“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.