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SECOND DEALING
God reclined back in Her seat as the last fragments of creation dissolved into ash. Smoke and flecks of golden light, a firestorm swept into a swirl and a crash, all of it gone in less than a human instant.
But She lingered in it for some time. If God was to create a Godless universe, She could spare a few moments, the human equivalent of a millennia, to reflect on Her last project before starting the new one.
She considered her Supreme Archangel, how he’d kissed his fingertips and pressed them to the mouth of a demon. The last eyes to meet in all the universe, the last hands to clasp, walked together into eternal dark on the promise of a second chance.
What is it She had agreed to, exactly?
Another round of human life on Earth, in all of its mundane glory. Free will. No one said anything about the propriety of dropping a couple of Her creations into play—not fate or destiny, but rather a bit of… artistic license. Everyone seemed to like the Earth, after all, and she had made that, too.
True to Her word, She wouldn’t meddle. She would bow out of the picture not a moment after flipping the switch on the Big Bang, nothing more than a dealer spreading a pair shuffled cards on the table, face-down. Two souls born into real, human lives might never encounter one another in this new world.
See, the trick is to never think of it as a trick. The last six thousand years had pretty much proved that.
Only after the most unexpectedly charming dinner of Anthony Crowley’s life, only after spotting his new copy of Arthur Eddington’s book on the passenger seat of his Bentley, did he remember what kind of a day he was having before he walked into that bookshop.
It had started on morning five of a migraine so intense that he came-to looking over the edge of the Centurial Bridge, with no recall of having dragged himself there.
Anthony was prone to migraines. The first fell upon him in his second year of grad school, and since then they came prowling every few months, brandishing kaleidoscope vision and a spiked flail.
A one-day attack he could manage well enough by now; lay low and rest if he could (ideal), push through if he couldn’t (a dangerous burning of future capital, often prolonging the ordeal). Two days became disruptive, and three could put him in a clinic if he didn’t watch his step—which only made things worse, as the clinic never knew what to do with him but shine more light in his eyes and push pills that helped absolutely fuck-all when they stayed down. Day four was a total loss.
Anthony hadn’t spilled into day five of a migraine in years, but this is where he tended to end up when it happened.
His semi-conscious self had at least put on clothes, albeit an absurd lavender tracksuit from who knows where in his closet. He hadn’t removed his sunglasses in days. The toes of his orange trail-runners poked out over the bridge’s edge, no more than a steel beam at waist-height between himself and terminal velocity. He had no clue what time it was, just that it was late enough for the rush-hour beeps and rumbles behind him to perforate his skull, which felt encephalitic with pressure.
He’d never jumped before. Obviously. But this time, to the extent Anthony was capable of thinking, he was really thinking about it. He was already clinging to one of the diagonal steel cables for support. Assuming he had the strength to pull himself up, all he’d have to do is let go and the rest would follow.
Just then, someone tried to shove him off the bridge.
Or that’s what it seemed like to Anthony, who only felt something solid connect with his left hip and then, seeing an explosive starscape in his already-fogged vision, grabbed the cable in both hands to stop himself from going over the edge. Then from the outer periphery of his sunglasses came a flash of gold, followed by the (late) ting-ting! chime of a bell, and an already-distant “So sorry!” as the cyclist swerved back into the bike lane with a backwards wave of apology.
Still clutching the bridge cable for what suddenly felt like dear, dear life, Anthony suppressed a dry heave as his brain did yet another somersault in his head. As his breath gradually slowed, his hip began to throb with the promise of a black-and-purple welt. That was when he realized that his vision had cleared.
Cautiously, and only after glancing around for any more rogue cyclists, he lifted the sunglasses enough to sneak a taste of that bright blue morning light. No more stabbing in his eye sockets.
By the time Anthony reached home, the migraine had subsided enough for a few bites of toast and a handful of ibuprofen. A cold shower further restored his faculties, and somehow he managed to get himself out the door in time for class—previously out of the question, he’d already written in to his TA asking for coverage. The TA was relieved to see him appear five minutes before the start of lecture, gratefully excused herself back to the observatory for research, and left him to the students.
