Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  “For you, friend,” it said, “yes.”

  “Muchas gracias, Vorágine,” said Principal Torres. “Y gracias a ustedes, Gabi and Sal, for helping me get back in the toilet’s good graces. I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson today about how our words have consequences. But let’s continue this conversation in my office, shall we? Maybe we can get this sorted out before homeroom?”

  “I’d like that,” said Gabi.

  I nodded in agreement and started to open the door.

  But when I flung it wide, I saw, standing a few feet away, dressed like the White Rabbit and wearing white face paint that had been ruined by crying, Aventura Rios.

  I slammed the door and locked it behind me.

  I kneeled in front of Vorágine, my head resting on the closed lid. The coolness of the plastic felt nice.

  “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,” Vorágine sang softly.

  “Come on, Sal!” Principal Torres called. “You know you owe Aventura an apology.”

  “And she wants to talk to you,” Gabi added. “She said so.”

  See, okay, but Aventura wasn’t saying anything. No It’s okay, Sal, or How dare you, you jerk! or Hey, Sal, can we talk? came out of her mouth. Nary a peep came out of her mouth. And hers was the only voice I was really listening for.

  Aventura had looked at me so…broken. I’d never imagined she could make a face like that. One of the reasons I’d liked Aventura from the first day I met her was because of her confidence. She could sniff out a fib from a hundred paces and wouldn’t let it slide: She’d wag her finger in your face and say “Nee nee nee!” until you’d admitted you lied. She was smart, fun, and an honest-to-pants superstar with needle and thread. But instead of being snobby about that, she used her talents to help people. She’d helped Gabi and me a ton with the Death costume for our Everyman play two weeks ago, and it had turned out so good, not only did Gabi and I get As for the assignment, but everybody at school was still talking about it. She was almost always in a group but not always at the center of it. Confident people don’t need to be. She was self-assured enough to let other people be the stars sometimes. Heck, she even went out of her way to make sure they’d be the stars.

  What she wasn’t, though, was some little namby-pamby pobrecita Debbie Downer Débil Debbie. Never once I had entertained the notion that someone could say anything that would make her cry. Sticks and stones, you know? But seeing her tear-smeared makeup had left me shaken.

  Which is why I was resting my head on the lid of a toilet while that same toilet sang me soothing lullabies.

  “I wish I could just disappear,” I said softly.

  “Don’t say that,” said Vorágine.

  “Yeah,” said Gabi, who was suddenly right behind me. “Because you make it sound like you can’t. But you can disappear any time you want.”

  Fear is an excellent cure for sadness. In that moment, I forgot all my troubles. I was too busy jumping onto the toilet lid and sticking out karate-chop hands.

  “Easy there, Shaolin Sal.” Gabi laughed. “I’m on your side, remember?”

  I took a big breath, ready to let Gabi have it, when I realized it wasn’t Gabi. It was FixGabi.

  Lots of things gave her away, once I calmed down enough to notice them. One, she didn’t have on her golden wig or hairnet anymore, just the jumbo chip clip giving her a massive fauxhawk. Second, instead of wearing an Alice dress, she had on jeans and a T-shirt that said “I’M NOT MEAN. I JUST SAY WHAT I MEAN.”—A GABRIELLE REÁL ORIGINAL.

  “What are you doing in here?” I whispered.

  “Is that Gabi?” said Vorágine. “How did she get in here? The door is still locked, isn’t it?”

  FixGabi leaned forward and held her knees. “Whoa! You have sentient toilets in your universe?”

  Vorágine blew bemused bubbles. “‘In your universe’ ? What are you talking about, Gabi?”

  I cut my throat repeatedly with my hand to let FixGabi know we should not be talking about multiple universes right now.

  She understood right away and let me know by lifting a finger to her smiling lips and shushing herself. Then, wordlessly, like a creepy fun-house ticket taker, she invited me to walk through the hole in the universe she had made to get into mine.

  I looked at the bathroom door. On the other side of it, Principal Torres and Gabi were still trying to convince me to open up. Aventura, if she was still there, wasn’t saying anything.

