The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  I snap the fitted sheet over the mattress, erasing them. A small cloud of dust rises as I make the bed, and I cough a little as I lie down and stare at the ceiling.

  There’s a water mark in the shape of Ohio, and I wonder if the pipes burst at some point. When I had been here during the season, we’d trudge back to the Dig House and race to be the first to take a shower before the electricity cut out, gingerly stepping into the stall because the water was so brutally hot—you could actually see the fire when the heater turned on in the boiler. Shaving my legs had been physically painful, and I could remember waving the razor in the air to cool it down before setting it on my skin. The water spread all over the floor, so you’d have to squeegee it to the drain before relinquishing the bathroom to the next person.

  Then I would sit with the pottery specialists as they sifted through buckets of curated sand, talking to the younger grad students who tried to put broken sherds together like a three-dimensional puzzle; or I’d pass time with the bone specialists going through the huge backlog of material in the magazine. Excavation is often fast, but analysis is slow.

  Since there was no television, in the evenings Dumphries would do dramatic readings aloud from a Jackie Collins novel. I remember how it wasn’t until I came to Egypt for a dig with him that I began to think of him as human, rather than as a demigod. In close proximity, you couldn’t help but see someone’s eccentricities and flaws—the way Dumphries took six sugars in his morning coffee or snored loud enough to wake Osiris, or how he giggled when he read the word erection in Hollywood Wives.

  When I came to Egypt each season, I’d brought the fattest books I could find, hoping to make my entertainment last. My first season was Russian lit, my second season was David Foster Wallace. In 2003, I was reading fantasy.

  One afternoon, Wyatt poked his head into my room as I was lying on my bed with one of my novels. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I didn’t even let my eyes flicker from the page. “Skydiving,” I said.

  “Science fiction?” he asked, looking at the cover.

  “Fantasy.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  I didn’t answer, hoping he would just go away.

  “What’s it about?” Wyatt asked, coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed.

  It was a love story, but I wasn’t about to give Wyatt that weapon. “Two brothers,” I told him. “One who is raised to be a king, and one who finds out in this chapter that he’s the true heir.” Wyatt didn’t take the hint. Instead, he plucked the book out of my hand. “Hey!”

  He scrolled through it, his eyes lighting on the paragraphs I’d underlined. I always did that in books, when authors found ways to say the things I never could. “ ‘You can plan for something your whole life, and still get taken by surprise,’ ” he mused. “ ‘And you can experience an earthquake and deal with it like you were born to have the ground vanish beneath you.’ ” He cut me a glance. “I guess that’s the moral of your story. You never know.”

  He had tossed the book lightly at me, but it was so thick that when it landed on my belly, I grunted. He was gone before I could ask him what he meant.

  Now I don’t have any novels for diversion. I could finish reading Wyatt’s dissertation, I suppose. Given the fact that he’s just hired me, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  I pad through the Dig House, which is dark and empty. I can hear tinny radio music in the personal living quarters of the Egyptians, and smell the faint scent of smoke. In the library, the stack of books I had set on the floor is exactly where I left them. I slide Wyatt’s bound dissertation under my arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  The unexpected voice makes me jump. I turn around to find Alberto staring at me, his hands in his pockets.

  “Finding something to read?” I say, but even I hear the question mark in my own words, as if I’m guilty of something.

  Alberto’s eyes are dark and assessing. He looks at the book tucked under my arm and then back at my face. “So you’re on the payroll now.”

  “Well. Sort of. I mean, I don’t expect to get paid. That’s not why I’m here.”

  Then why are you? He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to.

  There is something unsettling about the silence he’s wrapped me in, like the unwitting fly caught in the spider’s web. I know he’s uncomfortable with me being here. I just can’t figure out why, unless it’s because he thinks I will slow down their progress.

  Well. If that’s the case, then the best thing I can do is to prove to Alberto I’m a hard worker. I produce a smile. “Big day tomorrow. I’m off to bed.”

  I can feel him watching me as I make my way back down the hall to my room.

  I reach for my clothing on the nightstand and fumble for the phone in the pocket of my cargo pants. I turn it on, but there is no signal.

  There’s a soft knock, and the door opens before I can respond. Wyatt leans in, his face limned in shadows, his eyes an abiding blue. He sees me holding the phone.

  I feel my cheeks flush with heat. “Guess I should have upgraded to an international service plan,” I murmur.

  “You have everything you need?” he asks politely.

  I nod.

  “Harbi will knock at four-thirty. Breakfast is at five in the main room.” He hesitates. “I’m not going to go easy on you.”

  “I know.”

  His fingers tighten on the doorjamb. “I hope you also realize that choosing to hide from the world in a tomb that’s bound to become a media circus may not be effective.”

  “Noted.”

  He glances at the book sitting beside me. “If you’re looking for something to pass the time I have far better material. There’s still some Jackie Collins around, I’m sure. Joe loves manga. Or you could try one of my later publications, after I succumbed to the joy of the Oxford comma.”

  “That’s okay. I want to read this one.”

