Finna

by Nino Cipri

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tricia called an emergency meeting, and everyone who wasn’t working a register crammed into the break room.

  It always surprised Ava how many people worked at LitenVärld. She only saw most of them crammed in here during the pre–Black Friday war meeting, or for their exquisitely painful “sensitivity training.” She’d only gotten through the latter by focusing on her and Jules’s plans to get obliteratingly drunk afterward.

  They hadn’t even been dating at that point. They’d woken up the next day in Ava’s apartment; Jules’s shoes had been in the bathtub, while Ava was wearing their shirt. It had smelled like blunts and Old Spice, unexpectedly comforting. Jules was sleeping on the couch, wearing an oversized sweater and a pair of boxers, using Ava’s bathrobe as a blanket. She’d stared at them for nearly a minute, trying to piece together the events that had led to her cute new coworker sleeping half-naked on the couch. Eventually, she shook herself out of her daze, told herself to stop being a creep, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Jules had stumbled in twenty minutes later, wearing the bathrobe they’d slept under, curls flattened on one side. “I will trade you my soul for coffee,” they’d said solemnly. Then, when they saw that all Ava had were Nifty! brand beans from PriceLow, they cringed and said, “Those only get part of my soul.”

  They hadn’t hooked up that night, or even that week, but infatuation was already sinking its claws into Ava, catching her bleary and unprepared.

  Ava went to the far side of the room, opposite to where Jules was standing. She caught a few whispered conversations between her coworkers, a couple of raised eyebrows, but kept her eyes down. This was the other reason she hadn’t wanted to be scheduled with Jules. She hated being gossip fodder. Jules, of course, was impervious to gossip, willfully oblivious. They’d never understood why it irked Ava so much. People are going to talk, they always said. No matter what you do. Ava had admired their courage at first, but she eventually recognized it as yet another way of shutting people out before they could hurt you.

  Tricia finally came in, wheeling a boxy television that looked like it predated LitenVärld itself, or at least this particular store. She plugged it into the wall, then turned to address everyone.

  “Can I have some quiet, please?” she called into the already quiet room. After a few seconds, she said, “Thank you. So for anyone that hasn’t already heard, we’ve got a maskhål.”

  There was a swell of dismayed groans and whispers. Ava, almost unwillingly, found herself seeking out Jules. They had done the same, and mouthed, A what?

  “Quiet, please,” Tricia said again. “And please hold all of your questions until the end. For the benefit of those who’ve joined us since our last maskhål, I’m going to play a short instructional video.”

  Another groan, this one softer and more hushed. Tricia didn’t even bother to shush anyone, just bent over and pressed play on … was that a VHS player?

  The video began with a click and a whir. Static flickered in lines across the screen, then cleared, but the color was still slightly off, oversaturated and alien.

  Yellow letters traveled across the screen, marquee style: Maskhål och du. Below it, in subtitles, “WORMHOLES AND YOU.”

  The LitenVärld logo appeared at the bottom of the screen as a man and woman walked into the shot. Judging by their hair and fashion, this video had been made before Ava was born. They both wore polo shirts in LitenVärld’s signature sky-blue, with yellow and crimson accents, tucked into unflattering khakis with pleats where no pleats should ever be. Their hair didn’t seem to move, stuck in helmet-like structures to their scalps, which made the rest of their faces look weirdly mobile.

  Their voices were overdubbed. Badly.

  “What’s up, amigos?” said the pallid white man. His voice was a cross between Wolf of Wall Street and California beach bum. “I’m Mark!”

  “And I’m Dana,” warbled the blonde.

  “Is Dana drunk?” Ava whispered to one of her coworkers. The coworker rolled his eyes and didn’t say anything. (God, they were all so boring. She’d forgotten how this store sucked the life from people.)

  Mark spoke again. “We’re here to tell you what to do if a wormhole opens up on your shift!”

  Mark spoke in exclamation points. His voice was far more energetic than the actor, who was wan, bland in that vaguely Scandinavian way, an off-brand Mads Mikkelsen with all the interesting bits filed off.

