The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

  ‘He of the cat.’

  ‘Yes. The cat guy. He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that’s how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.’

  ‘But what about us? We’re doing that.’

  ‘Exactly. I am here but I also know I am not here. I am also lying in a hospital in Paris, having an aneurysm. And I am also skydiving in Arizona. And travelling around southern India. And tasting wine in Lyon, and lying on a yacht off the Côte d’Azur.’

  ‘I knew it!’

  ‘Vraiment?’

  He was, she decided, quite beautiful.

  ‘You seem more suited to strolling the Croisette in Cannes than an Arctic adventure.’

  He widened his right hand like a starfish. ‘Five days! Five days I have been in this life. That is my record. Maybe this is the life for me . . .’

  ‘Interesting. You’re going to have a very cold life.’

  ‘And who knows? Maybe you are too . . . I mean, if the bear didn’t take you back to your library maybe nothing will.’ He started to fill the kettle. ‘Science tells us that the “grey zone” between life and death is a mysterious place. There is a singular point at which we are not one thing or another. Or rather we are both. Alive and dead. And in that moment between the two binaries, sometimes, just sometimes, we turn ourselves into a Schrödinger’s cat who may not only be alive or dead but may be every quantum possibility that exists in line with the universal wave function, including the possibility where we are chatting in a communal kitchen in Longyearbyen at one in the morning . . .’

  Nora was taking all this in. She thought of Volts, still and lifeless under the bed and lying by the side of the road.

  ‘But sometimes the cat is just dead and dead.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just . . . my cat died. And I tried another life and even in that one he was still dead.’

  ‘That’s sad. I had a similar situation with a Labrador. But the point is, there are others like us. I have lived so many lives, I have come across a few of them. Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.’

  ‘It’s crazy to think that there are other people who could be . . . what did you call us?

  ‘Sliders?’

  ‘Yep. That.’

  ‘Well, it’s possible of course, but I think we’re rare. One thing I’ve noticed is that the other people I’ve met – the dozen or so – have all been around our age. All thirties or forties or fifties. One was twenty-nine, en fait. All have had a deep desire to have done things differently. They had regrets. Some contemplated that they may be better off dead but also had a desire to live as another version of themselves.’

  ‘Schrödinger’s life. Both dead and alive in your own mind.’

  ‘Exactement! And whatever those regrets did to our brain, whatever – how would you say? – neurochemical event happened, that confused yearning for death-and-life was somehow just enough to send us into this state of total in-between.’

  The kettle was getting noisier, the water starting to bubble like Nora’s thoughts.

  ‘Why is it always just one person that we see? In the place. The library. Whatever.’

  Hugo shrugged. ‘If I was religious, I’d say it was God. And as God is probably someone we can’t see or comprehend then He – or She – or whichever pronoun God is – becomes an image of someone good we have known in our lives. And if I wasn’t religious – which I’m not – I would think that the human brain can’t handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it organises or translates this complexity into something it understands. A librarian in a library. A friendly uncle in a video store. Et cetera.’

  Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

  She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.

  ‘It’s like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick,’ said Nora.

  ‘What?’

  She saw that Hugo’s watch was of the analogue variety. ‘Try it. You just can’t. Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.’

  Hugo nodded, as he observed his own watch.

  ‘So,’ Nora said, ‘whatever exists between universes is most likely not a library, but that is the easiest way for me to understand it. That would be my hypothesis. I see a simplified version of the truth. The librarian is just a kind of mental metaphor. The whole thing is.’

  ‘Isn’t it fascinating?’ said Hugo.

  Nora sighed. ‘In the last life I spoke to my dead dad.’

  Hugo opened a jar of coffee and scooped out granules into two mugs.

  ‘And I didn’t drink coffee. I drank peppermint tea.’

  ‘That sounds terrible.’

  ‘It was bearable.’

  ‘Another thing that is strange,’ Hugo said. ‘At any point in this conversation you or I could disappear.’

  ‘Have you seen that happen?’ Nora took the mug Hugo handed her.

  ‘Yeah. A few times. It’s freaky. But no one else would notice. They become a bit vague with their memory for the last day, but you would be surprised. If you went back to the library right now, and I was still standing here talking to you in the kitchen, you would say something like “My mind’s just gone blank – what were we talking about?”, and then I’d realise what had happened and I’d say we were talking about glaciers and you’d bombard me with facts about them. And your brain would fill in the gaps and make up a narrative about what just happened.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about the polar bear? What about the meal tonight? Would I – this other me – would she remember what I ate?’

