Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

ALL THE LITTLE GODS WE ARE by John Grant

It is an easy enough mistake to make—the most natural mistake in the world.

It’s late on a Thursday afternoon and, although the air is cool in the library, the day is hot enough outside that even just the sunlight roaring in through the windows is enough to put thoughts in mind of darkened bars and long cold beers, condensation silvering the outside of the glass… You know the kind of day, surely. The kind of day on which, when there’s just over an hour before you’ll be free to go home or at least away from here, you think it’d be a good idea to phone up one of your unmarried friends and suggest getting together after work to sink a few.

In my case the friend in question is called Bill, and that’s exactly what I do.

Bill lives only a few blocks away from where I live, in a similarly solitary apartment. His bachelorhood expresses itself in what I would describe as a near-obsessive neatness and a near-compulsive shedding of unnecessary possessions, so that his apartment is always full of space, shining surfaces, emptiness. My own bachelorhood manifests instead in the form of clutter: top-heavy heaps of books on the shelves and floor, CDs scattered everywhere, ashtrays and waste baskets and kitchen sink brimming with all my claims to a productive life. But his wide open spaces and my lack of them are both symptomatic of the same thing: while neither of us is short of friends and acquaintances, neither of our lives is very long co-tenanted by another. His life has occasional lodgers, if you will, who stay a night or three and leave a smell of eau de cologne in the rooms until Bill manages to scrub the air molecules clean of it. My own is shared by myself alone, not so much by deliberate choice as through a lack of inclination to have it otherwise.

Because his apartment isn’t far from mine, our telephone numbers have the same local code, and indeed the same first five digits, differing only in the last two.

The day has been long and hot, the borrowers have been unusually annoying in their demands (“Are you sure that’s the right version of Pride and Prejudice? The one my friend’s been reading has a grey cover, not a blue one”), a teacher from the local junior school brought in a bunch of the kids to show them how to use the Dewey Decimal System, and so on, and so on. Just to add to my irritation is the thought that Bill, as a freelance copywriter, is able to work at home and avoid all this; probably the reason he chose that profession, in fact, so that he wouldn’t be troubled by the clutter of other people.

No wonder, then, that, as I turn my head away from Mrs. Baldeen at the lending counter in case she thinks I’m calling a friend to suggest going out for a beer, the number I stab out on the pad in front of me isn’t Bill’s, but my own.

I realize my error almost as soon as I’ve made it. If I were in a call-box I’d hang up, but I’m aware of the vigilant eye of Mrs. Baldeen so I stay on the line, thinking I’ll leave some jokey message on my answerphone when it cuts in after the fourth ring, and then I’ll dial again.

Except that my call never gets as far as the fourth ring, because on the second ring someone picks up.

“Hello,” says a man’s voice.

For a moment I assume that not only have I dialed the wrong person’s number—my own rather than Bill’s—but I’ve managed to dial the number wrong as well.

“I’m sorry,” I start. “I seem to have…”

The voice—the, now I think about it, very familiar voice—overrides my words. “John Sudmore here.”

Which of course stalls whatever it was I was going to say, because I’m John Sudmore.

Psychologists have a term I can never remember for the type of unconscious censorship our brains practice. When confronted by something we “know” to be “impossible,” we either refuse to perceive it at all or we instantly conjure up some byzantine explanation for it that, no matter how implausibly complicated, seems somehow more commonsensical. It’s the latter that happens to me in this instance.

“What a strange coincidence,” I say as soon as my tongue and lips start working again. “My name’s John Sudmore, too. I didn’t realize there were two of us here in Lampitt.”

I chuckle with self-conscious naturalism.

“Is this some kind of telemarketing stunt?” says the other John Sudmore. He sounds suspicious, but more interested than displeased.

“No, it’s not,” I assure him. “I’ve dialed the wrong number. I was meaning to call a friend of mine and I made a mistake. Silly of me.” I know I’m beginning to burble. I don’t have to look at Mrs. Baldeen to know that I’ve kindled her attention. “I must have dialed Bill’s number a thousand times, but… or maybe it’s a foulup in the network, not my fault at all.”

It’s not enough to assuage the other John Sudmore’s suspicions. “You’re not trying to sell me anything?”

I’m just about to answer this when down the line I hear an infant wail in the background. Then there’s that distinctive sound of someone moving the telephone receiver away from their face to couch it on their shoulder.