About halfway through his lecture on orbital dynamics, the second bizarre thing happened. A student in the third row raised their hand and asked whether any other planets were actually known to exist within the circumstellar habitable zone and confirmed to have conditions sufficient to support human life. And Anthony, without hesitation, answered, “Certainly.”
Then a long pause—not from the students, who were first years and had no idea that he’d just said something entirely false with all the confidence of the Prime Minister lying to a journalist. But from Anthony, who felt and had to physically stop his mouth from saying the words, “It’s called Macan Prime.”
Anthony quickly corrected himself and moved on before anyone could look too puzzled about it, but he dismissed the lecture precisely on time and fled to the library, where he spent the rest of the day searching for the so-called Macan Prime and even a nougat, a crumb, of confirmation that something by that name was even theorized to exist. After exhausting the internet (admittedly not his strongest terrain, though fastest by far) he pulled every astrophysics book from the shelves and flipped through every index on extra-terrestrial habitable life.
In the background of this search was a notion that he dismissed as post-migraine hilarity, but which continued to lurk over his shoulder as a know-it-all research assistant: that he not only knew, knew, deep in his synapses that this planet existed, but that he had made it himself.
It was on the heels of this frenzy, and clouded with migraine hangover, that Anthony stepped into a SoHo bookshop and forgot all of his problems for two precious minutes.
Anthony had a lovely dinner with a perfect stranger. That night, he slept for twelve hours straight and awoke the next morning in full-blown psychosis.
“Mr. Crowley, you’d better pay up if you’re going to keep squatting on prime real estate.”
“Right—thank you, Mrs. Sandwich—” Anthony felt for his wallet and pulled a few bills without taking his full attention from the window. It was more than enough to cover the tea and his untouched plate, but when the purveyor continued to glower at him, he added a few more bills to the pile.
She tracked his gaze across the street. “Nice view, innit?” she said smartly.
As if on cue, the bookshop’s front door opened. Anthony ducked for cover when Asa stepped out onto the curb, adjusting his scarf. Mrs. Sandwich made an unimpressed, pitying sort of sound.
“Just quit the primary school rubbish and go talk to him.”
“I can’t,” Anthony said, chancing a glance over the table to watch Asa turn down the street. His profile, just the glimpse of it, nearly put Anthony into fits.
“You’ve been camped out here all week. That’s headed towards stalking in my book.”
Mrs. Sandwich scooped up the money and left him there, half-stooped with his pulse racing until Asa disappeared from sight. Stalking seemed a fair assessment, though stalling was the better word. Anthony had spent the first week trying to decide whether to submit himself to the nearest psychiatric hospital. The second week he’d spent coming to grips with the new—old—reality that had dropped, fully-formed, into his head. For most of the third week, he was here.
His name was Anthony J. Crowley. The “J” wasn’t just a “J.” He’d been born and raised, had grown up, gone to school, gone through puberty and the whole rest of it, taught himself astrophysics from scratch. He’d had a fairly typical period of teenage existentialism—leather jacket, angsty music screaming from the sub-woofers, cigarettes and late nights on the roof with a rotating cast of characters also in leather and jeans—and eventually come out the other side without internalizing too much of it. Some amount of rebellious spirit was, apparently, an inexorable part of him.
Anthony had buried his mother, an extraordinarily bright but troubled woman, two days after securing tenure at a top-ranking university. He had one aunt who still wrote from time to time. He knew how to sew but couldn’t be bothered to mend his own clothes. As a teen, he once fell asleep stargazing in an open field and woke up surrounded by farm kids who thought they were poking a dead body with sticks. He knew, as much as he knew anything, that the universe began when a big bang kick-started a billions-year course to Earth and eventually life.
Yet now, he also recalled facing down Satan with a tire iron and mouthing off at God about how to run the universe. He’d witnessed both the sunrise and sunset of creation. He’d spent a not inconsiderable amount of time as a woman. And he’d been so, so desperately in love with an angel that he would have walked away from all of humankind to spend a few more centuries with him, until that angel made him believe that human beings were worth saving. And then he’d traded them all in, and his existence with it, for a second chance at different sort of humankind.
