—Preface—

1372 AD

This is a walnut.

The walnut has no name. Its Latin appellation, however, is juglans, short for jovis glans. Jovis is what Zeus was called when the Romans saw him and decided they wanted one of those too; glans means nuts. Jupiter's nuts. It is highly probable that, back when this name was chosen, people meant to say walnuts were nuts fit for the gods. Funny, what the evolution of language can do to nuts.

This walnut is lying on the wooden floor of a monastery, a monastery beautifully situated in the middle of a seemingly endless forest.

This is Friar Mattheus. In a moment, Friar Mattheus will step on the walnut, slip, fall down the stairs, and break two ribs. Friar Mattheus really likes walnuts. A little earlier, he was going to crack this one open and enjoy it. At that exact moment, he had a doubtlessly divine inspiration for a chorale praising his saint of choice. The ingenuity of this chorale's words was that they would only make sense to someone who knew the saint's true name. He dropped the walnut to the floor and went to fetch some paper, ink, and a quill. Then, in a hurry, he wrote the chorale down.

Among other things, the chorale makes fun of the Greek gods.

Friar Mattheus belongs to a secret order, primarily dedicated to one even more secret saint. The church was, maybe is, somewhat ashamed of this saint. Essentially, we are talking about the Saint Of Really Odd And Unlikely Things. Friar Mattheus is the last man alive who knows this saint's name.

Oops, he just slipped.

There is not a soul within earshot. When the other monks return from the fields that night, they find dead Mattheus still grasping the note sheets. Monks of the same order are still telling this story today. Its moral is not known, but the punchline is this:

The chorale was never forgotten.



                                                  —The Expected—

The distant future—2005 AD

Artists drive ancient French cars held together by rust and good will alone, tough guys drive four-by-fours; Jacob owned a station wagon.

The telephone rang.

“Jacob Lavalle, good day—”, he started.

He listened for a moment and said nothing. Then he assured the other end not to worry: he would be there in five minutes.

Four minutes and forty-three seconds later, he arrived at Paul's house. He unlocked the passenger side door and turned off the radio as his friend got in.

“Paul, good to see you. What's up?”

“Drive, please.”

Paul looked out of the rear window, into the dark streets of the early night. He saw nothing.

Jacob started driving. He said nothing; he merely looked at the street and waited for his friend to start talking.

“Fuck.”

Paul lit a cigarette. There was a sticker on the car's dashboard, a smiling bear asking the passengers to please refrain from smoking. Jacob noticed how Paul tried not to look at the sticker.

“Do you know what a dog does when it feels that it is going to die?” Paul asked finally.

Jacob thought for a moment.

“It hides.”

“That's right. It finds a spot away from everyone and lies down to go peacefully. Do you know why it does that? It's not fear; it's pride. It does not want to lay the trouble of its own death upon others, it does not want others to try and help or comfort it.”

“You know I'm more of a cat person, but I get the picture. Where does the allegory go?”

“Jacob, I have AIDS.”

The yellow of a traffic light looked surreal through a patch of dirt on Jacob's windshield. Jacob pulled a lever towards him, and water sprayed on the windshield. The windshield wipers failed to remove the patch of dirt. Paul's eyes were still fixed on the yellow of the traffic light as they passed just before it changed to red. The car went past a church, a banner hanging by its side advertised some sort of spiritual get-together.  Jacob could not quite make out the name of the festivity and was reminded that he really needed to see his optician about some glasses. You do not put these things off. Your eyesight could worsen.

Paul exhaled another lungful of smoke into the car.

It started raining. Under a streetlight, Jacob saw a dog running into an alley, tail tugged in between its hind legs. Somewhere ahead of them on the road two women, who had been arguing in the middle of street, were reminded by the onset of rain of where they were, and relocated their discussion. Jacob looked at Paul again.