  He inclines his head. The moon, spilling through a window in the hallway, silvers his hair and deepens the lines that bracket his mouth. For a moment, I can see his future.

  “Sleep well, then.”

  He says the words, but he doesn’t leave. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know how to put himself on the other side of the door. Years ago, when he snuck into my room, he would wedge the desk chair under the knob for privacy, barricading us in, together.

  “Wyatt?” I say, my throat dry. “Thank you. For the citation.”

  He looks up at me with such wonder that it is clear he included that footnote as an emergency flare, an SOS across continents and oceans. Finally, against all odds, it had found its recipient.

  “You’re welcome, Olive,” he says, and he closes the door behind himself.

  HARVARD SQUARE IS dissected by roads, an ill-fitting puzzle. The university is sprinkled across the sections, with a cluster of Georgian brick buildings in the main yard. This summer, Brian is teaching at their extension school. It’s good money and easy work, since the topics he covers are layman-friendly versions of the ones he gives to physics students during the academic year.

  I slip into the rear of the lecture hall just as he puts up his first slide, and try to see him the way the others do.

  Brian has jet-black hair, with silver threads only just starting to show. He’s tall and lean and rangy, and I know that at least one undergrad wrote an ode about his eyes—something that included a shaft of sunlight falling through a forest, and about which I’d teased him for weeks. He wears a professor’s uniform: wrinkled button-down shirt, rumpled blazer, khaki pants, Oxfords. He is the kind of guy whose collar you want to fix, whose jacket you want to smooth, whose hair you want to push out of his eyes, just so that he will look down at you, sheepishly, with a shared secret and a stealth smile that feels like a jolt to the heart.

  I look around the lecture ha
ll. Since this is an extension class, it’s not just college-age kids. There are elderly couples, women in yoga pants, professionals whose schedules allow them to take a long lunch break. “According to quantum mechanics,” Brian says, “you may well be immortal.” He reminds me of a tiger as he paces in front of an audience that knows he is toying with them. “A very controversial proposal was put forth by Max Tegmark—from that physics department down the street.” He means MIT, and that makes some of the audience laugh. “It’s called ‘quantum suicide.’ ” He clicks a remote in his hand and a slide appears: a ket bracket with pictures of an electron, a gun, and a kitten inside. “You remember the quantum state of the electron that spins both ways at the same time? The one that both killed and didn’t kill Schrödinger’s cat? Let’s take that a step farther. Let’s say that in this ket, we have that spinning electron, and a trigger, and a gun…but now, you take the place of the cat. If the electron spins clockwise, the trigger goes off, the gun fires, and you’re dead. If the electron spins counterclockwise, the trigger doesn’t go off, the gun never fires, and you live. We’re playing Russian roulette with an electron.”

  A new slide appears on the screen. “We know that the laws of quantum mechanics say that as a result of this experiment, you’ll be split into two versions: one who gets killed, and one who does not. In one universe, you leave your physics lab and go pick your kid up from summer camp and have a beer on the back porch and watch an episode of Fleabag on Amazon Prime. In the other universe, everyone’s coming to your funeral.”

  He spreads his hands. “Here’s where it gets really interesting. The dead version of you has no experience of where you are and what’s happening. Because, face it, you’re dead. On the other hand, the live, conscious version of you bears witness to the fact that you’ve survived the experiment. So the only outcome you will ever perceive, if you run the quantum suicide experiment, is the one where you live. You can literally run it a thousand times, and every single time—a statistical near impossibility—you will survive…because that is the only version of you that can experience anything.”

  He raises a brow. “Ironically, for those of you who are still doubting the concept of a multiverse, this experiment might actually prove to you that parallel universes exist. If there actually is only a single universe, you should expect to die half the time you run the experiment. But…if there truly are multiple universes, and you perform the quantum suicide experiment a few dozen times and always come out alive, you can’t help but admit that multiple worlds or timelines must exist.”

  I sink back into the wooden chair, wondering if another version of myself is in a world where her husband catches her eye just then and smiles to see her there.

  If it fixes everything between them.

  When Meret was ten we took her to Disney World. I was most excited about Space Mountain—a roller coaster in the dark. But in the middle of our ride, our little car screeched to a stop. A voice came over a loudspeaker, asking us to remain seated, while a technical difficulty was addressed. And then the lights came on.

  If it had been exciting in the dark, it was terrifying well lit. I could suddenly see how tight the curves were, how little space existed between the tops of our heads and the tracks. It was absolutely shocking, in its transformation. What I thought I’d been looking at was something else entirely.

  Now, staring at Brian, I have the same sensation. As if the home we have created, the marriage we’ve settled into, the life we have, has had the lights turned on, and now I can see the grinding gears and steep drops and near misses that constitute it.

  “You can take it one step further,” Brian says. “If we assume that cancer, and heart attacks, and Alzheimer’s, and anything else that might kill you is the compilation of a ton of cellular—and therefore subatomic—events, that spinning electron may or may not launch a gene that causes a reaction that will lead to your death. Die-hard quantum immortality buffs will say that we are all, in some universe, the oldest living person on the planet—having dodged all these genetic and literal bullets.