There was no coming to terms with that. It was difficult enough to process that he was somehow simultaneously himself, the self that he’d always been, and this other separate being who was also him—never mind that the entire notion was undoubtedly delusion brought on by brain damage from a migraine or fever or something like that. Yet he’d spent several hours last night (again) scouring his reflection for any hint of a yellow iris, a slitted pupil, all the while contemplating a roiling, visceral anger at a God he decidedly did not believe in yet knew, at least formerly, to exist. Cheater. Liar. Fraud.
In the background of all of that: Asa Fell. Human male, slightly different in demeanor but identical, identical, to the angel in so many invisible ways that a single night out for dinner and a short walk more than confirmed it. He was the same, except he wasn’t an angel and had never been one.
Three weeks ought to feel like an eternity to a man debating how to approach someone after a date, but Anthony was already beginning to internalize the sheer time distance of his alter ego’s—his own—lifespan, which made three weeks the equivalent of a sneeze. The sharp breath before a sneeze, even.
Asa’s face set Anthony straight on that—a full and involuntary theatrical act starting with bewilderment and shifting through disbelief, offense, intrigue, and a glimmer of something else that Crowley recognized with a distracting wave of possessiveness. Anthony swept that latter feeling aside and reminded himself that he was dealing with a stranger.
“I thought you’d fled the continent,” Asa said.
If Anthony didn’t already know better, he may have interpreted it as a dismissal instead of an invitation. The shopkeep, Derek, seemed to hear the latter; he got up and wandered off, muttering something about restocking.
“I’m sorry. I… never gave you my number, did I?”
Anthony was gambling that Asa would interpret the faltering delivery of his lie as embarrassment (which it was, also, to some degree). Asa’s guardedness seemed to falter.
“No… you didn’t.”
“I’d love to make it up to you. Tonight, if you’re free.”
“Tonight?” A glance around, as if searching for a calendar. Or an excuse. “What did you have in mind?”
“There’s a community theater on Delaney and Fifth. Small operation. They’re putting on an adaptation of—”
“Hamlet!” Asa cut in. “Oh, is that tonight?”
“Hamlet, yes,” Anthony said grimly. “It should be… fun.”
“I should say so. Have you seen the fliers? It’s supposed to be a one-man performance, dialogue and all! Very interactive.”
“Shall I count on you, then?”
Asa looked at him, seemed to study him. Then he smiled. “Yes. Count away. What is it, seven?”
“Seven thirty. I’ll see you.”
Anthony started his retreat, but stopped at the sound of his name.
He turned. Asa slid a piece of paper and fountain pen across the checkout counter. “Your number, please.”
“Why is it you aren’t running the bookshop?”
“Beg your pardon?”
They were walking down a narrow avenue that didn’t exist in Crowley’s memories, packed tight with storefronts and vendors abutting the street. Twinkle lights above, cobblestones underfoot. The London air was cool and dreary as ever in the evening, but it came as a relief after the crowded theater.
Asa slowed to a near stop at Anthony’s question—too forward, too soon? “It’s Derek’s shop.”
“Right, I know.” said Anthony. “It’s just, you seem to like it a lot, don’t you? And Derek’s getting up there in age. I didn’t know if you’d ever considered…” he let the trail run off, not wanting to seem overly interested. The first time they met, three weeks ago, he’d had no trouble at all knowing what to say. He’d just thought it and said it, no fear of ulterior motives lurking in his subconscious. Now he couldn’t tell whether he’d have come up with the question himself, or if it was just Crowley poking around for intel.
“I do like it,” Asa sighed. They resumed their pace, and the tension passed. “I’m not sure how well I’d do as a shopkeep, to be honest. I have a hard time parting with some of the wares.”
Anthony hmm-ed neutrally.
“Derek did offer to sell me the shop once.”
“Did he?”
“For quite a fair price, considering he knows my income and what he could get for market value. But… I’ve always gotten these terrible headaches.” Asa touched the side of his head, just outside his right temple. “I used to be able to trudge through them when they first started, but I was younger then, fresh out of university. Now?” He shuddered at a thought that Anthony knew well. “I could never manage the shop if I was out of commission two, three days at a time. Although—” brightening, he added, “I’ve had an unexpected clear streak. It’s like I’m on holiday.”
