“No, I haven’t.” Again, that smile, sending him spiraling through responses: fondness, pride, resentment. “To be honest,” she goes on, “I’ve always found the whole thing a bit stupid.”

“They repeat.” He blurts it out before he reminds himself to slow down. “If—if you walk across and keep your eyes on the locks, after a while, they start to repeat. The shapes, the colors. Even the names.”

Her mouth opens a second before she speaks. “There are only so many brands of padlock. And with people coming here from all over to do the same thing, some names are bound to repeat. That’s just statistics.”

He shakes his head violently. “It’s not like that. It’s not random. I’ve seen the same names, over and over again, in the same order.” He rolls the cigarette between his palms. “It’s a pattern, a message for me. I just need to learn how to decode it.”

She laughs, throwing her head back. The gesture is so familiar it staggers him. Who is she? Why does her presence make him feel partial, fragile, on the verge of crying? “You think it’s a message for you,” she says.

“Yes.”

She looks down at him. “How many people live in Cologne?”

Their roles shift again: she the patronizing professor, he the resentful student. “I don’t know. A million?”

“A million people. How many of them walk across that bridge every day?”

A different reaction, a different self. Brother to sister, weary and superior. “A thousand. Fifty thousand. Does it matter?”

“Why do you think the message is for you, and not for any of the other thousand or fifty thousand people who might happen to walk by?”

Santi puts away the cigarette and sits on his hands. He hates feeling like a marionette, his gestures controlled by memories that can’t possibly all be his. He focuses on what makes him real. “Because no one but me sees what’s wrong with the world.”

She frowns. “What’s wrong with the world, Mr. López?”

That the stars keep changing. That the city repeats itself, over and over. That I’m the only one who’s really here. The answers stop at his lips, destabilized by the fact that his illusion of a constant self dissolves every time she speaks. Was he as unreal as the world, all along? Is he just another dream, being dreamt by a hundred changing Thoras?

She speaks quietly, as if she’s afraid someone will overhear. “Why do you come here to look at the stars?”

He turns toward the glass wall of the Odysseum, sees their reflections watching them. “Because the stars in there don’t change.”

She looks at him with growing disquiet. “You remember different stars?”

“Yes.” He swallows. “Sometimes, when I look up, it’s like I see them all superimposed. Like the light of them all together could blind me.”