Someday

by David Levithan

  M: We can never meet.

  Someone: Haven’t we already met? Isn’t this meeting?

  We’re told that the most powerful words in the world are “I love you.” And while I think those are powerful, I think equally powerful is this phrase: I have started to know you, and I want to know more.

  HELMUT, AGE 64

  I have been in this body for almost forty years now. There is not a single day when I don’t think of what I’ve done, and tell myself it was wrong. But there is nothing I can do now.

  After more than twenty-five years of moving from body to body, I’d had enough. I felt cursed. I wanted to break the curse. I was living in the center of Berlin, and even in the larger anonymity of a large city, there was no way to make a constant life in such inconstant form.

  It is not like I woke up as Helmut and knew he was the one. There was an emptiness in his life, for certain…but I had experienced greater emptiness in others. That day happened to be a good day for him—a minor success in the office, a going-away party at night for a friend that left me tipsy and longing. I may have even, in my drunken state, convinced myself that I led Helmut’s life better than he ever had. When I looked into his memories, there were all these dark corners, all this trauma that made it hard for him to go forward. I understood that. But I also knew that it would never bother me, not in the way it gnawed at him. I could break him free of that. The only hitch was that he would stop existing as himself. I would become his better form. It seemed, in my twisted logic, the benevolent thing to do. So that night, it was like I made this bargain: I asked Helmut if I could stay, and even though I didn’t receive an answer, I woke up the next morning still inside his body, still inside his life. I was not intending to stay for long. But days became weeks. Weeks became months. I started to worry about what would be left of him, if I vacated. And I also worried about what would be left of me, if I had to go back to the way life had been. So I stayed. I squatted. I wore out my welcome, and there was nothing Helmut could do about it.

  I have now occupied his life for longer than he ever did. But I still make the distinction between us. I have not become him. I will never become him. I will always be the pretender, the borrower, the thief.

  I did not want to be captive to fate. So I made myself my own captive. Which still made me captive to fate, and I have taken someone else down with me.

  The only person who can absolve me is the person I cannot let free.

  MORRIS, AGE 5

  I told Mommy I wanted to go to the beach again today, and she asked me when did I go to the beach, and I told her I went yesterday when she had brown hair, and she told me she didn’t know what I meant, so I stopped talking about the beach and asked her if we could get ice cream, and later when she asked me what flavor I wanted, I got that right.

  X

  What do I remember?

  Not very much.

  I have expunged the insecure sentimentality that causes people to cling to their memories, to set some measure of their own worth in the unreliable miasma of recollection. Memories—particularly ones that can be called fond—are pointless distractions, the act of putting your life into rerun when you should be focusing on the matters at hand.

  You do not bring your house along with you when you travel. There’s no reason your mind should be any different.

  Also:

  The fewer attachments you have to other people, the more you have to yourself. This has served me well. Undistracted, I can take hold when I need to. I can erase the people whose bodies I am in, because as they reach out, I can spend all of my strength grabbing the memories away.

  I keep a few touchstones. Or, perhaps, the touchstones are too heavy for me to throw over the side, so I don’t have much choice. Whatever the case, it’s not like there is a blank space where my memory should be.

  My strongest memory from childhood makes sense to me. I haven’t kept it because it matters, but it has stayed because it was at the time, and is still, instructive. I must have been eight or nine. Still in elementary school. Still going out at lunchtime for recess. Still not understanding why I was different from all the other boys and girls. What my name was that day is unimportant. I was a boy, and I was at the top of the slide. There was this girl trying to cut in front of me, saying it was her turn. Possibly there was an order to it that I was breaking, since I had not been there the day before. Whatever the case, she was pushy, and I pushed her back. I can still feel the force in my arms, and the contact of my hands on her shoulders. I wasn’t thinking of the direction. I pushed her back the way she came. Which meant I watched as she fell past the ladder and landed on the ground.

  There were wood chips. I remember the area around the slide was covered with wood chips. I remember the cedar smell of them, even though I couldn’t possibly have smelled them from my perch, which seemed to my young self like skyscraper height. I remember other kids screaming. Everyone screaming. Except the girl, who lay there, her leg an unnatural angle beneath her. There wasn’t any blood, but she wouldn’t open her eyes. Adults ran over. I had no idea who they were, since I hadn’t been there yesterday. I just stood at the top of the slide, watching as some kids pointed at me, as one of the adults yelled at me to come down, come down right this minute. Someone said the girl was breathing; no one knew whether to move her. I knew I was in trouble. I knew it wouldn’t be right to slide my way to the ground, so I lowered myself down the ladder at a funereal pace. No one grabbed me when I got to the bottom. I could have gotten away. But I stayed there as the girl started to stir and then, awake, howl like an animal. Teachers began to collect the other students, herd them back into the school. But I stayed. I punished myself with that girl’s pain. The woman who’d yelled at me to come down finally pulled me into the principal’s office. The ambulance came while I was walking inside.