“I've known for several years that I'm positive. It hasn't broken out yet; doctors say I can have ten, fifteen years before it does. I didn't want to tell anyone; this is my death. I don't need greeting cards and forgotten friends telling me to be brave. I just wanted to keep it to myself and face this on my own. Miriam is pregnant.”

Paul wound down the window and spat out of the moving car. He did not leave Jacob time to think.

“We've always used condoms. She should have known. I should have told her. I should have informed her. Of the risk. There was one night… I shouldn't have allowed myself to get so drunk. There's no doubt I infected her too. Too much blood.”

He spat the sentences out like cancerous lung cells. After a drag from his cigarette, he continued a little slower.

“She has got to get an abortion. I mean, there's not even a choice here, is there? It's enough that I killed myself. And my wife. I don't…” Paul's mouth closed. Jacob turned his head for a moment and saw his friend's jaw muscles work. He looked back at the street.

“Jesus, Paul. You've caused this life to be. You have already created and killed it. At least give it some time on earth. There is no way you'd have the… the moral right to talk Miriam into an abortion. What you should do is lower your head and apologize.”

Jacob's eyes were locked on the street in front of them, failing to focus on any one single spot.

Paul looked at the glow of the cigarette in his hands. It had burnt away half of its length. He blew the smoke onto the end, causing the light to intensify. Small, bright red fragments came off, their light diminishing quickly as they descended. Paul wondered for a moment whether there was any chance at all that these little fragments of heat could light anything on fire, even if that chance was absolutely minuscule. He thought about many things that were generally considered absolutely impossible and thought that these things were really only very, very improbable. Only because the expected happened in ninety nine out of a hundred situations…

“You know there is a good chance that the child will be healthy. That he, or she, will live a normal life…”, Jacob began.

Paul continued. “And that his parents won't suddenly die when he's 6 years old.”

“Paul, you're not dying.”

“No. Not yet.”

They drove past an office building. The car's headlights illuminated the front of the building, including a potted plant behind a fifth floor window, but the leaves were almost impossible to be seen from inside of the car. Paul threw the half-smoked cigarette out of the window.

“I don't know; I just… how do I tell her that, Jacob? How do I tell anyone?” He lit another cigarette.

“You start with the truth. Always start with the truth. That's the most simple thing to do. Then, you explain. Finally, you can offer opinions. As long as the truth comes out alright, the rest is just spit and air.”

* * *

“There is a one in ten chance he will contract the disease at birth.”

“Patrick”, Miriam answered decisively, biting her lips. For a moment she was afraid that she might bite her lips bloody, as if she could infect herself. She discarded the thought. “His name is Patrick.”

“Yes. There is a chance that Patrick will be infected with the virus at birth. The other big risk for him will be breastfeeding. I'm afraid I'll have to advise you against that. But even then, there will always be risks…”

“We know, Doc, we've given it ample thought.”

The doctor put down the pen he had been playing with and fixed his eyes on Miriam's.

“Very few children who are born with HIV ever live to be four years old.”

“We are aware of that. Our decision is final.”

Paul said nothing.

* * *

The tap on the sink was simple: you could push left and right to turn it on and off. It was constructed so it could be operated with an elbow. Two dispensers hung next to the sink: one for soap, the other for disinfectant. A plastic bag containing one single sterile, powdered glove was carefully opened. The glove inside had been folded over around the wrist, causing that part of the surface the doctor had to touch in order to pull the glove onto his hand to end up on the inside. A nurse held the bag toward the doctor, who had just applied the quickly drying disinfectant to his hands.

Past the group of doctors and nurses in preparation, everyone wearing double gloves, through the two doors, into the room where Miriam lay in her bed, panting heavily, past Paul, standing next to her, through the hospital wall behind which Jacob was waiting.

Jacob opened his digital organizer. He changed the entry saying 'Miriam and Paul Arlington' to 'Patrick, Miriam, and Paul Arlington'. He hesitated a second before inserting the last comma.

* * *

Patrick Arlington is born the 19th of November, 2005.

