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before.
If Eleanor had been more prone to introspection during her brief time on Earth, she might have read something into the fact that the oldest version of herself she ever meets is only in her early thirties. Or the fact that the few times that she does visit further into the future, it’s always to unfamiliar places and strangers she can't tie to her own life, even though she knows they must fit in somehow because that's how this whole thing works. She might have slotted some of the larger, more glaringly obvious pieces into place.
But she’s eight, and young enough that thirty-three seems utterly ancient; she’s fifteen, and angry enough not to care how long she lives; she’s twenty-nine, and drunk enough that it stops mattering. So she doesn’t.
And then she’s thirty-four, and she’s dead.
And then she’s thirty-four, forever, and it starts again.
one.
On her second day in the Good Place, Eleanor’s busy having the quietest and most Good Person- like crisis she can manage (she doesn’t belong here, those aren’t her memories, she’s never fed a meter let alone a thousand starving orphans, her soulmate is suspiciously hot even for a mailman, she doesn’t belong here) when she hears a soft thud from the bathroom, like something solid landing on the plush bath mat.
Since she doesn’t have any pets – she doesn’t right? She hopes there’s no Good Place equivalent of a hellhound that she needs to walk, she doesn’t have a great track record with dogs – and she’s pretty sure that people don’t break into other people’s houses in heaven, she’s a little concerned.
“Um... Janine? Juh...JoJo? Sexy Robocop chick? Is that you?” she calls hesitantly. There’s no answer. She drags herself off the couch and creeps to the bathroom door, aware of how ridiculous she’s being. There's no burglary in the Good Place she tells herself (the stash of shrimp in her fridge from the welcome party last night doesn’t count. There’s definitely no burglary at a buffet in the Good Place). As she approaches, a bare foot comes into view through the door frame. It's followed by the calf it's connected to, and then a lot of thigh with no evidence of anything covering it. There’s some rustling, and a quiet grunt.
Okay, so maybe people do break into other people’s houses in the afterlife. In the nude. In the middle of the day. In the bathroom where there aren't even any good drugs and she knows because she searched. Thoroughly. She takes a deep breath and cranes her neck around the door frame.
“Okay, hi, who the he...?”
She knows that thigh. She definitely knows the particular anatomy that it’s connected to, which she realizes at the same moment that the owner of the thigh sits up. No. No no no no no, please no, she silently chants. She declares it out loud as well for good measure, scrunching her eyes shut and scrubbing at them roughly with the heels of her hands as though it will clear her vision. Praying like an “everything but” virgin, she opens them again. The person is still there. She. She is still there.
Eleanor looks at her self for a long, tense moment. Then she shatters it. “Oh, you’ve got to be forking kidding me,” she groans. “What the fork, man? Time’s not even a thing here!"
The other Eleanor shrugs at her apologetically from the bathroom floor, pulling a towel off the rail to wrap around her naked body. “Trust me, dude, I get it” she says, hauling to her feet. “I’m not peeing my pants with excitement over this either.”
Eleanor eyes her other self critically as she winds the towel around her. She had always been a little uncomfortable, as a child, with the physical realities of watching herself age. She had meticulously catalogued the teenage spots, the haircuts, the occasional crinkle next to the eyes, hoping that being able to predict them would make them easier to live with. This her is not so startling. This her looks exactly the same (of course), so she guesses she has the afterlife to thank for something, but she does seem... a little softer, somehow. Caustic edges worn and rounded.
“We’re still keeping it tight, I see,” is what comes out, raising an eyebrow in appreciation.
Her other self laughs. “It’s the afterlife, babe. We’re gonna be tight for eternity.” They high five, and then Eleanor's brain whirls into overdrive.
“Wait, how does this work, even? Wasn’t dying supposed to put a stop to this bullshirt? How do I even travel when I don’t technically have, like, a body?” She stops to parse the physics of it all, and then remembers she never actually understood it in the first place beyond the concepts of 'involuntary' and 'naked'. Gives up on that line of questioning, goes for the easier one, the one she's always asked. “So when are you from?”
There’s a pause. There never been a pause, and Eleanor can't understand why there ever would be. Is she about to lie? She never lied to her self before, not about this, not once in the hundred-and-sixty-two times that her timelines had crossed. Why on earth (or not) would she? Names, dates, precise and detailed information. That’s how she’d survived when she ended up outside in the middle of winter. How she’d sometimes known to leave clothes and food at a certain place because she’d be arriving there soon from sometime else. Details are why she was killed in a freak shopping cart accident, and not by frostbite or getting shot by an angry co-workers wife because she travelled into his bedroom at night (one of her more unfortunate episodes). And sure, it's not like she can die again, here, now, but... she never lied to her self before.
“I can't... time’s different here, you know? A while away yet,” the other her says, finally, and leaves it at that. Confused, and sad, Eleanor mentally files it away nonetheless.
The other Eleanor wanders out into the house and Eleanor follows. “There’s clothes in the bedroom,” she says, gesturing, but her other self has already clambered onto the platform and is making her way to the dresser. Duh, Eleanor thinks. This is her house too.
“When are we now? How long have you been here?” the future Eleanor asks once she’s dressed. She’s drifting around the living room, straightening the clown paintings, her fingertips lingering on the frame with an expression that almost seems affectionate. (Does she... does she like clowns in the future? No, that can’t be right. Nobody likes clowns.)
“Like, two days? And, okay, I am freaking out,” she hisses. “Those aren’t my memories, man. They think I’m someone else. Which, obviously, you know. You gotta help me. What the fork is going on?”
“Yeah, well,” future Eleanor says. Her voice is edged with something. Eleanor thinks it might be a faint hint of amusement, but it's sharp. Precarious. “The thing about that, is.” And then she stops. Eleanor sees the tell-tale shadow flicker across her other self’s eyes, catches the hitch in her speech. It’s time to go.
“Shirt, okay, I won’t have time to explain. You’ll figure it out. You always do,” the other Eleanor says to her, as her features begin to shift and disappear. “Just... we make it eventually, okay? We’re okay.”
“Wait. What do you mean, figure it out?” she asks, tiny prickles on the back of her neck. Inklings of something she can't fully know. The pause, and the way this her is looking at her like she’s made of candy glass. If Eleanor didn’t know herself better, she’d almost call it sympathy. There's just something different about all of this – other than the fact that she's dead, obviously – and the unease pools low in her stomach. “The thing about this is what?”
“You need to find Chidi,” her vanishing counterpart tells her, her voice scratchy and ever so slightly desperate and slipping away like she is. “Okay? Find Chidi.”
“Chidi? What the fork is a Chidi? Figure what out?!” she yells, but her questions hang in the once-again empty air.
Eleanor slides down the wall and slumps on the floor next to the kitchen, her mind reeling. Time travelling had been the most consistent and giant bummer of all the consistent giant bummers that defined her life. Why the hell would it still be happening in heaven?
two.
Between the blackout drinking phase of her early to mid to late twenties, and her unfortunate habit of drifting around in time like a hobo, Eleanor’s pretty used to waking up not knowing where she is. But she’d thought she’d left both hangovers and her inter-dimensional commute behind when she’d somehow wound up on the right side of the afterlife, so she’s a little more confused than usual this time around.
She sits up and surveys her surroundings, stifling a low moan. She’s in what looks like the living room of an apartment, an unfamiliar one. It’s a little smaller than her Icelandic clown house, and much more conservative, all brown and leather and warm wood. Its occupant also seems to have a serious thing for throw blankets. Since her clothing never travels with her, she’s immediately grateful for the grandmotherly decorating choice. She wraps one of the intricate woven spreads around her, toga-style, and tries to figure out what the fork is going on. Reverting to one of her old tricks, she starts ticking off what she knows for sure on her fingers.
