Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  It was uncanny. She drove along McGrath Highway, an elevated road from which drivers could usually see out over the roofs of the town or look through second-floor windows and spot people watching television. Tonight, however, she saw none of that. She was wrapped in a featureless gray blur. It was as though she and the two or three other cars on the road were floating in empty space, in the nothingness before the universe began.

  She shuddered and finally turned off. She was down by the Charles River, by the MIT dormitories. She found a parking spot and left her car there, continuing onward on foot. There was a smell of salt, of seaweed, of fumes. She stopped in front of MacGregor House and looked up at the smears of light spilling out of the windows into the gloomy fog, wondering which one was Hiroshi’s room. Back in Tokyo she would have known. How long ago it all was.

  She turned away, crossed the street, and walked over to the river. Though she could hear it, she saw nothing at all. There was a thin strip of asphalt, the bicycle path, then the riverbank and beyond that only the lapping of the water. She found herself thinking of the shrine, the altar. Her memory told her she had been lost in a thick fog then as well.…She heard footsteps behind her and turned around, startled. It was Hiroshi.

  “You?” he said, evidently just as astonished as she was.

  “Hello,” she said and hugged herself tight. “What a coincidence.”

  He had stopped. “Do you really still believe that?” he asked, and she could hear him struggling with incredulity. “Do you believe we’ve just run into each other by chance?”

  She looked at him. His face, so foreign to her but so familiar at the same time. The thin curve of his eyebrows, the shine of his dark black hair. She still saw the boy she had known then. The boy who had pulled her back from the bottomless pit of time.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” she confessed. “I didn’t want to stay home tonight. I drove around, going nowhere…and now here I am.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “It’s hardly been an ordinary day. This is the first time I’ve ever just left the dorm for no reason with no destination in mind.”

  He didn’t say any more. He didn’t need to. She knew what he meant. That the two of them should meet one another like this, on an evening when hardly anyone was around, at a spot where neither of them ever normally went, was beyond the realm of coincidence. The fog seemed to enfold them, cutting them off from the rest of the world. At a moment like this it was easy to believe in fate, in predestination. The unease that had been nagging at her had vanished. For the first time in days, she felt she was where she was supposed to be. On the other hand, she was getting cold.

  “Do you collect stamps, or anything like that?” she asked.

  Hiroshi looked surprised. “What? No.”

  “Do you have anything else you could show me?”

  He considered the question. It really looked like he didn’t get it. “My room?”

  “Okay,” said Charlotte. “Show me your room.”

  6

  When Hiroshi woke up the next morning, something was different. It took him a while to realize what it was. He was happy.

  Charlotte. He turned his head carefully, looking at her in astonishment as she lay there asleep next to him. It was broad daylight. Bright white light flooded the room, and her black hair spilled across the pillow. Sleeping like that, with such a peaceful expression on her face, she was more beautiful than ever—an angel caught here in his bed. How passionate she had been. He remembered the sounds she had made, the whispered nothings in his ear, as though remembering a dream. Yes, he was happy. For the first time in his life, everything was as it should be. He hadn’t known it was possible to feel like this. So this was happiness.

  His happiness lasted up until the moment Charlotte opened her eyes. First, she was confused, still caught in the web of sleep, but then she looked around, looked at him, and to Hiroshi’s horror he saw reappraisal in her eyes. No, worse than that—regret. Everything was by no means as it should be.

  “What’s the time?” Charlotte asked huskily.

  “No idea.”

  “I have to get dressed.”

  She sat up and threw the covers back. A musky smell rose up—her smell, their smell, the smell of sex and passion—and Hiroshi was overwhelmed, almost intoxicated. He could only watch helplessly as she bent over, naked, beautiful to look at, a flawless vision, and picked up her clothes from where they lay on the floor. It was probably the cleanest floor in any of the MIT dormitories, he thought miserably.

  “Is that all you have to say after last night?” he asked at last.

  Charlotte stopped what she was doing and looked at him, visibly annoyed. “What’s that supposed to mean? I slept with you. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “What?” Hiroshi couldn’t believe his ears. “What makes you think that?”

  She slipped her bra on. “Just say it. Did you or didn’t you?”

  “Well of course I did. But that’s not all! It’s not enough.” Now the words came gushing out of him, pouring out in the desperate hope that if he could only find the right ones, he could set everything right. “I want you, don’t you understand? I want…listen. There are over six billion people in the world who we could have met, millions of places where either one of us could have ended up, and even if we’d gone to the same place it could have been at different times. There were so many ways we might not have met, and despite all that we did. That can only mean it was fate that we found one another. It can only mean we were meant for one another. It can’t mean anything else.”

  She was holding her panties, absorbed in turning them the right way out, but now she dropped her hand and lifted her head. She looked around the room, at the almost-empty shelves, the bare walls, the computer, the few remaining books.

