Letters to No One in Particular

The first thing Thomas did every morning was check his handwriting.

Not for quality — he had no particular investment in penmanship — but for continuity. He kept a notebook on whatever bedside table he found himself beside, a small red notebook that was always there regardless of which body he woke up in, which he had stopped questioning because some things resist questioning and the notebook was one of them. He would sit up, locate the notebook, uncap the pen clipped to its cover, and write a single sentence in the top margin of whatever page came next.

The sentence was always the same: I was here yesterday and I am here today.

He did this because the handwriting was always the same too. Not similar — identical. Whatever hands he was given on any given morning, the sentence emerged in his handwriting, as if the motion bypassed the body entirely and came from somewhere the body was only borrowing.

This, he had decided, was the closest thing to proof he was going to get.

The condition — he thought of it as a condition the way you think of weather as a condition: descriptive, morally neutral, impossible to negotiate with — had been with him for as long as he could remember, which was the source of a specific philosophical difficulty, because as long as he could remember was not a very stable unit of measurement when the person doing the remembering woke up in a different configuration every twenty-four hours.

What he remembered was this: he was Thomas. He did not remember a last name, which he suspected was either genuinely gone or had never been the kind of thing he thought about. He was, he believed, somewhere in his late thirties, though the bodies varied enormously and his sense of his own age was more emotional than physical — the particular weariness and occasional wonder of someone who had been conscious long enough to develop opinions. He had opinions about music, about the right way to make coffee, about the specific pleasure of a sentence that ended exactly where it should. He had opinions about people, which he had gathered the way you gather anything during a long journey: imprecisely, with great feeling, in no particular order.

He did not know where his own body was. He did not know if it still existed. He did not know whether Thomas-the-person was a thing that had always worked this way or a thing that had once worked normally and had then been altered by some event he couldn't access. He had looked for evidence both ways and found it both ways, which meant the evidence was not, ultimately, the point.

The point, he had decided after what felt like a significant amount of time, was the letters.

He had started writing them in year two — or what he estimated was year two, counting from the earliest continuous memory he could verify.

The letters were addressed To Whoever I Was Yesterday, which was grammatically awkward but more precise than any alternative. He wrote one every morning after the sentence in the margin, filling whatever pages remained in whatever time he had before the day's body was required to begin its day. He wrote about what he had seen in the previous body. What he had noticed. What the day had felt like from inside a different height, a different set of sensory tolerances, a different accumulated history pressing against the present moment.

He had been, in the past year alone: a seventy-two-year-old woman in Lisbon who kept an immaculate garden and wept every Tuesday for reasons he never identified; a teenager in Osaka who was very good at mathematics and secretly wanted to be a chef; a man roughly his own age in Nairobi who was in the middle of a conversation with his estranged brother that Thomas had to continue without any briefing whatsoever; a child of eight in rural Finland who spent the day at school learning about the water cycle and found it, Thomas had to admit, genuinely moving. He had been tired bodies and rested bodies, bodies in pain and bodies in the particular animal ease of good health, bodies that were loved and bodies that were lonely in the specific way of people surrounded by others.

He wrote about all of it. To himself. Which was also to no one, and also, he had come to believe, to everyone, because if you moved through enough people you began to understand that the borders between them were more permeable than anyone liked to admit.

The morning that changed things — which is a phrase he would have resisted if he were writing this as a story, because it implies that things had a stable configuration before and after, which his things did not — he woke up in a small apartment in a city he identified by the light as somewhere in Southern Europe and found, on the bedside table, not just his notebook but a second notebook. Same size. Different color — blue where his was red. Same pen clipped to the cover.

He sat up slowly. He looked at the blue notebook with the attention of someone reading a situation before entering it.

He opened it.

The handwriting inside was not his.

But the sentence at the top of the first page — the sentence he wrote every morning, the proof of continuity — was written in his hand. And beneath it, in a different hand entirely, was a response:

I know. I've been reading your letters. I think we need to talk.

Thomas sat with this for a long time.