“Hey, Jus!” calls the other John Sudmore. “Can you get Maggie to cool it? I’m trying to speak on the phone here. Some fruitcake, I think, but…”

There’s a response from the distance. I’m not able to make out many of the words the woman says, but I gather the unseen child Maggie has bumped her knee on the table-leg. This is not what makes my body tense up, however.

And now the crazy theory my mind desperately constructed to explain how there could be another John Sudmore living in Lampitt—even though I knew there wasn’t, because in a town this size we’d already have been aware of each other—and how his voice could, by coincidence, be so like my own, and how our telephone numbers might be almost the same, and how… This house of cards I’ve built out of steadily more improbable coincidences comes tumbling down.

What shocks me out of that fool’s dream is that I recognize the woman’s voice, too.

And her name.

Jus.

Short for Justine.

Justine Parland.

I could credit the existence of another John Sudmore, even if it meant twisting my mind around to believe something I knew to be untrue, but I cannot accept that he might have married Jus Parland.

I throw my mind back twenty years—no, let me see, it must be twenty-one.

I was fifteen when a new girl arrived in the school. Her family had just moved the thirty miles out of Manhattan to live in Lampitt. Her dad, Mr. Parland, would still commute into town every weekday to where he worked as a stockbroker or something infinitely tedious like that, but Justine and her mom and her quite maddening kid brother David would enjoy the benefits of living in semi-rural Jersey while, incidentally, Mr. Parland would pay about half the mortgage for a sprawling five-bedroomed house in four acres that he’d been paying for a cramped apartment on 48th Street.

I discovered all of this and quite a lot more because Jus—she soon told me she preferred the contraction to her full name—because Jus and I were seated next to each other in her first class, which happened to be math, and I made a point of welcoming her to the school as we packed up our books to move on to literature. I was very shy back then—still am, although meeting so many of the public every day in the library has gone some way towards curing my timidity—and in the normal course my reticence would probably have won out, but I conquered it and spoke to her, smiled even, because during the math class I’d been taking occasional peeks at her face as she leaned forward, earnestly taking notes, and during those glances I’d grown up a little.

Before the start of that class, if you’d sat me in front of an easel and given me a brush and asked me to paint my ideal of womanhood—and assuming I could actually draw or paint, which I couldn’t and can’t—I’d have put on the canvas some anatomically impossible creature composed of masses of tumbling blonde hair, breasts that strained at a skimpily revealing garment and that demanded to be called not “breasts” but “tits,” lips that pouted like a baseball mitt, pants that seemed to have been sprayed on and whose zipper was beginning slowly to unpeel its two halves, and eyes of purest blue that, with stark animal lust and yet a virginal romantic eloquence, spoke the plain and simple message: “John Sudmore, you paragon among superstuds, there is nothing in the world that I desire more than to get hot and heavy with you in the back of a Merc.” I had never in fact met a girl who even remotely resembled my paradigm, but I knew that somewhere she must exist. She was probably called Elektra, although Tabitha would do, or… To be honest, I wasn’t much concerned about the name so long as she was someone all the other guys would be insanely jealous about.

Studying Justine rather than quadratic equations, however, I realized I never would meet Elektra or Tabitha. More than this: I didn’t want to any more. It wasn’t that my fifteen-year-old self was instantly enamoured of my new classmate—not at all, I don’t think—but that for the first time I began to understand there was more to the attractiveness of girls than physical stereotypes and availability, more than sex or the apparent promise of it.

Justine’s hair wasn’t a froth of gold. It was straight, quite long, and its colour was either mousy or bronze depending on how the sunlight caught it. She used her left hand, always her left, to push back her hair behind her prettily shaped ears whenever it fell forward—something it did often—over her cheek, which had the faintest down of transparent, cobweb-fine hairs on it. Her fingers were slender, the nails raggedly chewed. Her nose was quite thin, and a little too long. Her eyes were brown, and when she glanced up at me to catch me hastily looking away I could see they were lit by intelligence—a quality whose possibility had never even entered my head during my secret masturbatory sessions with the specter of Elektra or Tabitha. Her mouth was small, her lips thin. So fascinated was I by the discovery that, even though she was so far from my template, she nevertheless drew me, that I didn’t notice how far her breasts pushed out the front of her blouse, although I was well aware they were there.

