by Blake Crouch
“What?”
“Before we opened the door to the hangar and saw the other versions of you and me getting caught, you had mentioned that very thing happening.”
“Did I?”
“You were talking about the idea of the multiverse, and everything that can happen will happen, and you said that somewhere there was a version of you and me that never made it into the box. Moments later, you opened a door and we watched that exact scenario play out.”
I feel the spine-tingling rush of a revelation sweeping over me.
I say, “This whole time, we’ve been wondering where the controls are—”
“But we’re the controls.”
“Yep. And if that’s the case, then we have the ability to go wherever we want. Including home.”
—
Early the next morning, we stand in the midst of this silent neighborhood, waist-deep in snow and shivering, even though we’re wearing layer upon layer of that poor family’s winter clothes, which we raided from the coat closet.
In the field ahead of us, there’s no sign of our tracks. No sign of the box. Nothing but smooth, unbroken snow.
The field is huge and the box is tiny.
The chances of us stumbling upon it through blind luck are minuscule.
With the sun just creeping above the trees, the cold is unreal.
“What are we supposed to do, Jason? Take a guess? Start digging?”
I glance back at the half-buried house, wondering for a terrifying moment how long we could survive there. How long before the firewood ran out? Before our food ran out? Before we gave up and perished like all the others?
I can feel a dark pressure mounting in my chest—fear pushing in.
I draw a deep breath into my lungs, and the air is so cold it makes me cough.
Panic stalks me from all sides.
Finding the box is impossible.
It’s too cold out here.
There won’t be enough time, and when the next storm comes, and the next, the box is going to be buried so deep we’ll never have a chance of reaching it.
Unless…
I let the backpack slide off my shoulders into the snow and unzip it with trembling fingers.
“What are you doing?” Amanda asks.
“Throwing a Hail Mary.”
It takes me a moment to find what I’m looking for.
Grasping the compass, I leave Amanda and the pack and wade into the field.
She follows, shouting for me to wait up.
Fifty feet out, I stop to let her catch up to me.
“Look at this,” I say, touching the face of the compass. “We’re in South Chicago, right?” I point toward the distant skyline. “So magnetic north is that way. But this compass says otherwise. See how the needle is pointing east toward the lake?”
Her face lights up. “Of course. It’s the box’s magnetic field, pushing the compass needle away from it.”
We posthole through the deep powder.
In the middle of the field, the needle swings from east to west.
“We’re right on top of it.”
I begin to dig, my bare hands aching from the snow, but I don’t stop.
Four feet down, I hit the edge of the box, and I keep digging, faster now, my sleeves pulled forward to protect my hands, which are passing from a cold-driven agony into numbness.
When my half-frozen fingers finally graze the top of the open door, I let out a shout that echoes through the frozen world.
—
Ten minutes later, we’re back inside the box, drinking ampoule forty-six and ampoule forty-five.
Amanda starts the timer on her watch, kills the lantern to preserve the batteries, and as we sit beside each other in the frigid dark, waiting for the drug to hit, she says, “Never thought I’d be glad to see our shitty little lifeboat again.”
“Right?”
She leans her head against my shoulder.
“Thank you, Jason.”
“For what?”
“Not letting me freeze to death out there.”
“Does this mean we’re even?”
She laughs. “Not even close. I mean, let’s not forget, this is still all your fault.”
It’s a strange exercise in sensory deprivation to sit in the total darkness and silence of the box. The only physical sensations are the chill of the metal bleeding through my clothes and the pressure of Amanda’s head against my shoulder.
“You’re different than him,” she says.
“Who?”
“My Jason.”
“How so?”
“Softer. He had a real hard edge when you got down to it. The most driven human being I’ve ever met.”
“Were you his therapist?”
“Sometimes.”
“Was he happy?”
I sense her pondering my question in the dark.
“What?” I ask. “Am I putting you in a doctor-patient confidentiality quandary?”
“Technically, you two are the same person. It’s new territory for sure. But no. I wouldn’t say he was happy. He lived an intellectually stimulating but ultimately one-dimensional life. All he did was work. In the last five years, he didn’t have a life outside the lab. He practically lived there.”
“You know your Jason is the one who did this to me. I’m here right now because several nights ago, someone abducted me at gunpoint while I was walking home. He took me to an abandoned power plant, drugged me, asked me a bunch of questions about my life and the choices I’d made. If I was happy. If I would’ve done things differently. The memories are back now. Then I woke up in your lab. In your world. I think your Jason did this to me.”
“You’re suggesting that he went into the box, somehow found your world, your life, and switched places with you?”
“Do you think he was capable?”
“I don’t know. That’s crazy.”
“Who else would’ve done this to me?”
Amanda is quiet for a moment.
