Weatherfield Books was exactly as I remembered it from my three
previous visits narrow and warm, smelling of old paper and the particular
optimism of people who believe the right book will fix the right problem.
The Tuesday poetry reading happened in the back, past the Philosophy
section and a display of local authors whose photographs suggested they
had all, at some point, stared meaningfully into a middle distance.
I took a seat near the back as instructed. Priya settled herself near the
front with a book she was pretending to read. The reader a woman with
silver hair and enormous earrings who later introduced herself as
Constance was arranging papers at a small podium. About twenty people
had gathered in mismatched chairs, the kind of crowd that turns out for
poetry on a Tuesday: students, retirees, a man in paint-spattered overalls
who looked like he might be lost but had decided to commit.
The chamomile tea was good. The letter had been right about that,
too.
Constance began with Neruda. Something about the night and hands
and the infinite the kind of poem that sounds like it was written specifically
about whatever you happen to be going through, which is the trick of great
poetry and why it survives. I was halfway through my tea and the second
poem when the door opened and a gust of November came in with a boy.
He was maybe eighteen. Dark hair darkened further by the rain. Dark
eyes that moved around the room with a particular quality of assessment
not suspicious, but careful, the way people look when they have learned
that rooms contain information and it's worth gathering before you commit.
He wore a jacket that had seen weather before and carried a battered
paperback: Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, which I had been meaning to
read for a year.
He stood at the back, scanning faces. His eyes moved past me, then
returned.
He looked at me the way you look at someone you have been told
about with recognition, and relief, and the slight adjustment of a person
who has been holding a description in their mind and is now comparing it to
the reality.
He came and sat next to me. Constance was reading about the moon.
The boy said nothing for a full minute.
Then: 'You're Elara Voss.'
The cold moved through my chest. 'How do you know my name?'
'I was told,' he said simply. He wasn't looking at me now; he was
looking at his hands. He had long hands, the kind pianists have, and he held
them together as though containing something. 'I've been told quite a few
things. My name is Cael. Cael Marchetti.' He paused. 'I have a letter for
you. And I think you might have one for me.'
We exchanged envelopes without speaking. Constance moved on to
Lorca. I read his letter; he read mine.
His said:
Cael. She'll be in the back row with chamomile tea and a portable
oxygen concentrator and she'll look at you like an equation she
hasn't decided to solve yet. That's all right. She looks at most new
things that way. Give her time.
Her name is Elara. She is brave in ways she hasn't discovered yet,
and she is ill in ways the doctors don't fully understand yet, and
she needs someone who won't flinch at either of those things. You
won't flinch. I know you won't, because I know what you've already
survived.
Tell her the truth about who you are. She'll know if you don't.
What happens next is yours. But you were supposed to find each
other. That was always true, even before either of you existed.
E
I set down my letter. My hands were not quite steady.
"E,' I said."
"E,' he agreed."
"Who is E?'"
'I don't know.' He looked at me directly for the first time dark eyes,
careful and direct, with something behind them that looked like grief that
had been lived with long enough to become quiet. 'I was hoping you could
tell me. The letters started coming to me a month ago.'
"A month ago. They've been coming to me for three weeks.'"
'They knew I'd find you before you found me.' He said this without
particular emphasis, as though it was simply information. 'The first letter
told me you existed. The second told me where to look.'
Outside, the rain intensified. Constance was reading Dickinson now I
heard the word circumference, which Dickinson used as a synonym for the
infinite. I thought about what it meant that a stranger had been receiving
letters about me for longer than I had been receiving letters about him.
"What else did they tell you?' I asked. 'About me.'"
He was quiet for a moment. 'That you count the days. Every morning.'
He looked at the window. 'That you've been doing it since the diagnosis.
And that it's not morbid it's the opposite. It's the most alive thing you do.'
Something loosened in my chest. Nobody knew about the calendar.
Not Priya. Not my mother. The calendar was mine, entirely mine, the small
private ceremony of having made it through.
"And you?' I asked, voice careful. 'What did they tell me about you?'"
'That I lost something important and stopped.' He looked at his hands
again. 'And that you'd understand what that means even before I explained
it.'
I thought about that. About what could be described as something
important that you stopped because of loss. About those hands those long,
careful hands.
"Piano,' I said."
He looked up. 'How'
"Your hands. The way you hold them.'"
A long silence. Constance had moved on to Mary Oliver now,
something about attention and the one wild and precious life, and I felt that
line land in my sternum the way it always did, the way it was designed to.
"My father died two years ago,' Cael said finally. 'After that I
couldn't.' He shrugged, a small controlled motion. 'It felt like playing in a
house that had burned down.'"
I understood that. The specific grief of the thing you loved that no
longer felt like itself.
We stayed until the reading ended. We walked out into the rain he
didn't seem to notice it, the way certain people treat weather as beside the
point and stood under the awning of the hardware store across the street,
comparing everything we knew.
He had received four letters. I had received three. None of the letters
overlapped; they were each addressed specifically, personally, with
knowledge that shouldn't have been available to any stranger.
"E knows things that haven't happened yet,' I said."
"Some of them. The Johns Hopkins study. My sister Maya's rent call
that came through exactly as described, three days after the letter said it
would.'"
"Which means either E has access to information'"
"Or E isn't writing from our present,' Cael said. He said it quietly,
without drama, the way you state something you've already spent time with.
'E is writing from somewhere this has already happened.'"
The rain fell. Somewhere above us, a gutter was working hard. I
thought about the mechanics of what he was suggesting the sheer,
structural impossibility of it and found, to my own surprise, that it did not
strike me as immediately ridiculous. It struck me as the only explanation
that accounted for all the facts.
"That's not possible,' I said anyway, because it wasn't."
"I know,' he said. 'But here we are.'"
Here we are. Standing in the November rain, two strangers who had
been introduced by letters from the future, standing under an awning
comparing impossibilities.
'I should go,' I said. 'My portable concentrator has about forty more
minutes.'
He nodded. He reached into his jacket pocket and I thought he was
going for a phone or keys. Instead he pulled out a photograph. Old the kind
printed on thin paper with a white border, the way photos looked before
digital. He held it out.
"This came with my first letter,' he said. 'I don't know who it is. But
I've been looking at it for a month, and tonight'"
He stopped.
I took the photograph. I looked at it in the gray November light.
The woman in the photograph was perhaps thirty-five. Dark eyes, dark
hair, a stillness about her that reminded me of something. She was sitting
in a garden somewhere, half-turned toward the camera, not quite smiling.
She had an oxygen concentrator beside her on the grass.
She had my face. My exact face, thirty years older.