  But I was pretty sure she was still there. And if I opened the door, I would have to face her.

  I ran through the hole in the universe.

  “WHERE ARE WE?” I asked FixGabi.

  “This is my universe,” she replied. “Or what’s left of it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But can you be a little more specific?”

  “Sure. What would you like to know?”

  “Well, for starters, why are we floating?”

  “Because we’re in a space station that’s orbiting Earth at two hundred and fifty miles above sea level.”

  My eyes confirmed her statement. This small room had white walls covered with small storage compartments and several portholes offering beautiful views of outer space. Also confirming her statement was the fact that we were in a zero-g environment.

  This was a lot to take in. A million trillion bits of new information flowed into every one of my senses. And yet, what I mostly noticed was the smell: an odor like someone had just fired a gun and sprayed Lysol to try to cover it up.

  “So, why are we in a space station?” I finally asked, trying not to let my voice crack. I had succeeded by the end of the sentence, and only after three restarts.

  FixGabi gently kicked off the nearest wall and floated over to me, pointing at a porthole as she wafted. “Because, in my universe, Earth is in the process of disappearing, because of your papi. Look out there.”

  I tried to reorient my body to see out the porthole she was pointing to. But, chacho, zero g is tougher than movies had prepared me for. I thought I could kind of swim through the air. Instead, my limbs flapped around uselessly, and I rotated until the bottoms of my shoes were pointing at what I took to be the ceiling. But in zero g, what does “ceiling” even mean?

  FixGabi had obviously had a lot of practice with zero g. She hooked her feet into the handles of two different compartments on one wall and anchored herself. Then she grabbed me, spun me, and pivoted me so I was looking out the correct window.

  Oh, yes. There it was. Earth.

  We were a lot closer to the planet than photos and videos usually depicted. In the shots they took from the moon, you can see the full planet against a backdrop of stars. But on this space station, I could only see, like, 20 percent of Earth out of the window. It was more like being in the highest plane in the world than what I thought it would feel like to be in a space station.

  We were moving slowly. I mean, no, we weren’t. My papi’s a calamity physicist; he’d kill me if he heard me say that. The ISS back in my universe circles Earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour. So, unless things were really different in this universe, I knew we were absolutely booking. But it felt slow as I looked down and watched the planet rotate under us. We seemed to be gently surfing the clouds. It was beautiful. Awe-inspiring. Meditative.

  Oh, and what luck! We were going to fly right over Florida! Maybe I’d be able to see this universe’s version of the Coral Castle from here!

  But as we got closer to my new home state, it seemed a little different. On a map, Florida looks to me like the head of a slightly nervous snake diving into the water. The eye of the snake is Lake Okeechobee, and its mouth is where Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda are. See it? Yeah?

  Now imagine that the snake’s head has been bitten off at the neck. Everything south of Gainesville was gone. And south of where southern Florida should have been, Cuba had disappeared. Well, not disappeared, exactly. Been covered up, maybe? But not by clouds or anything—by a hazy, blurr
y cling wrap that looked exactly like the holes in the universe I’ve been making for the last few years.

  Like. A. Hole. In. The. Universe.

  There’s nothing like seeing your planet collapsing to put your own problems in perspective. “What happened to Florida and Cuba?!” I exclaimed, almost even yelling.

  “Dr. Vidón happened to them,” said Gabi, floating beside me and also looking out the window. “He did this.”

  “I know, but what actually happened? What did he do?”

  She became very angry very fast. “I’ll tell you what he didn’t do. He didn’t listen to me! I tried to tell him that the universe needs holes in order to be healthy. But he wanted to seal them all up. So he built his remembranation machine—”

  “Huh,” I interrupted. “You call it the same thing in your universe.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” she said. “It’s one of the weird things I’ve noticed about traveling the multiverse. Names are strangely consistent. Almost everything else can be different, but for some reason, names tend to remain constant. It’s like Shakespeare said: ‘A rose can have no other name save rose, as thou remain’st thyself whilst changing clothes.’”