She says finally, “Jason was obsessed with the path not taken. He talked about it all the time.”
Now I feel the anger coming back.
I say, “There’s still a part of me that doesn’t want to believe it. I mean, if he wanted my life, he could’ve just killed me. But he went to the trouble of injecting me, not only with an ampoule, but ketamine, which rendered me unconscious and blurred my memories of the box and what he’d done. Then he actually brought me back to his world. Why?”
“It actually makes a lot of sense.”
“You think?”
“He wasn’t a monster. If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior. In your world, are you a renowned physicist?”
“No, I teach at a second-rate college.”
“Are you wealthy?”
“Professionally and financially speaking, I can’t hold a candle to your Jason.”
“There you go. He tells himself he’s giving you the chance of a lifetime. He wants a shot at the path not taken. Why wouldn’t you? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying that’s how a good man works himself up to do a terrible thing. It’s Human Behavior 101.”
She must sense my rage building, because she says, “Jason, you don’t have the luxury of freaking out right now. In a minute, we’re going back into that corridor. We’re the controls. Your words. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“If that’s the truth, if it’s our emotional state that’s somehow selecting these worlds, to what kind of a place is your rage and jealousy going to take us? You can’t hold on to this energy as you open a new door. You have to find a way to let it go.”
I can feel the drug coming.
My muscles relax.
For a moment, the anger vanishes into a river of peace and calm I would give anything to make last, to have carry me through.
When Amanda turns on the lantern, the walls perpendicular to the door are gone.
I look down at the leather bag
that holds the remaining ampoules, thinking, If the asshole who did this to me figured out how to navigate the box, then I will too.
In the blue light, Amanda watches me.
I say, “We have forty-four ampoules left. Twenty-two chances to get this right. How many did the other Jason take with him into the box?”
“A hundred.”
Shit.
I feel a glimmer of panic course through me, but I smile in spite of it.
“I guess it’s lucky for us I’m way smarter than him, right?”
Amanda laughs, rises to her feet, and offers me her hand.
“We have one hour,” she says. “You up for this?”
“Absolutely.”
He gets up earlier.
He drinks less.
Drives faster.
Reads more.
Has started exercising.
Holds his fork differently.
Laughs more easily.
Texts less.
He takes longer showers, and instead of just running a bar of soap over his entire body, he lathers up a washcloth now.
He shaves once every two days instead of four, and at the bathroom sink instead of in the shower.
Puts his shoes on immediately after dressing, not at the front door before leaving the house.
He flosses regularly, and she actually saw him plucking his eyebrows three days ago.
He hasn’t worn his favorite sleeping shirt—a faded U2 T-shirt from a concert they saw a decade ago at the United Center—in almost two weeks.
He does the dishes differently—instead of building an unwieldy tower in the drying rack, he sets the wet plates and glassware on towels that he’s spread across the countertop.
He drinks one cup of coffee with breakfast instead of two, and he makes it weaker than he used to, so weak in fact that she’s been making an effort to beat him down to the kitchen each morning to brew the coffee herself.
Lately, their family dinner conversations have centered around ideas, books, and articles Jason is reading, and Charlie’s studies, instead of a mundane recounting of the day’s events.
Speaking of Charlie, Jason is also different with their son.
More lenient, less paternal.
As if he’s forgotten how to be a father to a teenager.
He’s stopped staying up until two every morning watching Netflix on his iPad.
He never calls her Dani anymore.
He wants her constantly, and it’s like their first time every time.
He looks at her with a smoldering intensity that reminds her of the way new lovers stare into each other’s eyes when there’s still so much mystery and uncharted territory to discover.
These thoughts, all these tiny realizations, accumulate in the back of her mind as Daniela stands in front of the mirror next to Jason.
It’s morning, and they’re getting ready for their respective days.
She’s brushing her teeth, he’s brushing his, and when he catches her staring at him, he gives a toothpaste-foamy grin and winks.
She wonders—
Does he have cancer and isn’t telling me?
Is he taking a new antidepressant and isn’t telling me?
Lost his job and isn’t telling me?
A sick, hot feeling erupts in the pit of her stomach: is he having an affair with one of his students and it’s her that’s making him feel and act like this brand-new man?
No. None of that feels right.
The thing is, nothing is obviously wrong.
On paper, they’re actually better. He’s paying her more attention than he ever has. They haven’t talked and laughed this much since the beginning of their relationship.
It’s just that he’s…different.
Different in a thousand tiny ways that might mean nothing and might mean everything.
Jason leans over and spits into the sink.
He turns off the faucet and steps around behind her and puts his hands on her hips and pushes up gently against her.
She watches his reflection in the mirror.
Thinking, What secrets are you keeping?
Wanting to say those words.
Those exact words.
