“You want to know what the most unsettling thing about them is?”
“No, what’s the most unsettling thing about them?” I’m the real one, Max kept assuring himself, over and over. I’m the original. Not this joker, with his virtual dreams and imaginary newspaper.
His counterpart’s voice softened. “The way they linger in the memory. By the time I’ve been up a few hours the following morning, I usually have trouble remembering the details of a dream. Not with these. They stick around like they’ve been epoxied to my brain. I can tell you details of the dream I had last week. For me, that’s unreal.” A sudden concern made him twitch slightly.
“Hey, you don’t think there really is a nut named Boles running around town with some kind of generator or ray that makes people have violent, unforgettable dreams, do you?”
“Ordinarily, I’d say not a chance.” Max pushed back his chair and rose from the table. “I don’t think you have to worry about anything like that. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it. What you’re describing doesn’t sound like the kind of apparatus that would be very portable. For one thing, it’d have to be permanently locked down somewhere so it could draw on a continuous source of power.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” The double nodded admiringly. “You’re a bright guy, Max. Not to mention good-looking.” He grinned. “How come you’re still working for a second-rate rag like the Investigator?”
“It suits me” was all Max could think of to say to his double. “I have to go now.”
The other Max looked distressed. “But we’re just getting started. I think we could establish a real good working relationship here.” As Max headed for the door his anxious counterpart followed, persistent and maybe a little hurt. “What about my dreams?”
“I told you—write them up yourself.”
“And I told you why I can’t do that.” His double was clearly baffled. Everything had been going so well. Almost from the start he had felt that his visitor understood him better than any other journalist he had ever met, even those he had worked with for months at a time on the Enquirer.
Max was anxious to be out of there, to get away from the apartment that looked, felt, and smelled like his, but was not. His impatience was reflected in his reply. “Then find somebody else to write your story. I can’t do it.” Like the doorknob at the bottom of the rabbit hole in Alice, the one attached to his front door seemed to be willfully resisting his efforts to turn it.
His bewildered counterpart pleaded with him. “Don’t run out on me like this, Max. I mean, I know we just met, but dammit, I feel like I know you already.”
Just as Max was about to scream, the stubborn door finally yielded. Turning, he favored his other self with a look of such anguish that his double flinched.
“You don’t want to know me. At this point, I’m not sure that I want to know me.” A lopsided grin cracked his face. “It’s not necessary anyway. Everybody else you know here knows me already.”
With that he exited quickly, deliberately pulling the door shut behind him and leaving his other self standing alone in their apartment, mystified and more than a little wounded.
Instinctively, he stumbled down the hallway, heading for the elevator because there was nowhere else to go. The elevator could take him to the garage, or to the other floors, but neither it nor anything else under his control could carry him home. Home. But wasn’t he already home? Wasn’t this his building, his address, his Santa Monica?
It was, and it was not. This apartment, like this world, belonged not to him but to his other. His para other. Unless, of course, the Max Parker he had just left behind was the real Max Parker, the first Max Parker, Maxwell Parker fundamental, and he himself was nothing more than a figment of the other Parker’s dreaming. Even now, the other Parker might actually be lying asleep in his bed, dreaming that he had just been awake talking to a duplicate of himself about turning his strange dreams of parallel worlds into a series of stories for a competing tabloid. Soon, tomorrow, this evening, he was liable to wake up, startled awake by the depth and color and richness of still another in an endless succession of dreams of infinite parallelities.
In which case he, the Max Parker staggering down the hall even now, would cease to exist except as a memory in the mind of his newly awakened self.
Tripping on the same loose piece of carpet he and his neighbors on the top floor had been besieging the landlord to fix for the past several months, he stumbled sideways. His left leg banged into the wall and pain shot through his knee. Wincing, he halted and grabbed the injured joint. If he was nothing more than a dream, and a dreaming parallelity at that, then the sleeping Max Parker was capable of more detailed and vivid reveries than Max had ever imagined.
