Page 50 of The Book Doctor

I don’t think I will.

If there is such a thing, I don’t think that’s where I’m going.

I feel lucky that we’ve had these years together. Lucky that we met in the first place. It’s a great big world, and yet, somehow by mere chance, the two of us were thrust together. What are the odds of that, being in the same place at the same time on any given day, falling in love, and spending your life with a person?

Maybe it’s the closer I get to death and the further I get from life, but suddenly it all feels like a dream. As though my mind has been sucked into a time machine. A vortex of thought, seemingly related and unrelated, I am like a clock winding down.

It’s early, and I see her there in the library, her nose scrunched up, her finger entangled in a loose strand of hair. She twirls and unfurls the same piece of hair over and over for hours. After a while she looks up at me and smiles. She must have felt me watching her. I smile back and she offers a little wave. I go over to her and I say, “I have a story to tell you.”

Her face is eager as she leans across the table and pulls out a chair. I sit down and she says, “Tell me everything. I want to hear it all.”

So I tell her the story of us. As I speak, she inches closer, propping her elbow on the table, resting her head in the palm of her hand. I see the whole world in her eyes, and I know that’s where the future is.

After I get through the beginning and the heavy middle, finally I come to the end. I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her that if she were to ask the people who knew us, they would say we lived a full life. We loved. We went through it. They’d say we weren’t perfect, but man, we were something.

She looks at me all funny-like when I thank her. She laughs in that shy way she used to before the end, before the heavy middle, back before things got rough. She says, “You’re crazy.”

I tell her she’s wrong.

“Why would I agree to dinner with you?” she asks. “Let alone fall in love?”

I tell her that since I can see the future, that she has no choice.

“What’s in the future?”

She wants to know, so I tell her. I say, “You made me feel safe. Safe enough to be who I wanted to be.”

; I say, “Your love gave me such a platform to go and make an impact on the world.”

I tell her our marriage gave me the energy to go out there and do the things I wanted to do.

I say, “I made a bigger impact on the world because of the energy your love gave me.”

“So you want to be famous,” she says. “That’s what this is all about?”

“No,” I tell her. “I just don’t want to be obscure.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I want my life to have meant something.”

“Well,” she says finally. “Did it?”

“Yes.” I reach for her hand. I expect her to pull away, but she doesn’t. “You made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world. And I don’t just mean because we had each other. I mean because you saw me. You got me.”

“Anybody could do that.”

“No,” I say. “They can’t. There’s a certain existential loneliness in life. Your ability to see me made me feel less alone in the world.”

“This is getting sappy,” she says.

“But we’re going to die,” I tell her. “So what does it matter?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“We don’t have a choice. We invited him in, and this is what happens when you aren’t careful.”