Number one: she’s travelled, which apparently still happens even though she’s dead. So there’s that.
Number two: a quick glance out the window would suggest that she’s still in the neighbourhood, though she can’t quite place some of the buildings. And the grass looks a different shade of green, if that’s a thing, and she’s sure she’s never seen those palm trees before (aren’t falling coconuts a hazard?) and the cobblestones seem more... cobbl-y, and the bird that chirps outside her window at the ash-crack of dawn every morning must have a whole bird family with a vendetta against her, because there’s a bird chirping too loudly outside this window too. Almost as if it’s taunting her. But there can't be such thing as avian bullying in the Good Place, and anyway, Good People don't get mad at birds.
Number three: she’s surrounded by books. So many books. They're thick and foreign and super boring-looking, and she figures out exactly who those books and the old-timey blankets and the whole apartment belong to just as he comes through the front door.
“Chidi! Oh thank fork it’s you. You know," she says, trying to make it seem totally normal that she'd be hanging out semi-naked and uninvited in his home, "I was just thinking, how have I never been to Chidi’s house before? We spend so much time in my house, which just seems selfish, cause I never have to go anywhere or even change out of my pajamas if I don't feel like it. And I don't want to be selfish any more! That's the opposite of what we want. And so, you know, I came. To your house. To see it.”
After an awkward beat of silence, he tips his head to the side, his face a politely bemused mask. “I’m sorry, who are you? And, uh, why are you in my apartment?” He looks at her more closely. “Is that... are you wearing one of my blankets?”
Eleanor scoffs, quirking an eyebrow. “Who am I? Are you trying to do, like, a bit? We both know comedy’s not your strong point, bud.”
“I’m so sorry, did we meet at the meeting? There were just so many people, and everything’s so new. It’s a lot to take in.”
“The meeting?” She narrows her eyes in confusion. Meeting? “Wait, is this your first day here?”
“Um, well, yes? It’s everyone’s first day here. Are you alright?”
“Yup, uh huh, right as rain. Cool as a cucumber. Other weird nature metaphors. Um, so I’m Eleanor. Shellstrop. I live—” she gestures in what she guesses is the direction of her house “—I dunno, somewhere that way. And I’m about to say something that will seem extremely bizarre, but, like, we’re dead, so in the face of that it’s not all that crazy.” She looks around, pretending to be admiring his dictionary collection, trying to buy herself a minute.
“Eleanor?” he prompts.
“Right. The thing is. I’m not really supposed to be here."
A warm, kind smile spreads across his face, creases the edges of his eyes, and for a split second he's the Chidi she knows. “I’m sure that’s not true. You heard Michael. This is the Good Place! We’ve all earned the right to be here.”
“No, not like that. Although, yes, also exactly like that, but that’s a different conversation. But what I mean is – and I’m just gonna need you to go with me on this one – I’m not supposed to be here. Now. I don’t even really now when now is.” She chews on her lip, hitches the blanket a little tighter around her. “Okay, see, I’ve been in the Good Place, in this neighbourhood, for a couple of months? And so have you. And you’ve kind of been my moral Yoda, teaching me how not to suck so much as a human. And we were supposed to keep going with Kant today, because according to you I'm 'purposefully misinterpreting 'acts of good will' as sex stuff.' But then all of a sudden I was here instead. So when you said it was the first day, I figured, okay, this is just the past of that. But it seems a little different.” She thinks she should probably feel guilty about all of the information she’s just thrown at him, and then remembers that guilt is a sign of moral reasoning. Heidegger, baby! she silently crows to herself with a flicker of pride, wishing that her Chidi were here so she could rub her learning in his face.
“How did you know I was a moral philosopher?” this Chidi asks instead, taking a small step back as though she’s a particularly skittish animal. “And what do you mean, you thought this was the past? How did you get into my apartment?”
She hates this part. It never goes over well. “I'm, uh, a time traveller."
It does not go over well. His eyebrows shoot straight up, his eyes saucer-round, and he nods slowly.
“Ohhhhh-kaayyyyyy." Another step back, his hands up. "I’m sorry, but I think you need to go. Maribel will be back in a minute, and—"
“Listen, Professor Buzzkill,” and she realizes almost before she says it that if he still hates that nickname back in her time – where he’s been secretly teaching her ethics for a few months and she’s been antagonising him for a few months plus a day and somewhere in amongst it all he’s become her best friend – he’s definitely not going to enjoy it now. “Sorry,” she interrupts herself. He’s not meeting her gaze, seeming incredibly uneasy with the familiarity in her eyes and the fondness of her tone. “Chidi. Just, listen. I know how insane this sounds. I do... wait, who the fork is Maribel?”
“Maribel,” he says, each syllable punctuated with exasperation like he’s talking to an insolent child, “is my soulmate.”
“Yeah, okay. And the Jaguars won eighteen SuperBowls. And now it’s your turn again to say something else totally wrong.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” and she knows he’s telling the truth, because he always does.
“Okay, whenever the hell I just came from, which we’re gonna assume is the future since this is apparently our first day here and all... your soulmate is Mina. And she is annoyingly pretty and well-spoken and she can play the harp, which is literally angelic to the point of almost being smug about it, you know? Anyway, that’s beside the point.” She scrutinizes his face for any sign of recognition. When he mostly just looks baffled at her ramblings, she presses on. “This place is full of one super specific kind of restaurant, right? What is it, sushi? Ice cream?”
“Uh, vegan bakeries,” Chidi answers. “Which you know. Since you have to walk past at least five of them to get here. Look, Eleanor, I...”
“Okay, in the Neighborhood 123whatever that I just left, this same neighborhood, we’ve got Italian restaurants. It's just an endless parade of carb-heavy deliciousness, although they are all gluten-free which kind of defeats the point of pasta, you know? And they’re all called things like The Hokey Gnocchi and Penne For Your Thoughts. And I know you don’t know me yet, but you will, and you’ll realize I’m definitely not clever enough to have made that up on the spot right now. There’s just... things are just a little bit different, then, and they have been from the start, only apparently this is the start.”
He shakes his head in disbelief, and her heart sinks. She wishes she had something more for him, something concrete that Janet could serve him on a literal silver platter as proof. But all she has is her word, and this Chidi doesn't know that sometimes - these days, with him - that's enough.
“I don’t know how to explain it," she tells him. "I don’t know what’s going on. I just know that this? Is not the Good Place that I know, and I don’t think it’s the place I just came from.”
“Look, maybe I should get Michael? He did say some people have trouble adjusting to, uh, dying. Maybe you could talk to him? Or Janet! Janet knows everything.”
“No, I swear, just—” she feels a wave of dizziness, and clutches at his hand urgently “—just listen to me. Please. Something is not right about this. And I can’t explain everything now, but you’re gonna meet me again. I don’t know when, exactly, but soon. Really soon, probably. But the me that you meet... it will be the first time. I won’t know you. This won’t have happened for me yet.”
A look that Eleanor knows all too well by now crosses Chidi’s face. A mixture of the existential pain that her general existence seems to cause him, and the physical pain of the stomach ache that, well, her general existence also seems to bring about.
“Something’s wrong here, Chidi.”
The last thing she sees as she slips away is his incredulity, burning into her, and she has a sudden strange feeling that she's just majorly forked things up for both of them somehow. Something's wrong here.
three.
Salmon.
Eleanor opens her eyes and she’s in a world of salmon. Patchy salmon wallpaper all around, and her back is itchy. She's in Mindy’s house, she identifies after her head clears. More specifically, she’s lying on the slightly prickly carpet of Mindy’s living room, and the little fibres are poking her in the butt, and she's travelled for the second time since she died. At least, it’s the second time that she remembers. She’d been hoping that the first one had been a creepy fluke, but apparently even after everything they’ve been through, she’s not that lucky.