  ‘Not necessarily. But I have seen it happen. It’s amazing what the brain can fill in. And what it is fine with forgetting.’

  ‘So, what was I like? Yesterday, I mean.’

  He locked eyes. They were pretty eyes. Nora momentarily felt pulled into his orbit like a satellite to Earth.

  ‘Exquisite, charming, intelligent, beautiful. Much like now.’

  She laughed it off. ‘Stop being so French.’

  Awkward pause.

  ‘How many lives have you had?’ she said eventually. ‘How many have you experienced?’

  ‘Too many. Nearing three hundred.’

  ‘Three hundred?’

  ‘I have been so many things. On every continent on Earth. And yet I have never found the life for me. I am resigned to being this way for ever. There will never be a life that I truly want to live for ever. I get too curious. I get too much of a yearning to live another way. And you don’t need to make that face. It’s not sad. I am happily in limbo.’

  ‘But what if one day there is no video store?’ Nora thought about Mrs Elm, panicking at the computer, and the flickering lights in the library. ‘What
if one day you disappear for good? Before you have found a life to settle in?’

  He shrugged. ‘Then I will die. And it means I would have died anyway. In the life I lived before. I kind of like being a slider. I like imperfection. I like keeping death as an option. I like never having to settle.’

  ‘I think my situation is different. I think my death is more imminent. If I don’t find a life to live in pretty soon, I think I’ll be gone for good.’

  She explained the problem she’d had last time, with transferring back.

  ‘Oh. Yeah, well, that might be bad. But it might not be. You do realise there are infinite possibilities here? I mean, the multiverse isn’t about just some universes. It’s not about a handful of universes. It’s not even about a lot of universes. It’s not about a million or a billion or a trillion universes. It’s about an infinite number of universes. Even with you in them. You could be you in any version of the world, however unlikely that world would be. You are only limited by your imagination. You can be very creative with the regrets you want to undo. I once undid a regret about not doing something I’d contemplated as a teenager – doing aerospace engineering and becoming an astronaut – and so in one life I became an astronaut. I haven’t been to space. But I became someone who had been there, for a little while. The thing you have to remember is that this is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big . . . You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.’

  She sipped her coffee. ‘I understand.’

  ‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely.

  ‘You’re quoting Camus.’

  ‘You got me.’

  He was staring at her. Nora no longer minded his intensity, but was becoming a little concerned about her own. ‘I was a Philosophy student,’ she said, as blandly as she could manage, avoiding his eyes.

  He was close to her now. There was something equally annoying and attractive about Hugo. He exuded an arrogant amorality that made his face something to either slap or kiss, depending on the circumstances.

  ‘In one life we have known each other for years and are married . . .’ he said.

  ‘In most lives I don’t know you at all,’ she countered, now staring straight at him.

  ‘That’s so sad.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ She smiled.

  ‘We’re special, Nora. We’re chosen. No one understands us.’

  ‘No one understands anyone. We’re not chosen.’

  ‘The only reason I am still in this life is because of you . . .’

  She lunged forward and kissed him.

  If Something Is Happening to Me, I Want to Be There

  It was a very pleasant sensation. Both the kiss, and the knowledge she could be this forward. Being aware that everything that could possibly happen happened to her somewhere, in some life, kind of absolved her a little from decisions. That was just the reality of the universal wave function. Whatever was happening could – she reasoned – be put down to quantum physics.

  ‘I don’t share a room,’ he said.

  She stared at him fearlessly now, as if facing down a polar bear had given her a certain capacity for dominance she’d never been aware of. ‘Well, Hugo, maybe you could break the habit.’

  But the sex turned out to be a disappointment. A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it.

  I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.

  It probably wasn’t the best sign of how their nocturnal encounter was going, that she was thinking of Existential philosophy, or that this quote in particular was the one that appeared in her mind. But hadn’t Camus also said, ‘If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there’?

  Hugo, she concluded, was a strange person. For a man who had been so intimate and deep in his conversation, he was very detached from the moment. Maybe if you lived as many lives as he had, the only person you really had any kind of intimate relationship with was yourself. She felt like she might not have been there at all.

  And in a few moments, she wasn’t.

  God and Other Librarians

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You know my name. I am Mrs Elm. Louise Isabel Elm.’

  ‘Are you God?’

  She smiled. ‘I am who I am.’

  ‘And who is that?’

  ‘The librarian.’