In 2009, in kindergarten, the smell of freshly painted wood becomes inseparably associated with the memory of a girl Patrick never dares to talk to. Against the odds, Patrick survives kindergarten.

In 2015, Patrick proposes to his parents that there is something fundamentally wrong with elephants. They smile and laugh: nothing is fundamentally wrong with his antibody count.

In 2020, while visiting a very boring museum, Patrick explains the many mysteries surrounding the Fibonacci numbers to a museum warden, who is missing his left eyebrow. A week prior, Patrick had officially been diagnosed. “Well”, the doctors said when alone amongst themselves, “15 years is pretty good.”

In 2021, his mother dies.

In 2028, Patrick decides to become a cynic. His psychologist tells him to cheer up. “At the slow rate your count is increasing, you might live to be…” At this point, the psychologist notices he has manoeuvred himself into a dead end. “Four hundred years old?” Patrick suggests.  

In 2030, Patrick falls in love, and finally, in 2031, he dies of a pneumonia his body could not defeat.

* * *

2021 AD

“This is Paul.”

Paul was in a studio. In front of him, a man sat at a desk, wearing a perfectly neutral suit. A pretty lady stood next to the desk; her function in the next ten minutes would be to point at the slot where the numbered balls would roll out of the magic millionaire making machine. Her job consisted mostly of smiling. It was only really a job on the days she was not feeling good. The night before that day, her old dog had passed away. Something in his eyes had told her he wanted her to stay with him. She stayed up all night, crying, and had been late for work that day. Someone had yelled at her for being late, and the only one who had taken an interest in the redness of her eyes was her make-up artist. No one was interested in her, no one cared how she was doing.

“That's me. How is she doing?”

Cameras were adjusted in height, papers placed on the table in front of the man with the soothing face. The papers contained words absolutely devoid of any meaning, extracted randomly from a treatise on pleasure and pain in Latin. These were the first two words: Lorem ipsum. There was nothing to be read, but it was decided that the table would look wrong without papers.

“Say that again?”

Lorem ipsum. Lorem was not even a Latin word. It was merely the two last syllables of “dolorem”, pain. Cicero had written an essay on pleasure and pain; sometime in the 15th century, someone needed a few words to showcase a typeset he had developed. He randomly extracted syllables from that Cicero document; somehow, the practise of using these words remained in effect. With the advent of the Internet, the Lorem Ipsum text was resurrected. When everyone wanted to showcase their beautifully designed web-page, which unfortunately had no information content whatsoever, this was what they used. The Internet turned content-free publishing into something between an art form and a popular sport.

The man in the neutral suit shuffled the edges of the papers straight. He had tried to make himself cry by writing a dramatic letter to his ex-wife the night before. Half-way through, he was distracted by a funny show on TV. He ended up laughing his way through two comedic broadcasts and then went to bed, feeling really pathetic.

Someone walked past Paul and whispered, in an urgent tone, “we're live in ten.” This someone then took a position next to the camera.

“Five, four, three…”

Paul hung up his cellphone and looked at the faces of the announcer and the pretty lady.

Instead of pronouncing them, the trainee indicated the last two numbers with his fingers.

2, 1…

“My wife just died”, Paul said.

The trainee pointed at the newscaster; a red light next to a camera came to life; and as if in reply to Paul's sentence, the two faces changed into radiantly smiling expressions.

Paul staggered out of the studio and somehow made his way home, only to write a eulogy he would never read.

* * *

2006 AD

Miriam's face. The amount of concentration required to keep her appearance under control visible around her eyes.

“If I stood in front of any other group of people, I would feel the need to explain myself; to explain the volatile nature of my situation, the unpredictability, the insecurity with which I am going to live, but I do not need to do this.”

We see a lecture hall in a university, the rows filled with people old enough to be professors and doctors themselves. In fact, most of them were.

“You all know as well as I do that there is no telling how much time I will have; there is no telling how much time Patrick will have. I can tell you one thing only: he will have a mother.”

