by Matt Haig
Island
She was in shock. But it was a slightly different kind of shock than the others on the dinghy assumed. It wasn’t the shock of having been close to death. It was the shock of realising she actually wanted to live.
They passed a small island, teeming with nature. Green lichens spread over rocks. Birds – little auks and puffins clustered together – huddled against the Arctic wind. Life surviving against the odds.
Nora sipped the coffee that Hugo handed her, fresh from his flask. Holding it with cold hands even under three pairs of gloves.
To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.
When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.
But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.
Permafrost
The surface air temperatures in Svalbard were warming at twice the global rate. Climate change was happening faster here than almost anywhere on Earth.
One woman, wearing a purple woollen hat pulled down over her eyebrows, talked about witnessing one of the icebergs doing a somersault – something that happened apparently because the warming waters had dissolved it from beneath, causing it to become top heavy.
Another problem was that the permafrost on the land was thawing, softening the ground, leading to landslides and avalanches that could destroy the wooden houses of Longyearbyen, the largest town in Svalbard. There was also a risk of bodies surfacing in the local cemetery.
It was inspiring, being among these scientists who were trying to discover precisely what was happening to the planet, trying to observe glacial and climatic activity, and in so doing to inform, and to protect life on Earth.
Back on the main boat, Nora sat quietly in the dining area as everyone offered sympathy for the bear encounter. She felt unable to tell them she was grateful for the experience. She just smiled politely and did her best to avoid conversation.
This life was an intense one, without compromise. It was currently minus seventeen degrees, and she had nearly been eaten by a polar bear, and yet maybe the problem with her root life had partly been its blandness.
She had come to imagine mediocrity and disappointment were her destiny.
Indeed, Nora had always had the sense that she came from a long line of regrets and crushed hopes that seemed to echo in every generation.
For instance, her grandfather on her mother’s side was called Lorenzo Conte. He had left Puglia – the handsome heel in the boot of Italy – to come to Swinging London in the 1960s.
Like other men in the desolate port town of Brindisi, he’d emigrated to Britain, exchanging life on the Adriatic for a job at the London Brick Company. Lorenzo, in his naivety, had imagined having a wonderful life – making bricks all day, and then of an evening he would rub shoulders with The Beatles and walk arm-in-arm down Carnaby Street with Jean Shrimpton or Marianne Faithful. The only problem was that, despite its name, the London Brick Company wasn’t actually in London. It was based sixty miles north in Bedford, which, for all its modest charms, turned out not as swinging as Lorenzo would have liked. But he made a compromise with his dreams and settled there. The work may not have been glamorous, but it paid.
Lorenzo married a local English woman called Patricia Brown, who was also getting used to life’s disappointments, having exchanged her dream of being an actress for the mundane, daily theatre of the suburban housewife, and whose culinary skills were forever under the ghostly shadow of her dead Puglian mother-in-law and her legendary spaghetti dishes, which, in Lorenzo’s eyes, could never be surpassed.
They had a baby girl within a year of getting married – Nora’s mother – and they called her Donna.
Donna grew up with her parents arguing almost continually, and had consequently believed marriage was something that was not only inevitable, but also inevitably miserable. She became a secretary at a law firm, and then a communications officer for Bedford council, but then she’d had an experience which was never really discussed, at least not with Nora. She’d experienced some kind of breakdown – the first of several – that caused her to stay at home, and, although she recovered, she never went back to work.
There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time. Maybe that was why she had given up on so many things. Because she had it written in her DNA that she had to fail.
Nora thought of this as the boat chugged through the Arctic waters and gulls – black-legged kittiwakes, according to Ingrid – flew overhead.
On both sides of her family there had been an unspoken belief that life was meant to fuck you over. Nora’s dad, Geoff, had certainly lived a life that seemed to miss its target.
He had grown up with only a mother, as his dad had died of a heart attack when he was two, cruelly hiding somewhere behind his first memories. Nora’s paternal grandmother had been born in rural Ireland but emigrated to England to become a school cleaner, struggling to bring in enough money for food, let alone anything approaching fun.
Geoff had been bullied early on in life but had grown big and broad enough to easily put those bullies in their place. He worked hard and proved good at football and the shot put and, in particular, rugby. He played for the Bedford Blues youth team, becoming their best player, and had a shot at the big time before a collateral ligament injury stopped him in his tracks. He then became a PE teacher and simmered with quiet resentment at the universe. He forever dreamed of travel, but never did much of it beyond a subscription to National Geographic and the occasional holiday to somewhere in the Cyclades – Nora remembered him in Naxos, snapping a picture of the Temple of Apollo at sunset.
Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place. She had no idea about any of it, really. But on that boat she realised something. She had loved her parents more than she ever knew, and right then, she forgave them completely.
One Night in Longyearbyen
It took two hours to get back to the tiny port at Longyearbyen. It was Norway’s – and the world’s – most northern town, with a population of around two thousand people.
Nora knew these basic things from her root life. She had, after all, been fascinated by this part of the world since she was eleven, but her knowledge didn’t stretch far beyond the magazine articles she had read and she was still nervous of talking.
But the boat trip back had been okay, because her inability to discuss the rock and ice and plant samples they had taken, or to understand phrases such as ‘striated basalt bedrock’ and ‘post-glacial isotopes’, was put down to the shock of her polar bear encounter.
And she was in a kind of shock, it was true. But it was not the shock her colleagues were imagining. The shock hadn’t been that she’d thought she’d been about to die. She had been about to die ever since she first entered the Midnight Library. No, the shock was that she felt like she was about to live. Or at least, that she could imagine wanting to be alive again. And she wanted to do something good with that life.
The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
But if it was important enough for David Hume to write that thought down, then maybe it was important enough to aim to do something good. To help preserve life, in all its forms.
As Nora understood it, the work this other Nora and her fell
ow scientists had been doing was something to do with determining the speed at which the ice and glaciers had been melting in the region, to gauge the acceleration rate of climate change. There was more to it than that, but that was at the core of it, as far as Nora could see.
So, in this life, she was doing her bit to save the planet. Or at least to monitor the steady devastation of the planet in order to alert people to the facts of environmental crisis. That was potentially depressing but also a good and ultimately fulfilling thing to do, she imagined. There was purpose. There was meaning.
They were impressed too. The others. With the polar bear story. Nora was a hero of sorts – not in an Olympic-swimming-champion way, but in another equally fulfilling kind of fashion.
Ingrid had her arm around her. ‘You are the saucepan warrior. And I think we need to mark your fearlessness, and our potentially groundbreaking findings, with a meal. A nice meal. And some vodka. What do you say, Peter?’
‘A nice meal? In Longyearbyen? Do they have them?’
As it turned out: they did.
Back on dry land they went to a smart wooden shack of a place called Gruvelageret perched off a lonely road in an austere, snow-crisp valley. She drank Arctic ale and surprised her colleagues by eating the only vegan option on a menu that included reindeer steak and moose burger. Nora must have looked tired because quite a few of her colleagues told her that she did, but maybe it was just that there weren’t many places in the conversation that she could enter with confidence. She felt like a learner driver at a busy junction, nervously waiting for a clear and safe patch of road.
Hugo was there. He still looked to her like he would rather be in Antibes or St Tropez. She felt a little uneasy as he stared at her, a little too observed.
On the hurried walk back to their land-based accommodation, which reminded Nora of a university halls of residence but on a smaller scale and more Nordic and wooden and minimal, Hugo jogged to catch her up and walk by her side.
‘It is interesting,’ he said.
‘What is interesting?’
‘How at breakfast this morning you didn’t know who I was.’
‘Why? You didn’t know who I was either.’
‘Of course I did. We were chatting for about two hours yesterday.’
Nora felt like she was inside some kind of trap. ‘We were?’
‘I studied you at breakfast before I came over and I could see you were different today.’
‘That’s creepy, Hugo. Studying women at breakfast.’
‘And I noticed things.’
Nora lifted her scarf over her face. ‘It’s too cold. Can we talk about this tomorrow?’
‘I noticed you improvising. All day you have been non-committal in everything you say.’
‘Not true. I’m just shook up. You know, the bear.’
‘Non. Ce n’est pas ça. I’m talking about before the bear. And after the bear. And all day.’
‘I have no idea what you’re—’
‘There is a look. I have seen it before in other people. I’d recognise it anywhere.’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘Why do glaciers pulsate?’
‘What?’
‘This is your area of study. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’
‘The science isn’t entirely settled on the matter.’
‘Okay. Bien. Name me one of the glaciers around here. Glaciers have names. Name one . . . Kongsbreen? Nathorstbreen? Ring any bells?’
‘I don’t want this conversation.’
‘Because you aren’t the same person you were yesterday, are you?’
‘None of us are,’ said Nora, briskly. ‘Our brains change. It’s called neuroplasticity. Please. Stop mansplaining glaciers to a glaciologist, Hugo.’