I am not a dream, he told himself angrily. Straightening, he worked his fingers up his body. There was nothing dreamlike about the throbbing pain in his knee, or the mushy feel of his underexercised belly, or his damp mouth and sensitive eyes. No, goddamn it! If anyone was a dream it was the Max he had just finished speaking with. A para Max. Just like this was a para world.
I’m the real one, he reassured himself furiously. All these worlds, all these paras, revolve around me.
In the garage, he passed a young couple he recognized but did not know. They lived in the building, and might easily have been residents of the same floor, but, man and woman both, they looked like him. As he made his way back to the Aurora, his Aurora, a late-model Lincoln drove in and parked. A well-groomed older man emerged who might have been Walter Konigsberg, the retired engineer who lived on the second floor. Might have been, except that he looked like a well-weathered, time-aged, slightly Teutonic version of Max Parker.
The first thing Max did upon sliding behind the wheel of his comfortable, familiar automobile was to lock all the doors. It was as if he could seal out the madness that had engulfed him simply by keeping the clear power windows closed against the outside.
Sitting motionless in the car allowed him to gather his thoughts as well as his wind, but it was far from satisfying. Without a clear notion of where he was going or what he was going to do when he got there, he started the engine and backed out of his assigned parking space. Better to be doing something, anything, he thought, than meditating morosely while waiting for the cosmos to rescue him from the onrushing approach of insanity.
How many paras were there? An infinite number for every individual? Or was the incomprehensible, too, ruled by strictures and laws he could not imagine? In addition to the paras where aliens commuted to Earth and the minions of Cthulhu ruled and civilization had been devastated or utopianized or just ever so slightly bent, besides the paras where ghosts and para ghosts and para alien ghosts walked the Earth and where the most perfect mate for himself was himself, was there one like this one for every man, woman, and child? A para existing for and inhabited solely and entirely by themselves? It nearly beggared the question of how many inconceivable paras existed that he had not yet visited.
Imagine if you will for a moment, he instructed himself, a reality inhabited entirely by paras of Barry Manilow. For the first time all that day, or all that para day, he managed a smile. Not a para smile, but one that could lay claim to reality. Feeling a little better, he thumbed the built-in garage-door opener and pulled out onto the steep side street that intersected Ocean Avenue. On the way up, he waved to a derelict resting in a bed he had fashioned from the flower bushes across the street. Looking back at him, the homeless man responded with a cheerful if none too steady wave. Para or not, the expression on the dirty, battered face was honest.
More honest than the physics of my life, Max reflected. There’s a whole lotta cheatin’ goin’ on there. Give me a para smile over a real glare any day.
An unexpected euphoria filled his mind and thoughts. No matter what the universe around him chose to do, he was still him, still Maxwell Parker. Nothing could change that. Not the presence of grisly, ravenous carnivores or unnatural quadruplet beauties or even a worl
d populated entirely by several billion versions of himself.
I am me, he decided, because nobody else is. Nobody else can be me. To paraphrase a well-known saying: No matter where I am, there I is. As a writer he hated to resort to paraphrasing, but that was as much a part of him as the fine car and beach apartment and as yet unrealized ambitions. Cobbled together, lumped as a whole, they combined to make up the one, the only, the original Max Parker.
It was a good feeling to be once more assured of himself.
Why not an infinitude of possible paras? Why not one for everybody, in addition to the infinite multiplicity of shared worlds? Let us have a para just for the kindly Konigsberg, and for the recently married lovebirds he had encountered in the garage. A perpetually grumpy one for the irascible Kryzewski, and one of voluptuous innocence for the curvaceous Omaha sisters. One for Alanis Morisette, in which thoughtful lyrics ruled, and another for the committed disciples of dear, departed Havergal Brian and his music too overwhelming for the curmudgeonly conservative cognoscenti, a para in which thirty-two symphonies ruled and “Prometheus Unbound” had not been lost.