One man lifted his fist to his mouth, as if he had to clear his throat or cough. He hesitated and made no sound at all.

“I am so sorry to leave you all. You know that this has always been more a calling than a profession for me. I have always believed in the success of our fight against this most unfair enemy. Now that I feel his sword against my throat, I have to abandon this battle. Believe me that now more than ever, I feel the need to proceed with our research, and I wished I could continue to dedicate my will and my skills to this. Yet we all know of the futility of our endeavours. We will win; but not necessarily within our own lifetimes. The chance to reach what we are fighting for is so incredibly small that at times we cannot see it at all. I… right now, I…”

Miriam took a swig from her glass, looked at the print-out of her speech in front of her, and turned it face-down. She fixed her eyes on the audience.

“My son may die, but he will not have lived without a mother.”

The same old man lifted his fist to his mouth once more. This time he cleared his throat. Somewhere across the room, a single pair of hands started clapping. Then another. Tears rose in Miriam as the applause grew steadily. She closed her eyes. In the darkness, the applause transformed into an amorphous sound washing on her eardrums like rain.

* * *

2030 AD, September

Rain fell on the muddy ground. The dark veins of marble on the gravestone became roads for the raindrops to follow on their way down.

The inscription said:

                  Miriam Arlington, née Smith
                           * 15.04.1980
                           † 26.11.2021
                  Wife, Mother, Fighter
                  We will not give up

A young man laid down a bouquet of flowers. An ancient iron fence marked the end of the graveyard, where a small road went past it. An ornamented gate stood half-open. On the bench of a bus stop across the road, a girl in her early twenties sat, dressed in a loose shirt adorned with a floral pattern. She held a notebook, and she was making a pencil drawing of the gate in front of her. Curiously, she had replaced the motto set in iron letters over the gate. The real life version said: “The Secret Of Faith: In Death Lies Life.” Her version said: “The Secret Of Faith: In Lies Lies Life.”

As she looked up at the gate again, the young man hurried through, holding a single purple tulip. His shoulders were raised and his head retracted, his hands shielding the flower against the rain, as if it was something very precious. He took a seat on the bench next to her and looked at her bundle of books. She kept drawing.

“Do you study art or religion?” he finally asked.

“A little bit of both. Philosophy.”

“So…”, the young man began anew, but was interrupted by her.

“Do you often steal flowers from the dead?”

He looked at her for a moment and gave no reply. She went back to drawing. Finally, he frowned and said:

“People must say really stupid things when you tell them what you study.”

She put down her pencil and looked at him quizzically.

“Oh, I just figured… what with you interrupting me so violently.”

She smiled a silent 'yes' and kept looking at him.

“And don't worry; you were right to interrupt me. I would have said something stupid too.”

“And you, sir, are avoiding my question.”

“Well, no, I don't. I brought this tulip with me in a bouquet of others just like her. I always keep one of the flowers I buy for my mother.”

Silently, the little display above the bus stop changed the estimated time of arrival from 18:30 to 18:37. The semitransparent plastic wall of the bus station flipped over to another page of the newspaper displayed on it. It now showed an article about a museum warden who had been playing the same numbers in the lottery for the past decade, and who had won a jackpot of 6 million. The article went on to report that the man would never see the money, due to an almost impossible array of coincidences; it was a gimmick of this lottery company to offer the winner the money in cash, the armoured transport was robbed en route, and finally, someone at the lottery company had embezzled money meant for the insurance. The lottery company went bankrupt, the museum warden never saw his money, and neither of the two young people sitting at the bus stop paid any heed to it.

For a long while, they smiled at each other in silence. She was the first to speak.

“How about Saturday night, 10 pm, Kelly's Pub?”

“Alright!”

“Jessica.”

“Patrick.”

With the softening rain fell the first leaves of autumn.

* * *

2031 AD

“… thus it is man's nature to sin”, concluded Patrick.

