48 pages • 1-hour read
Our Infinite Fates
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Chapters 12-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Wales, 2022”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, child death, graphic violence, suicidal ideation, and mental illness.
Evelyn dreams of the war, and she suspects that the witchy woman is the one with whom she and Arden made a deal. She wonders when this woman will find them again.
A week before her 18th birthday, Evelyn and Ceri agree to go on a date. Evelyn carries her list of things she hopes to do as an adult in her pocket and wears a fun red dress, her favorite color. Evelyn’s mother wants her to start going to her therapist again, but Evelyn stopped seeing Dr. Chiang because it was too difficult to skirt around the truth about her and Arden.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Wales, 2022”
Ceri arrives, and Evelyn is touched that Arden still tries to look nice for her. She offers to give him a tour of the farm, but once they get into the barn, she knocks Ceri out with a shovel and drags him into the stables. She secures his wrists around a post, shocked by what she’s done. She hears a voice behind her and turns to see Dylan, who comments wryly on her actions.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Wales, 2022”
Dylan’s upbeat persona falls away as he reveals himself to be Arden. He says that he lied about his age and that he didn’t plan to get so close to the Blythes, but he started to care about Gracie. Evelyn knows that she should hate him, but she yearns for him instead. When he says that he must kill Evelyn now, he reasons that they won’t have to watch Gracie die. Evelyn is shocked by his heartlessness and reminds him that her mother has lost her husband and now stands to lose both daughters. She says that there’s still a week before their birthdays, but Arden is afraid that Evelyn will run away if he doesn’t kill her now. In response, she proposes that they stay together until she saves Gracie. Arden accepts this deal, saying that he’ll have to kill her in six days whether she succeeds or not.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Austria-Hungary, 1898”
Evelyn is a young man attending the opera with his mother. When her mother gets up to use the bathroom, another young man sits down next to Evelyn; it’s Arden. He asks whether a male or female body feels most like her own, and Evelyn says that no one body feels more “right” than any other. Evelyn recognizes how her heart burns for Arden, even though he’s there to kill her. Arden says that he prefers being a boy but can’t articulate why. Evelyn realizes that he’s stalling, but she doesn’t want her mother to see her commit murder. She shoots him in the head.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Wales, 2022”
Evelyn and Arden discuss what to do with Ceri. Arden says that they should leave him tied up and free him right before they die, but that sounds cruel to Evelyn. Ceri awakens and says that he needs medical attention. Arden refuses, saying that he will kill Evelyn immediately if she lets Ceri go. Evelyn panics, having to choose between freeing Ceri and staying alive long enough to save Gracie. She calls Arden’s bluff and frees Ceri.
Chapter 17 Summary: “United States of America, 1862”
Evelyn and Arden are female patients in a Vermont psychiatric hospital. Evelyn feels offended by the beauty of the place, as though nature doesn’t care about the patients’ pain. The use of torturous “alternative therapies” causes Arden to decide to end their lives early. However, orderlies stop him before he can kill Evelyn, and then he’s given drugs that cause him to recede into himself.
Evelyn steals the key to her “cage” from one orderly and escapes the hospital. She runs into the woods but quickly feels guilty about leaving Arden. At first, she decides to return after their birthday, but a horrifying and painful vision convinces her that turning 18 will only lead to their destruction. In this vision, she sees a “world of white bone and falling ash” and Arden saying, “I told you it would ruin us” (133). The vision fades but leaves her with the certainty that Arden acts as he does to protect them both.
The chapter ends with a poem in which Arden describes his heart as a haunted house with a moat that he digs himself.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Wales, 2022”
Arden and Evelyn tell hospital personnel that Ceri fell onto some farm equipment. Evelyn realizes that this Arden is more like the cold killer from El Salvador than the sweet Siberian boy. When they reach Evelyn’s home, they tell her mother that they’re seeing each other, and she gives permission for Evelyn to sleep in Arden’s cabin. Evelyn is determined to win him over, though she recognizes that while he used to live for his family, he now guards his heart. He handcuffs Evelyn to the bed so that she cannot escape, and then he lies down on the floor. She begs him to talk, suggesting that they could figure out a way to survive together; Arden says there is no way out.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Wales, 2022”
Evelyn awakens to find Arden in the throes of a nightmare, screaming in pain and terror. When she wakes him, she says that she’s also haunted by memories of the psychiatric hospital and trenches, but he only rolls away. Evelyn mentions coffee that they drank in the Ottoman Empire, but he says it’s best not to discuss that life. Evelyn realizes that he remembers absolutely everything, while she does not, and that this explains why he protects his heart. She can remember the last 100 years, but only in “broad strokes,” not details. Everything older is blurred and murky.