Worlds enough for everyone, and time. Paras uncountable as the stars in the sky, paras enough to make a pinch of all the sands on all the beaches of the world. Paras unbounding, so that anything that could be imagined was possible; paras sufficient to make the unimagined a reality.
Quadrillions upon quadrillions of paras, piled upon and beneath and side by side one another in a macrocosmic volume wherein a single universe was but a pinprick.
Not for the first time was it all too much for his mind to cope with, too much even for a legion of para Einsteins to come to grips with. For that matter, imagine a world inhabited by nothing but para Einsteins, he thought. What a world that must be! Genius truly triumphant—or else a world filled with millions of multiple versions of real dreamers endlessly dreaming their dreams of other universes while nobody did the cooking or the cleaning or the washing-up. It would be a disheveled, badly dressed world, to boot.
He did not need Utopia. The threat of disease and brush-fire wars and too much poverty existing side by side with the super-rich and inane television programming and homogenized fast food and carjackings he could handle. But he could no longer deal with a Fate that indulged in repeated hijackings of reality. His reality. Hell and dammit, the novelty had worn off. He had to do something.
The first consisting of forcing himself to think in simpler terms. One para at a time, he ordered himself. Focus on the here and now and don’t try to make sense of the distant and tomorrow. Minute by minute does the trick. Next, find something to focus on. Something to rivet the mind, limit the scope of perception to what can be immediately comprehended.
As it turned out, that was less difficult to do than at first it seemed.
Boles.
Staring grim-faced over the wheel, he roared up the access street and out onto Ocean Avenue, ignoring the angry bleats of drivers he cut off and those who were forced to slam on their brakes to avoid crashing into him. The Aurora sped down onto the Pacific Coast Highway, accelerating as it turned northward and elbowing aside lesser vehicles. Max was the recipient of murderous stares from other drivers that he single-mindedly ignored. Having already dealt with monstrous tentacled shapes from other worlds, subtle variations on Armageddon, blighted scenes of terrestrial destruction, aliens, ghosts, and assorted other para phenomena, he was not about to be disturbed or even distracted by the comical, angry gestures of bellicose commuters on their way home from work.
By now the patience of his editor was likely to have run out, but Max did not care. His job no longer mattered to him. Nothing mattered except terminating the Boles Effect and getting himself snapped back to his own para line. If that was even possible now, he found himself wondering. Like a ship whose engine had died at sea, he was adrift, floating across parallel worlds, riding a crest one moment and plunging into apocalyptic troughs the next. His greatest fear was that he might have drifted too far to find his way back, even if the Effect suddenly evanesced. He only hoped that if that was the case and he found himself permanently attached to a para different from his own, it would be one that was more or less benign.
Either way, he fully intended to survive. He had learned how to do that much, anyway.
As if determined to discourage him, the field in which he was unwillingly embedded showed signs of strengthening. The world around him seemed to shift and flow even as he drove up the coast, reality melting and coalescing like some great cosmic pudding in which he was the sole, lonely raisin.
The ocean vanished, to be replaced by a heaving mass of pale pink flesh from which massive, lugubrious bubbles slowly rose and burst. Each time one erupted, a burst of discordant music filled the air. People and animals still lined the beach, gazing contentedly out to where the sea had been. Cats listened intently to the pulsating pink chorus side by side with humans, and bears and coatimundis shared aural space with sunning sheep and monkeys dressed in shorts, vests, and wrap-around sunglasses. Jaw set, lips tight, Max kept his eyes on the road and drove on.
The crumbling sandstone cliffs of the Palisades, familiar to him from hundreds of trips up the coast, had vanished. In their place a long stone wall stretched from north to south as far as the eye could see, the endless rampart interrupted only by occasional towers and redoubts. He was no longer in the Aurora but on the back of a chariot drawn by three white horses, whipped along by a charioteer while he sat, petrified and disoriented, on the seat behind.