“No! I won't have this!” Jessica grinned at Patrick, their arms locked as they walked through the soft snow.

“Sinning feels good to man, let's put it like that”, he said.

“No! Sin is just that which does not feel good.”

“Alright. Extra ecclesia, how would you define sin then?”

“It would make sense to attach the definition of something as human as sin to a group of people. If we can say that something feels wrong to enough people, we could call it a sin.”

“Vanilla or chocolate?” They had stopped in front of an ice cream parlour. For a moment, Jessica wondered why that place would be opened in January.

“What? Uh… Vanilla.”

Patrick paid for the ice cream and handed the cone over to Jessica with a smile.

“How many people would you say read Cosmopolitan?” he added. “Because I'm quite sure that in their eyes, you're a sinner right about now.”

“Oh shut up”, Jessica laughed through ice cream-smeared lips. “It's not that simple.”

“It always is.”

* * *

“Patrick, please, I'm really not religious.”

“Don't worry, they won't kick you out.” Patrick held open the heavy wooden door.

She smiled at him, shook her head, and entered the church. Once inside, her steps instinctively became slower and more silent. The smile was replaced by a sombre face, filled with something akin to awe.

“I can see you like the architecture”, Patrick whispered into Jessica's ear. He touched her elbow and nodded into a certain direction. As they moved through the benches, a dark-skinned man—dressed in what was immediately apparent as the latest chic among the homeless—started singing a song. He sat there, smiling, rocking back and forth. First the song sounded Arabic, then Patrick picked up a few French words. The song seemed wrong in this place. A church commanded silence, only monks and priests were to sing here. No one could name the saint this man sang to.

“What's with the candles?” whispered Jessica to Patrick. They had arrived at a little metal table; it held a good number of unlit candles, and elevated on a rack, three burning candles. By the side of the table hung a box for donations.

“They're votive candles.”

The strange black man still sung. It seemed the silence between the notes was as much part of the song as the notes. Words reverberated forever, when one would think that one word's echo was over, from a distant corner of the church another one would wash over.

“They remind the saints of your prayers”, Patrick whispered.

The man stopped singing. The last echo lingered.

“They need to be reminded? Explain that!”

“Well, you see, it was really quite improbable. Or perhaps will be. Who knows? Who knew? The thing is that improbable is not impossible. It could happen! Like winning in the lottery, only backwards. Or both.”

The words echoed through the church. The homeless man was now speaking loudly, toward an unseen audience.

“I can't”, Patrick whispered, finally. “It's just one of these things. Look, I'll light one for you. As long as it burns, nothing bad will happen to you.”

“Aww”, she said, and smiled.

“So you see, all this here isn't really happening. This is just a possibility. We're all a possibility. We're a good possibility, the strongest one by far, but unfortunately, we never happened. It was necessary to show us anyway. It is important to remember that even though we never happened, we are just as real. I feel real. I exist.” With this, the man got up and started walking toward Jessica and Patrick.

Patrick stepped up to stand a little in front of Jessica, as if to protect her. She laid a hand on his shoulder and smiled.

“Want a cracker?”, the apparently homeless man said and extended a pack of salted crackers toward the two.

“Sure… thanks.”

“'tis the body of Christ, you know.”

“… yeah.”

* * *

2030 AD. August.

A soft summer rain fell on Paul's windshield, and as he saw the yellow of a traffic light through it, he closed his eyes and shivered. A moment later, his car drove into the side of an armoured van at full speed. Thus we learn that one should not close one's eyes and reminiscence while crossing a busy intersection.

Two airbags inflated and cushioned Paul's impact into the steering wheel and the door to his side. When their warm surfaces retracted, Paul mentally thanked science for inventing airbags which do not heat up to the point of scorching your skin upon inflation anymore. Then he noticed the gun pointed at him through the side window of the car.

