Alice Through The Multiverse

by Brian Trenchard-Smith

  “You’re not one of the men who broke into my flat...” Indeed, Jane would never forget their faces.

  Paul was relieved; the girl volunteering potentially exculpatory information was a good sign. He was quick to grab the lifeline.

  “What men? I can help you. When was that?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Who are you...really?” She sipped her coffee.

  “I am the best friend you’ve got right now, Alice,” said Paul with quiet emphasis, then an instant later realized that he had misspoken. “Jane! Sorry. Jane.”

  Jane immediately slid the scissors back into his pants. Paul writhed. “A...hah!” exclaimed Jane. The scissors had found their mark.

  “Bingo! Are you circumcised?”

  “Jane!”

  “I haven’t had much practice, but I could take a stab at it.”

  Paul fought to remain calm. Begging was his only option now.

  “Jane, don’t do this!...Please!” As he uttered the word, Paul saw his facade crumbling. He realized that he felt just like a torture subject would, about to be violated, trying one last desperate appeal to reach the human side of the aggressor. Like most members of the Agency, Paul was strongly against torture, never more so than at this moment in time. “Don’t do this, please, you’re in danger, don’t do this...”

  “Danger?” Her implacable look returned. “What’s your game?”

  Paul’s last option was the truth: “I work for the CIA.”

  “Of course you do!” snorted Jane with a derisive laugh. “You’re a secret agent and I’m the loony toon. Glad we got that straightened out...Jesus wept!”

  But the fear on Paul’s face was so genuine, it gave her pause. And then it hit her. She’d seen his face before. But when?

  Dear God. He was James. Alice’s James.

  At that moment the front door burst open as far as the thick security chain would allow. A big man, 280 pounds of steak-fed muscle, looked inside. Jane jumped up, scissors in hand. The Giant Man. Paul could see instantly that she recognized him.

  “Get away from me!” she screamed, raising the scissors. The big man grinned as he put his shoulder to the door with increasing force.

  “Run!” Paul yelled. But she had hesitated too long. This time the intruder’s collision with the door wrenched the chain apart. He lunged in, closely followed by a shorter slightly older man. Jane bolted for the kitchen. Paul watched as she barely made it through the doorway before one of them grabbed her hair. She swung the scissors. The big man blocked the thrust and slammed the side of her head into the fridge door. Jane slumped to the floor semi-conscious looking up at the two faces bent over her, their outlines flickering, their voices slowing into unintelligible guttural growls. They, whoever they were, had caught her again. For what purpose she still could not imagine.

  CHAPTER 16

  Crazy Jane

  It seemed to Jane Benedict, before she blacked out yet again, that only a short while before she had been sitting at her computer in her bathrobe, freshly showered, energized, ready to write up her research for a paper to be entitled: “Erasmus’ and Machiavelli’s Distorting ‘Mirrors for Princes’.” It was late on a rainy Wednesday night.

  As long as she could remember, Jane had been fascinated by the 16th century. So it was natural for her to gravitate toward Early Modern European History after her admission to the University of London. There she had attracted the attention of tutors and professors because of her preternatural insight into Early Modern quotidian village life in England. She had enjoyed lively office-hour debates with one tutor in particular, an unmarried man in his early thirties. Then Jane sensed that his interest in her was becoming personal. Nothing he did, nothing he said, but a change in his body language. He rarely looked away from her as he had done when she had first visited during his office hours. So Jane stopped attending them. Nothing was ever said. She could see him tense up beneath his smile when she asked a question during a tutorial.

  It was better, Jane had decided, not to get too close to people. Relationships of anything but the most superficial kind led only to pain. She recognized that she was a borderline reclusive, but who cared? She was quite content with her own company. Jane managed to put her tutor off without incurring unpleasantness, believing that she was doing the man a favor, in fact, because if he truly got to know her, he would run a mile. He would discover The Secret. It was a pretty open secret within Jane’s immediate circle. Namely, that she was nuts. Bats in the belfry. Barking. Choose your pejorative.

  From earliest childhood, Jane would herself acknowledge, she had always seemed a little strange. Intense. Remote. She would on random occasions either wake from a nap or zone out for a few seconds, then snap back and breathlessly recount what she had experienced in an English country village of the mid-sixteenth century. Initially, such a playful and imaginative child delighted her parents and her two older brothers. But when these episodes started to occur in front of extended family and friends, when nine-year old Jane insisted that she really had traveled back in time for a few moments, and that the whole olden day village of Farnham knew her as a girl named Alice, her parents became concerned. Perhaps, as the youngest child, she was making these stories up to get attention? The vivid images of antiquarian rural life, they reasoned, she probably derived from books, movies and television. They decided to play along and ride it out. Their daughter had an IQ in the 160s. Perhaps it was an extreme form of pre-pubescent hormonal rumblings.

  Then, the summer she was fourteen years old, Jane’s parents and brothers were killed in a holiday motoring accident, when their rented station wagon took a bad turn on a Cisalpine pass. Images of her family members hideously injured and dying in the hours before rescue came were burned into her mind. Jane herself escaped with minor injuries, but suffering intense survivor guilt and PTSD, and the loss of the people on whom she could rely to accept her idiosyncrasies without judgement.