But she keeps brushing, because what if the price tag on that answer is this amazing status quo?
He says, “I could just watch you do this all day.”
“Brush my teeth?” She garbles the words, the toothbrush still in her mouth.
“Uh-huh.” He kisses the back of her neck, and the shiver goes down her spine and into her knees, and for a split second it all falls away—the fear, the questions, the doubt.
He says, “Ryan Holder is giving a lecture tonight at six. You want to come with me?”
Daniela leans over, spits, rinses.
“I’d love to, but I have a lesson at five thirty.”
“Then can I take you to dinner when I get home?”
“I’d love that.”
She turns around and kisses him.
He even kisses differently now.
Like it’s an event, every time.
As he starts to pull away, she says, “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
She should ask.
She should bring up all these things she’s noticed.
Throw it all down and clear the air.
Part of her wants to know so badly.
Part of her never wants to know.
And so she tells herself that now isn’t the time as she plays with his collar and fixes his hair and sends him off into the day with one last kiss.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 44
Amanda glances up from the notebook, asks, “You’re sure writing it down is the best way to go?”
“When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.”
“How much should I write?” she asks.
“Maybe keep it simple to start? One short paragraph?”
She finishes the sentence she’s been working on, closes the notebook, and rises to her feet.
“You’ve got it all in the forefront of your mind?” I ask.
“I think so.”
I shoulder our backpack. Amanda crosses to the door, turns the handle, pulls it open. Morning sunlight enters the corridor, so blinding that for a moment I can’t see a thing outside.
As my eyes adjust to the brilliance, the surroundings fade into focus.
We’re standing in the doorway of the box, at the top of a hill overlooking a park.
To the east, emerald grass slopes for several hundred yards, down to the shore of Lake Michigan. And in the distance rises a skyline like none I’ve ever seen—the buildings slim, constructions of glass and steel so reflective they border on invisible, creating an effect almost like a mirage.
The sky is filled with moving objects, most crisscrossing the airspace above what I assume is Chicago, a few accelerating vertically, straight up into the deep blue with no sign of stopping.
Amanda looks over at me and smirks, tapping the notebook.
I open it to the first page.
She wrote…
I want to go to a good place, to a good time to be alive. A world I’d want to live in. It isn’t the future, but it feels like it….
I say, “Not bad.”
“Is this place actually real?” she asks.
“Yes. And you brought us here.”
“Let’s explore. We should give ourselves a break from the drug anyway.”
She starts down the grassy slope away from the box. We pass a playground and then hit a walking path that runs through the park.
The morning is cold and flawless. My breath steams.
The grass is blanched with frost where the sun has yet to touch it, and the hardwoods that border the park are turning.
The lake stands as still as glass.
A quarter mile ahead, a series of elegant Y-shaped structures cu
t across the park at intervals of fifty meters.
Only as we draw near do I realize what they are.
We ride a lift up to the northbound platform and wait under the heated overhang, now forty feet above the greenway. A digital, interactive map emblazoned with Chicago Transit Authority identifies this route as the Red Line Express, linking South Chicago to Downtown.
An urgent female voice blares through a speaker overhead.
Stand clear. A train is arriving. Stand clear. A train is arriving in five…four…three…
I glance up and down the line, but I don’t see anything approaching.
Two…
A blur of incoming movement rockets out of the tree line.
One.
A sleek, three-car train decelerates into the station, and as the doors open, that computerized female voice says, Please wait to board on green.
The handful of passengers who detrain and move past us are wearing workout clothes. The panel of red light above each of the open doors turns to green.
You may board now for Downtown Station.
Amanda and I share a glance, shrug, and then step into the first car. It’s nearly full with commuters.
This isn’t the El I know. It’s free. No one is standing. Everyone is strapped into chairs that look like they should be bolted to a rocket sled.
The word VACANT hovers helpfully above each empty seat.
As Amanda and I move up the aisle, the automated attendant says, Please find a seat. The train cannot depart the station until everyone is safely seated.
We slide into a couple of seats at the front of the car. As I lean back, padded restraints emerge from the chair and gently secure my shoulders and waist.
Head back against your seat, please. The train is departing in three…two…one.
The acceleration is smooth but intense. It shoves me deep into the cushioned seat for two seconds, and then we’re floating along a single rail at an inconceivable speed, no sense of friction beneath us as a cityscape blurs past on the other side of the glass, too fast for me to actually process what I’m seeing.
In the distance, that fantastical skyline inches closer. The buildings don’t even make sense. In the sharp morning light, it looks as if someone shattered a mirror and stood all the shards of glass upright in formation. They’re too beautifully random and irregular to be man-made. Perfect in their imperfection and asymmetry, like a range of mountains. Or the shape of a river.