Up on that roof, with water ticking in the gutters and the sky the color of pearls, we talked about movies. About favorite foods and songs and colors. We wondered what dogs and cats and seagulls would say if they could speak a language we understood. We tried, really, we did. But it felt so simple. Too simple. So we gave up and instead we talked about books and the ukulele. About Bill Hicks, Gujarati cooking, the end of electricity, the I Ching, the chances of alchemy, the possibility of alien life, Tony Hoagland poems, the smell of cut grass, plastics in the Galápagos, Kintsugi pottery, the northern lights, the sea. After a while we were quiet and I watched a bee find its way into the wall through a gap in the mortar by his head. It hovered and docked like something off a space station. Novo listened. I could see him listening. He closed his eyes. “There were bees inside the wall in my last house,” he said. “I used to lie in bed and listen to them. They sounded angry.”

“Where was that?”

“You wouldn’t know it. It was a long time ago.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” I said.

“Stop trying to. There’s more to life than what we know we know.”

“I mean, there’d better be. I do hope so.”

I’d left a book up there a few days ago, and the pages were now swollen and damp and all stuck together. I shook it out, laid it flat in the sun. “What are you reading?” he said.

“Just something I picked up,” I said. “About hypotheticals and theories. It’s like a guessing game got turned into a science.”

“Like what?”

“Like time travel and parallel universes,” I told him. “And black holes and quarks and the god particle. I mean. All these wild ideas, before they get broken down into equations and probabilities and stuff.”

“The mechanics of magic,” he said.

“Exactly. Precisely. So this is before the mechanics, when you’re totally feeling your way around in the dark. Like trying to work out what the bigger picture is by studying one tiny drop of paint. Am I making any sense to you?”

“I get it.”

“Gives me loads to think about.”

“Tell me something you think about.”

“Nothing exists in isolation, by itself,” I said. “Things only exist when they are colliding with something else. Like atomically. At the very smallest level. Of everything.”

Novo looked at his hands while I was talking. He pressed his palms together, interlocked his fingers.

“You see, I read that,” I said. “And then I think that if it’s true about atoms, and we are all made of atoms, then it must be true about people too.”

“So,” Novo said. “If you spend your whole life on your own you never really existed?”