In this life, Evelyn is allergic to anesthesia, so she is nervous about the bone marrow retrieval process. The doctor is willing to move the procedure up to Monday of next week, but Evelyn turns 18 on Saturday. Unless there’s a cancellation or some other lucky break, Arden will kill Evelyn before the operation can take place.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Dutch East Indies, 1770”
Evelyn is on a ship and will turn 18 in minutes. That morning, Arden tried to strangle her, but the first mate hauled Arden away, and now he’s tied up in the ship’s hold. At the moment when she turns 18, Evelyn feels her “tether” grow 1,000 times stronger. Then, she feels like a lasso is tightening around her waist and hauling her backward. Just then, Arden leaps onto her with a roar, and they fall overboard and die.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Wales, 2022”
The next morning, Evelyn and Arden work around the farm, and she wonders what she’s supposed to do with herself while they wait to see if an appointment opens up at the hospital. Arden suggests that they kidnap someone with an earlier appointment, but Evelyn is unwilling to jeopardize another patient’s life to save Gracie’s. Arden says that he respects Evelyn’s morals but doesn’t share them. He says that a hero is someone who gives up love to save the world, while a villain is willing to give up the world for love. He would sacrifice everything for the safety of someone he loves. He remembers that Evelyn came back for him at the psychiatric hospital, and she is shocked that he was even aware of what was happening. Evelyn suddenly has an idea: to go see her old therapist, who is married to a surgeon. Evelyn hopes that Dr. Chiang might convince her wife to do the procedure.
Chapters 12-21 Analysis
Steven uses figurative language to create the text’s mood, convey characters’ feelings, foreshadow future events, and develop key themes. For example, in describing her feelings as a member of the Blythe family, Evelyn says that “grief [i]s tucked into every corner of [her] world” (94). The comparison of grief to a physical object underscores that its presence is so pervasive and tangible that she cannot escape it. Being in the kitchen reminds her of her father, who was tragically and unexpectedly killed 10 years prior in a terrible, bloody accident. Thoughts of Gracie’s leukemia influence her every moment. Realizations about how horrible her mother’s grief will be when Evelyn dies, especially if Gracie also dies, further upset her. The family’s last name—Blythe—is ironic in its resemblance to “blithe”: No one in this family is happy or carefree.
Another example of the work’s use of figurative language comes when Evelyn dreams of the trenches in the war. She says that she remembers “[t]he deafening sound of the sky being cracked down the middle like a rib cage. Ice-cold adrenaline peeling the marrow from [her] bones” (91). The simile in which she compares the sky resounding with artillery to the sound of a rib cage being ripped apart is ominous and violent, conveying the brutality of war and its all-encompassing nature, which tears apart human flesh and air alike. The comparison of adrenaline to ice and the hyperbole, which suggests that Evelyn’s adrenaline strips away something visceral and core inside her, suggest war’s ability to change the bodies and souls of those impacted by it; Evelyn has been affected emotionally but also physically in a way that she can never forget and from which she can never fully heal. In all of this, the violence of war mirrors the violence of Evelyn and Arden’s personal lives—a point underscored by the above passage’s subtle evocation of Evelyn’s upcoming bone marrow donation in her latest incarnation. The parallels between the novel’s personal drama and the historical settings in which it unfolds reinforce the core theme of the Blight of Humanity: Both individually and writ large, Steven suggests, humans are a destructive force.
The novel often juxtaposes descriptions of human violence—not only the war and Evelyn’s and Arden’s deaths but also episodes like the one in the psychiatric hospital—with descriptions of an idyllic and beautiful natural world. Evelyn, thus, often interprets nature as indifferent to humanity’s pain. When she describes the view of nature visible from one tiny window in her cell in Vermont, she says, “It was an insult, the beauty of it—the bonfire of autumn leaves in red and orange and brown, the yellow-bellied goldfinches bright against the clean blue sky” (124). Despite the horrors that exist inside the psychiatric hospital, “still the birds s[i]ng” outside (124). Nature’s very persistence—e.g., the unvarying cycle of the seasons—is galling to Evelyn, and she perceives it again and again as evidence of Nature’s Apathy to Human Pain.
Meanwhile, conversations between Evelyn and Arden suggest The Fluidity of Sexual and Gender Identity—another key theme. When they are both reborn as men in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Arden asks Evelyn, “Which feels the most like you […] Girl? Boy?” (113). Evelyn says that this is something she has often considered “over the centuries, while navigating the ever-shifting and perpetually confusing gender norms” (113). That gender norms continue to shift, so significantly as to baffle one who has observed them multiple times, suggests that gender expression (prescribed or otherwise) is fluid and not inherently connected to a certain kind of body; it also suggests a disconnect between the internal experience of gender and the cultural norms surrounding it. Evelyn’s elaboration further develops these ideas, as she claims, “I’m just me. No particular body feels more ‘right’ than the other, nor more wrong. They’re just vessels. And with you…it doesn’t matter to me how you look or what form you take […] You’re just you” (114). Here, Evelyn suggests that neither her sense of identity nor her feelings of love/attraction hinge on her biological sex (or even, perhaps, gender). The novel thus makes a case for the insignificance of sex and gender as social categories, though it also acknowledges the limitations of this; Arden does have an inner sense of maleness or masculinity, even if he finds it hard to explain.
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