  Huh again. “In our universe,” I said, “Shakespeare wrote: ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’”

  FixGabi seemed thoroughly unimpressed. “Well, I guess my Shakespeare’s smarter than yours, then. Look, I don’t care about Shakespeare quotes. What I care about is that, in my universe, Dr. Vidón used that machine to seal up the universe so tight, it became like a cosmic pressure cooker. There was no release valve left that could keep it from exploding. So, it did.”

  What? Wait. Too fast. “What do you mean, ‘it did’?”

  There were a lot of differences between the Gabi from my universe and FixGabi, but they both gave the same What rock did you crawl out from? glare when they thought I was being an idiot. “‘It’ as in ‘the universe,’ and ‘did’ as in ‘did explode.’ Or, to make it even clearer: ‘Your papi made a hole in the universe big enough to eat half a peninsula, Cuba, and the Bahamas.’ And the worst part is that it’s growing, slowly but surely.”

  I thought about my house back in Connecticut, and how the last hole I’d opened there had never closed, and it became impossible to live there. Then I pictured doing that to Florida and Cuba.

  “How are you going to fix it?” I asked.

  Gabi laughed bitterly. “It’s too big for me to close. If we still had a remembranation machine, we might be able to stop it, for the time being. But that still wouldn’t solve the bigger problem.”

  “What problem could possibly be bigger than a rip in the universe as massive as the one I am looking at right now?”

  FixGabi grabbed, spun, and pivoted me until we were face-to-face and uncomfortably close. I backed my neck away so she wouldn’t accidentally kiss me when she said, “The problem that caused this problem, Sal. The root of the problem.”

  “What’s the root of the problem?”

  She delivered her next sentence like it was the line she’d been waiting to say all her life: “Dr. Vidón.”

  I thought about this. “So, like, the Papi in this universe is super evil or something?”

  She almost lost her patience. Frustrated, she opened one of the nearby compartments on the wall, yanked out a package of space food, ripped it open with her teeth, and started chawing down on a dehydrated Neapolitan ice cream sandwich. Her annoyance was instantly replaced by closed eyes and mmm sounds coming out of her nose.

  Once she had regained her composure, she could speak to me civilly again. “The problem isn’t a Dr. Vidón, Sal. It’s all Drs. Vidónes. All of them. In every universe.”

  I was really trying to keep up, but that made zero sense. Or more like negative sense—so wrong it made other ideas wrong. “Look, Gabi, I don’t mean to keep asking stupid questions—”

  “Oh, no, don’t worry, I’m eating ice cream now. Ask all the stupid questions you want.”

  “—but the multiverse is infinite. Why the heck would you assume that all Papis in the multiverse are the same?”

  “Because,” she said, her mouth full of solid ice cream pebbles, “it’s too dangerous not to make that assumption.” She almost but not quite jammed the unbitten end of the ice cream sandwich into my mouth. “You want some? It’s real good. I saved you the chocolate part.”

  “No, thank you,” I said, not separating my lips as I answered so she wouldn’t just shove it in anyway. But then the magnitude of seeing what this universe’s Papi had done finally hit me hard. It made all the gerbils in my head revolt. I shook like a scared horse. I had to use all my powers of relaxation just to be able to ask, “How are you staying so calm? I mean, the rip in the fabric of spacetime is threatening to consume your entire universe, starting with your Earth. How are you not freaking out, like, every second of every day?”

  FixGabi nibbled on her ice cream sandwich and pondered this. I noticed that her giant chip-clip fauxhawk swayed gently in the air, like it would if it were underwater. Zero g really was super weird.

  “Well, for a couple of reasons, I guess,” she said. “One, I’m hoping I can find a way to reverse what’s happening here. That’s what I’m searching the multiverse for: a solution. And two, I am doing as much good along the way as I can, while I search for an answer. That’s why I’m warning every Sal I find about the true nature of their papi. And, when the time is right, I’ll intercede on your behalf, too.” She gripped my shoulder. “I’ll stop your papi. I won’t let what happened to my Sal happen to you, Sal.”

