37. Infinite Things
Infinite Things
Elias
“I wanted to give it to you in person,” Mr Mazzati says, beaming.
“Mr North and I were over the moon when we received the news—first time I’ve ever seen that man crack a bottle of champagne at work.
Don’t tell anyone.” His eyes crinkle. “You must be so proud of yourself, Elias. You’ve earned this. You have a bright future ahead of you.”
When he was twenty years old, did Mr Mazzati watch one of those cheesy films where the fancy, well-spoken teacher discovers that the underprivileged teenage rascal is actually a genius? Has he been waiting his whole career for this glorious moment, being the noble hero in my pitiful story?
But no. Mr Mazzati’s goofy smile and crinkled eyes are sincere enough to disarm even my cynical mind.
Mr Mazzati isn’t proud of himself for getting me into Harvard: he’s proud of me for getting myself there.
It was obvious from the way he handed me the acceptance letter, from his expression when he watched me read it, from his gushing review of the essay I wrote for my scholarship application.
Mr Mazzati, the idealistic fool, simply believes in me.
“There’s a bursary, which might seem quite significant, but I wouldn’t rely on it too much,” Mr Mazzati rushes on.
“It’s Harvard we’re talking about—it’ll mostly go towards tuition fees and textbooks.
You’ll need to get a part-time job, but that’s absolutely doable.
They’re always looking for research assistants in the labs, and I have a couple of professors in mind who are on the lookout for assistants. I’ve already contacted a few of them.”
The words on the letter barely seem real, like incomprehensible runes forming a message I don’t have the ability to fathom. I keep looking at the letter, Mr Mazzati’s words washing over me, wrapping me into a dream-like fugue.
I can almost picture it—the future he’s describing.
Studying physics at Harvard, my tuition fees paid.
A part-time job in a lab, working with professors who know me only as a promising young student, not the charity case poster boy for the failing British care system.
Studying physics, standing on the shoulders of the giants I’ve been reading about all my life.
Picking Desdemona up from tennis practice after classes, my arm thrown over her shoulders while we buy coffee to warm up against the cold Cambridge wind.
Carrying her books, lending her my jumper, holding her hand.
Being the Harvard fuckwit she sneaks into her dorm room, lining the graceful curve of her spine with wet, slow kisses while she lies naked on her stomach, case files and law books spread across a bed that smells like both of us.
My throat is so tight I have to suck in a breath sharp and thin as a needle.
Fuck.
“You alright, Elias?”
Mr Mazzati’s hand falls on my shoulder and just like that, the spell is broken.
The images dissipate like smoke, leaving only a faint shadow in my mind. Things that could be but probably won’t. Things that might have been, had I been anybody but myself. Things that should be, was life not an unforgiving bitch.
The dream fades, receding, but my heart is still hammering, my throat still constricted.
“I know it’s a lot,” Mr Mazzati says, calmer now, as if my expression has sobered him up.
He pushes his thick glasses up over his nose.
“You might think this is too good to be true, but it’s not.
You’ve worked hard, and you’re a bright young man.
Whatever your life has been thus far—whatever decisions you’ve made and whatever decisions have been made for you—they’re just your past, and a very short past, at that.
You’re going to realise one day that life is very long, and that these eighteen years have been very short.
Whatever you decided yesterday has already happened—but what you decide tomorrow is still up to you. ”
He smiles, and I have the sudden unsettling awareness that he’s a real person, not just a teacher.
His hair, dark like mine, needs a fresh cut.
His shirt sleeves are rolled back, and there’s a red pen tucked into his lanyard that’s left a red mark on his chest. His shoes are scuffed, and he has a tattoo of a lowercase phi on his wrist.
I’ve always thought of him as old, but he can’t be more than thirty.
“Right now,” he says, “the future probably seems far away. But it’s not.
It’s close, within your reach, and the things you want are within your grasp, so take them and hold on hard.
I think you know that, but I worry sometimes that you might refuse to acknowledge the things you want for fear that you might not get them. None of that, eh?”
My heart is beating so fast I’m suddenly terrified it’s going to burst. Fuck, I don’t want to feel inspired by his words. I don’t want to be the underprivileged loser he saves, the necessary secondary character to his story. Mr Mazzati is right, I am smart—too smart to fall for this bullshit.