  The rest of the day was a series of adults yelling at me. Asking me why. Saying, This isn’t like you, but showing in their eyes that now this was exactly who I was to them. They knew what I was capable of; if they hadn’t noticed it before, it had been lying in wait, unleashed on this poor girl with the broken back, whose name I cannot remember. But I do remember that phrase, broken back. Also broken legs, but I had heard of broken legs before. I hadn’t known a back could break.

  I cried. I said I was sorry. I knew I was terrible. If I could have broken my own back to save that girl from falling, I would have. I was sure of it.

  I remember going to sleep that night, knowing I was just as bad as all the adults suspected.

  Then I remember waking up in a different house, in a different body, in a different life.

  This had always been the case, of course. But young me somehow thought I would be punished if I did something really bad. The privilege of escape would be taken away.

  I remember realizing: The pain and the punishment were no longer mine. I was free of them. I had achieved what all people want at various junctures of their days. I had found the reset button.

  I have been divorced from consequence ever since. I have no idea what happened to that girl. It would make a better story if she’d died, because then I would have gotten away with more. For all I know, she recovered valiantly and then got into Harvard ten years later with her stirring essay about the time a boy shoved her off a slide, and how she walked the road to recovery. My back may have been broken, but my spirit never was, she may have written.

  And the boy? They probably put him on meds. If he hadn’t been the kind of boy to push a girl off a slide, he probably is one now. Most men are. I know I am.

  It’s not that I drive around thinking about this. It’s not like when I’m in the shower, I slip into reveries for the damage I’ve caused. There are no crimes dying to be confessed. There is only the secondary crime of forgetting. Insult to injury. I hurt you, and then I hurt you more by not remembering it.

  The past means nothing to me.


  I erase it wherever I go.

  AEMON, AGE 18

  I met Liam at the Melbourne Writers Festival. I was Peter at the time.

  This was two years ago, when I was sixteen. I was in my lazy stage…which, okay, hasn’t entirely gone away. But I was especially not paying attention that morning. I arrived at school to find I was the only boy not wearing the school’s blazer-jumper-tie combo, which was apparently required for field trips. They almost didn’t let me go, but an English teacher intervened, saying I of all kids would benefit from being exposed to so many authors. Suddenly I was paying attention, because I’ve always been a reader, but the odds were slender of me landing in the life of someone as die-hard about books as I was.

  Sure enough, there were three different novels in Peter’s bag for me to read on the bus ride into the city. I always faced a dilemma in situations like this: Go back to the start or pick up reading where Peter left off? If it was a book I’d already read, I’d pick up in the middle. But if it was new, I’d keep the bookmark in place and start at chapter one. Sometimes our tastes would match, and I’d learn about a new author. Other times…it felt like homework.

  Peter’s taste was pretty good—some Larbalestier (Razorhurst), some Lanagan (Yellowcake), and a copy of Jasper Jones for class. Even though we were going to a book festival, I was the only one on the bus reading. Peter’s friend Edward sat next to him, but I think Edward was used to Peter reading, because he just loaded some comedy videos on his phone and watched those.

  As a group, our school was signed up to see some Very Worthy Authors talking about some Very Worthy Topics. Mr. Williams, the teacher who’d defended my wardrobe, pulled me aside to say that he trusted me to make my own choices, but that I absolutely had to check in with him at lunchtime, and absolutely absolutely had to be back on the bus at the predetermined departure time.

  “Don’t get me fired for losing you,” he requested.

  I assured him I would do as he said, and with a nod to Edward plunged into the crowd at Federation Square. All these different schools were there, each with its own blazered plumage. It was funny to me how much you could tell about a school by the way the students wore those blazers—some like it was their posh, God-given right, and others like they’d been dressed by their mothers for a church they didn’t want to attend.

  I checked out the schedule and found there was a panel on queer lit. Since I’ve identified as queer ever since the first time I read the words gender nonbinary, I figured that’s where I’d go. It was in a small black box of a space, and clearly none of the schools had chosen to attend this panel en masse. That meant a profound lack of blazers, and a surfeit of university students with dyed hair, some of whom (I could tell) were gender nonbinary as well.

  I walked in. I could’ve sat anywhere. I ended up sitting next to Liam.

  First thing I noticed: He’d taken off his blazer.

  Second thing I noticed: A copy of Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice in the blazer pocket. Not Yellowcake, but close.

  Third thing I noticed: Elvis Costello glasses.

  Fourth thing I noticed: Him looking at me looking at him.

  “You’ve gone rogue, I see,” I said, pointing to his blazer.

  “I like to think of myself as more a rebel than a rogue,” he replied, his self-deprecating tone making it clear he thought of himself as neither of these things. Which was endearing.

  He introduced himself as Liam. I introduced myself as Patrick. Because I didn’t want to introduce myself as Peter, and in that moment, my mind couldn’t get that far away from it.