And she was easy to smile at, and to talk to, as we gathered up our books.

When the lunch break arrived she cut through the crowds of other kids to stick out her hand.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Jus. If you’re not eating your sandwiches with anyone else…?”

“John,” I said, moving over on the low wall even though there was no one else for yards around. We knew each other’s names, of course, from when Mr. Dorrigan had introduced Jus around the class, but it seemed necessary to exchange them personally.

And so we sat and we talked for half an hour or so in the sunshine as we ate, and this time I confess I did check out the size of her breasts (small but definitely in attendance, so far as I could make out through the blouse and the bra, my perceptions heightened to X-ray status by the fact that I was fifteen, male and omniscient) even though they didn’t seem especially significant by comparison with the sound of her voice, the animation of her face, the laughter in her eyes, her unassumed articulacy.

We were born to be friends. We both knew it. The Australian Aborigines have the traditional belief that a complete human being comprises two parts that are split before birth, that we spend our lives seeking the other part to make ourselves whole again, and that only the lucky succeed in doing so. Jus and I recognized, only a minute or two into that half-hour, that we were among the lucky.

The curious thing is that I can’t now remember much of what we talked about during this most important half-hour of my life beyond the mere data of our existences: our names, our family members, our potted histories. I know we covered our hopes and dreams as well, but the details of what we said then are lost to me. It was as if neither of us had to make a conscious effort to remember them because we knew them all already. This wasn’t an exploratory conversation: it was just a passage of reminder, a reassurance that nothing had changed since the last time.

We were, of course, inseparable after that, we two halves of the same person: all through school and beyond. Yet what we’d probably both assumed from the outset would be the route-map of our future wasn’t followed by the reality. I know that I expected after that first lunch together that we’d travel along the familiar pathways: sweethearts, lovers, marriage. This wasn’t the way it went, though, over the years. Oh, sure, there was so much physical rightness between the two of us you almost felt it was a bubble around us you could tap your fingers on; and we could hardly go out on so many dates together, or be visiting so often in each other’s homes, or go on so many long hikes just the two of us, without there having been some reasonably steamy sessions—kissing, hugging, touching. Her breasts proved indeed to be small, two delicious little apples, so much prettier than any I ever saw in skin mags—which I never in fact got much into, although there were always plenty around at school—or at the movies. But somehow all our love and our passion never developed into full-scale sex; the occasional voyages of discovery we made together were just that—two dear friends helping each other out by sharing what they didn’t have in common so they’d both know what to expect when it was some stranger’s body they were doing the actual sex thing with.

It was one of the few matters—perhaps the only one, now that I think on it—about which we disagreed. I was as if I’d been born with the knowledge that we’d be lifelong lovers; Jus was as if we’d certainly be together all our lives long, yes, but that what we had between us, the unity, transcended and perhaps even obviated our being lovers at all. “I can’t make love to you, John,” she said more than once. “It’d be like having sex with my brother, or—no, I got that wrong: with myself.”

I agreed with her that the thought of making love with her brother David was pretty horrendous—whiny, stupid, probably liked pulling the wings off flies; not really surprising he was so successful in later life. But that didn’t stop me from pressing my case. We were made for each other. It was inevitable. Why waste time on others, or even just waiting in celibacy? Why not cut straight to the chase? Accept this glorious gift we’d been given, and rejoice in it?

None of my arguments ever prevailed. In a way it didn’t matter; in a way it did. Our love for each other was unaffected. We were still Jus and John, Jusandjohn, Jusnjohn, Jusjohn, the one person with the two different names, the two independently mobile halves of a single organism.

I thought one of the real problems, the real reasons for her resistance, was that her parents approved of me.

And approve of me they certainly did. They were nice people. David Sr. was no conversationalist, having little interest outside stocks and sports, the former for the weekdays and the latter for the weekends and public holidays, all carefully compartmentalized; but he had a geniality that made his tediousness easy to tolerate. Ellen-Anne, her mother—Ellie, as I was soon taught to call her—was quite different. Mercurial, very lovely in a minxy way, sometimes waspish, always curious for new knowledge, always alert for anything of interest, she was one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. I once in a moment of stark idiocy confessed to Jus that several times, when her mother had casually brushed against me, I’d found myself with an incipient hard-on—an awful thing to admit about somebody’s mother, for chrissake. Jus only laughed; her mother, she said, had that effect on men.