A man in a grey uniform held the gun with two trembling hands and said:

“Get out of the car slowly, sir, and leave your hands where I can see them!”

Another one like him stood in front of Paul's car, hand next to his gun, surveying the surrounding area. Both of them must have been older than 50.

“Shit, they're early!” exclaimed Robert, some two hundred meters away from the site of the accident, and accelerated his quick stride into a sprint.

“Yeah, but it looks like we got lucky”, Brian mumbled, trying to keep up with Robert's run.

Two weeks before that day, Brian, 1,89m tall, shaved head, an acidic burn distorting his mouth, and Robert, 1,70m, chronically sun-glassed, always carrying three guns, had entered a flower shop.

This had caused some shock.

Nicole, the clerk in charge of the shop at the time, had asked them what kinds of flowers they wanted.

What can be said about Brian? He grew up in Britain. Some argue that it was the forest, which, as folk lore had it, was cursed with angry spirits, and in which his middle school was located, that turned him into the chronically violent man he would become as an adult. More rational-minded and Freud-educated scholars argued it was the fact that young, bright Brian had eavesdropped on his mother's internet communications, in which she had conspired with a number of other women to kill Brian's father. All these women had thought themselves the sole wife of Brian's father. Whatever the reason, young Brian first flirted with the idea of violence when, pushed into a corner, he resorted to pulling another pupil's eye out. Not quite out; the optic nerve is quite sturdy, as Brian would remark whenever someone else told that story. At 18, he went to Germany, found a neo-nazi cell, killed a few policemen, then killed the head of the neo-nazi cell; he had a cosmetic surgery, paid for by a friendly Russian criminal boss, and started traveling the world. He liked to refer to it as crime-tourism.

Brian also likes bananas.

That is what can be said about Brian.

“Roses”, Robert had said. “Two bouquets of yellow roses, and make them big.”

What can be said about Robert?

Robert grew up the son of an extremely successful policeman. During the years 2030 and 2031, he went through a highly delayed phase of father-son rebellion. At the end of this two year period, his father was discharged from the police after allegations had surfaced that he had been using his power to protect his son gone gangster. The son repented, came home, and of course became a policeman almost as dedicated and skilled as his father. Brian would eventually become his arch-nemesis, in a very classical story-compatible way. When in 2120 there was a sudden sentimental revival of the graphic novel, one of the most successful series, R&B, retold the story of Brian and Robert in a highly dramatized form. In real life, Brian was killed by a ricochet during a small shoot-out in a meat factory. In the comic, he did not really die, but rather secretly retired to a secret hide-out in the Antarctic. When after a long successful run the sales started to decline, Robert learnt how to fly, and things really went downhill from there.

Robert hates bananas.

That is what can be said about Robert.

“Are they for your wife?” Nicole had asked. “Wives. I mean wives. I didn't mean to imply you share a... oh my God please don't kill me. Are you going to rob us?”

What can be said about Nicole?

Not really much. She played with plastic ponies until she was eighteen, then she went to work in her aunt's flower shop, hoping every day for a white knight to come save her. Some days, when she felt courageous, the white knight would be nasty, a robber even. She had never dared hope for two knights.

Nicole does not feel strongly about bananas either way.

That is what can be said about Nicole.

That afternoon, the three had taken the decision to rob the armoured van together. Nicole would drive the delivery truck of her flower shop and get into an accident with the armoured van. Robert and Brian would kill the security guards with their bouquets of yellow roses.

But then the van was early, and Nicole did not manage to get into an accident with it.

Paul spotted the logo of a lottery company on the side of the van he had just rammed. After the security officer had finished searching Paul for concealed weapons, he eased up visibly and started explaining:

“You see, company policy demands that we exercise utmost care in the case of a traffic accident. Many times, robbers stage such accidents to get us out of the car where we're vulnerable.”