  Her paternal uncle and his wife became her legal guardians and she went to live in their home. Although she was fond of her uncle and aunt, their relationship with her was rather formal and forced. Their hugs lacked warmth. Jane swiftly learned that she could not confide in them. For their part, they did not know what to make of this singular child. Her visions disturbed them. So there had been a mutual sense of relief when she turned eighteen and was emancipated from their care. Thanks to them, however, her inheritance had been prudently managed and was adequate to provide for her university education and a middle-class living standard. Unfortunately, after leaving their home, Jane had embarrassed her conservative uncle and aunt by getting arrested. She and they hadn’t had much to do with each another since.

  To compensate for the emotional deficit of her teen years, and hoping to solve her personal conundrum, Jane had applied herself indiscriminately to the getting of wisdom. As a voracious reader of history, science fiction, philosophy, psychology and the paranormal, she had considered mystical explanations, like reincarnation, but none seemed to fit. She thought about psychological causes, but her mental quirk failed to conform to the features of DID or of any other pathology she researched. Ultimately, Jane had embraced the quantum physics notion of the multiverse. Life was not confined to one universe, rather, it existed in a series of parallel universes, each either slightly or vastly different from the one she inhabited, all stacked one upon the other in a sort of cosmic hard drive, containing all the options of Being.

  Or as one of her classmates had said: “Oh, like a stack of vinyl 45s on my granddad’s stereo?”

  “More like a CD that skips,” Jane had replied, ignoring his snarky undertone.

  Hanging out with fellow students at a campus coffee shop, Jane had turned the usual talk of politics to the mysteries of the cosmos. Unwisely, given the looks of sly derision she observed, she offered theories based upon her own experience. She revealed how images of another life in an apparent past intermittent
ly invaded her. She defined them as a glitch in the cosmic computer, an unintentional momentary download from one of her other selves. A file swap, as it were. But metaphysics was beyond the ken of her group of acquaintances. It was as though Jane had said that she had been abducted by aliens whom she had discovered making crop circles. Jane read their faces. To hell with them. She rarely spoke about the things that interested her. They would have to listen to one of her raves for a change.

  If there was a multiverse, she continued, it prompted larger questions. How was it created? Did God create it? And for what reasons? Did God have to have reasons? What is God? How can we, mere bipedal sentient life forms, hope to fit our limited intellectual apparatus around a concept as vast as that of a Supreme Being? How can we hope to understand the cosmos, when we impose upon that understanding a patriarchal hierarchy that mirrors society’s control structures? An elderly but all powerful man with a long white beard sitting on a throne, dispensing judgment, to be obeyed without question. Theologically unsound, but an enduring image. Wasn’t Xenophanes right—people create gods in their own images? And a throne? Constant obeisance? God, creator of the universe, needed the trappings of earthly monarchy to reflect his status as Supreme Being? Give me a break! Were people really supposed to accept on faith a system of rewards and punishments for the way they led their lives—the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell—the two options in the rulebook of life, as defined and administered by society’s elite for their own benefit? Please...

  Jane often spoke much as she wrote, in complex paragraph-sized streams of consciousness. No, God, as defined by religious leaders, was a hoax. Religions were just competing corporations. But, that said, was there a guiding intelligence behind existence? Jane was not 100% ready to rule that out. In truth, Jane felt that mankind was at the earliest stage of groping towards the answers to these questions. She remembered asking Teresa, the last person left at the table by this stage, was existence linear? Was it just what you could see and touch? Or was there more that we were not yet equipped to understand? But Jane could see that Teresa’s eyes had glazed. She was not buying it.

  “The multiverse. It’s science fiction, Jane. No offense,” she had said, hurrying to finish her meal.

  “What if it’s science? “ Jane had countered, “We’ve invented computers and the Internet. How come? Because they reflect our multilevel cosmos in miniature. Isn’t that plausible?”

  Not to her friend, who fled the cafeteria, having suddenly remembered a book she needed to check out of the library. Existence is a computer, Jane decided, and computers get glitches. Pop-ups from a past life that somehow bypass the firewall. Or maybe there were nihilistic cosmic hackers scattering viruses and messing with lives. Who really knows shit? Whatever. That was Jane’s best explanation for what intermittently happened to her. It was preferable to the stigma of having a mental illness.

  When in her mid-teens Jane had first brought up these theories, her guardians had taken her to a series of psychiatrists. One suggested that their niece’s fugue states, obsessive behavior and irrational ideation resulted from a treatable imbalance in brain chemistry. Initially Jane had refused to take medication, but finally succumbed to pressure. The prescribed cocktail had reduced her “delusions” and smoothed out her mood swings, to everyone’s relief. But Jane stopped taking it when she gained independence. She felt that it was getting in the way of her studies, stopped her mind flowing free. Bollocks! People shouldn’t be forced to take psychoactive drugs if they didn’t want them, she had told herself.