From the direction of the sea rose the commingled howling of half a million throats. Rushing toward the wall in an unbroken line a half mile wide came the Golden Horde, thundering over the desert that had previously been the sea on foot and on horseback.
Their terrifying battle cry was met by a roar of thunderous defiance from the tens of thousands of armored defenders who lined the crest of the immense wall. A hail of arrows and heavy spears began to fly from the parapets to fall with devastating effect on the berserking attackers. The martial pealing of drums and bugle-like horns rose above the shrieks and cries and humanoid bellowing.
Abruptly and without warning, the rattling chariot vanished and he was back in the enclosed metal womb of the Aurora. As he grabbed frantically for the steering wheel, one bronze-tipped spear grazed the passenger’s side of the sedan’s windshield, crazing the glass. Mouth set, Max didn’t even wince. Ignoring the fact that he was driving down the rapidly shrinking divide between two onrushing, opposing armies of monstrous size and murderous intent, he continued to barrel up the wide dirt road that the Pacific Coast Highway had become.
The Golden Horde winked out of existence, the impossible Great Wall of Santa Monica disappeared as cleanly as if deleted from a computer screen. He was back on paved road, the friendly dark surface marred by familiar cracks and potholes and white striping. It didn’t matter. He paid it no more attention than if it had transformed into one of the rings of Saturn and he was cruising along toward distant Triton at seventy miles per. His thoughts were focused not on place but on one man. Barrington Boles was the single coherent entity around which his existence now orbited, and it was to Barrington Boles that he was fleeing as fast as heavy horsepower could carry him.
He couldn’t even kill the son of a bitch, Max thought bluntly, because he might end up killing the right son of a bitch. But it was a pleasing thought, and the protracted contemplation of assorted forms of homicide helped to pass the time as he continued up the coast.
Perhaps the worst of it was that, if he survived physically and mentally, the likelihood of extracting a story from his experiences was much reduced. Readers of tabloids like the Investigator were usually confused by any science more complicated than that necessary to explain the workings of a cheese grater. As a consequence, even adventurous editors tended to shy away from stories about the space program or new developments in computers or even mass consumer electronics— unless they involved kidnapping aliens or secret government plots or new
ways to lose weight, or Elvis.
Leaving Santa Monica and L.A. proper behind, he began winding his way along the base of the mountains, speeding past sun-bronzed surfers and flabby families and students from UCLA playing hooky. Much to his relief, none of them looked the least like him. The sky did not turn red, or purple, or polka-dot. The road did not metamorphose into the back of a giant, writhing snake. No little men, green or otherwise, materialized in the seat next to him, and no alien spaceships disgorged the bemused citizens of other worlds onto the increasingly rocky beach. With his window down, the damp rushing air that poured into the car smelled of salt and sea and rock and festering hydrocarbons. It stank, in fact, of reality.
He would not let himself believe, would not allow himself to accept. He had been burned by a chortling cosmos too many times already.
But the guard at the gated compound was one he remembered, and who in turn recognized him, waving him through with a sprightly California good-afternoon. Iceplant defined the limits of large yards, gluing the uncertain hillsides together with clutches of spiky, defiant greenery. He saw nothing more outré than a wandering poodle with a punk coiffure.
Boles’s manse was exactly as he remembered it. A gardener was just leaving, the bed of his battered, dented pickup filled to capacity with bush and tree trimmings. He waved as the emotionally exhausted Max pulled into the circular driveway and parked, not even bothering to take his keys.
As before, Boles answered his own door. It looked like Boles, sounded like Boles, acted and talked like Boles. The overriding and all-important question was—was it the correct Boles? Was this the right reality, or one sufficiently subtly different to permit the existence of a Boles who did not have a clue as to how his addlepated work had distorted the true nature of the universe?
“Hi,” Boles said jauntily. “It’s not Tuesday yet.”
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