Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

And Nora felt her heart race, but this time she had no ladle or saucepan to bang. She didn’t particularly like this Hugo character, but was far too intrigued not to hear what he had to say. And she also wanted to know if he could be trusted.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’

Expectation

Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents, who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.

She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.

She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.

She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best.

And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.

Life and Death and the Quantum Wave Function

With Hugo, it wasn’t a library.

‘It’s a video store,’ he said, leaning against the cheap-looking cupboard where the coffee was kept. ‘It looks exactly like a video store I used to go to in the outskirts of Lyon – Video Lumière – where I grew up. The Lumière brothers are heroes in Lyon and there’s a lot of things named after them. They invented cinema there. Anyway, that is beside the point: the point is that every life I choose is an old VHS that I play right in the store, and the moment it starts – the moment the movie starts – is the moment I disappear.’

Nora suppressed a giggle.

‘What’s so funny?’ Hugo wondered, a little hurt.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. It just seemed mildly amusing. A video store.’

‘Oh? And a library, that is entirely sensible?’

‘More sensible, yes. I mean, at least you can still use books. Who plays videos these days?’

‘Interesting. I had no idea there was such a thing as between-life snobbery. You are an education.’

‘Sorry, Hugo. Okay, I will ask a sensible question. Is there anyone else there? A person who helps you choose each life?’

He nodded. ‘Oh yeah. It’s my Uncle Philippe. He died years ago. And he never even worked in a video store. It’s so illogical.’

Nora told him about Mrs Elm.

‘A school librarian?’ mocked Hugo. ‘That’s pretty funny too.’

Nora ignored him. ‘Do you reckon they’re ghosts? Guiding spirits? Guardian angels? What are they?’

It felt so ludicrous, in the heart of a scientific facility, to be talking like this.

‘They are,’ Hugo gestured, as if trying to pluck the right term from the air, ‘an interpretation.’

‘Interpretation?’

‘I have met others like us,’ Hugo said. ‘You see, I have been in the in-between state for a long time. I have encountered a few other sliders. That’s what I call them. Us. We are sliders. We have a root life in which we are lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place. And it is always something different. A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant . . . What does that tell you?’

Nora shrugged. And thought. Listening to the hum of the central heating. ‘That it’s all bullshit? That none of this is real?’

‘No. Because the template is always the same. For instance: there is always someone else there – a guide. Only ever one person. They are always someone who has helped the person at a significant time in their life. The setting is always somewhere with emotional significance. And there is usually talk of root lives or branches.’

Nora thought about being consoled by Mrs Elm when her dad died. Staying with her, comforting her. It was probably the most kindness anyone had ever shown her.

‘And there is always an infinite range of choices,’ Hugo went on. ‘An infinite number of video tapes, or books, or paintings, or meals . . . Now, I am a scientist. And I have lived many scientific lives. In my original root life, I have a degree in Biology. I have also, in another life, been a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. I have been a marine biologist trying to protect the Great Barrier Reef. But my weakness was always physics. At first I had no idea of how to find out what was happening to me. Until I met a woman in one life who was going through what we are going through, and in her root life she was a quantum physicist. Professor Dominique Bisset at Montpellier University. She explained it all to me. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. So that means we—’

A kind-faced, pink-skinned, auburn-bearded man whose name Nora didn’t know came into the kitchen to rinse a coffee cup, then smiled at them.

‘See you tomorrow,’ he said, in a soft American (maybe Canadian) accent, before padding away in his slippers.

‘Yes,’ said Nora.

‘See you,’ said Hugo, before returning – in a more hushed tone – to his main thread. ‘The universal wave function is real, Nora. That’s what Professor Bisset said.’

‘What?’

Hugo held up a finger. A slightly annoying, wait-a-minute kind of finger. Nora resisted a strong urge to grab it and twist it. ‘Erwin Schrödinger . . .’

‘He of the cat.’

‘Yes. The cat guy. He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously . All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that’s how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.’

‘But what about us? We’re doing that.’

‘Exactly. I am here but I also know I am not here. I am also lying in a hospital in Paris, having an aneurysm. And I am also skydiving in Arizona. And travelling around southern India. And tasting wine in Lyon, and lying on a yacht off the Côte d’Azur.’

‘I knew it!’

‘Vraiment?’

He was, she decided, quite beautiful.

‘You seem more suited to strolling the Croisette in Cannes than an Arctic adventure.’

He widened his right hand like a starfish. ‘Five days! Five days I have been in this life. That is my record. Maybe this is the life for me . . .’

‘Interesting. You’re going to have a very cold life.’

‘And who knows? Maybe you are too . . . I mean, if the bear didn’t take you back to your library maybe nothing will.’ He started to fill the kettle. ‘Science tells us that the “grey zone” between life and death is a mysterious place. There is a singular point at which we are not one thing or another. Or rather we are both. Alive and dead. And in that moment between the two binaries, sometimes, just sometimes, we turn ourselves into a Schrödinger’s cat who may not only be alive or dead but may be every quantum possibility that exists in line with the universal wave function, including the possibility where we are chatting in a communal kitchen in Longyearbyen at one in the morning . . .’

Nora was taking all this in. She thought of Volts, still and lifeless under the bed and lying by the side of the road.