At least Mindy, who has both the luxury and the curse of getting to remember everything, might be able to tell her when she is.
She can hear noises coming from upstairs. A dull banging and muffled voices and a stifled giggle and oh my god it’s her. Her and Chidi, to be specific. She knows that moan very, very well; as well as she knows exactly how effectively his shoulder acts as a silencer to her laugh when she buries her face in the crook of his neck.
The back door opens just as she’s debating whether she can steal her other self’s clothes, since she’s very much not using them at the moment, and Mindy strolls in from the garden carrying a basket of flowers and herbs. “Finally came on board the walking-around-naked train, huh?” she asks with a smirk. “Took you long enough. So, taking a little snack break? Refuelling?"
Eleanor smiles wryly, guiltily, as Mindy abandons her haul and makes her way into the kitchen, bending down to open the fridge. Another smothered laugh floats down from the bedroom. A particularly feminine laugh. Mindy’s head whips back around, and she sizes Eleanor up through narrowed eyes. “Unless Chidi’s doing something to himself up there to make that kind of noise, and I don’t think he’s kinky enough for that because I’ve asked... who the hell are you?”
Eleanor holds her hands up, palms forward. “I’m Eleanor. Really. And that’s also Eleanor up there. It’s a whole big thing, which I swear I will explain, but could you please get me something to cover up with first? I didn’t actually want to, um, board the naked train."
Mindy doesn’t look at all placated, but she nevertheless disappears up the staircase, returning with a baby-blue skirt suit in one hand and a floral bedsheet in the other. “Take your pick.” Eleanor grabs the sheet gratefully, knotting it around her, and then launches into the story that she’s been rehearsing since she was thirteen. She’s told it to exactly six people, and it’s the only thing about herself that she’s never felt the need to embellish.
“So how does it work?” Mindy asks, fascinated, when she’s finished. “You just pop in and out like–” she snaps her fingers sharply “–that?”
Eleanor nods. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Who the fork knows? I found a couple of other people who did it too, just once, tracked them down after some very creepy Internet message board experiences. They called it auto-genetic, said it's something to do with emotional gravity. Which is hilarious because I had as much emotional gravity as the moon, you know? And okay, one time I did accidentally flash Kenny Rogers in the 80s, and I don't think I was very emotionally attached to him. But other than that, I mostly just ended up in my house, or places that meant something to me at some point. I was kinda my only safe space." She trails off, stopping to think. She's never had to tell the ending before. Never had one. "But here, well, you’ve been that for me, I guess. You and Chidi.”
Mindy gives her a leering grin. “Oh, I think you’re the one giving him a “safe space” at the moment.”
Eleanor snorts with laughter and realizes that she really does miss Mindy, in her own strange way. There’s no need for them to go to the Medium Place these days - no way to, either - so she hasn't seen her since Team Cockroach became Team Cockroach. They haven’t given up on the idea of a complete overhaul of the system that divides those destined for the Good or the Bad Places, the finality of it all, but it’s a slow process. She figures that Mindy’s doing okay with her eternal mediocrity, at any rate. The last she’d heard, she’d finally gotten a copy of Cannonball Run 3 to complete her set.
"Do you know how it started?"
"Nope. I didn't even know what was happening at first. I was six or seven, playing outside, and then this blonde woman just appeared in the garden. I didn’t know it was me, then; I thought she was like some cool hobo angel or something. She would just kind of appear every so often, teach me how to forage in bins and break into cars and where people hide their spare change. I thought everyone had one."
“But you don’t control it? You didn't mean to come here?”
“None of it. I didn’t choose when or where to go, or for how long,” Eleanor explains, toying with the fraying edge of the sheet. “Mostly I would go for a few minutes or an hour, sometimes a day. One time it was close to a week. My mom took me to a doctor, once, but I couldn't just make it happen so he didn’t believe me. I don't think she really did, either. She wasn't around enough to see it happen. I guess I just figured it would stop when I did... you know, stopped living. But I also didn’t know about the afterlife, so.” She gestures aimlessly around the pink-walled room. “Here we are.”
Mindy nods, as if processing it all. Then she offers Eleanor a drink.
“You really are my kinda gal. Don't know if I'll have time to finish it, but yeah, I'll take a beer.” They sit at the kitchen bar, and Eleanor's struck by the notion of just how many times she must have sat here, in this exact spot, drinking warm-ish beer with Mindy and trying to change her future. You'd think, she reflects, that I of all people would have known better.
“So when did you come from? The future? You seem a lot happier and a lot less worried about eternal butt spiders," Mindy observes, and Eleanor is reminded once more that underneath the excessive masturbating and the coke addiction and the acerbity of a hundred years alone, Mindy is also as sharp as a tack. Sharp and smart and driven and stuck within these salmon walls for the foreseeable forever. They'd gotten to the Good Place, and Eleanor can't help but feel like it would be gloating. She's not really one to gloat anymore.
"From the real Good Place," she finally tells her anyway, because she owes it to her. They all do. "We made it eventually. Thanks in large part to you. You'll see what I mean."
A smile tugs at the edge of Mindy's lips. "I'm glad," she says sincerely, and Eleanor knows she understands. “So I’ll be seeing you again? It seems like a whole lot of stuff happened between the you here and,” she waves towards the ceiling, “the other you up there.”
“Yeah. At least twelve more times, actually, not that we’ll know it. It takes us a while.” Eleanor considers this, turning it over and over in her head until the right answer resolves itself. “Hey, don’t tell me, okay? That me, or the other me’s that are gonna come knocking eventually. About the travelling, or the future. Not unless I bring it up first, and even then, only answers to anything I specifically ask. I don’t know what went down the first eight hundred reboots, but I travelled once before this, to one of them. I told Chidi everything, then, and I saw what it did to him. I wish I hadn’t. I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I don’t think it was. It didn’t help him, you know? Lying would have helped him. And even though I am obviously, like, a million times cooler than he is, I think knowing about this would only have made it harder. Okay?"
"You don't think you'd want to know that you're here?" Mindy gestures upstairs again, sounding doubtful.
"Nah. It's not gonna matter anyway." She thinks of the first time Chidi had kissed her in the life they know, the momentary completeness of love and wonder and hope. "Let her have this."
Mindy eyes her for a long moment. “Whatever you want,” she finally agrees. “It’s your afterlife. But, just tell me this. At some point, at any point, in any form, do you ever bring me cocaine?”
Eleanor laughs again, deep and genuine, and thinks of Derek and escape trains and exactly how much coke they had agreed amongst them it would take to outweigh the initial disappointment of the wind-chime factor. She can’t spoil that, or make Mindy wait two hundred years for it. “I, uh, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Sorry. The mind wipes got us pretty good every time.”
They fall quiet, just the background noise of rhythmic creaking still coming from the bedroom, punctuated with the occasional headboard thump.
“Wow, we’re really going for it, huh?” Eleanor remarks, and she’s not in the least ashamed of the hint of pride coloring her voice. Because, damn, they really are.
Mindy nods thoughtfully, the spark of an idea lighting up her eyes. “If you want, you could always take a peek. You know, for comparison. I don’t know what it’s like now, all that heavenly sex or whatever, but there is some serious pent up tension being worked off up there. The quiet ones always have the moves.” She eyes Eleanor admiringly. “You guys are way better than anything I’ve managed to cobble together from my books.”
Eleanor pauses. It’s not like she doesn’t get to see Chidi naked on the reg these days, but still, it’s also not like she’s not curious what their first first time was like. She’s seriously considering it when she feels the recognisable tug in her gut, a shiver up her legs and along her spine. She sets her beer down on the bench. “Next time,” she says with a wink as she fades out. “Thanks, Mindy. For real. We're gonna frustrate the shirt out of you, but we owe you everything.”
four.