  “So,” he continues, “should you go and commit quantum suicide? I wouldn’t advise it, for the same reason I personally have issues with Tegmark’s hypothesis. Every time you run the experiment and survive, there are people who will see you survive, and who will think you’re the luckiest bastard on the planet. But every time you run the experiment and die—there are people who will see that, too, who will grieve and bury you and come visit your grave. From their point of view, in the vast majority of universes, you’re guaranteed to die. Here’s the problem with quantum immortality: it’s subjective, not objective. Even if you can prove it exists, you’d only be able to prove it to yourself—not to anyone else. To them, you’d just be a really stupid dead person.”

  He turns off the projector and faces the students again. “Questions?”

  A young woman raises her hand. “How do I get to the universe where Hillary Clinton is president?”

  Brian grins. “Unfortunately, you can’t. You’re stuck here now. The door is closed.”

  You’re stuck here now.

  If that’s the case, if Brian is right, then I have to make my peace with the spot that Brian and I have occupied for fifteen years. There has to be value in comfort. When you reach into your closet, do you grab the new, stiff, unwashed jeans, or the pair that feels like pajamas?

  “There’s a philosophical component to that question,” Brian continues, and I startle, thinking he has heard my thoughts out loud. “We don’t get to choose the universe we’re in, so no matter what kind of positive thinking or voodoo you do, you don’t get to land in the timeline of your choice. The laws of physics say you just plod along and then there’s a branch point, and you get funneled into one universe or the other. In other words, it’s not free will. It’s chance, based on however that electron happens to be spinning.”

  Suddenly Brian looks right at me. Until this moment, I thought that he hadn’t seen me slip into the rear of the lecture hall. As it turns out, he’s known I was here all along. He gives me a half smile, rueful and self-deprecating, as if I have caught him in the act of something embarrassing, rather than his livelihood. “Keep in mind: physics says that if something terrible happened to you, there would still be another version of you somewhere else. A version that realizes how lucky you are to have a second chance. So, we could become devotees of quantum immortality,” he says. “Or we can live every day like it’s our last.”

  Brian dismisses the class to a smattering of applause, but I hardly hear it. I swim upstream against the students who are dispersing. He is gathering his notes, and all the while, he keeps glancing up at me. He steps away from the lectern, to meet me halfway.

  This is how it happens, I tell myself. This is how we start over.

  I can take this first step.

  Finally, I am standing in front of Brian. Silence bunches between us.

  “Hi,” he says finally, softly.

  I open my mouth, but before I can answer I see a movement from the corner of my eye. A young woman with a dark braid, thick as a fist, hovers at the edge of our conversation. She is holding Brian’s battered leather briefcase like it’s the Holy Grail. “If you’re late to the department meeting again, I’m not going to take the fall for you,” she says to him. It is as if I’m invisible.

  All I can smell is roses.

  * * *

  —

  BRIAN’S GRANDMOTHER LEARNED English by watching Gone with the Wind over and over at a movie theater. I tried to imagine what it felt like to wind up in a country where you could not speak the language. After being in Egypt for the season, immersed in my doctoral research, coming back to Boston to watch my mother die wasn’t all that different.

  On our first date, Brian told me that his grandmother had survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, a work camp called Pionki, a sorting line at Auschwitz, and typhus in
Bergen-Belsen. I watched him tear a sourdough roll into quarters and sipped from my second glass of wine as he told me stories about her. “At Pionki, there weren’t supposed to be children. It was a labor camp, and children weren’t strong enough to do the work. But there was one couple from her village who had a little five-year-old, Tobie. They couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from her, so they smuggled her in. My grandmother knew that if Tobie was found, she and her parents would be punished, and probably killed. And she wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “Jesus,” I breathed. I tried to reconcile the tiny, birdlike skeleton in the hospice bed with this flesh-and-blood younger version being painted for me by Brian.

  “My grandmother spoke fluent German, and because of that, she got to do office work instead of physical labor. This meant she could see the Nazi supervisors coming and going. So she made Tobie play a game—if my grandmother hung a white scarf outside the office, Tobie had to promise to hide herself so well her own parents couldn’t even find her. She couldn’t come out until the white scarf—and the Nazis—was gone.”

  I leaned forward. “What happened?”

  Brian shrugged. The flame of a candle danced between us. “She got moved to Auschwitz and lost track of Tobie and her parents.”

  “That’s a terrible ending,” I told him.

  “Who said I was finished?” Brian said. “Fast forward to 1974. The war’s long over, and my grandmother’s visiting my mother in New York City, who’s pregnant with me—”

  “Aww.” I settled my chin on my fist and looked at him. I was a little drunk, which was the loveliest alternative to how I’d felt for the past two weeks at my mother’s deathbed.

  “My mom dragged my grandmother to Saks to buy maternity clothes. But my grandmother got tired, so she sat down in the shoe department to wait for my mom to finish shopping. She was just minding her own business when she saw a woman staring at her. And staring. And staring.”