And yet…
When he finally dismisses me, after I’ve thanked him and left his office, I find my feet moving against my own accord. Because even though this is probably too good to be true, the only thing I want to do right now is to find Desdemona. Show her the letter.
Smile down into her clever brown eyes and say: “Yea, alright. I’ll be your Harvard fuckwit. Somebody’s got to be, right?”
Who else, but me?
My heart, which has always felt small and tight and hard, the chip off an ancient fallen meteor, has split wide open, revealing an infinite cosmos, an entire universe blooming with stars. Fuck, is that what hope feels like?
I can see why people become addicted to it. Make fools of themselves for it.
I’m about to do the same damn thing.
“Events don’t have a definite order,” Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time. “There’s no beginning or end.” Meaning life is just a series of things that have always happened and never happened simultaneously.
Desdemona has always existed, and at the same time, she has never existed. In the grand, empty continuum of my life, she is a blaring sun, omnipresent—and she is the gaping darkness of her own absence.
I should know this—I’ve just been accepted by one of the world’s most prestigious physics scholarships, after all.
But as Einstein said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.”
And he wasn’t even sure about the universe.
Desdemona finds me before I find her. At first, I head to the tennis court, where she usually trains after classes on Thursdays.
Her tennis partner, Zafira, is there in her training clothes, stretching while reading something on her phone, her breath puffing white in the bright floodlights.
When she sees me, she looks up, eyes widening in surprise.
“Where’s Dess?” she asks.
I stop short in my tracks. “Uh, that’s what I was about to ask.”
Zafira frowns. “I thought she was with you.”
“What?” It’s my turn to frown. “She normally trains with you on Thursdays.”
“Yeah, and she normally doesn’t skip classes or meetings or sneak boys into the girls’ dorm, but—” Zafira’s eyes move up and down the length of me, more appraising than judgemental. “There’s only one exception to all those things, isn’t there?”
I swallow hard, inexplicably shaken by the way she’s put all that together—my impact on Desdemona’s tidy, orderly life, the chaos I’ve put in it, the disorienting idea that I’ve somehow managed to tilt her life on its axis—tempted her enough to lead her off her righteous path.
I feel Zafira’s eyes following me even after I’ve left the tennis court, and there’s a dull heat in my cheeks, the stars in my blown-open heart burning bright. Fuck. If I’ve made a mess of Desdemona, at least she can safely say she’s made a mess of me right back.
And then I see her.
I’m walking down the central path that leads away from the tennis courts towards the Old Manor, where her head girl’s office is.
The old oaks lining the smooth stone path are shaking hard in the ice-cold winter wind.
Night has already fallen over Spearcrest; most of the students have disappeared indoors for supper.
Despite the encroaching darkness and the wind and the trees, I know Desdemona’s figure as soon as I see it.
Something’s wrong. I know before I even reach her. I frown, drawing closer, and start back when she throws out an imperious hand, palm up.
“I want Birnam’s phone back.”
My stomach drops, the lurching sensation of being thrown off balance, or missing a step at the end of a staircase.
“What?”
“The phone I gave you, earlier this year. I want it back.”
Her eyes are huge, shining with a feverish inner light. Her cheeks are flushed, the faint brown mascara smudged like she’s been crying. Fuck. My heart sinks, a gutting feeling. She has been crying—her chest is heaving like she’s still being wracked with sobs.
I reach for her arm.
“Hey, are you alr—”
She pulls back as if my touch is venomous and cuts me off. “I’m fine.”
“Is this about the police coming this weekend? It’s fine, love, they’ll—”
“I don’t want to argue.” She says it low and tired and hurt.
“Argue? We’re not arguing, we—”
“Then just get me the phone.”
I frown. My heartbeat is a jolt, a hectic staccato; unfamiliar panic tightens my chest. Something’s happened, something bad, and now Desdemona is all raw and restless with pain, and she’s not lashing out, because that’s not what she does—worse.
She’s retreating, throwing up fortresses, walls on walls on walls until I can barely see her for stone.
“Is this about the deal?”