“Mindy, you pervert!” Eleanor yells into the fish-eye lens whirring at her through the small hole in the wall. She flops back onto the bed with the sheet firmly tucked around her, wedging herself back under Chidi’s arm and settling her head on his chest as his hand fits itself against the curve of her hip.
“What are we gonna do?” she asks him. They can only distract themselves with really (really) good sex for so long before the reality of their unearthly existences needs to be dealt with.
He drums his fingers lightly on her side. “I don’t know. Catching a magic panda is actually starting to sound like a reasonable option."
She snorts. “Wow, we really are in hell if you’re turning to Jason for guidance. Jason. The guy who thought that store mannequins were people who had died in the mall.” When he doesn’t respond she looks up, and he’s staring at the ceiling, lost in thought. “What?”
He chuckles softly, an exhale more than anything. “Nothing. I was just thinking. I don’t, uh... I don’t really want to go back. Now. If what Mindy’s saying is true. If we’re going to get our memories wiped. I don’t want to not... have this.”
She swallows hard, fighting against the lump rising in her throat. “Yeah. Me either,” burrowing back into his side. “You know, we could...” The words fade suddenly, and she coughs, tries again. “We could always...,” but it’s like sandpaper on her tongue. And then she understands what’s about to happen. The hollowness in her voice, the tingle she’s started to feel creep up her legs. Oh, she thinks, because she knows she doesn’t have time for panic or shock even if that’s what she wants to feel. Oh, shirt.
“Hey Chidi?” she says, trying to keep her tone steady. “You remember how you spent, like, two days trying to explain the ethics of time travel to Jason so that he would understand why even in heaven he wouldn’t be allowed to go back and put glue on every football so that the Jaguars would actually be able to hold onto them?”
“Um, yes? Unfortunately. Why?” he turns his head to look at her, and flinches with alarm at her flickering hair, the worn floral pillowcase becoming visible through the strands. “Eleanor, what’s happening? Are you okay? What’s happening?”
“Okay, don’t freak out.” She tries to grasp his hand reassuringly but her fingers are already half gone. “Think of this as, like, a first-hand demonstration of that lesson. I’ll be back to explain, I promise.”
~~~~~
Twenty minutes later, she lands next to the now-empty bed with a thump, slightly dizzy as though she’s stood up too quickly. It’s never the same, the physical feeling of travelling. Sometimes she’s dizzy and sometimes she’s nauseous. Sometimes she feels like she’s taken a couple of bumps of Mindy’s cocaine.
Eleanor finds her bra tangled in the bedsheets, tugs on the clothes that she left scattered on the floor, runs her fingers through her hair to tidy it. She sits heavily on the bed for a moment, running scenarios in her head, figuring out her angle. This part always sucked.
Making her way down the stairs to find Mindy perched at the island bench, a half-finished glass of warm beer in front of her, and Chidi pacing agitatedly at the foot of the stairs. He jumps a little when he sees her and clutches her to him, one palm firm on her back, running strands of her hair through his fingers as though confirming that they’re solid again.
“Eleanor, what the heck was that? Where did you go? What was that?”
She flashes him a shaky grin, then takes a deep breath and waves her hand in mock dismissal. “It’s no big deal, dude. Every now and then, I kind of... time travel? But I mean, who doesn’t, right?” She gently extricates herself from his grasp and collapses backwards onto the couch. If they weren’t in such a pickle, she might enjoy watching the way his eyes bug out of his head.
“I’m sorry, you...”
“She time travels,” Mindy cuts in flatly, before downing her beer, and then it’s Eleanor’s turn for bug-eyed bewilderment.
“What?” She sits up so fast she sees spots for a second. “I mean, I know that, obviously, but how do you know that?”
“It’s happened once before, at least that I've seen,” Mindy informs her. “I wasn't supposed to say anything unless you brought it up first, which ya just did. Yeah, it was like the third time you guys were here? The first time you started getting nasty. I heard you, and so I was about to get nasty with myself, when somehow, another you just kind of popped up in the living room."
Okay, Eleanor thinks. That was easier than I thought it would be. “What happened?”
“We talked about your whole situation, and then I stopped caring, because you didn't have cocaine then either. I asked you if you wanted to watch yourself bone, for research” — Chidi’s forehead scrunches up and his mouth makes a perfect inverted-U of disgust — “and then you were gone again. It did give me some great ideas for my next book." She picks up her pasted- together porn novel, waving it at them as evidence.
“Huh,” Eleanor says thoughtfully. “Not gonna lie, I definitely would have watched us.” She throws Chidi an exaggerated wink, and Mindy smirks in affirmation.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, a mix of curious and hurt.
“Cause we’re dead! I honestly didn’t think it would ever come up again." She turns to look at him properly, squeezing his thigh. "I wasn't trying to hide it, I was trying to forget it. And also, really, unless you see it firsthand, it’s very hard to take me seriously.”
He tilts his head and relaxes his shoulders a bit, as if to say, can't argue with that. “So, how does it work? Where... where did you just go?”
“Here,” she says, and then reconsiders. “Well, there. The neighborhood. One of the other reboots, I guess.” She gestures for him to sit next to her, and he obliges, pulling her in close. “I don't get a say in where or when, I just... go. But I saw you. There were frozen yoghurt shops everywhere and you were letting yours melt to waste, which is criminal considering the endless parade of kebabs we’ve had to put up with here. And Janet was wearing maroon, which was weird, but she totally pulled it off.” She pauses, going over it in her head. “I don’t... I’m pretty sure we weren’t together, then. You seemed very offended by my nudity, which is, not to brag, not the response I’m used to getting from you at the sight of my boobs.”
He smiles a little at that, his gaze dropping briefly downwards.
“Eyes up here, bud. I told you the truth about Michael and the Bad Place. You called me an orthopaedic paradox, which seemed a little rude—”
“An ortho... are you trying to say ontological?”
“—and then I used what you taught Jason to school you on metaphysics. Boom. So hopefully at some point, in some reboot before or after now, we’re using the knowledge bomb I just dropped on you to fork Michael’s day up.” She holds her hand up for a high five, but he hesitates, his face twisted and his eyes panicked.
“Ugh, what?” she asks. “Ohhhh no. I know that face. No! You cannot be questioning my Good Person...ness...hood because of this.”
“Of course I am!" he exclaims. "This is vexing, Eleanor! All of the ethical discussions around the concept of time travel stem from the notion that, if it could even exist, it would have to be voluntary. Permissibility, moral obligation, the argument from moral risk. It’s what I was trying to tell Jason, only with much smaller words.”
“What happens if you go back and kill your grandfather,” Mindy offers from the bar, without looking up from her homemade erotica.
“Right, exactly.” He hesitates. “Well, no, actually, that’s a logician’s question and the grandfather paradox was disproven. But, it’s about choice. Removing choice removes the various rationalization processes behind choice, which introduces a whole new and permanently unknowable factor. Eleanor, from what you said, you don’t actually choose to travel. So it could be argued that ethically, you’re not doing anything wrong because you’re unable to do otherwise. There’s no alternative. Buuuutt...
“... no, no, we can just leave it there,” Eleanor says brightly. “I’m off the hook. I'm permissible!”
“—but,” Chidi continues, ignoring her, “you do make the choice to interact with people and events once you’re there. And that could influence numerous other events in ways you don’t intend, and can’t control. And the consequences of those interactions could have a ripple effect that we can’t even comprehend. This is an entirely new area of thought.” He looks around the living room, forehead creased in mild anguish. “I need my chalkboard.”
