Other Worlds Than These

by John Joseph Adams

  And now I listen to taste, to eat the music and make it part of me. This time I break my rule, I’m impatient to get to the final track. I want to hear Seu Alejandro’s words from whatever place Captain Spooky summoned him. That’s a Tuesday Afternoon question. Now I need it to be just me and Seu Alejandro high over the circling city lights. It’s a song about a moment of wonder and the sweetness of loss, like many of the best Brasilian songs. Take her face out of the mornings. I’ve seen that face. Imagined glimpses in a car across the highway, a figure passing on the street that might just be a wish. If our lives were like songs we would hear the harmonies, we would live a chorus. On the street. We are older but no wiser and in a flicker we’ll be gone.

  Full dark. I’ve forgotten the hour. My chest is heaving, my face wet with tears. I drove away the women who loved me. I let my children go. I’m not a bad man, I just loved the music with all of my heart. I always knew that the radio played just for me. The songs never let you down. They would always rhyme with your heart.

  The cleaner finds me the next morning, still in the chair in the yellow morning light.

  “Your macumba is strong,” I say to Captain Spooky and slide the caipiroska across the table to him. I’m one down already and it’s hit hard like a bailiff’s knock.

  “I wield the power cosmic,” he says. He takes a big draw from the drink. He winces as the vodka goes down, a grimace of pain. “Jesus.” He thumps his fist against his breastbone, gasps twice. “The laws of the multiverse bow down to me.”

  He looks like shit, the kind of pale and pasty shit you get if you feed a dog too much dried food.

  “No but really, what did you do? In words a man can understand.”

  “There is not one world, there are many worlds.”

  “There is not one me, there are many mes, yeah yeah.” Including ones where my social universe doesn’t consist solely of fortysomething males.

  “And there are universes where Seu Alejandro didn’t go back into the studio.”

  “Since when have you become an expert on Seu Alejandro?”

  “Research is my business, right? And universes where that studio never caught fire.”

  “So what exactly did you do?”

  “The quantum computational equivalent of being a DJ in your own bedroom. I quantumised your master on the uni quantum core and then set her to re-render.”

  “That spooky quantum computer of yours.”

  “That spooky quantum computer of mine can perform calculations no other computer can in less than the lifetime of the universe because she exports the problem to her sisters in parallel universes. Somewhere in the region of ten to the power of eight hundred universes. In a sense there is only ever one universal quantum computer, spread through the whole multiverse. It’s the one true universal constant.”

  When Captain Spooky talks, like his name, it makes my head spin and my balls contract. The world around me goes pale and washed-out, like those old last-century postcards of Rio, bleached by the light of other suns. Millions upon billions of other universes; numbers so huge that even if there were as many Leblon beaches as there were grains of sand on Leblon beach, they still would not be one sand-grain of those other Rios, other lives, other mes. Because I can’t help but think about those other mes and the oblivious lives they lead. On the balance of probabilities I cannot live the best of all those probable lives. It’s equally unlikely that I live the worst. I can easily imagine the worst. I’ve seen it. The terrible news from the multiverse is that I am grey and average. I’m not a football hero or a samba star and I didn’t marry an underwear model. I’m not a wrecked man throwing bottles at the wall every lilac sunset or dead in some police-and-malandros firefight. This is the best I can reasonably hope for. This is...endurable. How can a man face such grand indifference? I am not the centre of the universe after all.

  “So is basically the multiversal equivalent of clicking Seu Alejandro on quantum iTunes and downloading Pretty Petty Thieves?”

  Captain Spooky throws up his hands in grand offence.

  “There’s some work in this you know. Mixing and stuff.”

  “You, mix?”

  “My nephew works in radio. He’s got this software on his laptop. The question is, never mind my nephew or whatever quantum spookiness I pulled, how does it sound?”

  I duck my head in a small acquiescence.

  “It sounds like Seu Alejandro.”