I’m giving the impression that thoughts of sex were near the forefront of our minds all through those years, but that wasn’t the truth of it. Yes, those thoughts were always there; but they were only a sort of darkened backdrop at the rear of the brightly lit stage that was the life we shared together. Often, as we went through high school, I’d get teased by the other guys about it—not so much teased as incredulously interrogated. In the height of summer Jus, like all the other girls, would be wandering around wearing not very much—a brief halter and ultra-short pants that did little to hide the fact that she was young, and female, and lithe. How could I stand it, the boys would earnestly ask me, being near to such unconquered but surely conquerable tracts of exquisite femininity and yet never so much as succumbing to the temptation to indulge in a seemingly accidental grope? I didn’t tell them, of course, that Jus and I were relatively familiar with each other’s bodies, that sometimes we’d lounge around naked together if that was more comfortable, that physical exposure and nudity in themselves don’t matter because it’s the baring of selves to each other that’s what lovemaking’s all about. They were disbelieving enough already; that mental censor I spoke of earlier would have distorted the information so that what they’d have perceived was that Jus and I spent our time alone mindlessly fucking.

I can hear it now: “Well, you know, guys, sometimes we lie around without any clothes on and talk about string theory.”

Yeah. Right. You a faggot?

String theory wasn’t the only thing we discussed. Cosmology was just one of our passionate interests. Pinball was another. Classic mystery novels. Photography. Existentialist philosophy, until in the end we concluded that Sartre had his head in the clouds just as much as anyone else. Music—rock, classical, jazz, exotic. The Surrealist school—art in general, in fact, although we decided ninety per cent of the Abstractionists were just clones producing sub-Pollocks in a factory line somewhere. Microbiology. Menstruation—both in terms of its being one of life’s great tedia and in terms of its relation to the lunar cycle… and so we rambled on into biorhythms. Cryogenics. Black-and-white movies, preferably with Edward G. Robinson or Veronica Lake in them. Sunsets. Fantasy fiction, most of which we detested as being Harlequin Romance set in Tolkien Country but some of which we adored. Politics and the corruptibility of the human soul, those two topics being natural bedfellows. The situation in whichever part of the world the situation was in at the time. Sex and, in a world-weary way, its follies. Crossword puzzles. Quantum theory. The history of stupidity. Religion—we were rationalist, and abhorred the efforts of the bigots to impose their nonsense on not just the rest of us but their own children. Love, in all its forms. Tennis—we played, badly, but spectated avidly. How ghastly just about everything was that was shown on MTV, and how little we wanted to be rich and famous… although we both knew with an absolute certitude that one day we would be.

Rich and famous together, as Jusjohn.

As it is, John’s on his own and he’s a Deputy Chief Librarian in a small-town library.

Of course, we both went to the same college. Our families, who by this time were really just one large family, always assumed it, as did we. There was no question of being able to afford one of the major institutions, but Rembrandt University, while undistinguished, had a highly respectable reputation. It was actually a very good university with a top-notch literature faculty—we’d decided on literature rather than the sciences. The campus was large and in a superb setting; the nearby town of Ilchester was just the right size to accept but not overwhelm us college kids. We both joined a bad campus rock band called The Flaming Ghoulies that reformed every week or two until finally, after a full three months, to the silent but intense relief of everybody it split permanently amid a deluge of accusations and counteraccusations over who’d purloined the lead guitarist’s private half-gallon of rye. (In fact, the rest of us had shared it one hilarious night, but the details got confused.) Jus and I studied together; after the first semester we took an apartment together and our parents acted extremely cool about the whole thing because of course we were Jusjohn and would soon enough be married. They’d have been less cool if they’d known we weren’t sleeping with each other—at least, never in the usual euphemistic sense of the term.

