One night he dreams he is at the Life After Death group in Southwark. He is present and Simon Merriweather is there too, but Simon doesn’t recognize him, as if he inhabits someone else’s body. Simon is crying. He says he needs to know if there really is life after death, because he needs to know Sam is still with him, and that he will join her when he dies.
But how can there be life after death without God, and how can there be a God if He’d let Sam die like that when both of us were doing good things? Just doing good things?
And Logan is crying too. He puts his hand to his face and it’s wet. He wants to hold Simon and hug him and tell him everything is okay, but he is afraid if he does that Simon will recognize him, and will think he is insincere. When he wakes up, he is still crying.
All through the day, he thinks about Simon. Simon’s pattern of loss: first Jules, then Sam. Had the one led to the other? Was Logan the root cause, triggering a fear of loss that created the crash? Or had Simon suffered some deeper, earlier loss that he, Logan, had somehow hooked into, obediently donning the mask, playing the part, stealing the lover? And had he not taken the role, would some other man have picked up the costume and done just the same? Had he simply responded to the signal emitted, an agent of universal forces, ensuring that what the poor man most feared, and unconsciously focused upon, collapsed into its final, particular state?
However he cuts it, he feels responsible. Each of them played their own blind game, propelled by their history. But undoubtedly Logan had caused suffering. And from the dream – which was vividly real – the man was still suffering. Walking Achilles across the heathland that evening, Logan watches the growing dark and considers his part in this pattern of destruction. If Jules had stayed with Simon, would Sam have died? Surely Sam was collapsing her own lines of probability, and to some higher purpose that none could yet understand? Was Simon meant to reforge himself through this tragedy? To discover, like Logan, that he was not alone, but eternally entwined in a miraculous whole? Had his pilot died to guide him?
Are you looking after him, Sam? he whispers aloud. Are you leading him somewhere? Will you guide him to peace?
Four hundred yards away, a single car is crossing the common. It flashes its headlights.
Flash. Flash. Flash.
And then turns off, north and away. He stops dead and stares after it. It is an answer. It is nothing to do with the driver. It is Sam, telling him yes.