  “Well there you go. Now, I’m going up to get something to eat. Do you want anything?”

  The Grill part of the Rodrigo de Freitas Bar and Grill is a small per-kilo restaurant, fine for lining the stomach against a post-match evening of drinking. See? We don’t even have to worry about Wednesday hangover. Captain Spooky floats and dithers over the buffet. Eating by weight is a fine art to him. He’s shown me his trick of slipping a little finger under the scales to take a coupe of réis off the price. But I’m hearing ghost sambas. What the Captain pulled in from across the universes is Seu Alejandro. There is no doubt that it’s him; from the moment I first heard that hunted, melancholy street guitar and the incredible falsetto soar above it like Christ the Redeemer on his high hill, from that evening he took the chatter and the cynicism of the Cambucás Club and turned it all to him and held every soul in the place until he chose to release it, I’ve learned every grace note Seu Alejandro’s played. It’s him. But of all the many many Pretty Petty Thieves that exist across that head-frying multiverse, how can I trust that this is the one that the Seu Alejandro who died in that studio fire intended; the ghost in the scorched hard drive? It’s a Pretty Petty Thieves, but can I ever know it’s the Pretty Petty Thieves?

  The crash is tremendous; a clatter of plates and metal trays and cutlery hitting the harsh white tiles all at once. Captain Spooky is on his side. He is covered in cold starters, his right leg is bent under him in an ugly, terrifying way. He’s not moving. He’s not making any sound. The Tuesday Afternoon Boys are on their feet and the Rodrigo de Freitas Bar and Grill is filled with a dull bellowing.

  Rio is not a city for funerals. Suits don’t suit us. We’d rather do our business in Bermudas and Havaianas. São Paolo, wedged between those eerie towers, perhaps in one of those all-too-common grey drizzles, that’s a city that does funerals well. The crumbling pastel colonial facades of Salvador and Olinda; there the slow rot and return to the earth is written into every house-front and Baroque Mission Jesus. That is a landscape of death. Rio is sex and life. That life is cheap—every day I hear the gunfire and the sirens—but cariocas understand that that is how death is done here. What Rio will not forgive is a heart that just grew tired of her and stopped dead at the serving counter in a kilometric restaurant. You get no kiss from Bitch City.

  So I’m too hot and too tight in my going-to-funerals suit—I’m at that life stage where I need one—and the collar is chafing my neck. For a time the priests were getting younger. Now they’re all getting older. The seminaries can’t get the young men. It’s no life really. The Tuesday Afternoon Boys have all turned out. In our suits and shades we look like a convention of dons. Our floral tribute is in the shape of a futsal ball. The old Captain would have appreciated the black joke but the family doesn’t seem to appreciate the humour. His daughters look good in their black miniskirts and hats. The youngest has fantastic legs and that sullen pout thing I love in a girl. His students are hot too. They keep back, acquaintances like us. One of them is visibly upset. The guy with his arms around her shoulder must be the boyfriend. I wonder if he knows. They’ll fuck afterwards. People always fuck after funerals. It’s not just Rio’s way, it’s everyone’s way. Death and sex.

  I talk with those faces you only see at funerals; those partial conversations that, like Christmas or carnaval chat, continue from calendar to date to calendar, stitched through time; then Marcelo offers me a lift home.

  “Did the Cap ever give you his theory for why he was going to live forever?”

  “Was this another one of his quantum-theory
-explains-everything-inthe-universe theories that no one understood?”

  “I always thought you understood.” Marcelo punches the horn as a yellow Honda full of teenagers cuts him up. “Don’t you have jobs to go to? Why aren’t you working? Parasites.”

  “Me? God no. I was just impressed with his theory for everything. Then you know what to blame when it goes wrong.”