They walked some more, intermittently speaking and silent, enjoying the scenery. Anthony had a little math problem he’d been noodling on since class this afternoon, and was about to share it when they passed a restaurant with small round tables crowding a patio nearly into the sidewalk. The simmering of shallots in butter caught his attention first, and then the spread of one couple on their white tablecloth: a round ceramic dish neatly trimmed with crushed ice and oysters on the half shell, and a bottle of wine.
“Ah—oysters!” Anthony said without thinking, then realized he’d said it with the tone of a suddenly recalled memory, and felt simultaneous dismay that he’d said it and that he’d never had an oyster in his life.
Asa cringed and made a polite sound of distaste. Anthony rounded on him. “You don’t like them?”
“I doubt I would.”
“But you haven’t tried?”
Asa seemed to consider it, looking doubtful. “Raw oysters? Cold, slimy—”
Scanning the patio, Anthony spied an empty table. Then, making meaningful eye contact with a passing waiter, he interrupted Asa’s rambling with a touch to the shoulder. “Come on, let me tempt you.”
He’d missed the smell of the library. It was one of the few places where his memories converged in pleasant harmony. Childhood summers camping out with his mother’s books became nostalgia for his college years in the stacks; brittle, waterstained textbooks meeting freshly-printed first editions, voices (hushed and inconsiderate alike) lost to his focus.
Anthony arrived before the end of Asa’s shift one afternoon and busied himself with his research grant proposal at a table in the back. His memories entwined with the older ones: a vibrant, musical voice always on the edge of his attention. Dregs of black tea, steeped not a millisecond too long, one of Aziraphale’s less appreciated powers. Soon enough Anthony made returning into a habit. He had a lot on his plate with university, arguably too much for his increasingly frequent (but casual, deliberately casual) dates. The department chair had a few choice words when he admitted he’d yet to choose his TA’s for the upcoming term.
Asa, appearing in the rear of the shop, perched leisurely on one end of the desk and huffed. “These astrology zines are getting out of hand. The teens were bad enough, coming in week after week for love advice, but now it’s grown adults! I ought to stop ordering them.”
“Did you not say yesterday that they’re the shop’s ‘number one new customer draw?’” Anthony asked without looking up.
“Oh, they are. But the absolute rubbish of it all; I’m starting to feel unethical.”
This, coming from the man who not three days ago Anthony overheard pawning off a mouldy, outdated thesaurus by swearing up and down it had been part of Margaret Thatcher’s personal collection during her failed bid for Prime Minister.
“You could steer them toward the prophecies instead,” Anthony suggested.
The cup of tea rippled on its saucer as Asa shuddered, no doubt at the thought of selling off his substantial, private collection (private only because he deleted them from shop inventory, moved them out of Derek’s failing eyesight, and claimed to have lost or sold them). Anthony had reviewed each and every spine for even a play on Agnes Nutter, Witch and come up empty.
Asa claimed not to believe in any of them beyond an interest in their historical insight. He’d been raised in a household dominated by a highly-religious father, to the degree that he never learned about his mother’s atheism until long after their divorce. As Asa had explained, “I could never understand why she always dozed off at mass, but turns out she was always a little tipsy.” Her subliminal messaging, he theorized, had fostered a fascination with alternative belief systems. What Asa’s actual beliefs were, Anthony was too afraid to ask.
A distant clock chime reminded Anthony that he had to catch the pharmacy before close of business. He stowed his papers and drained his teacup, let the last tannins simmer on his tongue before he swallowed. Donning his coat and scarf, he said to Asa, “Some might call it a cold world out there, so better to believe in something than nothing.”
“And what say you to that, Dr. Crowley?”
Asa was still at the edge of the desk, his shoulders and chin angled slightly to watch Anthony pack. Anthony, fishing the weathered clasp of his bag into its slot, glanced up and was surprised at the coyness of Asa’s expression. Anthony’s sunglasses hung from his inner coat pocket; with tremendous effort, he resisted the urge to put them on.