  “It wouldn’t work,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it wouldn’t work.” She slipped her panties on and stood up impatiently. She picked up her T-shirt and looked at Hiroshi. “I’m going to marry James. Get used to it.”

  Hiroshi felt his face harden to stone. He had offered her his naked, beating heart, and she had stomped all over it.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you marry him or not,” he explained. It was a pointless, spiteful thing to say—it would change nothing, he knew that—but he had to say it anyway. “Fate is fate. You can’t run from it.”

  She pulled on her pants. She picked up her jacket, which she wouldn’t need today. “It’s better if I just go,” she said, running her fingers through her hair. Then she sat down on the end of the bed to pull her shoes on.

  Hiroshi sat up. “Do you love him?” he asked.

  “I’d hardly be with him if I didn’t,” she said, not looking up.

  “Why not just say yes?”

  She turned her head. Her eyes blazed. “All right then,” she said. “Yes. Yes, I love him. Happy now?”

  What did she have against him all of a sudden? How could she have flung herself at him so ravenously the day before and this morning treat him more or less as though he had raped her? By now there was nothing left of the extraordinary happiness he had felt when he woke up, nothing but an unreal memory.

  “How do you know you love him?” Hiroshi pushed on. “I don’t mean like loving—I don’t know—your dog or something, but…” She tied her laces and stood up. He fumbled for words; he felt he was at the threshold of madness. “Does your heart fill with joy when you see him? Is life better when you’re with him? Do you see more beauty, more colors? Is he the one fate chose for you? Is he the man meant for you since the beginning of time, the man you were meant for?”

  She just stood there looking at him incredulously. “Don’t you think you’re being a little sentimental?”

  He looked back at her, could have looked into her eyes for a thousand years if need be. “Do you?” he asked.
>
  She snorted. “You don’t know the first thing about the beginning of time,” she hissed between gritted teeth.

  Then she left.

  When Charlotte left MacGregor House, she had to take a moment to get her bearings. The street was flooded with bright sunshine and looked utterly unlike the fog-shrouded gloom of the night before. She strode over to her car, climbed in, and slammed the door. She started the engine and swung out into the first gap in traffic. She didn’t think twice about whether she was being watched. She should have. Seven pairs of eyes followed her from the windows of MacGregor House, and thirteen from Burton-Conner next door—all of them male. Eight people knew her car had been in the parking lot all night.

  That morning the news spread like wildfire that Charlotte Malroux had spent the night in MacGregor House, and some three hundred students racked their brains for the rest of the day, wondering with whom she had spent it. It was only a matter of time before the rumor reached Harvard as well—and James Michael Bennett III, heir to Bennett Enterprises. The news caught up with him on Monday morning, before his first seminar, in a dark-paneled hallway where the air was still redolent of the good old days when the upperclassmen smoked cigars before lectures.

  “Where did you hear that?” he asked, his face a mask.

  Lawrence Kelly squirmed. “Oh man, you know how it is with these rumors. A guy who knows one of my hall mates heard it from someone in B-C, who heard it from someone in MacGregor…Pretty well everyone knows by now. The only thing nobody knows is who she spent the night with.”

  But James knew. He had suspected as much straightaway; he had known there was more to it than what she had told him. A childhood friend? Bullshit.

  “I mean,” Lawrence went on, “theoretically she could have just spent the night with a girlfriend—”

  “It wasn’t a girl,” James snarled.

  Half of Harvard must be laughing at him by now. And he had other reasons to be furious, too. He had spent all of Saturday without Charlotte because of that stupid house move, and on Sunday he hadn’t been able to reach her. So he had carried on with Project Terry Miller, but she was turning out to be one hell of a tough nut to crack. He had gone so far as to suggest a trip to Hawaii in his father’s jet—which wouldn’t be easy to organize—but even that had brought him not one step closer to his goal.

  Time to go work off his anger on someone who truly deserved it.

  “Come with me,” he ordered, putting a heavy hand on Lawrence’s shoulder. It was time for him to prove his loyalty. “Someone’s about to learn he picked a fight with the wrong guy.”

  The Infinite Corridor is the main hallway linking all the main buildings of MIT. Thronged with students whenever classes are in session, it is the shortest way to walk from one end of campus to the other. The corridor is dead straight, so that on certain days of the year—at the end of January, and early in November—the setting sun shines along its whole length.

  Hiroshi had no idea how many course announcements, club flyers, and other notices were displayed on the bulletin boards along its length—far too many to count, though. Early that morning he had gone to bug Prof. Bowers one more time about his project application. (“You’ll know just as soon as I do,” the prof had told him. “I’ll send you an e-mail straightaway. You really don’t need to show up here every Monday morning. That won’t make things happen any faster.”) Now he was on his way from his systems optimization seminar over to the library in the Rodgers Building when all of a sudden a broad-shouldered figure appeared from nowhere and blocked his path. Hiroshi had to take a step back before he recognized James, the man Charlotte supposedly loved. James was furious. Not hard to guess why.