He was, he assessed from a brief examination, in the body of a man in his mid-forties — Mediterranean features, ink stains on the right forefinger that suggested writing as a habitual occupation, a general physical impression of someone who moved through the world with careful deliberateness. The apartment was small and extraordinarily full of books, arranged with the idiosyncratic logic of a personal system rather than any conventional taxonomy. Through the window, light came in at the angle of mid-morning, falling across a wooden floor in a shape that moved slightly as the curtain shifted.

He read the blue notebook from the beginning.

It took two hours. He drank the coffee that the apartment's kitchen supplied without his having to think about it, and he read, and what he read was the record of a person who had, apparently, been moving through different bodies in the same way he had, for approximately the same duration, and had been finding his letters in the bedside notebook since sometime in what she estimated as her third year.

He did not know it was a she until page forty, when she mentioned it in passing, with the offhandedness of someone noting a fact rather than making an announcement.

Her name — the name she used for herself, assembled from fragments in the same way he had assembled Thomas — was Ada.

She had opinions about architecture, about the migratory patterns of certain birds, about the specific failure of most people to actually listen rather than simply waiting to respond. She had, over the two hundred pages of the blue notebook, developed a theory of consciousness that she admitted was possibly insane but that she found more explanatory than anything she'd encountered in the philosophy she'd managed to read across a hundred different bookshelves in a hundred different lives.

The theory, simplified: consciousness was not a property of bodies. Bodies were temporary structures that consciousness inhabited the way a piece of music inhabits a particular instrument — the music was not the instrument, and the instrument did not determine the music, but neither could the music exist without some instrument, and the particular resonances and limitations of each instrument shaped, without ultimately defining, what you heard.

You and I, she had written on page two hundred and seven, are the music. We are having the unusual experience of knowing this, which most consciousness doesn't. I am not sure yet whether this is fortunate or simply strange.

Thomas read this three times.

Then he turned to a blank page in the blue notebook and wrote, in his handwriting, which was beginning to feel less like proof of identity and more like proof of something larger and harder to name:

It might be both. Fortunate and strange are not, in my experience, mutually exclusive. Tell me about the birds.

The correspondence — conducted in stolen mornings across an unknown geography, the blue notebook appearing on whatever bedside table he was assigned with the reliability that he had stopped questioning along with the red one — became the organizing principle of his days.

Not because it explained anything. It didn't. Ada's theory of consciousness, though he found it genuinely beautiful, did not tell him where Thomas ended and the borrowed body began, or whether the borrowing was temporary or permanent or whether those words meant anything useful in this context. It did not tell him why this was happening or to whom else it might be happening, and he suspected, based on his reading of her two hundred pages and his own accumulation of other people's days, that the world contained a number of people who were less continuous than they appeared, wearing their bodies with varying degrees of conviction, less certain of their own edges than the cultural consensus about selfhood would suggest.

What the correspondence did was something he found harder to articulate and therefore more true: it gave the movement direction. Not destination — he had stopped expecting destination — but direction. The sense of moving toward rather than simply through.

He began to notice things differently. In the seventy-two-year-old gardener's Tuesday tears, he had originally found only grief and privacy and the feeling of being somewhere he wasn't meant to be. Now he found, underneath those things, a tremendous fidelity — a person who had decided that some losses were worth honoring weekly, that scheduled grief was not lesser grief but grief made sustainable, grief made livable, grief transformed by ritual into something that could coexist with the garden and the light and the continuing Tuesday afternoons. He wrote about this to Ada. She wrote back that she had been, the previous week, an elderly man in Glasgow who attended the same café every morning and ordered the same thing and sat in the same chair, and that she had spent the day wondering whether this was limitation or loyalty, and that she had concluded it was impossible to tell from outside and probably both from inside.

Most of the important things, she wrote, are impossible to tell from outside.

He was beginning to agree.

On a morning he calculated as approximately three years after finding the blue notebook, Thomas woke up and wrote his sentence and opened the notebook and found a letter longer than any Ada had written before.

She had been, the previous day, a young woman in Buenos Aires who was a dancer — whose body knew movement the way his hands knew his handwriting, with the below-language certainty of deeply practiced skill. She had spent the day at a rehearsal and then at dinner with the dancer's friends and then walking home alone through streets that smelled of rain on warm concrete, and she had thought, walking, about continuity and identity and the question she had been avoiding asking for three years of correspondence.