“Okay, dude, first of all. Those “interactions”” — Janet had once informed her that the first person to use sarcastic air quotes was now very much in the Bad Place, being tortured with the incorrect over-use of the same, but Eleanor enjoys a dramatic reading of the text — “were things like getting food and clothing and teaching little Eleanor how to pick locks so I could hide out in my neighbour’s garden shed for the night if I needed to. It’s not like I was there cheating on lottery numbers or kidnapping the Lindbergh baby or whatever."
She stops abruptly. "God, why wasn't I cheating on lottery numbers? Think of how rich I could have been!" He huffs, and she doesn't even have to look to know he's wearing his disappointment face. "And then," she backpedals, "I could have used all that dough to, like, buy the Lindberghs another baby. Deworm orphans in Somalia, save the whales, get all horny for the environment, all that nerdy do- gooder stuff. Anyway. Totally not the point, which is that I’m not changing anything! If I’m there, that’s how it happened anyway. Which you know because you taught me that! Well, you taught Jason that, and I eavesdropped.” She huffs in frustration, and then laughs.
“What?” Chidi asks.
“I literally just had this exact conversation with the other you. Compossibility, baby. Anyway. We don't really have time to invent a new chapter of moral philosophy right now, bud. I love you and your morality boner, but I feel like for now, I should just get an ethical free pass here.”
“I love you too,” he murmurs, pointedly ignoring the rest, and drops a kiss on the top of her head. Eleanor curls into him and wonders, not for the first time, if giving up everything else to stay like this in the Medium Place forever wouldn’t be worth it.
five.
Eleanor’s lying in bed, listening to Chidi not sleeping in her guest room, trying to etch her memory with everything good that happened in the Bad Place. Team Cockroach. Her shrimp dispenser. Friends. Tahani’s legs. Beating Vicky at her own game. Chidi. Chidi, again. Tahani's legs again. Chidi with Tahani's legs? It’s the last night she’ll ever have (get) to spend in her Icelandic clown hut, and no matter how desperate she is to leave, to plead their case to the Judge, she’s also not really sure how to say goodbye. She’s not really sure exactly what she’s leaving behind.
Eleanor’s lying in bed, and then all of a sudden she’s not.
~~~~~
Eleanor’s lying in bed, again, in another life (another death? She's never been good with semantics). It’s daylight, and the sun is shining aggressively onto her comforter through the too-big window. For a minute she questions whether Michael’s done something. Rebooted them again, for some reason, reverted back to his torture-happy former self. But she has her memories, and she doesn’t have her clothes, so she knows it’s a different kind of torment. At least it’s the kind she’s used to.
She’s alone in the house, and she wonders where her other self is. The clock reads 8.20am (Michael had informed her, back before she’d figured out his ruse, that people liked the structure of a day, of comfortingly measurable periods of light and dark, of time, even if there was no need for it here. She’d bitten her tongue. For once, she’d thought, she could have taught him something), and Eleanor can’t imagine that in any reboot, she voluntarily did anything this early.
She finds her answer in the pile of clothes on the kitchen floor, pooled neatly on top of each other. If this is her other self’s first time travelling in the afterlife as well, she hopes she’s gone to one of the good reboots. Michael had said something about there being baby alpacas in one of them, hadn’t he? Or baby llamas, or baby... something furry and kinda weird. It’s nice to think that her other self might be playing with tiny farm animals right now, somewhere in time. A whole lot nicer than some of the alternatives that she knows about now.
She doesn’t want to risk going out into the neighborhood, in case she disappears in the middle of the square and gives the whole game away. Instead, she meanders around the house for a half hour or so, waiting for her other self to return. Or to be returned herself to her own time. Neither happens.
At 9.00 on the dot, just as she’s contemplating whether she can get Janet to bring her some frozen yoghurt (if they even have it in this reboot? Oh god, she hopes it’s not clam chowder again. Surely Michael, as evil as he was, hadn’t made them live through that more than once), Chidi lets himself in the door, calling a hello. He’s juggling two coffees and a box of pastries and a pile of books and a brand-new packet of chalk, all precariously stacked, and her heart flip-flops. Does she pretend to be the Eleanor from this attempt, and pray that her other self doesn’t come back in the meantime? Does she tell him the truth? Does she make a run for it and hope that Tahani has a gigantic garden maze she can hide in?
“Ready for today’s lesson?” he asks, somehow managing to unload everything safely onto the thin wood slab of the coffee table. Her gaze wanders to the blackboard behind him. Categorical Imperative, it reads. Perfect vs imperfect duties. Scrawled in smaller, messier letters underneath is they’re out of Kantrol. Eleanor has never been prouder of her self.
“Eleanor? Are you ready?” he repeats.
Oh, fork you, Kant. She knows what she has to do. She thinks she knows. She hopes. “Um, I’m not Eleanor. Well, I am, obviously, but I’m not your Eleanor. I mean, I’m not this Eleanor. I’m not the Eleanor from now.”
He peers at her in confusion as he takes a sip of his coffee, eyes made even wider by the thick lenses of his glasses. “Is this... are you doing some sort of practical examination of Gunnarson? Because that was just a thought experiment, he concluded it would never actually happen. Also, I told you not to read that chapter, it’s not going to explain anything.”
She smiles, biting her lip as she feels tears begin to unexpectedly prick the corners of her eyes. There have been eight hundred versions of this Chidi, his brain still grinding at full volume, who never made it as far as the one waiting for her back in the future. She misses them all: the times he didn’t fall in love with her or she with him, the times she drove him to near-insanity with her ethical flexibility, the times she wanted to strangle him for being unable to pick out a turtleneck. She doesn’t remember them, but she knows they’re a part of him, and so she misses them all the same. “That’s my guy.”
He shakes his head in affectionate bemusement. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay? We can pick this back up this afternoon.”
“Yup. Nope. Can you, um, can you sit down?”
She doesn’t know what to tell him, so she tells him everything. About the travelling, about the reboots, about the Bad Place. About the eight hundred times they’ve forked up Michael’s plan, no matter what scenario he crafted. About how the bones of Team Cockroach, the glue that’s held the four of them together throughout countless hereafters, existed in some form or another long before it had a name.
“We figure it out – well, usually I figure it out, or so I’ve been told, not to brag – and then Michael resets our memories and tries again,” she finishes. “Only this time, my time, the time I just came from... well, I don’t want to spoil it. Let’s just say he doesn’t.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he says, and she rolls her eyes a little because it’s totally that he doesn’t believe her. “It’s just... that sounds crazy.”
She pats his shoulder supportively. “I know. It’s okay. I probably wouldn’t believe me either. Oh, by the way? You secretly suspect you don’t belong in the Good Place because of your weird guilt trip over almond milk,” she adds, because as fun as forking with him a little might be, she doesn’t know how much time she’s got. “And you wore ugly red cowboy boots for way too long because of some messed-up sense of duty.”
“I never told you that,” he stammers. "I've never told anyone that."
“You will,” she says simply, and she can tell the exact moment it clicks in his brain that she’s not doing some sort of weird long-form role play. That this is real.
“Wait, just... no." His voice is quavering, just a little, and Kant is mocking her from behind him. "Because, see, even if we leave aside the time travelling thing, what it sounds like you’re saying that this is some sort of... joke? Being played on us. That we’re not in the Good Place.”
“That’s pretty much it, yeah.”
“... and this is just going to keep happening? We’re going to keep being here. In the Bad Place.”
“Yeah," she confirms, feeling like the world's biggest bench, because what else can she say? "But you won’t know, until you do. And then you won’t again. You won’t get to remember this, just like you don’t remember any of the other ones.”
His eyes are impossibly round and she can see his throat tensing with distress. “Eleanor, why would you... what do I do... I don’t know what to do with all of that.”