  “We gotta talk.” The words came from his mouth like the rumble of a distant volcano.

  Hiroshi dropped his shoulders and tried to relax his stance. “What about?” he asked.

  “Don’t you play dumb with me, you Nip,” James spat at him. “You know exactly what about.”

  He had brought along two buddies, who were doing their best to look as mean as him. Actually, they looked kind of worried, as though they were medical attendants in charge of a patient who might suddenly flip out. Not very reassuring.

  “Perhaps you could tell me all the same,” Hiroshi suggested. “Sometimes people jump to the wrong conclusions.”

  James lurched forward alarmingly, his muscle-bound frame filling Hiroshi’s field of vision. He clenched his fists.

  “Okay then,” he spat in Hiroshi’s face. “I’ll tell you straight out. You keep your hands off my fiancée or I’ll bash your face in so hard, you’ll be on a liquid diet for the rest of your miserable life.”

  Hiroshi shifted his right foot a little so that his feet were as wide apart as his shoulders. He had unobtrusively taken up the basic jujitsu stance. He regretted now that he had only ever taken the beginner’s class at school.

  “As far as I know,” he replied, “women get to decide that for themselves these days. Twenty-first century, if that means anything to you.”

  “If you can’t understand what I’m saying, I can tattoo it on your yellow hide,” James snarled. “You keep your dirty fingers off my—”

  Then without even finishing the sentence, he threw a punch. Hiroshi barely saw it coming, but he saw enough. He had no idea of how to use jujitsu locks or strikes, but he understood dodging. He shifted his weight to the side in an instant, and James found himself flailing at empty air.

  “Coward!” James roared.

  “Lamer!” Hiroshi shot back.

  The students all around them saw what was happening, of course. A fistfight at MIT was almost unheard of, and most of them simply scattered. Many of them had no problem spending their nights rampaging through virtual labyrinths on their computer screens, hewing down virtual enemies in fountains of blood, but physical violence in real life was something else altogether. Those who didn’t simply take off kept a wary distance, creating a kind of arena around Hiroshi and James.

  James swung again, harder this time, and Hiroshi broke into a sweat. And then it happened—James brushed him on the shoulder and connected on the chin. It was just a glancing blow but the pain shot through Hiroshi like lightning. It gave him a very clear idea of what awaited him if this uneven fight should turn against him.

  At that moment a professor arrived, a wiry, gray-haired man a head taller than James Michael Bennett III. Hiroshi had no way of knowing, of course, but the prof also happened to bear a striking resemblance to Bennett’s father. “What is going on here, if I may ask?” he said.

  James stopped where he was. He and Hiroshi looked at one another, then at the professor. Endgame. No. Stalemate, it seemed.

  James took a step back and dropped his fists, shaking his arms loose. “Okay, Kato,” he declared. “Today you’ve got away. But don’t think you’re safe. I have plenty of other ways of getting at you.”

  Hiroshi said nothing. He simply stared at his opponent, badly shaken by Bennett’s animal rage. Charlotte wanted to marry this guy? What on earth did she see in him?

  “You know how it is,” James continued with a savage grin. “We’ll cross paths again.” He turned to go. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  James Michael Bennett III was wrong. Their paths had crossed before but never would again. That was the last he would see of Hiroshi Kato.

  Charlotte had spent all of Sunday at home, curled up in her favorite chair, gazing into space. She had heard the telephone ringing but hadn’t reacted. She just sat there, her knees drawn up, her arms around her legs, thinking of anything except last night. How she had forgotten the whole world. How she had lost control completely. How she and Hiroshi had been as one. She had never experienced anything like it, and it scared her. She had had to get away.

  Luckily, her stomach had eventually rumbled, urging her into the kitchen to make coffee and a slice of toast. Cup in hand, she st
ared out of the window at the sunshine. The leaves on the trees danced in the light. Everything looked so peaceful, so full of new life. It was strange that she wasn’t worried about James. For some reason, this seemed to have nothing to do with him. What had happened was between her and Hiroshi. Maybe it only had to do with her?

  After that she roamed restlessly through her apartment. She looked at her computer as though she had never seen it before in her life, and at her bookshelf as though it were a nest of scorpions. Maybe she could get to work on her assignment. She didn’t feel like it one bit but told herself it might take her mind off things. And so it did. She dove into the books, into the assigned reading, and wrote as though in a trance about events hundreds of thousands of years in the past. She didn’t react when James drove up and parked in front of the house, didn’t open the door when he rang the bell.

  She stayed home on Monday as well. She couldn’t head over to campus today and act as though nothing had happened, as though everything were just the same as ever. She didn’t want to see anybody, didn’t want to talk to anybody. The permanent American smile and good cheer would get on her nerves today. Something was bubbling beneath the surface inside her, and if anybody said so much as “Hi!” or told her something was “great,” she knew she would burst out screaming.