  “First, we should get our disclaimer out of the way,” Dana said, in her wobbly, nasal whine. She had an affected mid-Atlantic accent, like she was auditioning for a minor role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The original actress moved with the confidence and poise of a piece of seaweed washed ashore. “LitenVärld accepts no responsibility or liability for any losses or injuries that wormholes incur, since they fall under the Act of God clauses on our employee insurance. This training video does not replace the longer and more in-depth training for our FINNA division—”

  Tricia bent over and skipped ahead on the video, speeding through what looked like several more minutes of banter and/or legalese. “The FINNA divisions were made redundant during the Recession. Each store handles the maskhål in-house now.”

  She restarted the video on a close-up of Mark. “—that’s out of the way, it’s time for a short physics lesson. In physics, the term quantum entanglement refers to particles that are linked in strange ways that we don’t entirely understand, but that we can measure.”

  Mark’s pallid face with its receding hairline faded into a cheesy animation. Two blobs appeared on the screen: one a dusky pink, the other a sky-blue. Ava could guess what was coming next, but that didn’t stop the physical pain of watching it happen. The pink blob grew eyes with heavy lashes, two spots of reddish purple appearing on what could generously be called its cheeks. The blue blob also grew eyes, along with a heavy brow and—god save them all—a handlebar mustache.

  Then the two blobs began flirting—cooing and blowing kisses at each other. It was the most obnoxiously heterosexual thing Ava had seen since the last St. Patrick’s Day parade.

  “Even across vast distances of space and time …” Dana said in a dreamy voiceover.

  The two blobs were torn away from each other, flung to opposite sides of the screen with a crude galaxy projected between them. Good, Ava thought savagely, as the blobs squeaked in distress.

  “ … entangled particles find ways of reconnecting,” intoned Dana, and the two blobs snaked out long, ghostly limbs toward each other, joining hands across the galaxy. The two blobs burbled happily, and Ava rolled her eyes.

  “This video is making me gayer out of spite,” Jules muttered, clear even from the other side of the room.

  Ava snorted. She couldn’t help it. Jules turned toward her in surprise, and she cleared her throat and turned away.

  “Quiet, please!” Tricia said.

  On the screen, the obnoxiously heterosexual blobs had been replaced with the vapidly heterosexual actors. They relaxed in a retro LitenVärld showroom—Newly Retired Swinger, Ava would call it. It was done up in beige and mauve tones, with some palm tree and flamingo accents to keep it from being too bland.

  “You may be wondering what this has to do with the wormhole in your store,” Mark said. The actors’ mouths always kept on moving for seconds after the end of the dub, which was giving Ava a headache.

  Dana addressed the camera head-on. “Some scientists believe in the many worlds theory.” She pronounced it as if it were something strange and exotic, not three words that could come up by themselves in any conversation.

  The blue-and-crimson logo on-screen shivered and split into two parts. Mark spread his arms, fingertips extended, augmenting the physics lesson with jazz hands. It was embarrassing to watch him try to emote.

  “This means that there are an infinite number of universes,” Mark said. “Endless varieties of them. That means that there are endless varieties of LitenVärlds!”

  Dana and Mark snapped t
heir fingers. Suddenly, they were sitting in two entirely different rooms; hers was a lavish, baroque French drawing room, and she wore the gown and powdered wig to match. Mark sat in a room that might have been considered “futuristic” when the video was made: lots of neon, inflatable furniture, and one of the largest and ugliest desktop computers Ava had ever seen. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses, a puffy orange vest, and fingerless gloves.

  Mark took off the sunglasses and continued. “The unique layout of LitenVärld encourages wormholes to form between universes. These wormholes connect our stores to LitenVärlds in parallel worlds.”

  Mark and Dana looked at each other, then snapped their fingers again. Now Mark stood in a rustic log cabin, wearing lederhosen and carrying an ax. Dana relaxed in a beach house, wearing a sarong over a bathing suit and holding a daiquiri in her hand.

  “That is not how physics works,” Jules muttered. Why was it so easy to always catch their voice?

