Hello Now

by Jenny Valentine

  I stood there on the sand behind him, not frozen like the rest of them, immune for some reason, but still, blank with wonder, a clean slate in the shape of a person. I was trying to catch up with what was happening here. I felt as distant as Icarus suddenly, from the things I thought I knew, as far from my certain little life as that farthest single star, nine billion light-years away. The boy turned his face from the water and bit into his apple and the stilled beach started moving again. The dogs thrashed and wrestled in the waves, and the kids and their parents raised their voices in a dispute about the finer rules of their game. Amnesia swept through them like a blizzard. Nobody looked at him again. Nobody noticed. Only me.

  He flattened out his newspaper to spread his gifts on it, but the wind flared, stole a page, and skipped it away toward me. As I put my foot out to stop it and pick it up, he turned. I don’t remember the page number. International. Something about Yemen. Something else about a man building playgrounds in refugee camps. I do remember the look on his face though, when he saw me, as captured as those sleepwalkers, as vigilant as those kids. I was something to him. I was already, definitely something. I just knew it. We watched each other as I walked across the sand to where he was sitting in his shadow-black clothes, no more likely to keep my distance than a marble is to stay at the top of a slope.

  “It’s you,” he said, and I said, “Yes,” because what else could I say? And then I gave the page back.

  He seemed to hesitate before he took it and for a moment we were both holding on to different edges of the same paper. I can’t say how long that moment was, I really can’t—a second, an hour, a year, they’d all work, I’d believe all of them, they could all be true.

  And then I let go.

  TEN

  The boy lay back in the sand, and more pages cut and snapped across him in the breeze, but he didn’t try to stop them. He didn’t do anything. His eyes in the bright sun were black tunnels of pupil, flecks of dark and amber pressed out to the edges. I was still standing over him and I moved so his face was in my shade. The sea messed and churned behind us. I could hear its beat and pull and whisper.

  One of the dogs started barking and somewhere a seagull squalled and the sand-digger kids ran toward us, around me and over him, shouting at each other, stomping down the sand, mouths open, wind stealing their words. The littlest one at the back of the group grinned at him, they grinned at each other, and as she jumped right over his body she froze, impossibly, in midair, and turned, smiling, to look straight at me. The boy lifted his arms toward her, and she caught another flying sheet of newspaper between her hands, like she was banging cymbals, and held herself still and proud in the air, still watching me, her eyes a bewitched sealskin-gray, cool and knowing. Then she landed, precise and taut as a gymnast, and her mother pounded over to collect her. “I flew,” the kid said, and her mother said, “How lovely,” and the boy sat back up, touched his fingers to his mouth, and watched them go.

  I didn’t speak. I think maybe in that moment I’d forgotten how. He held out his hand to me and I sat down next to him, silenced, and stared at the water. The old people’s swimming group was bobbing about in the concrete-colored waves in their bright caps with their straight necks, like some odd species of bird. I thought, That didn’t happen, there’s no way that just happened, and I could feel him smiling then, feel him watching me. So I turned and looked at him. I had no idea what I would do next, but his smile washed over me and all I needed to do was smile back. It was that easy. An old motorbike cut through the quiet with its opened-out mega-phone rattle, and up at the café someone dropped a load of plates and all the atoms of the sea crashed louder against the rocks, and the sky—that shell of atmosphere—was impossibly, ridiculously, groundbreakingly, life-changingly, earth-shatteringly blue.

  ELEVEN

  Memory is a distorted, persuasive thing and I can’t trust it, my own version of things, but I also have to, because it’s the only version I’ll ever have. I think about us, me and Novo, that morning on the beach, and at first it’s not so much what was said as what went on underneath that I remember best—tectonic plates moving together, a confirmation, the puzzle box sprung open. It happened fast, like everything does, and there wasn’t time to think about it except there also was, enough time that while we looked at each other, I could say to myself that this was something unexpected and easy and just perfect. A run of green lights, smoothest journey ever, so you can’t believe your luck and before you know it you’ve arrived. Alice down the rabbit hole. Edmund through the wardrobe. Us on the flattened sand, me and a tall, dark, magic, infinite boy with a quick smile and crumpled trousers and upturned palms. What did I say about the unknown? On its mark, getting set to happen. Go.

  He sat close enough for me to feel the warmth of him all down my side, without touching, and while I thought about all the numberless charged particles crashing about in that slice of air between us, he asked me my name.

  “Jude,” I said, and he told me that Jude the Obscure was the saddest, bleakest book he’d ever read. “Quite a thing to have to carry around with you your whole life.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re not singing the Beatles at me over and over, like everybody else does. Longest song on earth, and let’s face it, not the best.”

  He laughed, a match strike lighting up corners of the day I hadn’t even looked at.

  “I’m Novo,” he said, and I knew instantly that it was the only name in the history of names good enough for him.