Then, Paul's hearing suddenly failed him, sensible input replaced by a long, high pitched tone, with only the hint of an initial loud sound. The officer staggered back and fell, his uniform now discoloured in the chest region. Paul whirled around to find two men pointing bouquets of flowers in the general direction of the second security guard. A bright flash of light, a momentary cloud of flower petals, and out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw the second guard go down. The men now lowered their floral weapons, discarding the paper and flowers they had used to hide the firearms.

Robert stepped up to Paul, said something, and hit him across the face with the butt of his weapon. Paul collapsed.

Unfortunately, Paul's ears were not used to the sound of gunshots nearby, otherwise he would have heard the robber thanking him for delaying the van they had been meaning to rob.

Brian, Nicole, and Robert robbed the van, stealing the money a Mr Cartier had won in the lottery. A few months later, Brian shot Nicole, for no reason really. In the comic, Brian was gay and had fallen in love with Robert, and Robert had an affair with Nicole. It was this shooting of “the only person who ever meant anything to him” that turned Robert off of crime again, in the comic. In real life, Brian was not gay, and Robert had no affair with Nicole.

“People are always looking for explanations where there aren't any”, Brian would say in a post-mortal interview about his comic persona.

* * *

2031 AD

“I don't care, any film where we won't have to listen to the dialogue”, Patrick said.

“I don't know, is that romantic?” Jessica grinned.

“I do think so. The light reflected from the canvas will enter into its own dialogue with the curves and crevices of your skin, and I'm going to pay attention to that conversation.”

As always, when Patrick came out of nowhere with a romantic line like that, Jessica was out of anything clever to reply, and instead merely kissed him. She turned to the teenage boy behind the counter.

“Two tickets for Titanic 2, please”, she said.

He gave them the tickets.

“What is this going to be, some mature-slash-zombie romance-slash-comedy?” Patrick asked.

“No, Harry does use the force. Come on. It's all over the books.” A pause. “Forget the wands, okay?” The ticket selling boy looked at the two people staring back at him. “Anything else?” he asked. Patrick laughed and shook his head no. The boy went back to his telephone conversation.

They chose seats in the back of the empty theatre and watched the trailers without much interest.

“You know that I won't always be here”, said Patrick finally into the silence between two trailers.

Jessica looked over at him, carefully. “Don't say that, please.”

“Listen to me. I hate rehearsed speeches, so I will subject you only to this single one, because I doubt I could say the things I need to say without the comfort of having recited them in my head a hundred times, without having reduced them from my own words to some text I learnt by heart.”

And he told her how she should remember those times they had, and how she should incorporate them into her life, not by remembering him and living in the past, but by understanding, and making the memories part of herself, and by allowing Patrick to speak out of her every now and then. It was not his absence or his presence that should matter to her; the knowledge that once he had been present and things had been good should suffice to make her a happier and better person.

“Do you understand what I'm saying?” he asked, just as the screen summarized the first film in the space of two minutes.

“Yes, Patrick, yes I understand you. But please let's not talk about this anymore now, okay?”

She did not understand yet.

* * *

“So this is art? What makes it art? I mean, seriously? Just because it's odd and stands in the middle of this walkway, it's suddenly art?”

Patrick looked pale; with Jessica in his arm, he was standing in front of an installation of pipes and cement blocks.

Jessica seemed surprised. “I guess this isn't art then… I don't know.”

“Damn right it isn't. Not yet!” Patrick pulled his arm away from Jessica's and leaned on the artwork. “Now it is!”

Someone was walking by with a camera, taking pictures of the glass front of the building behind them.

“Hey! Excuse me? Sir? Yes, could you please take a picture of me and the artwork here? We're good friends you see.” Patrick made an impossible grimace standing next to the pipes, and the man with the camera took a picture.

“Thanks a lot”, Patrick said, walking up to the man. “Would it trouble you too much to send it to my e-mail address?”

The man was smiling, almost laughing. “No, not at all. Wait, I got a pen and paper somewhere here.”