She smiles softly at him, an expression she wonders if he’s even seen from the Eleanor he knows in this reboot, and cups his cheek. “I know. And I know you’ve got a killer stomach ache right now, and I’m sorry. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you helped me. And you did it before and you’re going to keep doing it. You always help me, every time. Whatever Michael tries to tell you, you’re a good person, Chidi. That’s what matters.”
There’s a distinctive thudding noise in the bedroom, accompanied by a muted yelp, as she begins to disappear. Her other self returning from whenever she’d been, thanks to the universe's impeccable sense of timing. She hopes they take it easy on each other. He with their immediate fates in his uncertain hands, and she unable to guarantee she'll stick around even if she wants to. She hopes he'll still want to help her. She hopes she did the right thing.
~~~~~
Eleanor’s lying in bed, listening to Chidi not sleeping in her guest room, his stricken face playing on a loop behind her eyes. Team Cockroach. Chidi. Tahani's legs. Chidi. What the fork did Kant know about the value of lying? There’s a tightness in her chest, threads of sorrow and remorse and impossible yearning all knotted together that feel like she's suffocating. I don't know what to do with all of that. She thinks she finally gets what her ex-boyfriend had meant when he'd told her one time, in that same strangled tone, that she’d never understand what it was to be the one who had to stay and wait.
six.
“— you always go back,” Mindy finishes. With the tedium of a professor telling a freshman class to read the forking syllabus for the hundredth time, she’s just informed them that this is the tenth time they’ve muddled their way to the Medium Place. Eleanor, mind reeling, is motionless next to Chidi on the couch. Janet has positioned herself in the corner, seeming content to stand and smile at Mindy's houseplants.
“Okay. So the question is, what do we do next?” Chidi starts to ask. He’s interrupted by another Eleanor dropping out of thin air, landing unceremoniously at the foot of Mindy’s stairs and giving the group a eyeful of her junk. The four of them gawk at the intruder, long enough for her to mouth “what the fork?,” and then just as quickly, Eleanor’s other self is gone again.
Eleanor thinks on her feet and starts to fumble out an excuse, but Chidi turns to her first, mouth hanging open. “Wait.”
“Oh. Oh! Yeah.”
"So, that?”
“Yup.”
“You... you really weren’t joking? It wasn’t some elaborate excuse to get out of reading Parminedes?”
“Dude, no. I told you. Why would I joke about that? Although, it definitely worked in my favor there, because you got so worked up that I never even had to deal with ol' Parmesan Cheese.”
"But did you know that— I mean, that here, you could still—"
"Well, I do now. And I gotta say, I don't love it."
In unison, their heads swivel to face Mindy, as if only just remembering that there was another witness. “Okay, that probably requires some explaining,” Eleanor begins, clasping her hands together. “Um, well, when I was alive, I had a little problem with staying in the one place. Not in a flaky way. Well, okay, also in a flaky way. But also in a... temporal way? The way that you might, say, take a quick trip back in time to take your twelve-year-old self to buy tampons, or be at a bar with your friends one night and go to the bathroom and the next minute end up handcuffed naked to a bike rack in 1998?" Chidi pats her knee encouragingly.
"Oh,” Mindy says. “Okay.” Unbothered, she goes back to searching a water-stained novel for the next word to construct her amateur erotica. Eleanor shoots Chidi an astonished look, which he returns it with a helpless eyebrow raise. A shiver of something prescient rattles her spine, icy even in the eternal medium-heat of the desert.
“In my experience,” Eleanor says carefully, suspiciously, “when you hit someone with the old “hey, by the way I’m a time traveller” whammy, they’re pretty forking stunned. I mean, I gave my great-aunt a literal heart attack. Although, you know, she was a racist so that kinda worked out. But you’re not even a little shocked.”
Mindy rolls her eyes. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s the afterlife. You just took a train here from hell driven by a sentient all-knowing database. Time travel doesn’t seem like such a stretch after that, you know?”
Eleanor shakes her head and stands up, walking the length of the room, feeling like a television detective. She wishes she had a whiteboard to scribble on. “When I told Chidi, he didn’t believe me for, like, a month. And even then it was only when Janet did her creepy “I know every detail about your life” thing and confirmed it. Which, way to be insulting, man. Don’t believe the girl you’re sleeping with when she tells you something deeply personal, but absolutely take the robot’s word for it.”
“Not a robot,” Janet pipes up cheerfully from the other side of the room.
“In my defence,” Chidi argues, “when you ask someone why they have such an oddly strong stance against Kenny Rogers, you very rarely expect the answer to be ‘because I time travelled to the recording session for ‘We Are The World’ and he seemed like a real ash-hole.”
“I also said he was weirdly hot for an older guy! If you’re gonna tell the story, tell it right, jeez.” She turns her attention back to Mindy. “Anyway. It's not just because it's the afterlife. You weren't just not surprised, it's like you knew. Wait. It's exactly like you knew. Motherforker. You knew. I've travelled here before, haven't I?”
Mindy sighs in resignation. and heaves the large, violently average watercolor of an 80s rockstar off from atop her fireplace. There are nine index cards taped to the back, along with a tightly folded sheet of paper wedged between the frame and the cheap cardboard backing.
“You guys” — she waves her hand between them — “have been here nine times looking for help, like I just said. But on four of those visits, and six other random times, you” — directed at Eleanor — “have either shown up from sometime else or gone sometime else.” She plucks the paper out and unfurls it to reveal a short list of dates and names and fragmented memories.
“The very first time, the travelling you told me not to tell the other you unless the other you – the you that’s supposed to be in the version you’re in – specifically ask,” Mindy adds with a shrug. “So I did when you did, and I didn’t when you didn’t, even though it kinda doesn’t matter because Michael keeps wiping your brains so both of the yous forget it happens.” She drops back into the armchair. “All this time, keeping your secret, and you can’t even manage to bring me one tiny bit of cocaine. Not one.”
Eleanor scans the list, trying to absorb the scale of it. “Holy shirtballs." She'd made a list like this for herself once, in another time and place and life, and it had kept her alive. It didn't need to anymore. She's not sure how to deal with that.
“So, wait, do you know anything about what’s gonna happen?" she asks. The archive of her visits is sketchy and incomplete, an outline needing color, and it seems to end right before the important part. Mindy couldn't have known the right questions to ask, annd Eleanor's other selves couldn't have answered them anyway. "Have I ever popped in and been like, ‘oh hey, we actually figured out how to beat Michael and now we’re in the real eternal paradise with an endless rain of shrimp, what have you been up to?”
Mindy regards her for a too-long second, long enough to make Eleanor wonder if maybe some stuff hadn't made it onto that little scrap of paper. “Nope,” she finally says. “Sorry. I don’t know anything concrete. You never even know when you’re from, or where you went. It’s really kind of annoying for me.”
“Okay, well that’s just uncool. Time travel and memory loss should not be allowed to mix.”
“Yeah,” Mindy says, now flicking uninterestedly through a People magazine from 1982. “I know. You complain about that every time.”
“It probably sucks every time,” Eleanor retorts, biting the urge to stick out her tongue. There’s a simmering frustration just underneath her skin, a niggling feeling that there's something that she should know, just beyond her reach. She hates it. Her past and future are a hopelessly intertwined patchwork of weirdness, sure. But it’s hers, and no one else had ever been given fragments of it like this before. She huffs out a disgruntled breath and sags back down onto the couch next to Chidi. His attention is still fixed on Mindy’s list, his brow furrowing deeper every time he re-reads it.
“What is it?” she asks him.
“Why doesn’t Michael do something?” he questions, studying the paper warily. “If he knows about our lives on Earth, he must know that you do this. And if he’s the one controlling this whole thing, he must have seen it happen before. If you've travelled here at least ten times, you've probably gone to other reboots too. Why isn’t he stopping you?”