  Tricia bent over to fast-forward the video again. “It goes on for a while,” she said. “You all get the idea.”

  They watched Mark and Dana flicker through a series of settings and costumes, some of them benign or bizarre, others straight-up racist. Dana in a teahouse and an exaggerated geisha getup got a couple of disgusted sighs, but Mark in a hut and with fake black dreadlocks and a bone through his nose earned widespread groans, and someone (probably Jules) threw a wadded-up paper at the screen. Not even Tricia could say anything about that.

  The bizarre zoetrope of Marks and Danas ended with the two actors in foam dinosaur costumes. They attempted to snap their fingers again, fumbling with their thick, rubbery claws, but the sound effect was apparently enough to bring them back to their original world, original bodies. They both heaved affected sighs of relief.

  “Now,” Mark said, putting his hands on his hips. “Before you decide that traveling to other universes is all fun and games, we should warn you that not all LitenVärlds are as nice as the one you work in.”

  Dana added, “Here’s some footage taken by one of our FINNA divisions during recoveries.”

  Ava’s eyes grew wide at the shaky, grainy footage that blasted across the screen. It was hard to make out the details, but Ava caught glimpses of something enormous, something with far more legs than a sane universe could ask for. There were shouts and screams in what a distant, shocked part of Ava’s mind guessed was Swedish. A spray of blood hit the camera, and the footage cut out.

  Back to Mark and Dana in the bland Retired Swinger living room. Ava broke out into goosebumps when she saw their smiles again.

  “Now that you understand what wormholes are, and what might lay on the other side of them, we’re going to tell you what to do in case one opens up in your store,” Dana said.

  Mark leaned forward. “After alerting your manager to the presence of a wormhole, the first and best thing to do is rope off the affected area. Make sure that no customers or associates enter it. They’ll usually collapse on their own within a couple hours.”

  “The only time you need to worry is if someone accidentally wanders into the wormhole. Since 1989, all LitenVärld stores have been equipped with the FINNA, a patented piece of equipment that can locate lost people using quantum entanglement. It helps the FINNA division in your store navigate the series of wormholes that the lost person may have wandered through. In our experience, wormholes tend to travel in packs.”

  A piece of technology popped up on the screen. To Ava, it looked vaguely like the brick phones that bankers talked on in movies set in the ’80s. It faded into an exploded view, familiar to anyone who had had to put together a piece of furniture from a LitenVärld instruction booklet.

  Tricia paused the movie, then shut off the TV. It went black with a quiet pop. “As I mentioned, the company closed its FINNA divisions back in 2009, as a cost-saving measure. Instead, I’ll need two volunteers who are willing to take the store’s FINNA and go after the missing woman.”

  The room went silent, as every employee became intent on disappearing. Ava shrunk down in her seat and avoided Tricia’s eyes. She felt a momentary pang of guilt, thinking of the young woman who’d reported her grandmother missing. But Ava had no interest in death by … by whatever those things had been.

  “Are we getting overtime for this?” someone else asked.

  Ava glanced up long enough to see Tricia shake her head. “Not unless you remain in the other worlds past eighty hours in a single pay period. But! I do have a couple of Pasta and Friends gift cards for the brave volunteers.”

  Ava scrunched down in her chair even further. Nobody in their right mind would volunteer for—

  “Jules!” Tricia said, and Ava felt the name go through her like an electric shock. “Thank you for stepping up.”

  Ava looked over to see Jules with their hand raised. Everyone else in the room was staring too. Jules shrank under the attention, and awkwardly waved before slumping back down in their plastic chair.

  “I don’t really need the gift card,” they told Tricia.

  Tricia shrugged. “Well, that just doubles the incentive for the next volunteer. Any takers? Two gift cards would make for a pretty good date night.”

  If it had been possible to crawl underneath her chair, transform into a literal puddle, Ava would have done it. She hadn’t thought she could sit through a worse work meeting than the sensitivity training.

