And I said, “What?” because all life was so loud in my ears suddenly, I didn’t think I’d heard him right.

“Oh, and look,” he said, smiling, not just at me, but at all of it. “Here’s another Now. Hello to that one too.”

He took that stupid, half-dead, not-even-functioning phone out of my hands and said that instead of pinning it down for later, maybe I should just try being in it for once. He said there was a Forever in every Now, if I was only willing to see it. “You’re missing it, Jude. You’re missing it the whole time.”

And that’s how he nudged me out of the real world and over into that moment, that particular Now, with the tide going out and the birds breaking the surface of the water, and the unrepeatable light and the warmth of us on that cold sand, not touching, not yet, but near enough, and like I said never-ending, already done.

“Hello Now,” Novo said as I moved atom by atom toward him, irreversible, and I said it back, and he said it again and we were like the flat, constant waves then. Hello Now, Hello Now, Hello Now.

Novo

I am in a great room lined with doors. I have no idea how I got here, no memory of the door through which I entered. The room is so long that I can’t see where it ends. I can’t be sure that it does. Each door is identical to the next, and there are so many it will take a lifetime just to count them.

All I can think of is escape.

The first door I try stands over a canyon so deep that I can feel the pull of the fall, the hum of it in the doorframe, the high air pushing against me as I force it closed.

The second door shows me an empty cell just large enough to crawl into, too low for me to sit up, too narrow to turn around, too dark to see.

Through the third I see a room alive with the glint and whistle of flying knives, so many and so effortlessly sharp that anyone passing through it would be cut into fine slices.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth doors open onto solid walls.

The seventh to an explosion.

At the next, a pack of starved dogs lunge at me, their teeth and claws savaging the door’s skin as I slam it, a finger’s width from my face.

Behind other doors flames that burn hot on my skin, a stampede of frightened horses, a floor slick and writhing with a million dying fish.

One door leads to another endless room lined with doors, and I shrink from the sight of it with exhaustion and horror.