  FixGabi looked ferociously protective—protective of me. It put me in a weird place. On the one hand, I could not believe that my papi would act the way this universe’s Papi had behaved. But FixGabi wasn’t threatening Papi, exactly. She was protecting me from the threat of Papi. But I didn’t need protection against Papi, right? Papi would always be on my side, right?

  This was all very confusing. For now, though, I needed more info. “How will we know when the time is right, Gabi?”

  She waved that one off, unconcerned. “Don’t worry. I’ve saved so many Sals from their papis, I have it down to a science. We still have plenty of time. We don’t really have to worry until your remembranation machine becomes sentient.”

  I inhaled all the oxygen in the entire space station. “What happens when the remembranation machine becomes sentient?”

  FixGabi snapped her fingers in front of my face so I would look at her when she spoke. “Then the time bomb really starts ticking. We have a day or two. Three days, tops. And then—then…” She trailed off, fighting with her sudden sadness for control over her mouth. Meanwhile, two tears—one from each eye—floated out of her face, and two perfect little balls of water hovered between us.

  She defeated her sadness and made her lips as tough and pursed as a tuba player’s. Then she gobbled her own two tears out of the air like a snapping turtle. Again I had to rear my head all the way back to avoid any unintentional lippage with her.

  “Don’t worry,” Gabi said. “I won’t lose my resolve. I will save my universe—and every other universe while I’m at it. Especially if I can count on a few brave Sals to help me along the way.”

  My head couldn’t go back any farther unless I somehow added more spine to my spinal cord. But FixGabi’s head was still slowly moving toward mine. She closed her eyes dreamily, and she still had my shoulder in her grip, and we were motionless and going seventeen thousand miles an hour, and the Earth was two hundred fifty miles away, and we were alone.

  An alarm sounded. Her eyes snapped open and she checked her watch. It was flashing the word RUN! in red letters.

  “Oh no!” she said to me. “The forces of evil have found me! I have to go!” She pushed off the nearest wall to clear some distance between us. “If anybody asks you, you don’t know what universe I’ve gone to, okay?”

  “But I don’t have any idea what universe you’re going to!” I said, very, very honestly.


  “It’s best that way.” She Frisbee-threw a kiss at me. “Farewell, Sal. I’ll be in touch soon. In the meantime, whatever you do, don’t let your remembranation machine become sentient.”

  And then she cut a slit in the fabric of spacetime and disappeared through it.

  One second later, someone with big curly hair appeared. She was literally flying through the air, almost horizontal, hands grasping in front of her. I couldn’t make out her features, but I could see enough to know I’d never seen a face so full of rage and hate. The mouth, wide open, was screaming, “Gabi!” And then she vanished through the hole FixGabi had just made to escape.

  One of the forces of evil, I guess? Only, despite all the anger the woman had displayed, and all the violence implied by her body language, I didn’t fear her. There was something familiar about her. Something that even drew me to her.

  Well, whoever she was, she was gone now. And so was FixGabi. I was alone. In outer space. In a different universe.

  I noticed as calmly as I could (though “as calmly as I could” was starting to mean the same thing as “less and less calmly”) that I had drifted into the center of this little space station room. I tried to flap close enough to grab the nearest wall, but I only managed to start myself spinning and pivoting in place. This would be really fun any other time.

  But right then? It was more or less 110 percent terrifying. “Hello?” I called out. “Can anybody help me get home?”

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN pretty easy for me to have fallen into a body-shaking panic then and there. How in the name of polyester pants was I supposed to get home?

  I needed to take back control. This called for desperate measures.

  So I took a zero-g blood sugar reading then and there.

  I didn’t think I needed one. I’d shown Yasmany my numbers not too long ago; they were fine. And I knew my body pretty well after all these years. But, as sucky as diabetes can be—it makes you keep it in mind for every little thing you do—one bonus of the constant monitoring is it gives you a feeling that you know what to do next. You take a reading, and you get back some numbers, and you can turn those numbers into action if need be. And once you’ve taken that action, you can relax. You’ve done everything you can. And if you don’t need to do anything right away because your numbers are okay, even better. It’s even easier to relax then.