Eleanor scoffs. “He might actually be the one who’s letting it keep happening," she suggests, but it lacks the disdainful nonchalance she'd been aiming for, ends up somewhere around bittersweet. "Gotta admit, it’s a pretty benchin’ way to torture me.”
“I don’t think so,” Chidi says, finally tearing his gaze from the the list and looking up at her. There's so much tenderness in his gaze when his eyes meet hers that she feels itchy. “It says here that every time except the first, the you that was travelling told the other you what was going on if you could. You must have messed up Michael’s plan dozens of times now, across it all. Why would he be the one orchestrating this when it keeps destroying what he’s trying to accomplish?”
“What if—"
“He can’t control it,” Mindy interrupts. “Don't get me wrong, I’d love to watch you and the professor here contort yourselves into tiny existential knots over this. But he can't stop it. Just like he can’t stop you guys taking Janet and coming here every time you get that far. He’s a supernatural demon, and kind of a sexy massive douche from what you’ve told me, but he can’t control your free will. None of them can. If whatever... thing,” wiggling her fingers in the direction of Eleanor’s forehead, “that makes this happen somehow stayed with you when you died, he’s not the one pulling the strings.”
“Okay, but—” Chidi tries.
“I don’t know how it’s happening. And I gotta be honest with you, I stopped caring, because it never ends in me getting cocaine. But Eleanor, you told me once that on Earth, you usually travelled when you needed a safe place. And apparently, my living room and Chidi are your safe places now. So something drags you back here, or to him, from wherever you are when you need it, and not even Michael can stop it.” Mindy resumes paging through the magazine she’s read 293 times. “The universe remembers, even if you don’t.”
seven.
Eleanor hears the front door open seconds after she finds herself sprawled behind her couch on the coarse, scratchy excuse for carpet that covers half her living room floor. She allows herself the luxury of a half second of dread – she’s travelled, she’s naked, she really just wants to go back to being curled up with Chidi in Mindy’s makeshift sex den despite everything that had led to them being there, and she’s about to have a shirt-ton of explaining to do – and then pops her head up above the orange pleather.
“Chidi!” Speaking of. “Fork. I mean, hey! You’re here.”
“Eleanor? I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d be home already,” he says as he makes his way towards the coffee table, holding a large cup of frozen yoghurt. “I just needed to grab a book I left and whhyyyyyyyyyy are you naked?” He tries to cover his eyes while also turning his back and scrabbling for his book, his free hand flailing behind him. She gathers from his panicked response that whenever she is now, he and the Eleanor here haven’t gotten to the sexy stuff yet.
“Well, it’s a funny story,” she says as blithely as she can manage, scooting across the floor and stretching for the dress she can see thrown over one of the dining room chairs. God bless you, you messy bench, she silently thanks her other self as she pulls it on. “You can open your eyes now, Mother Teresa, I’m decent. Well. I’m covered."
He drops his hand and stares at her, a rabbit trapped in some very confusing headlights. She pastes what she hopes is a reassuring smile on her face. “Sorry. I have a completely normal and totally not weird explanation for this.”
“Whattttttt is going on?”
She realises a little too late that she does not, in fact, have a completely normal and totally not weird explanation for why she was hiding naked behind her couch. “If I said I’m a time traveller and that I lose my clothes when I travel, what are the chances you’d believe me?” Hey, he was the one who was always harping on about the whole honesty thing. Here she was. Being honest.
He laughs, regarding her with the same mystified ‘are you a complete idiot?’ look she’d once given a waiter who had asked her if she really needed a third helping of free chips and guac. “Uh. Well. Very slim, I would say.”
“Okay. Yeah, that's fair. Well, then. Um. Oh, fork it, I can’t actually think of anything else, so... I’m a time traveller?”
“You could have just said it was none of my business,” he says, rolling his eyes and backing towards the door. “I’m sorry to have disturbed... whatever’s going on here, I really didn’t think you’d be home. How did you even beat me back? I know you didn’t run, because you claimed you were, quote, allergic to it.”
She steps forward, one hand reaching for him to still his retreat. “Chidi, I promise, I’m actually not joking around,” she says, much more softly. “When you came in, you were surprised that I was home. Where did you think I was?”
“You took Tahani to get frozen yogurt because you said the little spoons look even funnier when she’s holding one.”
Eleanor snorts in unexpected delight. “They totally would! Cause she's a giant!”
“I walked there with you and left the two of you trying to choose between ‘You're the Thinnest at Your 10-Year-Reunion’ and ‘Beyoncé Compliments Your Hair’. Only apparently I didn’t, because you’re here, and you’re being very weird.”
“Who would— actually, no, that’s a really tough choice. Those sound great, I definitely want both of those. Okay, focus. Janet?”
Janet blinks into the rooms. “Hi there!”
“Hey Janet. Oh, cute outfit!” because even though she’s short on time (which she’ll be the first to admit is pretty ironic, considering), is she supposed to not notice this Janet’s bold new maroon- paisley combination? “This is gonna sound a little weird. Would you do me a huge favor and just pop over to the frozen yogurt place and see if, uh, I’m also there?”
"Would you like me to go to Yogurt Acres, Yogurt Horizons, Yogurt Forever, Yogurt Only Until Midnight...”
“Wow, there’s a lot of frozen yogurt places,” Eleanor murmurs in disbelief. She looks at Chidi expectantly.
“Uh, Yogurt Yoghurt Yogurté,” he supplies. “They have the smallest spoons, which as you insist on pointing out every time you go there, is annoying because they also have the chunkiest toppings.”
“Sure thing!” Janet winks out, and reappears in an instant. “Eleanor is with Tahani, eating a double serving of ‘WWE Smackdown Goes Into Overtime.’ But... Eleanor is also here. I’m not sure I understand what’s happening, and I understand everything.”
“Don’t worry about it. Thank you, Janet!”
Eleanor takes a seat on the couch once Janet has disappeared again, waiting for Chidi to unfreeze. “Is it cool if I eat this?” she asks, picking up the frozen yogurt monstrosity that he’d abandoned on the coffee table and taking his silence as a yes. “Chidi? You doing okay there, bud?” He’s rooted to his spot in front of the kitchen island. “Chidi, I don’t want to be a bummer, but I don’t really know how long we’ve got. Kinda need you to work with me here."
He blinks in rapid succession, taking his glasses off and wiping at the lenses as though everything will make sense once their smudges have been cleaned. “You’re not my– I mean, you’re not the Eleanor I know.”
“No, I am. I’m the same person. I’m just her from the future. Or the past? It’s hard to tell, since I guess we get to keep these rockin’ bods for eternity.”
“You can... time travel.”
“Yes. Even though we’re dead. I don’t actually know how that works. Huh. I guess time still exists in the afterlife? Philosophise that.”
“You can travel. Through time.” Like a record, stuck in a particularly deep groove.
“Yup. Travel. Time. Time travel. We covered that. I know it’s a lot, it’s just, I don’t usually hang around too long and there’s a shirt-load of stuff I feel like I need to tell you, so."
Chidi stops repeating the words ‘time travel’ and just gapes at her.
“Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “Here goes. Um. So. This is really the Bad Place and Michael is actually torturing us all by making us think it’s the Good Place and every time we figure it out he resets our memories and tries again and I don’t know how many times he’s done it but I must have come from one of those other reboots because we don’t have frozen yoghurt and also none of this happened.” It comes out almost as a single word all strung together. Also, we’re totally banging and I love you more than Steve Austin, she wants to add, but figures that she’s dumped enough on him for now. That little nugget might actually send him over the edge.
“What?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“This is the Bad Place?”
“Okay, yeah, take a minute with that.” She spoons some more froyo into her mouth, and it's cold and creamy and so close to being real ice cream she could weep. “Oh my god this is almost amazing. What flavor is it? It tastes the way clean sheets feel on your legs.”