  “No, he had this theory that he was going to live forever. Not just him, everyone. There was a price, though, and he was very drunk when he told me this. He told it like an experiment, like this. You’re a very old and very distinguished physics professor with a very hot young PA. Well, she doesn’t have to be young and hot, she just needs to be an observer. There always had to be observers in Cap’s theories. The reason that you’re very old is that you’re about to put down the big stake on a bet: your life. There’s a gun with some quantum doohickey attached, I don’t know how it works but all it needs is to be a random Russian roulette device. You stand in front of the gun and then you say, all right Miss Hottie, start the process and record what you see. The quantum device spins the gun at random and fires. Click. Nothing happens. And again: click. Nothing happens. And a third time, click. You’re still alive. Miss Hottie notes it down. Round four. The quantum device spins the chamber and fires. Oh my God! screams Miss Hottie as you take one right smack between the eyes and go down dead as dead can be.”

  “Correct me if my quantum theory is flawed, my friend, but this sounds more like a quantum suicide device than an immortality theory.”

  “Not so fast. Round four, other point of view. The quantum thingie spins the barrel and fires. And where Miss Hottie sees the back of your head come off, all you hear is another click. Empty chamber.”

  At the lights a lad skinny as want waves his windshield squeegee at us. I wave him away.

  “Explain.”

  “Well, I don’t understand it but Captain Spooky did and according to him it was this. Now, he was very drunk at the time, but every time the quantum thingie spins the barrel, it divides the multiverse into two sets of universes, one in which you live and one in which you die.”

  “I’m keeping up so far.”

  “And the next time it spins, that set of universes where you live on takes another hit: a subset where you live, another where you die.”

  “This is basic probability. Anyone who’s ever put a bet on will get this. The odds get shorter all the time whether it’s dice or Captain Spooky’s parallel universes.”

  “Absolutely, but no matter how many times the gun fires, there will always be a universe where you live.”

  I consider that as we pass a group of Pentecostals dressed in respectable whites holding some evangelical praise-service in a bus shelter.

  “But in the one that really matters you’re dead,” I say.

  “Now here comes the spooky bit. Those universes where the gun fires, you’ve no awareness of them. You’re dead. The only realities which exist for you are the ones in which the gun hits the empty chamber and you live. You can’t perceive your own death. So the quantum trigger runs on and the gun barrel spins and goes click click click. And it will keep going click click how ever long you stand there, because you must always survive to perceive those realities.”

  We’re at a light again. A crente waves a badly printed tract at us. I wave him away too. I’m getting that coldness in my balls, the clench of the alien.

  “But what about Miss Hottie? She saw you die in front of the gun.”

  “Ah, but that’s her perception, isn’t it? From your perception you’re immortal. No matter what happens, a miracle will always save you. You’ll never be in that fatal car crash or get into that mugging. If you get cancer, they’ll find a cure. If you get Alzheimer’s, they’ll work something out. When you’re so old they have to feed you soup and hold your dick to pee, they’ll find some way to make you twenty-five again and hung like a horse. Because only you can perceive those universes where you exist. You’ll be there at the fucking end of time. It’ll be you and God.”

  I shiver again but it’s not quantum chill. It’s the deeper darker cold of mortality and the futility of any hope against it; Captain Spooky’s insane theories or the promise of a street corner evangelical tract. I say,

  “I can see how this chimes with your gestalt theory, mate. But it didn’t work for him, did it?”

  “He’d say that we’re seeing from our own point of view. We’re the Miss Hotties. From his point-of-view, it was just a little twinge, a little trapped wind, a quick burp and he’s fine.”

  “There’s a big difference between a quantum Russian roulette machine and a dicky ticker.”

  “Yeah but he reckoned everything was quantum, all the way up, the only reason we couldn’t see it was because our minds were all just aspects of that universal quantum computer he used to play with.”

  We’ve arrived at my apartment. The beach is two blocks down, lines of gold and blue like the design on a 1930s cigarette packet. I hate the beach, I don’t do beaches but today in my going-to-funerals suit and too-tight tie it looks like heaven,

  “The Captain surely did have a theory for everything,” I say.

