Sadness in here feels like a warm flannel. But it's still sadness; the warm flannel is over my face and I can't breathe properly.
"It can't be too late! Apollo Smintheus must have told you about the trains?"
"I did," says Apollo Smintheus. "Well, sort of."
"He told me there was a way I could get back to where I'd started. But I didn't want to go back there. I wanted to find you."
"But Adam..."
"What?"
"Adam, you can't ... You didn't..."
"I think I'll leave you two to it now," says Apollo Smintheus. "Here's that address for Abbie Lathrop." He produces a slim white business card, very similar to the one he first left for me: the one I found on the street after I'd done Pedesis for the first time. I take the card and look at it. When I look up, he's gone. I'm here on my own with Adam.
"I don't like it in here that much," says Adam. "Let's go outside."
There is no outside, I think. Not anymore.
But I follow him down the jumbled-up street, anyway. We pass a car showroom and a small haberdashery. I want to cry but it doesn't work. I don't think you can cry in here. But raindrops start falling softly from somewhere above me, and when I look up, the night sky seems wet and glossy.
We end up in a meadow by a river. The bright moon seems to touch every part of the black water, and moves through the tall yellow grass like gentle fingers. There are benches that face the water, and Adam sits on one of them. I sit on one, too. The wood isn't cold. Like everything else in here, it doesn't seem to have a temperature. Tiny drops of rain still fall from the sky, but they don't feel wet.
"Ariel," says Adam, taking my hand.
"Why did you do this?" I ask him.
"I wanted to know...," he says.
"Know what?"
He shrugs. "Just to know. I couldn't go back."
"But ... Why did you want to find me?"
"I just had to. And I missed you."
I breathe in for a long time. Then I sigh. "I missed you, too. But..."
"What?"
"Shit. Adam. Why?"
He shrugs again. "Apollo Smintheus told me you needed me."
"I would have found you when I got out. I'd..."
Adam looks away from me and out onto the river. An owl hoots.
"Fuck," I say. "So it's all too late. Nothing means anything anymore. Everything's..."
"Don't say it," Adam says. "Just come with me."
He takes my hand and we stand up. We walk down the path, past thousands of trees that seem to reach up into heaven. Moonlight strobes on their leaves, and bats flicker in and out of the trees like shadow puppets against the black of the sky. Soon we come to a clearing: a circle of thick, soft grass, surrounded by trees. We walk into the clearing and Adam immediately pulls me towards him.
"Ariel," he says. And he kisses me.
But what's happening? This kiss is a million kisses. This kiss is every kiss. Our lips seem to press together with the force of ten thousand hurricanes, and when his tongue meets mine it feels like the softest electricity: a million-volt shock happening in slow motion, one electron at a time, where each electron is the size of the sun.
And in the sky, there's lightning.
The rain starts to hammer the ground, but I can't feel it.
Adam is pulling me down onto the grass.
As I close my eyes I can see that there are tornadoes everywhere, but I can't even feel a breeze. All my clothes have gone. I'm so naked it's as if I don't even have skin. Adam's taut body moves down onto mine. And when he enters me it's as if I'm being turned inside out, and the whole world is penetrating me; and that means I contain everything.
Afterwards we both lie there on the ground, shaking. I know everything about Adam now, and he knows everything about me.
"Oh...," says Adam.
"Yeah."
"Oh ... Is that...?"
"No."
"You don't know what I was going to ask."
"Yes I do. You were going to ask if that's what sex is like usually."
He takes my hand. "Well, something like that."
"And the answer is no."
"But we'd never done it before," he says, and I can see him smiling in the moonlight.
I imagine tornadoes around the Shrine of St. Jude. But maybe he's right.
I put my head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around me. I feel so small and warm, like I'm an acorn he's holding in the palm of his hand. But at the same time I feel as if I'm the one holding on to him. He only exists here now. And if I do this and then go back... Don't think, Ariel. Just have this moment. But if there's no Troposphere, I won't be able to see Adam ever again. Perhaps I'll go back and find that I don't even know who Adam is. Perhaps I won't miss him, because I'll never know I knew him.
But if the book is the only thing that disappears? If I make it so it was never written?
Then maybe I did know Adam. Maybe he did move into my office. Maybe the railway tunnel did collapse. But not because of Burlem. And maybe I became a Ph.D. student, anyway. Maybe Burlem still did the conference in Greenwich, but on another subject. Maybe he talked about Samuel Butler. I would have gone to that. We still would have talked and we still would have got pissed together and we still wouldn't have had sex and everything would be more or less the same.
I can sort of see how that might work.
But Adam would still be dead.
Perhaps I'd wake up from a scary dream about men chasing me and there'd be a knock at the door, and a policeman would be telling me that he just passed away in his sleep. A tragic mystery. But don't be stupid. No policeman would come and tell me anything. They'd tell his relatives, and I wouldn't even be invited to the funeral because no one would have known we were involved. Perhaps I'd read about it in the university newsletter, or in one of those "Sad news" e-mails.
I sit up.
"Where are you going?" Adam asks sleepily.
"I've got to ... Well, basically, I'm going to 1900," I say.
"And I'm coming, too."
"Are you sure you want to?"
Adam sits up and shakes his head. "We've just shared the most amazing experience that I've ever had," he says. "And I'm not leaving you. Not ever." He pauses. "Not until you have to go back."
I don't know what to say next. Until I have to go back. I didn't have any lunch. Who knows how much time I've got? You can only use the underground system if you are alive. But does it even matter now whether I am alive or dead? I really don't know.
"So what do you think? Should we aim for America and then go back in time?" Adam asks. "Or the other way around?"
"Hmm?"
We're walking hand in hand back towards town, the moon racing us down the river and winning. The way I feel with him now is hard to describe. It feels as if we've already grown old together. I know, already, that we're going to die together.
But he's already dead.
"Pedesis," he says. "How shall we do it?"
"I think we're going to have to go back and forwards around the world in order to jump the time," I say. "We can aim for Massachusetts later. In fact, maybe we should be aiming for one of Abbie Lathrop's descendants and then carefully jumping backwards from there. I'm not actually sure what would happen if we missed her. Say we jumped back ten years too far or something. You can't exactly go forwards in time here—well, you can, but it has to be in real time. We'd be stuck in Massachusetts for ten years."
Adam sighs. "I think you know more than me about doing this."