  ‘But you aren’t a real person. You’re just a . . . mechanism.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  ‘Not like that. You are the product of some strange interaction between my mind and the multiverse, some simplification of the quantum wave function or whatever it is.’

  Mrs Elm looked perturbed by the suggestion. ‘What is the matter?’

  Nora thought of the polar bear as she stared down at the yellow-brown stone floor. ‘I nearly died.’

  ‘And remember, if you die in a life, there is no way back here.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘The library has strict rules. Books are precious. You have to treat them carefully.’

  ‘But these are other lives. Other variants of me. Not me me.’

  ‘Yes, but while you are experiencing them, it is you who has to pay the consequences.’

  ‘Well, I think that stinks, to be perfectly honest.’

  The librarian’s smile curled at its edges, like a fallen leaf. ‘Well, this is interesting.’

  ‘What is interesting?’

  ‘The fact that you have so thoroughly changed your attitude towards dying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You wanted to die and now you don’t.’

  It dawned on Nora that Mrs Elm might be close to having a point, although not quite the whole point. ‘Well, I still think my actual life isn’t worth living. In fact, this experience has just managed to confirm that.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think you think that.’

  ‘I do think that. That’s why I said it.’

  ‘No. The Book of Regrets is getting lighter. There’s a lot of white space in there now . . . It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. This is one of your barriers.’

  ‘Barriers?’

  ‘Yes. You have a lot of them. They stop you from seeing the truth.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About yourself. And you really need to start trying. To see the truth. Because this matters.’

  ‘I thought there were an infinite number of lives to choose from.’

  ‘You need to pick the life you’d be most happy inside. Or soon there won’t be a choice at all.’

  ‘I met someone who has been doing this for a long time and he still hasn’t found a life that he is satisfied with . . .’

  ‘Well, Hugo’s is a privilege you might not have.’

  ‘Hugo? How do you—’

  But then she remembered Mrs Elm knew a lot more than she should.

  ‘You need to choose carefully,’ continued the librarian. ‘One day the library may not be here and you’ll be gone for ever.’

  ‘How many lives do I have?’

  ‘This isn’t a magic lamp and I am no genie. There is no set number. It could be one. It could be a hundred. But you only have an infinite number of lives to choose from so long as the time in the Midnight Library stays, well, at midnight. Because while it stays at midnight, your life – your root life – is somewhere between life and death. If time moves here, that means something very . . .’ She searched for a delicate word. ‘. . . decisive has happened. Something that razes the Midnight Library to the ground, and takes us with it. And so I would err on the side of caution. I would try to think very keenly about where you want to be. You have clearly made some progress, I can tell. You seem to realise that life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist insid
e. But you don’t want that gate to close before you get a chance to go through it.’

  They both were silent for a very long time, as Nora observed all the books all around her. All the possibilities. Calmly and slowly, she walked along the aisle, wondering what lay beyond the covers of each book, and wishing the green spines would offer some kind of clue.

  ‘Now, which book do you fancy?’ came Mrs Elm’s words behind her.

  Nora remembered Hugo’s words in the kitchen.

  Dream big.

  The librarian had a penetrating gaze. ‘Who is Nora Seed? And what does she want?’

  When Nora thought of her closest access to happiness, it was music. Yes, she still played the piano and keyboard sometimes, but she had given up creating. She had given up singing. She thought of those happy early pub gigs playing ‘Beautiful Sky’. She thought of her brother larking about on stage with her and Ravi and Ella.

  So now she knew precisely which book to ask for.

  Fame

  She was sweating. That was the first observation. Her body was coursing with adrenaline and her clothes were clinging to her. There were people around her, a couple of whom had guitars. She could hear noise. Vast, powerful human noise – a roar of life slowly finding rhythm and shape. Becoming a chant.

  There was a woman in front of her, towelling her face.

  ‘Thanks,’ Nora said, smiling.

  The woman looked startled, as if she’d just been spoken to by a god.

  She recognised a man holding drumsticks. It was Ravi. His hair was dyed white-blonde and he was dressed in a sharp-cut indigo suit with a bare chest where his shirt should have been. He looked an entirely different person to the one who had been looking at the music magazines in the newsagent’s in Bedford only yesterday, or the corporate-looking guy in the blue shirt who had sat watching her do her catastrophic talk in the InterContinental Hotel.

  ‘Ravi,’ she said, ‘you look amazing!’

  ‘What?’

  He hadn’t heard her over the noise, but now she had a different question.