“I say, one step closer to the Sun and we’d be on Venus.”
“We couldn’t have that, could we?”
Over the course of several months, Anthony got to know Asa well enough that he sometimes forgot about the delusions. Then some reminder would rain down on him like hellfire, re-igniting worries about his mental state and the ethical implications of dating someone who might also be someone else, but who might have no interest in learning about that someone else, or might suggest Anthony’s institutionalization if it came up in conversation.
This time, it was a gold bicycle chained outside the bookshop.
“Is that your bike?”Anthony asked when he found Asa in the nonfiction section. “Out front, with the little—” he thumbed over an invisible bell.
“My car is on the mend,” Asa answered, reaching to straighten the D-named authors overhead. “I should ride in more often, but the weather needs to be just so.”
“Does your commute by any chance take you over the Centurial Bridge?”
“You might know the answer to that if you’d been over my place,” Asa said archly, a wayward stab that Anthony didn’t have time to absorb before the conversation took another turn.
Asa peeked around the corner and, seeing no one, rounded on Anthony. “Did you say something to Derek?” he asked, backing Anthony into the shelf, which gave an ominous wobble.
Anthony felt the pulse drop out of his throat. Cornered, unprepared, he made a sad pass at deflecting. “I didn’t see him when I came in.”
“He offered to sell me the shop again. At a… not insubstantial discount.”
Asa was searching him for a tell, and Anthony wasn’t up for the lie. The eyes on him were too clear and—while cunning, yes, sometimes cagey—ultimately too honest. The frustration was there, the want, the desperate affection for this place and everything in it, all out in the open.
“Well,” Anthony said, choosing his words carefully, “you ought to take him up on it.”
“I can’t,” Asa hissed. “I told you, Anthony, I’m… not equipped to run a business. A few sick days here and there—”
“—everyone’s entitled to few days off—”
“—one bad stretch and I’d be underwater.”
“The sale price builds in a bit of security, no—?”
“And the men in suits who come around trying to buy Derek out, always talking about the—the flammability of paper—”
“Oh, you can take a few moguls. They’re just bureaucrats in custom clothes—”
“It just won’t do,” Asa concluded glumly.
“Been a while since your last headache, hasn’t it?” Anthony asked. “Even one of those little nagging types?”
Asa clearly hadn’t considered it; his brow came together. “Yes, it has,” he said slowly.
“When was the last one?”
“Months. That was… was it? I think it might have been the day we met.”
“That so?”
Asa nodded absently. “I was riding my bike to the clinic—safer than driving, I thought, I could barely see—but by the time I got there, it was gone. And later that day, I met you!”
“If it makes any difference,” Anthony began, “my schedule’s flexible. I could always hold office hours here if you needed a hand.”
Asa, who’d been staring through a gap in the books like a portal to another dimension as if trying to process how he’d failed to notice the longest medical reprieve he’d had in his entire adult life, suddenly snapped to attention at Anthony’s suggestion. He looked incredulous, almost scandalized.
“This shop was made for you, Asa,” Anthony said.
He felt the fingers find and tighten on his lapel. His weight shifted onto his toes at the gentle tug, and the kiss landed so softly—nothing like the desperate gambit Crowley had played in a parallel bookshop. Still, for the first time he understood how Aziraphale must have felt when cornered with an unexpectedly pivotal moment. The feeling didn’t last; longing swallowed up the fear, spat it out.
But it was so brief. The grip on his jacket eased without releasing, and Asa muttered something so quiet that Anthony might not have heard it if he hadn’t also felt the breath on his chin: “Good god.”
Anthony shook his head. The incidental movement was enough to catch Asa’s lips, and Anthony stalled there, kissed him again. This time—still maybe just a few seconds, sparse—the door chime split them up.
Asa seemed unwilling to let go of Anthony’s coat now that he’d got a hold on him, and his voice was lighter than a whisper. “Why have you been avoiding me?”
“I’ve come by most days this week.” Anthony said, then winced at Asa’s reproachful tsk!