Midway through that first semester I lost my virginity to a girl called, strangely enough, Tabitha; I can’t remember much about her except that her breasts were too big and the wrong shape, not being Jus’s, and that she knew more about Sean Connery than anyone else I’ve ever known, discussing his movie career with greater and greater intensity and louder and louder up to and through orgasm—a detail that had Jus, when first told about it, pummelling the floor in gleeful laughter. Over the space of a couple of months I must have slept with Tabitha a dozen times or more, because I could, until I discovered that she was extending the same privilege to several of the other guys, including a chemistry professor, and I began to worry about disease. Jus followed the liaison—it could hardly be called an affair—with fascination; it was the Jusjohn organism’s first experience of physically “going the whole way”, and thus obviously of potent interest to both of us. The Jusjohn organism might not have been so emotionally equable about it all if Tabitha had been more than an educational aid and receptacle, of course.

As I learned when Jus started dating and eventually sleeping with Martin.

This wasn’t a matter of double standards—the “it’s OK for the guy to screw around, but heaven help the girl who does the same” principle. Jus seriously liked Martin. She didn’t talk about their lovemaking when she came back to the apartment, to me, didn’t tell me everything they’d done. The two of them spent a lot more time talking or going around together—all the activities that I regarded as my prerogative, in other words—than they did grappling. And, worse, I could quite understand why she liked him. As I sat at home alone in our apartment nursing a bottle of whatever was on special offer that week at the liquor store I tried to find something—anything—about Martin that I could legitimately detest, and I always failed. I mean, I liked the guy as well.

Despite being liked by both parts of the Jusjohn being—“in their different ways,” as I fastidiously put it to Jus one time—Martin was a casualty of our first long vacation from Rembrandt. I spent much of that vacation reconciling myself to the notion that, although Jus was the other half of me, we didn’t own each other exclusively, that what she did with her body was irrelevant to the fact that we two were one, indivisible, our essences united, that even if she married this guy Martin he would always be an irrelevance in the light of… you can fill in all the other rationalizations yourself. Sometimes I voiced them to Jus; sometimes she agreed; sometimes she kept quiet.

It was almost an anticlimax to get back to college and discover that, during his weeks away from Jus, Martin had found “somebody else,” which “somebody else” he was going to marry.

When I first heard about it, Jus had to restrain me from stomping round to his place to bawl him out for his treachery.

She got over it quicker than I did, because Richard came along. He lasted nearly six months, until he suggested it could be more fun if he invited a friend to join in. (Jus wasn’t against the idea in principle, as she explained to me, but she was deeply offended by the presumption.) I had a nostalgic weekend with Tabitha—to hell with worries about infection—and then, later on, another; her field of expertise had shifted to Keanu Reeves, and I couldn’t help feeling she was on a potentially fatal slide. Who next? Adam Sandler?

After Richard came Derek. Then another Martin. I didn’t like Nigel very much—he didn’t last long—but Nick and Peter were both excellent choices, I felt.

For my part there was Annette, in whom I was quite absorbed for a full semester; where Tabitha had taught me a lot about fucking, Annette patiently and with considerable skill and versatility taught me virtually everything I know about lovemaking. She was also a very dear friend; Jus had to put a lot of effort into consoling me when Annette and I broke up.

And then there was Jennifer. I adored Jennifer and probably we could have spent the rest of our lives together, a perfect match; but she wasn’t the other half of me. I told Jus this one night, and over the next few weeks we combined our ingenuities to let Jennifer down as lightly as was possible, so that in the end she thought it was her idea for us to go our separate ways after graduation.

Because graduation was where Jus and I had got to in our shared academic career.

My relationship with Jennifer—more specifically, the realization by both Jus and myself that it would be wrong of us ever to expect anyone else to substitute for, to approximate for, the other halves of the Jusjohn organism—brought about in both of us what used to be called a paradigm shift.

We talked the last of it through one afternoon after we’d got home to Lampitt from college for the final time. Neither of us had jobs in prospect, and our parents were contentedly permitting us to be lethargic for a few months about chasing opportunities—my dad might have thought differently, but he’d died during our previous semester at Rembrandt. We were sitting by the edge of the Greenemill River, watching butterflies—this was in the days before the river got so polluted by the Sharplet Chemicals plant, which had just started construction a few months earlier.

Jus slowly twirled a pale blue flower between the fingers of her two hands, hoping a butterfly would be attracted to it.

“You know something, darling?” she said.

“Know what?”

I could see on her face that she was taking her thought to completion before speaking it. I almost knew what the thought was.

“We’re virgins,” she said at last.

“Yes,” I said.