  “That I think was the idea,” Marcelo says.

  “You got your check-up booked?” I ask stepping out of the car.

  “The earliest I could get was Friday,” Marcelo says. “You?”

  “Next Monday. It does kind of make you sit and look after yourself.” I close the car door.

  And I go to the beach. I slop along the hot hot white sand in my sober suit, grit filling my shoes. There are gorgeous people here, playing beach volleyball, futvolley, roller-blading along the sidewalk. There are boats in the marina and stalls for beer and caipis and men fishing and old men just staring out across the bay, their leather skins knuckled with melanomas. I’m listening to Pretty Petty Thieves. Sun and shade, alegria and saudade, joy and melancholy; that has always been our music. The final track plays: [a ghost samba]. Those ghost worlds are real, the guitar and cello, the whispered vocals say. We come from there. Among those parallel universes the Captain is in a tutorial with his good-looking students, reading at his desk with his trademark small coffee, exploring those other worlds and other lives on that magical computer. He’ll never know about those worlds where his heart stops dead and drops him to the floor of his favourite per-kilo restaurant. There’s a dark truth buried in Captain Spooky’s vision of himself stepping forward to the end of the universe, one that makes this bright day and its people look as false and insubstantial as carnaval costumes. Around us others die, by age or disease or accident, but we live on. Little by little we lose everything and everyone. Every one of us is alone in our own little universe of ourselves.

  I stop dead, a mad man in a dark suit on a blazing beach, and watch a TAM shuttle lift off from Santos Dumont. The compulsion, formed in an instant, possesses me. I must know if the Captain’s Pretty Petty Thieves is the one my Seu Alejandro intended. Certainty is impossible—that’s as true in pop music as quantum theory—but I can find hints and intimations. There is still room for faith. I trudge up between the brown volley-boys on to the sidewalk. I sit on a bench and empty the sand out of my lace-ups.

  If in another life—another universe—I had to be a favelado, I think it would be in Vila Canoas. It’s small and green and folded in on itself so that streets and alleys can cross each other several times. There’s an underground river. Police and taxi drivers eat in the diner on the corner. They always know where the good food is. There’s even a neat little backpacker hostel. I’ve never got that sense of perpetual tension I feel in big sister Rocinha around the mountain; as if the whole city on a hill might break lose and slide into the sea like an avalanche, sweeping the rich of Barra de Tijuca before it.

  So, I’m a cosy middle-class music hack who doesn’t know any speak of the street or the signs and ways you need to know to live as a Vila Canoista and not a tourist and I wouldn’t last more than two nights in this place
without killing or being killed. But I like the circle of forested mountains and the lap of sea. I like the way the clouds catch around São Conrado Mountain. Hang-gliders circle through the mist up there like hawks. On the intersection at the café a youth painstakingly welds an old Toyota pick-up, his gun wired into the streetlight. I turn off into the shadowed alleys between the leaning buildings, overhung by ramshackle balconies and washing. There is the studio, rebuilt and now a DJ school. I remembered it burned, I remember the yellow walls smoke-stained and the green paint peeled away, the windows and doors empty and eyeless. Vila Canoas was a pilgrimage site for a time. I was one of many who laid flowers and set candles and plastic virgins, Flamengo shirts and thongs to the Seu. I feel the hard drive in the breast pocket of my jacket grown heavy and warm. There’s a second Pretty Petty Thief in it; the ghost Captain Spooky found on the shores of the multiverse.

  The bar across the alley is changeless, a brick counter built into the under-hang beneath an apartment house, a bench seat set into the opposite wall. The television blares some Canal Quatro reality shit, the usual malandros loll around with Antarcticas, one in green with an attempted moustache, one in yellow with a smart light in his eye, one in white who thinks he rules. They nod when I greet them.

  “I wonder if you could help me; does the Dona Severino de Araujo still live round here?”