wildflowers swishing at our ankles.
We didn’t speak much as we ambled together, just once or twice an “I love you” or a warning to steer around a cowflop. I don’t think I’ve ever been as aware of existence as I was then; it seemed as if Jus’s presence was a lens that focused onto me messages from every atom of the world. I was as one with everything, though most of all, of course, with the warmly glowing sun alongside me.
And then it all began to change. The first I noticed of this was when the knowledge arrived in my mind that things had been changing for some little while. The day wasn’t as welcoming; the breeze didn’t caress my face with the same tender attentiveness; the wildflowers had paler, dirtier colors.
And the grip of Jus’s hand, so firm in mine just a few moments ago, was subtly fading.
I glanced up at her. She was still there, of course, but the face which had been so emphatically full of life, so very present, was now a texture of floating shadows, a pattern of light and dark that seemed to have been serendipitously thrown together to take the form of a face. Through her smile I could see a cloud that hugged the horizon.
I came to a halt.
“Jus!” I said desperately.
A gust of the breeze ran through the unkempt grass, the rustling of the blades drowning any reply she might have made.
We turned and walked on together—there was still enough of her in the air beside me for that. It was as if I was being accompanied by strains of an orchestral piece so faint that I couldn’t quite make out what music was being played. The touch of her fingers against mine was a grace note so elusive that you barely notice it, yet would notice it were it not there.
I suppose I should have been feeling some sort of grief, but what was going through me was too profound for that, was beyond grief. Loss—yes, there was an aching sense of loss that seemed to make heavy every part of my body, slowing the pulse of my blood and the sparking of my synapses, chilling my skin. Pain, too—the ghost pain felt in an amputated limb. But more than anything else what I felt was acceptance.
Jus and I had shared our sandwiches and our selves sitting on the low wall outside the school. Once or twice our hands had brushed, the touch as light and insubstantial as the feel of her hand in mine now was. In her eyes I had seen my future; I had read it in its entirety, page by page, word by word, and I’d joyously accepted it. All the afternoon, through classes that were mere blurs, I’d pored over its pages, reading and re-reading, living, a story in which I was one of the main protagonists—part of one of the main protagonists, part of the Jusjohn organism.
At the end of the school day I’d danced home, cheeks radiant with excitement, with life. For once I’d been communicative over the dinner table with Mom and Dad, telling them that there was, you know, this girl I’d met, and maybe they would like to meet her too, could she come to dinner on Friday, perhaps? She was really nice, they’d like her a lot. I saw my parents exchanging glances, glances that said something like, “He’s always been too shy to tell us about girls before. Maybe this one really is a cut above the others. It’s about time. Remember when we were like this?” And I didn’t care that there was something a little patronizing in all this.
That night, although I’d expected to lie awake for hours thinking of her, expected when at last I did fall asleep that I’d dream of her, in fact I dropped right off and dreamed of pirate ships and cabbages and kings, and I didn’t wake until the alarm clock shrilled at me. I’d have eaten no breakfast at all if my mother hadn’t stood over me.
Even though I reached school twenty minutes early—an unheard-of over-punctuality in my life to that date—I was far from the first to get there. Already there were little huddles in the corridors, many earnest faces, some of the girls in tears. “The new girl, the new girl, the new girl,” the echoes whispered along the walls.
The new girl had been waiting for her dad to pick her up in his car after school the evening before when a truck had swerved because old Fatso Berringer had been drunk at the wheel again and it had plucked her from the sidewalk as neatly as the clawed hand in one of those fairground machines might pluck up a trinket and it had carried her on its hood for fifty yards or more before crushing her, and the life out of her, against the wall of the hardware store, blood falling onto the splayed pages of the books that spilled out of her satchel so that it was unlikely even the thrift store would now accept them for resale.
I lost a month of my life after that.
It was all a dreadful mistake, you see. I had already read the story of the future and, in it, the character called Justine, or Jus, was very much alive. If she’d been killed by a drunkard’s truck, that story would be negated before it had even started. Yet the story was the truth; I knew it was. The falsehood was what people were telling me. Those kindly people, the new friends who suddenly appeared, Mom and Dad, the doctors—however well they were intentioned, they were lying to me.
Or, if they were not, I would make it so.
And I did.
I insisted to reality that the story would be told, that if reality itself would not tell the story of its own accord then I would do so for it.
And I had done that, too. I had lived the future that I knew to be the truth, and Jus had lived it alongside me.
Yet now she was fading from alongside me. Now, after nearly a decade, the conviction that had made me mold reality to suit my wishes was ebbing. And the sign of this ebbing was that Justine ebbed.
What was it that scattered my concentration? Was it the prospect of finally announcing to our parents—my Mom, Mr. and Mrs. Parland—that the fusion of the Jusjohn organism, so long established, was now to be formalized? Was it that my mind couldn’t embrace the clash between the two realities? Was it, and I’ve hardly ever dared admit this to myself, that I didn’t, at the core of me, really want our unity to be recognized by the world? Could it even be that my emotions rebelled against the thought of finally making physical love to Jus, that I was repelled by the notion?