“My dear, if it’s a matter of… experience,” Asa began in what he seemed to think was a delicate tone, “you needn’t be embarrassed. There’s no rush. I can show you—”
“It’s not that,” Anthony cut in, mortified. He hadn’t had many relationships, casual or otherwise, in his adult life—a fact which he now regretted disclosing to Asa several weeks ago over lunch, in what he’d thought as a throwaway comment of little conversational value.
(This was actually true for Crowley as well, but unlike Anthony, in Crowley’s occupation sex was sort of a cheat code, albeit lazy. He once spent a solid forty years as a courtesan in Persia, which had enabled him to topple the local church, foment a cult, undermine a different cult, and displace a monarch. The memos had been long, the accolades outrageous. Which was all to say, he’d seen all the kingdoms of the world, so to speak, and didn’t need a middle-aged man to coax him through Gay Sex 101.)
“Then what?”
“I thought… if I put my hands on you, I might not be able to take them back.”
“What’s so wrong with that?” Asa pressed. “I—”
“Hello?” a voice called out from somewhere near the front of the store, likely another victim of this week’s astrology predictions; the papers had warned this morning about the perils of Mars being in retrograde, which it very much was not.
“Just a tick!” Asa responded, too loudly and in his most half-assed customer service voice.
Before Asa could round on him again, Anthony said, “Let’s talk tonight. My place.”
“Your place?”
“I’ll cook something. We can… have a drink.”
“Have a drink,” Asa repeated.
“Something decent,” Anthony assured him. “Nothing too local.”
Finally, Asa stepped back. He threw his hands up with exasperation bordering on drollery. “Dinner, yes. Dinner!”
With no game plan for how to navigate the night, Anthony defaulted to the time-honored delay tactic of a full tour. It wasn’t a long tour, being a two-bedroom townhouse, but Asa was a good sport. He stopped to appreciate every piece of thrift store art and seemed genuinely delighted by the guest room-slash-office, which had an embarrassing number of potted plants and a telescope mounted at the south-facing window.
Anthony cooked dinner in the close, eat-in kitchen while Asa sat at the table with a glass of wine and gabbed about a war raging at the zoning commission. Once they got into conversation, the atmosphere lapsed back into its comfortable tenor. After dinner they migrated to the sofa with a second bottle. Anthony put on a documentary, but they spent more time talking over it than watching it.
He’d had nothing to worry about. Leaned forward with his wine glass in his hands, elbows on knees, Anthony had a revelation: he was going to spend the rest of his life with Asa. There was nothing predestined about it, no fated plan from the cosmos—just the effect of studying Asa’s face in the television’s intermittent, blue-grey light. Like the first time his mother brought him out to the country to view the stars without light pollution, he knew that he could never, ever get his fill of this moment.
Well past midnight, Asa caught a glance of the wall clock and blinked hard. “I should call a cab.”
“Actually,” Anthony said, setting his drink on the coffee table. “You should stay.”
“Oh, it’s all right.” Asa moved to stand, a bit wobbly.
“Asa.” Anthony was more than a little tipsy himself but unwilling to attribute his calm resolution to the booze. “I’m in love with you. I know you’re in love with me. So please, just stay.”
Asa dropped back onto the sofa. The voice on the television was droning on about the discovery of a new species of pterosaur in the Balkans. They sat for some long moments without speaking, only vaguely aware of the background noise. Eventually Anthony said, “No sense being sideways about it. Our lives are too short now.”
“How long?”
“Ah. The whole time, I suppose.”
“Then why—” Asa put his face in his hand, “why make me wait so long?”
Was it so long? A few months? In the bookshop this afternoon, Anthony realized that he’d been waiting lifetimes, innumerable lifetimes, to be kissed like that. “I had to make sure I was right,” he said, shrugging. “I had to make sure I knew you.”
Asa tossed aside a pillow that had been serving as their chaperone. “Do you know me?” He touched Anthony’s knee. “What else can I tell you?”
“Do you believe in God?”