Jessica still stood where she had been when Patrick had pulled away from her. She was watching him and the man with the camera, a smile on her face and just the hint of a tear in her eyes.

“Actually…” Patrick said, still with a wide mock grin on his face, “send it to her e-mail! Because you know, by this time next week, I'll be dead!” His grin widened. The other man froze in mid-movement.

“Patrick…” Jessica stepped up to them.

“I'm…” started the other man.

“No, no, it's alright. No greeting cards, no good wishes, no flowers please. I only wished I could have been an artist, you know. Instant! Fame!” His hands painted the two words into the sky as giant neon signs. “Just add Death!”

The other man took down Jessica's address and left, in a hurry. The couple hooked their arms together again and continued walking toward the hospital.

* * *

Jessica's unsteady hand lit a small candle. “Patrick. His name is Patrick”, she said, then tried to say something else, but instead only barely managed to stifle a sob. The echoes of the aborted sob expanded through the church.

Early the next morning, the flame reached the bottom of the candle, and in a hospital somewhere, a nurse gave a doctor a death certificate to sign.

“Well”, the doctor said, “twenty six years was pretty good.”

* * *

“Come on, we're late for class.”

Swiftly and silently, a printer produced a high quality print on glossy paper. It showed a young man leaning against an artwork of sorts. Jessica took the printout from the printer, put it into her schoolbag, and got up.

* * *

“If there is one thought-experiment that has been beaten more than all the proverbial dead horses out there, it's Schroedinger's Cat. I don't see the point, really: all it says to me is that a cat you can't watch may as well be dead.”

Soft laughter in the lecture hall.

“There is another basic truth in this experiment, which, as you all doubtlessly remember, we discussed last Friday. Let me summarize: we have a cat inside a box. We can't look inside, and that's essential. There's a nuclear something, we needn't worry what it is, only one thing concerns us: within the time of our experiment, there's a 50/50 chance the nuclear thing will emit a particle. If that happens, the cat is killed. The point is, while we're not looking into the box, according to the postulations of quantum mechanics, the cat would be in a state that's both alive and dead. Let's have a close look at the zombie cat.”

Once again, the students laughed.

“What do you know about zombies?” the professor asked. It took the students a moment to realize he was serious about the question.

“Come on, come on, this is general knowledge. No one?”

A boy in a black t-shirt, sitting in the back of the class, raised his hand. There was absolutely no way to decipher the name of the band on the shirt unless you already knew it. Fortunately there still lived people knowing the name.

“Yes, Mario?”

“You have to chop them into little pieces to stop them. Or blow their brains out.”

“That's good, what else?”

“Uh, they used to move really slowly, until like some time in 2004, when they started moving like fucking 100 meter sprinters.”

“Well, what I was getting at was that they aren't real.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah, that's right. There are no zombies. So our cat cannot be both alive and dead. So what's going on?”

He paused for a moment.

“Quantum mechanics describe the state of very small things as a wave equation. There's a statistical distribution of probabilities, describing where the particle might be, and how likely it is we think that it is there. But it's more than that. In some way, the particle occupies all these places. It is everywhere, simultaneously. How can that be explained?”

Against her expectations, Jessica found herself strangely engrossed. In the row in front of her, a couple sat. He was absent mindedly resting his hand on her thigh. A few seats next to Jessica sat another girl, doodling on her notebook. It was the face of a boy.

“One approach is to claim that all these things are true; but not necessarily in the same world.”

In the row behind Jessica, someone noisily got up and left the classroom. She turned around to see a girl desperate to contain her anger; the girl broke a pencil in her hand, then she got up and left too.

“It's all happening; but in different realities. A way you can think of it is that both the world in which the cat died and the world in which it survived exist. As an event becomes less and less likely, one might want to imagine fewer worlds in which the event has happened…”

Jessica thought of the black man they had met in the church. His face (his face, there was something wrong with his face) as he rambled insanely about possibilities. The numbers on the blackboard blurred.

Everything stopped.