In strict dictionary terms, of course, neither of us was—Tabitha and Martin and Jennifer and the others, even Nigel, could have told you that (and Nigel probably would, in great detail for the full length of a bar-propping evening)—but in truth that’s what we were.

We were virgins to one another.

The two parts of the Jusjohn creature had experimented both physically and emotionally, but they’d done so separately—independently.

I lay back flat on the cool, slightly damp grass, my hands behind my head, and gazed at a couple of small white clouds and a dissipating jet-trail that ran alongside them.

“We should maybe someday do something about that,” she continued.

“Someday,” I agreed.

It wasn’t really so important, after all. Because in another way we weren’t virgins to each other at all. No two people, it seemed, had ever been so closely and steadfastly entwined; even that was understating it, because we weren’t two people, just one.

She waited a few moments before speaking again. “John, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. I thought maybe we could do that without physically living together, especially when I was with Peter, but then…”

“It was the same as with me and Jennifer,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Could have been a marriage made in heaven. Really it’d have been the wrongest thing you and I ever did, if we’d let me marry her.”

“Yes,” said Jus again.

A green butterfly meandered briefly above my nose and then sailed on breezes only its wings could detect towards Jus. I raised my head and followed its indecisive flight. It pirouetted around the blue flower, which she was now holding determinedly still, and then landed on it.

“Look,” she breathed.

“We’re making love,” I said, just as softly.

In a minute or less the butterfly tired of the bloom—at least, that was the way someone else might have seen it. In reality, it had pulled us back into the unity of the Jusjohn, it had made our love for us; the fine and delicate task done, it was free to grace other flowers, other lovers.

Neither of us spoke for a long while, then:

“There are practicalities,” she said. “If we’re going to get married, I mean. Parents to tell, that sort of thing.”

I chuckled. “It’s hardly going to be a surprise to them. They think we’ve been living together—I mean ‘living together’—these past three years.”

“Yes, but they’ll still want the formalities to be observed. And they’ll want to be able to think they helped us fix the date, and gave their blessing, and—oh, all the usual shit.”

She stood up and brushed with one hand at the back of her jeans. With the other she threw the blue flower down onto the slowly moving water of the Greenemill. It floated a few yards downstream, and then was taken by the eddy formed around a moss-covered rock that broke the surface. As we watched, the abandoned bloom bobbed once, bobbed twice, and then was pulled under.

“Take my hand,” she said, “as we walk back to tell the others. I want your hand in mine.”

And, still, “Jus” is the name this stranger has just used to the woman behind him in the room, the woman who seems clearly to be the mother of his child.

The child whose father is called John Sudmore and has my voice.

He’s speaking to me again, but I can’t hear his words through the cacophony of my memories. And then the memories in turn are superseded by the rush of my thoughts.

I can believe in many things, but one of these is not that there is a creator god—still less one who, not satisfied with having brought his universe into being, continues to tamper with its course of events. Nor can I accept the idea espoused by some of the quantum scientists that each and every moment of our universe sparks off a myriad other universes, each defined by a single one of all the different outcomes of all the different events a moment can contain. Yes, I can conceive that this might happen, that the passage of every instant of time is characterized by near infinite creation; but surely all those other possible universes that are generated are like pairs of virtual particles—springing spontaneously into existence but then instantaneously returning to the base level, the nothingness, as they annihilate each other. In the case of universes, the base level is the universe we know, can see, can test, can probe. The almost infinitude of individual alternative possible existences persist for barely a quantum of time before they all converge back upon the base level. In short, I can no more believe that the universe creates and re-creates itself than I can believe in the creator god.

So the idea that I might have somehow dialed into an alternative reality, where there’s an alternative John Sudmore who married an alternative Justine Parland, does not even enter my mind as a possibility; well, as a possibility, perhaps, but one to be instantly dismissed.

Yet I do believe in creations, and I do believe in gods.

I believe in all the little gods we are.

I believe in the power each one of us has to create a future so forcefully that it imprints itself irrevocably upon the fabric of spacetime, or whatever it is that forms the substrate of reality.

And I believe that my younger self did that, creating for himself a future that, while it was not my future, was nevertheless so vital that it has played itself out… somewhere else.

Somewhere that I’ve just accidentally phoned.