Asa laughed. Anthony heard the reservations shake free from his voice, the wariness; the person who had chased him down in the street to ask for his number was here, and he knew he’d won his gambit. Stroking Anthony’s hair back from his temple, Asa said, “If you could tell me that, you’d know me better than I know myself.”
They kissed again, and again, and the night unfolded into long hours. The minutes were finite, but they were theirs.
The sound of a sniffle pulled Anthony out of the best sleep he’d had in years. Coming-to through the persistence of a long-winded dream and burgeoning hangover, he gradually clocked the angle of light through the blinds as pre-dawn, pale, and the shape beside him in bed, wiping eyes on a pillowcase, as Asa.
“S’matter?” Anthony croaked.
“Just lamenting a fool for wasted time,” Asa answered; he still sounded drowsy, like he woke up crying. “Less than half a human lifespan left, all thanks to cowardice.”
Anthony set blindly to patting Asa’s shoulder and found his head. “You were very brave, angel.”
A few long, sleepy seconds passed. Then Asa said, “Oh, don’t tell me…”
Anthony shot out of bed. Moments later, the house was shrieking with alarms.
Asa came stumbling into the hallway, a white sheet wrapped pell-mell over his shoulders, to find Anthony in his underwear jabbing a broom handle into the overhead carbon monoxide detector. “What the devil are you doing?”
“Gas leak.”
“What—?”
“Gas leak!” Anthony said, squinting up at the detector through the noise. The light was strobing, a mechanical voice chanting through the alarm ‘WARNING: CARBON MONOXIDE. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.’ It seemed to be working. “Gas leaks can cause schizoid delusions—”
“Anthony, stop.” Asa wrested the broom away and turned off the alarm. An ear-ringing silence dropped over them. He sighed. “We haven’t been poisoned.”
Anthony slumped into the wall and slid down to the floor. “How long?”
“The day after you showed up at my bookshop.”
“Which time?”
“The first time, of course. It took a few days for everything to trickle back in. And then when you didn’t come back, I thought I’d lost my mind and dreamed you up with the rest of it.” He nudged Anthony’s leg with his foot. “You?”
“Same, but—” Anthony snapped his fingers, “all at once. The next day.”
“You were always a little quicker on the draw.”
“Tch! Speak for yourself—I thought you were going to climb me in the shop yesterday.”
Asa smiled, a little smugly. “What can I say? My mother always said ‘never seek, never know.’” He put his hands together in imitation of prayer. “I’m afraid the contrition and self-recrimination of my past existence were nurture, not nature.”
Anthony’s head was starting to ache; the drank-too-much type of headache, easily remedied by a glass of water and a few pills if he could convince himself to stand. He ought to be thrilled—he was different and the same, and Asa was different and the same, and there was no doubt they’d never part again. But the truth had just opened the wounds he’d spend months trying to close, the questions that burned him raw.
“She lied,” Anthony said stubbornly.
“Maybe this was the way things were always headed—just less one divine, apocalyptic plan.” Sighing, still draped in the white sheet like a toga, Asa came came over and sat next to him on the floor. “You know, we spent a lot of time canceling each other out. It’s not too far-fetched to say the humans got along more or less on their own.”
“Then what are we doing here now?”
“Witnessing.”
“I never had to think about God. And now—” Anthony clutched his chest, feeling the gravity of it, “now I’ll never be rid of her, and there’ll always be this gaping hole she carved out of me. I’ll always be wondering if there’s anything more out there.”
“Anything like what?”
“Anything, like—anything. Good or bad, doesn’t matter.”
“Then I’ll wonder with you.” Asa offered a hand, palm-up. Anthony took it, let their fingers thread together, the perfect fit. “But you know, always is a long time—”
“—not anymore, is isn’t.”
Asa chuckled. The gentle weight of his head rested on Anthony’s shoulder. The light in the room was rising; a slice of it had worked its way through the kitchen blinds and was creeping towards Anthony’s outstretched ankle.
“How did you know it was me?” Anthony eventually asked.
“Hmm?”
“That’s what took me so long. I had to make sure it was you I was after, and not—y’know, you, but, the one I thought I made up.”
