‘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.’