  “Well, if nobody volunteers, corporate policy is to have the people with the least seniority go. That’s Jules, but since—since Jules has already volunteered, we need someone else to join Jules on this mission.”

  Ava winced as she listened to Tricia contort her speech in an effort to avoid using they or them. I just can’t do it! Tricia had cheerfully told Ava once, completely unprompted. I guess I’m too much of a grammar nazi! Since then, she went out of her way to avoid using any pronouns at all when talking about Jules, warping her sentences around her refusal. Ava wondered, not for the first time, why anyone would so proudly declare themselves to be any kind of nazi. She was so distracted by her irritation that she missed the last bit of Tricia’s speech, and it took her a few seconds to realize everyone was staring at her.

  Rewind: The policy was to send the person with the least seniority. That was Jules. Jules had been hired on two months after Ava. Was there anybody else in between them?

  Derek. Fucking Derek, who was the entire reason that Ava was here on a day she’d explicitly asked not to work.

  “Oh, hell no,” Ava said.

  “Why don’t the three of us talk in my office?” Tricia said sweetly.

  * * *

  Tricia’s office was a purgatory of fallen LitenVärld fashions, a claustrophobic island of misfit furniture. Chairs with denim upholstery, a glass-top desk with chrome accents, and a gag novelty lamp in the shape of a hairy, muscular leg, complete with sock garters. The look was completed by a couple of soulless art prints that reminded Ava of waiting rooms in urgent care clinics.

  Ava decided to take a reasonable approach, since it was that or run screaming out of the store. “Tricia,” she said. “This is really unfair. I know I don’t have the seniority—”

  “You do have the right to refuse the assignment,” Tricia said.

  Relief flooded through Ava. “Okay, in that case—”

  “But it would be grounds for termination.”

  All the relief flooded right back out of her, replaced by a vision of her current checking account balance. “What?!”

  “Listen, Tricia,” Jules said, leaning forward. “I’m happy to do this by myself. I don’t need—”

  “Jules, I appreciate your willingness to go above and beyond. It’s a nice change from your usual MO.” Tricia laughed like the soulless bitch she was. “But we do have to stick to policy, which says that nobody goes through a maskhål alone.” Tricia turned her blank gaze back to Ava. “Furthermore, I’d like you both to keep in mind that there’s a young woman sitting in the cafeteria who’s scared for her grandmother. Customer
s always come first.”

  Ava was, possibly for the first time in her life, too angry to speak. If she lived through this, she decided, she was going to track Derek down and kill him.

  “Let’s get you the FINNA,” Tricia said. “Oh! And don’t forget these!”

  She slid the two gift cards across the table.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Okay, so, listen,” Jules said.

  Ava dropped the box carrying the FINNA on the ground and squatted next to it. Behind them, in the Nihilist Bachelor Cube, the maskhål squirmed in the air. The seam between their world and another universe twitched restlessly. Ava turned her back to it, so she wouldn’t have to look.

  “I’m listening,” Ava said, opening the box. The FINNA looked like some of the equipment she’d seen on Ghost Hunters reruns, with a massive gray case, a black-and-green console, and two antennae on the side. It was lighter than it looked, at least.

  Jules peered over her shoulder. “The instructions should be in here,” they said, plucking the booklet out. “In Swedish, French, and Japanese, great. I can muddle through the French— Or yank them out of my hands, that works too.”

  “You don’t need written instructions, the diagrams are made to be universally understandable,” Ava said, flipping to the pictures.

  She knew she was acting like a royal bitch, but she was still so angry at Tricia, at her corporate overlords, and at the universe—sorry, the multiverse—in general. She tried to rein her irritation in as she said, “What were you going to say before?”

  Jules took a deep breath and let it out slow. They’d gotten good at not rising to her bullshit, not taking the bait she waved in front of them. Their discretion hadn’t helped; Jules’s calm demeanor while Ava lost her shit had just made her feel even angrier. The heart was a stupid, hurting animal, and her heart was stupider than most.

  “I know that you don’t want to do this,” Jules said. “And that I’m the last person you want to do it with. So here’s my proposal.”