I want to ask you something, the letter said, and I want you to know that I'm asking it as a genuine question and not as a test, because I'm tired of questions that are actually tests disguised as questions, which is a habit I notice in myself and am working on.

Do you think we are the same person?

Thomas put down the pen. He looked at the ceiling of whatever room he was in — somewhere new, somewhere in what the light suggested was Northern Europe, gray and even and clean. He thought about the question with the seriousness it deserved.

The case for yes: the notebooks appeared for both of them. The handwriting crossed between them. They had been, on at least three occasions he could document, in the same city on the same day without occupying the same body. They thought about similar things and arrived at similar conclusions through different routes, the way people who have read the same books do, regardless of whether they've met.

The case for no: she found architecture interesting and he found it mostly invisible. She could identify birds by flight pattern and he could barely identify them by sight. Her theory of consciousness was elegant and spatial; his, when he tried to articulate it, was more like music — temporal, sequential, made of duration rather than form. They had been shaped by different accumulated days into people who were related but not identical, the way a theme is related to its variations without being reducible to them.

He wrote back:

I think we might be the music from the same piece, played on different instruments, in different rooms, at different times, with all the distance and resonance that implies. Which is not the same person. Which is also not different people. Which is, I think, a category we don't have good language for yet.

I think that's why we're writing letters.

He paused. Then added:

Tell me about the rain on the concrete. I want to know what Buenos Aires smells like at night. I have never been, as far as I can tell, and I would like to know.

The letter that arrived a week later began with three paragraphs about rain on Buenos Aires concrete — the specific warmth of it, the way it activated the city's accumulated smell of coffee and exhaust and the river and something floral he couldn't name from her description but understood from it — and then continued:

I've been thinking about what you said. About language. About the categories we don't have.

I think this is what the letters are for. Not to explain the condition. Not to solve it. But to build, slowly, across all this distance and all these borrowed days, a language precise enough to describe what it is to be us. Whatever us means. However many of us there are.

Because here is what I keep coming back to: every person we inhabit for a day is also, in some sense, writing letters they don't know they're writing. Every person is sending signals about what it's like to be them — through the way they've arranged their books, the way they hold their coffee cup, the thing they look at when they're thinking. We read them. We are the only ones who read them in quite this way, which means we are doing something, I think, that matters.

We are paying attention.

I think that might be enough. I think that might be, actually, everything.

Thomas read this in the morning light of a room he didn't recognize, in a body he was borrowing for the day, with his handwriting on the margin of the red notebook and the blue notebook open on the bed beside him and the city outside beginning its day without knowing he was in it.

He thought about the gardener's Tuesday tears. The mathematician who wanted to cook. The estranged brothers in Nairobi, the conversation he'd had to continue without briefing, the way the estranged brother's face had shifted during that conversation from wariness to something more complicated and more true.

He thought about paying attention. About what it meant to move through a hundred lives with nothing to offer except the willingness to be fully, quietly, completely present in each one.

He picked up the pen.

You're right, he wrote. It is enough. It is, in fact, enormous.

Today I am somewhere cold and northern and the light is gray and even and very clean. I don't know whose life this is yet. I'm going to go find out.

Write to me tonight.

He closed the notebook. He stood up. He looked at the window, at the gray northern light coming through it, at the city visible beyond — its rooftops and its ordinary morning and its complete indifference to the fact that it was being observed by someone who was only visiting but intended, for the duration, to be entirely here.

He went to make coffee.

He did not know the kitchen. He found it anyway, the way you find things when you're paying attention — not by knowing where they are but by following the logic of the space, the way a room tells you what it contains if you listen to it correctly.

The coffee was good.

He stood at the window and drank it and watched the city and was, for all practical purposes and possibly for some impractical ones too, entirely present in a life that was not his and also, in every way that the letters had taught him mattered, completely his own.

Outside, the day continued to be itself — indifferent and generous and full of people who were, each of them, sending signals to anyone attentive enough to read them.

Thomas was attentive enough.

He always had been.

That, he had finally decided, was what Thomas meant.

Found in a red notebook, author unknown, city unknown, date unknown:

"I was here yesterday and I am here today."

Written in the same handwriting on four hundred and twelve consecutive pages.

The handwriting never changes.