He had never been good at physics, especially quantum physics, but death was helping with that. Now he saw the truth of things in a new way. He understood what Charlie had been telling him when he was high on LSD. That life was a kind of spinning coin.
It could be changed by death and also not changed by deathat the same time.
The quantum wave function meant everything was eternally and infinitely variable. Death made things a bit wobbly. It madedifferent possibilities exist on top of each other. Miss Graham was trying to tell him this. Sometimes you had to break the rules in order to live.
Agnes had caught up with him. She peered at him, eyes wide beneath her cloche hat.
‘Oh dear, Old Bean. Listen. You are at the end of your life and the start of your death. Your life flashes before your eyes. You linger where you are meant to linger. On scenes that provide, as a whole, a complete representation of your life. But then, when the time comes, you get on board the Midnight Train and keep on chugging along the track. You don’t stick around. Because as I told you, you can’t be there when your living self falls asleep. You get on the train and then you wait for eternity.’
‘What happens?’
Agnes looked confused so he expanded.
‘I mean, what happens if I am there and he sleeps?’
‘Then the train comes for him too. Potentially … things are unpredictable …’
‘Does he become a ghost?’
Agnes didn’t want to answer this but she had to. Lying was against her principles. ‘No. Not in the conventional sense. He would be there, but via his dreams not his death. So while at the end of the journey you would disappear into nothingness, he would’ – she hesitated, knowing this would be an incentive – ‘just wake up. The way dreamers always do. Potentially … Actually, Old Bean, that is rather unclear. I don’t actually know for certain that would happen. It is probable but not certain.’
‘And in the dream he sees his future, right?’
She gave a reluctant nod.
The Ghost smiled. He was so excited he almost felt alive.
Agnes shook her head. ‘Exactly. And how can someone live if they know their future?’
‘Look, I had a friend. Charlie.’
‘I know Charlie, Old Bean.’
‘Well, when he was high, Charlie always talked about time. About how it is never really the past. That it always allows the possibility of change. Like a book you can keep editing. He knew a lot about quantum physics. The wave function. Reality was always changeable even when you felt it had been lived. The past and the future could interfere with themselves.’
Agnes sighed. ‘I know how it works. As I said, I was given a knowledge of the universe when I opted to help you.’
‘I just think that is what is already happening. I think I am making a change. But to really do it … I need to stay until he sleeps. I need to guide him onto the train and tell him what I have learned by dying. And for the train to show him the future.’
‘It’s all so unpredictable, Old Bean. You are throwing away your eternity, and you will never know if that sacrifice was worth it. I wouldn’t tinker if I was you.’
The Ghost looked back through the crowd but he could no longer see Maggie or himself. He didn’t want to get closer to the train. He sensed it – and Agnes – had less power over him the further he moved away from their spectral magnetism.
He finally spotted Wilbur and Maggie, disappearing around the corner on their way to the church.
‘Listen, Agnes, I’m not getting back on that train.’
A couple staring at a giant map walked through Wilbur the Ghost.
‘How can a life have meaning if the future is known?’ Agnes asked. She knew the answer, because she knew everything, but the bookseller in her needed to know he was making the right decision.
‘But that’s the point, it would no longer be the same life. It’s the observer effect. That’s another thing Charlie talked about. The moment you witness something, it changes the thing you are observing …’
‘Oh dear.’
‘So, if the future is known, then the future becomes knowledge, and then things change.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Agnes, shaking her head. ‘I’ve told you about the rules. I’ve told you of their importance. It’s not hard. You get on the train. You don’t meddle. And you don’t see yourself asleep. One, two, three. That’s it.’