  That’s when he hit me with the Saint Jude thing—patron saint of lost causes—and I was like, “Really? Why didn’t I know that?” and I thought, even then, that this was bound to be one of them, a lost cause. That this was going to trample all over us whether we wanted it to or not.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Lost causes are underrated anyway.”

  He took my hand, and my skin lit up like the sea under his fingers, pulsed and shimmered just below the surface, and we both watched it, we both smiled, and I wasn’t afraid, not even for the smallest fraction of a second. Not ever.

  “Pleased to meet you, Novo,” I said, my veins full of fireflies.

  We just looked at each other, without speaking, without needing to speak, and then I broke the quiet.

  “What is this?” I said, holding my arms out, still filled with light. “How do you do that?”

  And even as I asked it, I knew I was in over my head.

  “That’s just me, being me,” he said.

  I nodded like I understood. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  He said, “I warn you. I’m not from here.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Me neither.”

  His eyes were black and white. “I mean I’m not from anywhere, Jude. I’m not like you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do. I can see that. I believe you.”

  The morning was golden and the air was laced at the edges with the stink of kelp and saltwater. Birds picked intently at the baking seaweed, patrolling their lines and lifting now and then straight up into the air on invisible currents.

  Novo smiled and shook his head a little.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For everything I have to give you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have a choice. You can say no and get up now and go back to your old life, same as it was, and nothing bad will happen. I won’t bother you. I promise I won’t do that.”

  “Or?”

  “Or you can take a chance,” he said. “Say yes.”

  “To what?”

  Novo shrugged. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Not once. “To everything.”

  I laughed a little, leaned back in the sand, finding the cool beneath its surface with the points of my elbows. “What’s everything?”

  He thought about it for a moment. �
�Everything possible and impossible,” he said. “No distinction. I come from a place between things. Ten lifetimes of adventure on the head of a pin. Unrepeatable and unforgettable.”

  “Are you serious?” I said. “Do I have to say yes or no?”

  “Absolutely. This is a moment,” he said. “Mark it. Life changing. I guarantee.”

  “And what’s the catch?”

  “The catch?”

  “Yes. What’s the downside?”

  He smiled at me. “We don’t know that yet.”

  I breathed in. Like I’d pick cleaning out kitchen cupboards with my perpetually disappointed mother over this. As if.

  “Well then, yes,” I said.

  “You’re with me?” he said. “You’re in?”

  “Of course I’m in.” Though I had no idea what that meant.

  He closed his eyes for the quickest moment, and when he opened them again and looked at me, something shifted in the air around us. Maybe even the air itself. The light changed and it fell away, a veil, the finest curtain, so that I could see the paths that birds carved up and down the blue sky, count the million points of light on the water, feel the singular oneness of every grain of sand and every atom in my own body. Strong. Like we were the exact same thing.

  “What’s happening?” I said, and he smiled again.

  “I told you. Everything. All at once.”

  Either I was disappearing into my surroundings or they were disappearing into me. I inhaled the whole world, drew it into me cool and clear, and then exhaled it again, letting it go, putting it back, warm with the heat of my blood, over and over again. The world was my lungs and my lungs were the sea and the sea was everywhere.

  “Hello Now,” Novo said, and I said, “What?” because all life was so loud in my ears suddenly, I didn’t think I’d heard him right. I didn’t know yet that it was the spell cast, right then, in that moment, and all the known rules thrown out. I didn’t know it was the start of something wild and unforgettable, impossible and true.

  “Hello Now,” he said again, smiling, not just at me, but at all of it. Everything. “Oh, and look. Here’s another Now. Hello to that one too.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The colors were beyond brighter. The details were infinitely sharper. Words can’t work hard enough to keep up with that sudden change in the fabric of everything. I can’t make them tell it right. We glowed, the two of us, sitting there. We were the whole world and we were nothing but atoms. I could feel the white heat of the sun rising right off my skin. Somewhere both other and also the same, the beach around us carried on as normal—the swimmers and surfers, the kids with their buckets, the rocks and the dogs and the wheeling gulls, the constant water. I was there too, with everyone, on the sand, and I was also elsewhere. I was the rock on the ground and the kite tied to it, stretching and flexing high up in the thin air. I was both. We were both. That’s what it felt like, to me.

  The world breathed and the sea breathed and we breathed. Time stretched and contracted, part light speed, part glacial, until I lost track of even losing track, and the sun, which had been barely moving in the sky, was burning suddenly low on the horizon and filling that whole stretch of water with flames. It was colder and the beach was empty and there was just us.

  “You can stay inside any Now with me,” Novo said. “You can stop and take your time and look around.”

  The wind dropped as quick as a ball and the moonless sea was ink-black and punctured with stars.

  “I can’t tell where it ends and begins,” I said, speaking for the first time in what could have been centuries.