My voice sounds just as hoarse and scared as hers, now. But Desdemona doesn’t soften—she stiffens, bites down. Muscles shift in her jaw, her long neck taut.
“The deal is over. I’m pulling the plug.”
“What?”
“This whole bargain was a mistake. I should never have agreed, I should have—” She stops herself, raising a hand as if she’s made a mistake.
“No—I should never have asked you in the first place. It was stupid, weak and selfish. It was shameful. I take it back, I take it all back—it’s done.
Give me the phone back and you don’t need to worry about a thing. ”
“I don’t understand. What’s happened? I knew what I was agreeing to, love, there’s no shame in—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps, poison on her tongue. “The deal is over, remember? That means we’re no longer pretending.”
I flinch like she’s slapped me clean across the face.
I’m not pretending. I’ve not been pretending since Christmas. Since the observatory. Since long before that.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” I tell her, soft and low. “That I’m using you?”
She laughs, cold and derisive. “Oh, come on. We were both using each other. How naive do you think I am?”
It’s started raining—maybe it’s been raining for a while.
The rain is so cold it’s practically slush, heavy in my hair, making thick curls droop over my forehead.
I’m not wearing a coat, and my entire body feels numb with cold, but not from the rain.
The cold comes from inside me, right from the middle of my chest, where my heart has furled like a clenching fist, grown once more tight and hard and closed.
“I don’t think you’re naive at all,” I say hoarsely. “If anyone is naive between us, it’s probably me.”
Naive enough to believe that our deal was ever anything more. Naive enough to believe that I could be loved by someone like her. Naive enough to allow myself to picture a future I have no possible way of ensuring.
I’m still holding the Harvard letter Mazzati gave me, what now feels like a lifetime ago. No, not a lifetime. Someone else’s lifetime. My chest is heavy and tight, sealed irreversibly shut. I curl my hand into a fist at my side, the paper crumbling in my fingers.
“Don’t pretend to be something you’re not,” Desdemona whispers, eyes boring into mine.
“You mean like you do?” I answer, just as softly.
“Hah.” She takes a deep breath and releases it in a shuddering laugh.
“Fine, yes. Call me fake. I am, you’re right.
I fake it all, just as you’ve always accused me of, because I’m just a terrified little coward, like you’ve always implied.
” She raises herself up with a smile so cold I physically flinch. “At least I’m not a liar.”
This time, a flash of something else bolts through me, electrifying.
Anger.
“I’ve never lied to you.”
She smiles, pure cold fury.
“You’re lying right now.”
“Don’t accuse me of something I haven’t done,” I snap, stepping closer.
She mimics me, and we’re now so close that I can see the breath misting from her lips, the icy raindrops suspended on her eyelashes. Her gaze is fierce and accusatory and brimming with pure, unadulterated, naked pain.
“You know that lying by omission is still lying, right?”
I frown. “What?”
She sneers. “You want to tell me what you and my little sister have so much to talk about?”
The earth opens up beneath my feet. I’m falling—and I have so far to fucking fall, and I’ve been so scared of it for so long. Falling, falling without anything to hold on to, from an impossible height, with nothing to catch me.
I gaze at her, helpless, utterly defeated, sick to my stomach.
“No?” she says, low and deadly. “No. I didn’t think so.”
She pushes her wet hair back from her face. She looks like an avenging goddess, an angelic being burning with righteous fury, with unimaginable sorrow.
“Our bargain is over. I’ll deal with this on my own. All I need is the phone back.”
I shake my head slowly. The fall is a black rush around me, dulling all my senses.
Since I’m already falling, since I’ve been judged and condemned, I commit the crime I’m being accused of.
I lie to her.
“I got rid of it.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I didn’t want to risk it—after what happened with the Pearsons.”
She watches me, utterly still for a moment. Invoking the Pearsons is pure manipulation, but I’ve fallen too far for shame. What’s one more sin when you’re already hellbound?
Desdemona lets out a short, sharp breath. “Fine.”
She turns around, without another word, her fortresses high and mighty around her, and she strides away without hesitation, without faltering, without so much as a glance back.
I look down, opening my fist. The letter in my hand is a crumpled ball of paper that turns to mush in the slush. I let it drop to the ground where it falls without a splash.
And then I, too, walk away.