  The moderator came on to tell us where the exits were, and the panel began. Even though it was very interesting, I was paying as much attention to the space next to me as I was to the authors in front of me—and I thought I sensed Liam doing the same thing. This thought was confirmed as soon as the panel ended, because we resumed talking as if there hadn’t just been a fifty-minute pause.

  Take two queer, bookish teenagers and give them the run of a literary festival—we might as well have been strolling on the Left Bank in Paris, for all the enraptured thoughts that rose into our queer, bookish hearts. Liam was from Melbourne proper; his mum managed a card shop in Fitzroy and his father was an ophthalmologist. I told him I was from Adelaide, in town for the festival with my dad, who worked for a festival there and wanted to scout out the authors. None of this was true, but I also told him the things I felt were the most true about me—about seeing myself as a person, not as a boy or a girl; about feeling like an outsider; about using books as a way to get inside something larger than my immediate life.

  I pretended Mr. Williams was my father when I checked in at lunch. Then I went right back to Liam, who told me he wasn’t going to check in with his teachers, even though he was supposed to. We spent the afternoon dipping in and out of panels, jumping from science fiction to environmental essays to debut authors not that many years older than ourselves. At some point, I told Liam my name was Peter, not Patrick. He didn’t seem fazed. I asked him if he wrote, and in a quiet corner of the AMCI building, he pulled out a notebook and nervously debuted some poems to me, saying he’d just written them that morning. He asked me if I wrote, and I told him the truth—that I was still observing, and hadn’t yet found the words.

  The afternoon was quickly counting down. His hand brushed mine as we went to see four authors discuss Margaret Atwood. We both noticed, and we made sure to brush them again. Then we were holding them, neither rebel nor rogue, just romantic.

  I knew it wasn’t true, but I could believe that the hundreds of people who’d planned the festival had done it just so Liam and I could meet. They thought they were festival planners, but really they were scenic designers. We had stumbled into starring in the production.

  Then it was time to go. I gave him my email address, Aemon808. He said Aemon was a cool word. There was no way for me to tell him that it was what I thought of as my real name. Until I found myself saying it was what I thought of as my real name.

  He liked it. He liked that I’d chosen it.

  We hugged goodbye. And we held that hug for as long as it could go. Our bodies recognizing the thing our minds and hearts already had.

  I didn’t want to let go.

  * * *

  —

  The mistake would be to think it would have been better if it had ended there. Just one perfect day.

  It still would have hurt. Any ending hurts.

  * * *

  —

  For months, we wrote to each other, about anything and everything. I told him about school, about thoughts I had, about things I read. The weird part for me was that it felt like I was telling the whole truth—the bodies I was in didn’t matter to me, so they didn’t matter to the story, either. We shared secret Instagrams with each other. When he wanted photos of me, I went onto Peter’s social media and borrowed some. When he wanted photos of Adelaide, I made my way there—and, because of the way my life worked, I stayed.

  The photos I could take from Peter started to become limited—he’d found a girlfriend, and so many of the photos he posted were with her. I had come to feel this strange kinship with him, as if he was what I really looked like, because that was how Liam was seeing me. I knew it was wrong, but when you’re different from everyone else, you can start to believe you get a pass on certain aspects of right and wrong.

  Then I got a message on my Instagram: Who are you and why are you using my photos? Somehow Peter had found me. Right and wrong reasserted themselves. I told him I was sorry and wouldn’t do it again. Which meant I couldn’t do it again.

  I told Liam I’d sneaked out to see his favorite band when they’d played in Adelaide, and had been caught by my parents on the way back in. I told him they’d found the Instagram, had taken my laptop and told me I needed to focus on my studies. I made it sound like their fault. I made them sound awful. But I t
old him I could still email. He went along with everything.

  We went on for more than a year, in that strange space that was romantic but not dating, essential but not best friends, tied to each other but not tied to any physical space. We thrived there, and both felt we should want more.

  I wasn’t even thinking when the next Adelaide Festival came along. Although I’d kept up the story about my father working there, I wasn’t paying attention. Then, a month before, Liam surprised me by saying he was going to come. So many of our favorite authors were going to be there—and he wanted to see me again. Finally.

  I had to tell him not to come. I had to find a way to tell him that didn’t tear down everything we’d built. I had to be as true as I could.

  So I told him I wanted to stay in our space. I wanted to be romantic but not dating, essential but not best friends, tied to each other but not tied to any physical space. He was a writer and I wanted to know him through his words, and his words alone. And I wanted him to know me the same way.

  Okay, he wrote back. Let’s keep it pure.

  I was so relieved. And, paradoxically, so disappointed. But we resumed writing as if there’d never been any chance of being in the same place. He didn’t ask me about the Instagram or any other photos.

  I still tell him everything-with-an-asterisk.

  He is easily the most important person in my life. So every day, I am afraid of losing him.

  A

  Day 6132

  R,

  Today’s the day. Do you think you can make it to New York City?

  A

  A,

  Yes.

  R