  “Where what ends and begins?”

  “Everything,” I said. “I can’t tell without the horizon.”

  “It doesn’t end or begin,” Novo said. “It just is.” And then we stood up on the black sand and walked through the pitch-dark ghost of town, back up the hill to our houses.

  TWELVE

  Up the hill and right at the corner onto our street, I didn’t hear anything until we were almost on top of it. The noise was trapped somehow and didn’t travel, not the way noises are supposed to. Outside Mrs. Midler’s, there was already too much frantic activity for me to get too close, but still, even though I could see all that was going on, there wasn’t one sound. I stood back on the lawn and felt the total quiet at all its edges while the house shed its own skin. I watched as it rid itself of the stuff it didn’t want— carpets, sacks of wallpaper, broken furniture, all sailing out of windows, all landing, more or less, in a massive heap out front. An orchestral sort of hum went with everything—base sander, the rhythm of hammers, the high sharp notes of screwdrivers and drills, so that it sounded like the place was filling up with giant bees. Novo moved ahead of me through the noise and the chaos to the door. I stood watching, and I thought of that film when the front of a house falls down on top of Buster Keaton in a storm and he stands up unscathed in the neat gap left by an open window. I thought of those buildings in war zones, patchworks of exposed interiors like dolls’ houses, except real as can be, someone’s home, and bombed inside out.

  Novo turned toward me with his arms out wide, the orchestra’s conductor. Behind him, the windows rattled and a sofa launched itself into the air and landed on the grass with a shudder.

  “Do you like what I’m doing with the place?” he yelled, and his half-drowned-out voice sounded like it was coming from streets away. I could only just about hear it.

  I was still at the end of the yard, right at the line between this impossible building site and total quiet. Moving my head, even just a little, took me from silence to commotion and back again. All the lights in the other houses were out, all the streetlamps too. For a second I thought there was a flicker of something at our place, at Henry’s, a blown-out candle maybe, a lighter flame, but when I looked over it was dark, same as the rest of them, so I couldn’t be sure of what I’d seen. I couldn’t be sure of anything, come to think of it.

  “Can you explain though?” I said as six chairs marched through the front window and onto the lawn. “Please? I mean, to me?”

  “Is it wearing off?” he said.

  “Is what wearing off?” I said, and I ran through my list of known hallucinogens: acid, mushrooms, mescaline, DMT, ket, PCP.

  “What is it?” I said. “Which one have I taken?”

  “Stop,” he said. “Jude. You haven’t taken anything. I just softened the border, that’s all.”

  “What border?”

  “Between us. So you can see what I see, without losing it.”

  “I am losing it though,” I said. “I really think I might be.”

  He walked across the dark lawn and put his hands on my shoulders, like I was a lighter-than-air thing, a thing that needed holding down. The glow from his hands fell through me like a faraway firework.

  “How is this possible?” I said, and Novo stretched his arms above his head and licked his lips and smiled at me.

  “Anything is. I told you. Just breathe, Jude. It’s all good. You can trust me.”

  He pulled us both out of the noise, into the sleeping street, and he put his finger to his lips, his soft sigh lifting the stooped flowers, stirring the leaves high in the trees.

  “Are you real?” I asked him, and he smiled.

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “Am I dreaming?” I said. “Are we in a dream?”

  “Maybe. Probably. What would you do if we were?”

  I knew the answer instantly, felt it without thinking, a stone in my belly, how pockmarked with letdowns the rest of my life was going to be if I woke up. I knew all this, and more, even though we’d only just met.

  “That’s easy,” I told him. “I’d just stay asleep.”

  THIRTEEN

  Time all but stopped when Novo and I were together. The afternoon I followed him through town
to the beach, whole days passed inside the world we created. But back at our house, at Henry Lake’s house, time had hardly moved. Mum was on her way down the stairs when I opened the front door, and she just about registered my presence, as if she’d knocked on her bedroom window and frowned at me in the yard seconds before, as if that had only just finished happening. She still wasn’t dressed. She didn’t see Novo because he stayed back, behind me. I felt him hold back. I felt him pause.

  “Coffee?” she said, and I said, “Not for me,” and she carried on into the kitchen, her slippers face-slapping the floorboards all the way. I heard her slamming cupboard doors and banging stuff down on the counter, crashing through still-packed boxes to find the coffeepot. A one-woman symphony of rage. I didn’t know what it was this time. There was always something. Like it was just built in. My mum never closed a door if she could slam it. She stomped when she walked, like she was crushing bugs. She held things like she wanted more than anything to break them. She shouted, even when she said she wasn’t angry. She’d done it since I was born, as far as I could make out. She probably did it before. My earliest memory is of her playing a room like a set of drums, bashing out rhythms with the sheer force of her disappointment and fury, and who knows? That might even have been when I was still in the womb.