Asa waved a hand. “I didn’t fuss about that.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Because,” Asa said, as though it were obvious, “I’ve loved you for six thousand years.” He sat up to look at Anthony. “I’m the best version of me I’ve ever been—somehow, human limitations and all… How could I not love the version of you that wasn’t forced to suffer just for being curious?”
Somehow, Anthony had never considered that. He didn’t have a counterpoint, so he shrugged. “You tell me, then: what shall we do with this mighty gift from a nonexistent god?”
Asa’s hand let go. He got to his knees like he might stand, but then instead swung a leg over and straddled Anthony’s hips. Cradling Anthony’s jaw, Asa kissed him three times: high on each cheekbone, and once between the eyes. “Darling,” he said, and Anthony could hear the smile even before he felt it, the kiss of a millennium meeting his eager mouth, “We’re going to live.”
They didn’t talk about god again, but that didn’t stop Anthony from thinking about her. In his work, in his dreams, he stewed on the origins of the universe; he would feel stardust in his palms, the heat of a new star radiating on his face like a campfire, then go back to teaching first-year college students about dense matter. In the observatory, he’d peer through the telescope and catch himself thinking about the things he’d never thought to ask and now never would.
Asa’s only concern seemed to be with Anthony’s months-long existential crisis, which reached a turning point when NASA announced it had discovered a new, potentially habitable planet they called Macan Prime, and Asa returned home to find Anthony sitting amongst his houseplants, drunk and weeping.
The next day, Asa presented him with a flight confirmation to Egypt. “I consider myself well-traveled, but the reality is I’ve never been anywhere on this Earth,” he explained. “I’d like to see how things developed out there without Moses.”
That was the first of many introductions. Most of the time they were content to stay local—Asa trying to do his best to run a profitable shop without selling any books, Anthony with lectures and his second publication—but they made time to see the world that, ostensibly, had spooled itself out on its own inertia. Over the ensuing decades they set foot on every continent, visited the cities they’d known yet not known, shared drinks with strangers.
The truth came to Anthony in fragments. In another life, it had taken most of eternity to sort it out; but he was a new and different kind of being now, more stubborn in some ways.
In Argentina, they flipped their car and almost skidded off the side of a mountain. They still made their dinner reservation.
On Anthony’s way home from a conference in Germany one winter, a snowstorm grounded all flights for five days—the longest he and Asa had ever been apart since their reunion—and a migraine struck him into such agonized catatonia that the flight attendants called an ambulance to take him off the plane in London; when the stretcher brought him to his hospital room, he found Asa already there—as a patient, having been admitted a few hours earlier for the same condition. By nightfall, they’d both fully recovered.
Mornings at home always began with a shared pot of tea, sometimes in bed, sometimes in the kitchen or in the garden, sometimes with a newspaper (but never the television). Sometimes they talked until one or the other realized he was late for work, other times they said nothing but ‘Good morning’ and ‘thank you,’ Yet on each of these mornings Anthony would take, or sometimes sneak, a glance at Asa’s profile, to take in the light on his hair, the steam rising past his nose, his smirk or his frown or his sigh.
On a research vessel in the Southern Ocean, Anthony and Asa laid out on the deck all night in parkas, threatening frostbite for a chance to see a far-distant comet. Gazing up, Anthony finally remembered what it was like to fall asleep in that field as a teen, staring at the sheet of pinpricks above until they seemed to take on layers, and then depth, and then absorb his vision and his consciousness into a warm bath of unknowns, and unknowable things, and questions unanswered, and the humbling acceptance that a simple primate could feel so much without ever being more than an atom, a single electrolyte buzzing through the universe. Anthony reached an arm up towards the sky and Asa, lying beside him, did the same, and their gloved hands came together and the tears froze on his face.
These decades—the travel, the homecomings, the dull periods interspersed throughout years of finite, fleeting, precious human life—finally met them at home, in South Downs, sitting together under the stars, listening to the nightingale.
“Do you ever wonder if there’s anything more than this?” Asa asked. He’d never asked in all these years, not once.
“I don’t need anything more than this,” Anthony said. “I have the universe out there, and I have you.” He took Asa’s hand. “I have everything I’ve ever wanted.”