Hugo seemed to retreat a little and she felt a bit guilty. There was a minute of silence. Just the crunch of their feet in the snow. They were nearly back at the accommodation, the others not too far behind them.
But then, he said it.
‘I am like you, Nora. I visit lives that aren’t mine. I have been in this one for five days. But I have been in many others. I was given an opportunity – a rare opportunity – for this to happen. I have been sliding between lives for a long while.’
Ingrid grabbed Nora’s arm.
‘I still have some vodka,’ she announced as they reached the door. She held her key card in her glove and tapped it against the scanner. The door opened.
‘Listen,’ Hugo mumbled, conspiratorially, ‘if you want to know more, meet me in the communal kitchen in five minutes.’
And Nora felt her heart race, but this time she had no ladle or saucepan to bang. She didn’t particularly like this Hugo character, but was far too intrigued not to hear what he had to say. And she also wanted to know if he could be trusted.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’
Expectation
Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents, who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.
She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.
She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.
She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best.
And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.
Life and Death and the Quantum Wave Function
With Hugo, it wasn’t a library.
‘It’s a video store,’ he said, leaning against the cheap-looking cupboard where the coffee was kept. ‘It looks exactly like a video store I used to go to in the outskirts of Lyon – Video Lumière – where I grew up. The Lumière brothers are heroes in Lyon and there’s a lot of things named after them. They invented cinema there. Anyway, that is beside the point: the point is that every life I choose is an old VHS that I play right in the store, and the moment it starts – the moment the movie starts – is the moment I disappear.’
Nora suppressed a giggle.
‘What’s so funny?’ Hugo wondered, a little hurt.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. It just seemed mildly amusing. A video store.’
‘Oh? And a library, that is entirely sensible?’
‘More sensible, yes. I mean, at least you can still use books. Who plays videos these days?’
‘Interesting. I had no idea there was such a thing as between-life snobbery. You are an education.’
‘Sorry, Hugo. Okay, I will ask a sensible question. Is there anyone else there? A person who helps you choose each life?’
He nodded. ‘Oh yeah. It’s my Uncle Philippe. He died years ago. And he never even worked in a video store. It’s so illogical.’
Nora told him about Mrs Elm.
‘A school librarian?’ mocked Hugo. ‘That’s pretty funny too.’
Nora ignored him. ‘Do you reckon they’re ghosts? Guiding spirits? Guardian angels? What are they?’
It felt so ludicrous, in the heart of a scientific facility, to be talking like this.
‘They are,’ Hugo gestured, as if trying to pluck the right term from the air, ‘an interpretation.’
‘Interpretation?’
‘I have met others like us,’ Hugo said. ‘You see, I have been in the in-between state for a long time. I have encountered a few other sliders. That’s what I call them. Us. We are sliders. We have a root life in which we are lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place. And it is always something different. A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant . . . What does that tell you?’
Nora shrugged. And thought. Listening to the hum of the central he
ating. ‘That it’s all bullshit? That none of this is real?’
‘No. Because the template is always the same. For instance: there is always someone else there – a guide. Only ever one person. They are always someone who has helped the person at a significant time in their life. The setting is always somewhere with emotional significance. And there is usually talk of root lives or branches.’
Nora thought about being consoled by Mrs Elm when her dad died. Staying with her, comforting her. It was probably the most kindness anyone had ever shown her.
‘And there is always an infinite range of choices,’ Hugo went on. ‘An infinite number of video tapes, or books, or paintings, or meals . . . Now, I am a scientist. And I have lived many scientific lives. In my original root life, I have a degree in Biology. I have also, in another life, been a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. I have been a marine biologist trying to protect the Great Barrier Reef. But my weakness was always physics. At first I had no idea of how to find out what was happening to me. Until I met a woman in one life who was going through what we are going through, and in her root life she was a quantum physicist. Professor Dominique Bisset at Montpellier University. She explained it all to me. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. So that means we—’
A kind-faced, pink-skinned, auburn-bearded man whose name Nora didn’t know came into the kitchen to rinse a coffee cup, then smiled at them.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he said, in a soft American (maybe Canadian) accent, before padding away in his slippers.
‘Yes,’ said Nora.
‘See you,’ said Hugo, before returning – in a more hushed tone – to his main thread. ‘The universal wave function is real, Nora. That’s what Professor Bisset said.’
‘What?’
Hugo held up a finger. A slightly annoying, wait-a-minute kind of finger. Nora resisted a strong urge to grab it and twist it. ‘Erwin Schrödinger . . .’