None of this can I even attempt to explain to the man who’s now back on the line speaking to me. He’s inquisitive as to who I might be in relation to himself; his suspicions assuaged, now he’s trying to work out if maybe we could have had a common ancestor. Do I have a great-aunt who was called Julie Petersen before she married and became Julie Halstread? Was my father’s name Clive?

Of course, the answer to both questions is “yes”, but I’m not going to tell him that.

Instead I babble: “Look, I’m terribly sorry to have disturbed you. I got a wrong number and then… well, I don’t know what came over me, claiming I had the same name as you, and all that stuff. Must be the heat. Heat and boredom—the twin curses of telemarketers. Make us do funny things sometimes.”

And so on. I’m hoping Mrs. Baldeen isn’t picking up too much of this.

He says nothing for a moment, and to fill the silence I speak again, unable to stop myself.

“Give my love to Jus.”

I put the phone down as quickly as I can, even though he’s talking once more, his curiosity now fully aroused.

I swivel my chair and stare straight into Mrs. Baldeen’s eyes, which are cold and gray. They remind me of the way I see the world. I could never explain to those eyes why it is I can believe in the little gods—the little creator gods who are us.

And now I’m back walking home across the fields with Jus’s hand in mine, birdsong in the air, long grass and occasional tough wildflowers swishing at our ankles.

We didn’t speak much as we ambled together, just once or twice an “I love you” or a warning to steer around a cowflop. I don’t think I’ve ever been as aware of existence as I was then; it seemed as if Jus’s presence was a lens that focused onto me messages from every atom of the world. I was as one with everything, though most of all, of course, with the warmly glowing sun alongside me.

And then it all began to change. The first I noticed of this was when the knowledge arrived in my mind that things had been changing for some little while. The day wasn’t as welcoming; the breeze didn’t caress my face with the same tender attentiveness; the wildflowers had paler, dirtier colors.

And the grip of Jus’s hand, so firm in mine just a few moments ago, was subtly fading.

I glanced up at her. She was still there, of course, but the face which had been so emphatically full of life, so very present, was now a texture of floating shadows, a pattern of light and dark that seemed to have been serendipitously thrown together to take the form of a face. Through her smile I could see a cloud that hugged the horizon.

I came to a halt.

“Jus!” I said desperately.

A gust of the breeze ran through the unkempt grass, the rustling of the blades drowning any reply she might have made.

We turned and walked on together—there was still enough of her in the air beside me for that. It was as if I was being accompanied by strains of an orchestral piece so faint that I couldn’t quite make out what music was being played. The touch of her fingers against mine was a grace note so elusive that you barely notice it, yet would notice it were it not there.

I suppose I should have been feeling some sort of grief, but what was going through me was too profound for that, was beyond grief. Loss—yes, there was an aching sense of loss that seemed to make heavy every part of my body, slowing the pulse of my blood and the sparking of my synapses, chilling my skin. Pain, too—the ghost pain felt in an amputated limb. But more than anything else what I felt was acceptance.

Jus and I had shared our sandwiches and our selves sitting on the low wall outside the school. Once or twice our hands had brushed, the touch as light and insubstantial as the feel of her hand in mine now was. In her eyes I had seen my future; I had read it in its entirety, page by page, word by word, and I’d joyously accepted it. All the afternoon, through classes that were mere blurs, I’d pored over its pages, reading and re-reading, living, a story in which I was one of the main protagonists—part of one of the main protagonists, part of the Jusjohn organism.

At the end of the school day I’d danced home, cheeks radiant with excitement, with life. For once I’d been communicative over the dinner table with Mom and Dad, telling them that there was, you know, this girl I’d met, and maybe they would like to meet her too, could she come to dinner on Friday, perhaps? She was really nice, they’d like her a lot. I saw my parents exchanging glances, glances that said something like, “He’s always been too shy to tell us about girls before. Maybe this one really is a cut above the others. It’s about time. Remember when we were like this?” And I didn’t care that there was something a little patronizing in all this.

That night, although I’d expected to lie awake for hours thinking of her, expected when at last I did fall asleep that I’d dream of her, in fact I dropped right off and dreamed of pirate ships and cabbages and kings, and I didn’t wake until the alarm clock shrilled at me. I’d have eaten no breakfast at all if my mother hadn’t stood over me.