He’s still staring at her in shock. “But - and I have approximately seven hundred and eighty questions, but this is the first - if you know this, all of this, why haven’t you done something?”
She rolls her eyes. “First of all, you can take your judgement pants off, it’s not that easy. You didn’t even have to figure it out for yourself like we did, I just handed it to you all nice and neat. And we’re trying. Whenever I just came from. We’re trying, we're always trying.” And then, remembering five index cards taped to the back of a crappy portrait, an idea hits her with unexpected force. “Oooh, you know what? You should see how long you can make Michael think you don’t know. Turn the tables on him.”
“Eleanor, I don’t think—"
“No, do think! Think about it!” She jumps up off the sofa and stands in front of him, eager to try and help him. “If you know it’s torture, it’s not really torture, right? All the little things that don’t seem quite right... you’d know why! You wouldn’t have to keep worrying about why all that stuff is happening in the Good Place, because it’s not. I mean, it’s not the Good Place. They’re definitely happening. Like, we had to go on a picnic with balloons in the middle of a cactus farm, that’s how I figured it out in the time I’m from. Balloons. What a giveaway, right? No one actually likes having to deal with balloons. They’re so fragile and needy.”
She takes his hands in hers, squeezing lightly. “I just think it could make things so much easier,” she adds. “For everyone,” and she’s only a little ashamed of how she’s manipulating him.
“What, uh, what do I tell Eleanor? I mean, you. I mean, her. I mean... I don’t actually know what I mean.”
“The truth?” Eleanor offers with a shrug. “You’ve never lied to me before, like, you’re terminally incapable of it, so why start now? I’ll believe you. I always do,” she reassures him, and it’s true.
He shakes out of her loose hold and paces around the room, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “This isn’t right, though. This can’t actually be happening. It can’t. You being here is an ontological paradox.”
“Not really,” she says, wholly unconcerned, settling back onto the couch and digging into the yogurt once more. She licks the spoon with a sigh of satisfaction before pointing it at him reproachfully. “Trust me, my dude, you should just enjoy this while you can. I can't believe you got frozen yoghurt. Sometimes you get stuck with kebabs, and they’re always just a little awkwardly wrapped so that the sauce drips on your top in public, which should really have been a sign that things weren’t right, and... anyway. I’m not changing the past, or the future, or whatever this is. I’m just here... I’m part of it, for this hot minute. It is how it is, this is how it was always gonna be. The only things that can happen are the things that did happen. So, we’re good. As far as the theory of compossibility goes, anyway.”
Chidi halts halfway through his eighth anxious lap of the door-kitchen-patio loop, staring at her incredulously. “You... you’ve read Leibniz?”
She grins back at him, bright and wide. “You’ll teach me. Remember, see how long you can fork with Michael,” as her fingers start to fade from their grip on the damp cardboard container.
‘How long’ turns out to be another seven months, for eleven in total. It’s their record.
eight.
Eleanor has some twisty feelings about time (Chidi would call them "an understandable response to confronting a concrete experience of eternalism.” Chidi has called them "an understandable response to confronting a concrete experience of eternalism," right to her face, before she'd even had her coffee. But Chidi has a lot of too-big theoretical words that all just mean "fucked up", in the end, so she's sticking with "twisty.") She went to her ninth birthday party when she was thirty-one, and skipped out of middle school science to hold her own hair back while she puked after a frat party. She's had more of it stolen from her than she’ll ever know, and yet has an eternity still somehow unfolding out ahead of her. Time rearranges itself around her, again and again, and she can't do anything except try to keep up.
She travels much less than she did in life, at least, as far as she can remember. She’s gone an effectively immeasurable, but definitely lengthy, stretch now without an incident. It’s been years, probably, since she sat in Mindy’s living room and asked her for yet another favor; one more mark on the long list of things that Eleanor owes her. Maybe it’s even been decades. It’s not like it matters anymore.
She’s sprawled out on a picnic blanket in the perpetual warm-but-not-too-hot sunlight, half-asleep with her head in Chidi’s lap, the next time it happens. She’s told him everything, and he’s witnessed it once, so he’s not too alarmed when she grips his hand tightly. “I gotta go,” she tells him in a raspy tone, and then she does.
She lands back in her Icelandic modernist bathroom in the fake Good Place once more. She fleetingly dares to hope that her other self is out somewhere in the neighborhood, and that she can just hide out here until she goes back. A hesitant call for Janet from the living room, and the footsteps coming toward her, shatter that notion.
“Oh, you’ve got to be forking kidding me,” comes the exasperated reaction from the door, which tells Eleanor that this is the first time it’s happened in whatever reboot she’s wound up in. She makes an apologetic face at her self – who seems younger, even though they don’t age in the afterlife; or maybe just tougher, closer to the abrasiveness she wore like armor on Earth – and grabs a towel to cover up.
“We’re still keeping it tight, I see,” her other self says, after giving her the once-over, and she has to laugh. The obsession with cataloguing her physical features is clearly a knee-jerk reaction, one that isn't stifled even by eternal agelessness. They high-five over the prospect of being hot for the rest of time.
“When are you from?” her other self asks next, as she had done every time she encountered herself while travelling. For the first time, though, Eleanor doesn't how to answer.
She recalls what she had asked of Mindy, the time before the last. Don’t tell me. I think knowing about this would only have made it harder. She doesn’t know how to explain to her self the when and how if it all, that the three or three hundred years separating the two of them will feel like days. She’d spent so much of her life wishing the multiplicity of her selves to be gone, and now there are eight hundred versions of Eleanor-past that she’ll never be allowed to remember unless she involuntarily drops in on them, collecting fragments of her previous selves like tiny precious souvenirs.
She'd wished her self away, and her mother had always told her that she’d get what she wished for.
She’s never lied to her self before, but it’s for the best. It has to be. “A while away yet,” and she knows exactly how annoyed and unsettled she would have been by that answer, but it’s all she’s got. Not wanting to give this unknowing version of herself anything more to deal with, she heads through the living room and hauls herself up onto the bedroom platform instead of hitting the button for the stairs. She roots around in the drawers for the soft grey Michigan sweater she’d come to love (thankfully, Michael had remained consistent in giving her clothing branded from a college she'd then have to pretend to have attended), pulls it on with a wave of melancholy.
“How long have you been here?” she asks when she hops back down, eyeing the living area intently. There’s barely anything on the shelves and the clown paintings have been re-arranged, but she doesn’t know if that her self’s own doing or Michael’s. She runs her fingers along the top of one of the frames, tipping it slightly to the right so that it sits evenly.
“Like, two days? And I am freaking out,” her other self says. She recounts her predicament in a voice so brittle it could crack, and Eleanor could swear her heart stops from the ache. In the moment, she wants so badly to tell her everything that’s happening, that will happen. She's spent a lifetime looking out for her self, how can she stop now?
“Yeah, well. The thing about that, is,” she begins, and then she can’t. I think knowing about this would only have made it harder. I saw what it did to Chidi. It didn’t help him. I wish I hadn't. She can’t. The other Eleanor will find Chidi in this reboot, like she did every time, and they’ll take it from there. Together. She's not her only safety net anymore.
And then Eleanor feels herself begin to fade away. She exhales in relief, allows herself this instance of selfishness by thanking the universe for giving her an easy out. “Shirt. Okay. I won’t have time to explain,” she tells this her, whichever one it is. “You’ll figure it out. You always do.” And they could be in attempt six or sixty or six hundred right now, it wouldn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered. Even if Eleanor can’t, or won’t, tell her self anything else, she should hear this.
"We make it eventually, okay? We’re okay.”
And then she’s back in the Real Good Place, with Chidi, the sky a perfect blue dotted with popcorn clouds and the grass soft against her skin. They did. They are.