Even though I reached school twenty minutes early—an unheard-of over-punctuality in my life to that date—I was far from the first to get there. Already there were little huddles in the corridors, many earnest faces, some of the girls in tears. “The new girl, the new girl, the new girl,” the echoes whispered along the walls.

The new girl had been waiting for her dad to pick her up in his car after school the evening before when a truck had swerved because old Fatso Berringer had been drunk at the wheel again and it had plucked her from the sidewalk as neatly as the clawed hand in one of those fairground machines might pluck up a trinket and it had carried her on its hood for fifty yards or more before crushing her, and the life out of her, against the wall of the hardware store, blood falling onto the splayed pages of the books that spilled out of her satchel so that it was unlikely even the thrift store would now accept them for resale.

I lost a month of my life after that.

It was all a dreadful mistake, you see. I had already read the story of the future and, in it, the character called Justine, or Jus, was very much alive. If she’d been killed by a drunkard’s truck, that story would be negated before it had even started. Yet the story was the truth; I knew it was. The falsehood was what people were telling me. Those kindly people, the new friends who suddenly appeared, Mom and Dad, the doctors—however well they were intentioned, they were lying to me.

Or, if they were not, I would make it so.

And I did.

I insisted to reality that the story would be told, that if reality itself would not tell the story of its own accord then I would do so for it.

And I had done that, too. I had lived the future that I knew to be the truth, and Jus had lived it alongside me.

Yet now she was fading from alongside me. Now, after nearly a decade, the conviction that had made me mold reality to suit my wishes was ebbing. And the sign of this ebbing was that Justine ebbed.

What was it that scattered my concentration? Was it the prospect of finally announcing to our parents—my Mom, Mr. and Mrs. Parland—that the fusion of the Jusjohn organism, so long established, was now to be formalized? Was it that my mind couldn’t embrace the clash between the two realities? Was it, and I’ve hardly ever dared admit this to myself, that I didn’t, at the core of me, really want our unity to be recognized by the world? Could it even be that my emotions rebelled against the thought of finally making physical love to Jus, that I was repelled by the notion?

I don’t know. I still don’t know.

But I know that as Jus and I strolled slowly home across the fields she trickled out of my existence as fine dry sand might trickle away through my fingers, until by the time I got home all traces of her had vanished. And I was entirely at ease with this—on one level.

“Did you have a good time down by the river?” asked Mom as I kicked the mud off my boots. And: “Isn’t it about time you got yourself a steady girlfriend to go on these walks with you, John?” And: “I’ve made a meat loaf for supper. Dad should be home any minute. I’ve already opened him a beer. Would you like one too?”

Yet on another level I wasn’t accepting of the new non-Jus future at all. The Jusjohn being was still there. There could never be a Pollyjohn, or a Veronicajohn, or a Katiejohn, or…

I say that I live alone in my apartment. But that’s not quite true. Sometimes Jus is there also. I have never seen her or heard her, but there are times I walk from the cramped kitchen into the cramped living room and I’m aware that the sound of her laughter has been there just a moment before.

None of this could I have said on the telephone. None of this can I ever hope to explain to Mrs. Baldeen’s hard gray eyes.

I stare at the phone. Will I be able to pick it up again and call Bill, as I originally intended?

I’ve been living a wrong existence, I now know, since that afternoon when we walked home from the river.

Parts of the truth I got right, parts I got wrong.

As I was washing my hands and going back downstairs for the beer Mom had poured for me I assumed, as I’ve been assuming ever since, that the future I’d created was somehow the lesser reality, the subsidiary one—that the primary reality had reasserted itself, compelled my version of creation to converge back towards the mainstream of time’s flow. It had chipped my conviction, then stood aside to watch it crumble.

But now I know, having spoken to the other John Sudmore, having heard the voice of Jus, how mistaken I’ve been.

The effect of my conviction crumbling was not that Jus faded away into a rejected subsidiary reality.

It was that I did.

I shrug my shoulders, as if I could discard the weight of infinity from them.

I reach out to pick up the receiver. I’m going to call Bill and arrange to meet him for a drink at the Tobermory Inn or O’Riley’s or Duncan’s Place, and we’re going to talk about old baseball games and new movies and I’m going to submerge my knowledge of the reality I’ve lost. Of the reality that lost me.

But the receiver is only halfway to my ear when I change my mind and return it to its rest.

Tonight…

Tonight is a night for drinking alone.