  And that’s when impulsivity and obsessive thought caused her to throw a cream pie in the face of the corporate CEO of a bottling company in a demonstration outside his office. When her uncle paid her bail and testified about her mental condition before the Court, he made it clear that she was completely on her own from then on. The Court mandated psychiatric treatment, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and community service.

  Jane reclaimed her solitary life, reentered university, and settled into her studies.

  Then the evening had come when her doorbell had rung, interrupting her creative engagement with Erasmus and Machiavelli. Of course. Just when you’re ready to concentrate, somebody bothers you. Jane tied the sash of her bathrobe. If it was that man in the flat down the hall again, pretending to be helpful while angling for a date, he was going to get the rough end of her tongue. Not the way he was dreaming of, either. But when she looked through the security peephole, Jones was standing there, or Jonesy as people seemed to call him because he wouldn’t tell you his first name. A recent acquaintance she’d made at school.

  She opened the door with a mildly peeved expression on her face.

  “Yes, Jonesy?”

  “I was in the area,” he said deadpan, then burst out laughing.

  Jane wondered—was he drunk or on drugs? Jonesy stepped aside and a Giant Man appeared, wearing a paramedic’s uniform. He pushed her back into the apartment. It all happened in seconds. Another man, Red Curly Hair with Bad Skin, in the same uniform as Giant followed, pushing a wheeled stretcher. The Giant pulled her to him and pressed a cloth over her nose and mouth. As she drew breath to scream, she inhaled a sharp acrid smell that spun her head. Vision blurred as she lapsed in and out of consciousness.

  Even with her mind blowing fuses, Jane realized that she was being kidnapped, and that the stretcher was a means to spirit her out of the apartment block in plain sight. Not that any of her fellow residents knew her beyond a figure hurrying in or out of the building with her eyes down. Was this some kind of crazy practical joke arranged by her fellow students? Pretty sick, if it was. Then Jane found herself lying flat, with Jonesy tying a restraining belt across her waist.

  He leaned into her face: “Hello, Crazy Jane.”

  Jonesy wore his usual grin, now with a sardonic edge. This cut her to the quick, because Jonesy had ingratiated his way into her friendship, overcoming her customary reclusiveness, and she had confided in him about her past and its problems. He himself had urged her to drop her medication again, release her creativity.

  “Bet you’re not such a smarty pants now, are ya?” he sneered.

  There was more going on here than a man’s resentment of a smarter woman. She was in genuine danger, she realized in a snap. But quickness of mind did not activate resistant limbs. The drug had taken hold.

  Blackness alternated with flashes of a man peering down at her. He was in his forties, wearing top of the line Armani. It’s funny how a suit will stick in your memory. She could tell from his demeanor that Suit was the man in charge. Again consciousness faded.

  A crashing sound brought her back. Jane awoke to see herself being propelled on her stretcher out of the open doors of an ambulance, feet first, into a ditch in drenching rain. Sheet lightning revealed forest on both sides of the road. Dark night, pools of light. A raging storm. She looked back to see that the rear of the ambulance had broadsided into a tree, buckling the doors open. Instinct dispelled the fog of anesthesia. Run and hide. Her hands felt the belt and unclipped it. She tumbled from the stretcher into the ditch.

  Jane looked back. A tree lay across the road blocking the path of the ambulance. Beyond the tree, a Toyota Land Cruiser had stopped in the road. Men were emerging from the vehicles: The Giant Man, Curly Red Hair, and that rat bastard Jones.

  Another lightning flash, and suddenly she was racing through the trees. Then Curly Red Hair jumped out from behind a tree right in front of her. Jones and The Giant grabbed her bathrobe. She twisted out of their grasp naked and ran on. She remembered thinking if these men wanted to rape her, why hadn’t they done it in her apartment? Why had they brought her out here? Bastards! They meant to murder her.

  A paroxysm of lightning assaulted her, then all went black.

  Those were the last memories Jane had had before she had awoken in this strange townhouse, God alone knew where. She realized that she must have been in Alice�
�s life, but could recall very little. Normally, these spells had only lasted a few minutes, an hour at the most, yet this time it seemed from the date on the digital clock behind the wet bar that a day had gone by. And here she was on the couch of an unknown apartment in someone else’s clothes in the middle of the night, with a torrent of anger pouring within her. The man she had knocked out cold while he was coming out of the kitchen was going to give her some answers. Perhaps strapping him to a chair and threatening him with castration was going a bit too far. But all her life, Jane acknowledged, she had had a tendency to go too far. She would not have gone through with it. Well...unless she found out that he had raped her. Maybe. Then she had recognized him. His black hair was shorter, but he had the same bone structure and those remarkable green eyes. Alice’s James.

  All these thoughts were ricocheting round her mind in the few seconds of consciousness she possessed after The Giant Man bashed her head against the fridge door. Then Jane’s world went dark once again.

  CHAPTER 17

  A Bucket of Murphy’s Law

  As Nelson dragged Jane’s limp body back into the living room by the arms, Paul called out “Don’t hurt her!”

  Brandt looked down at Paul, taped to the chair, his zipper undone, a piece of his shirt protruding from his fly. What has been going on here? Brandt wondered, as he pocketed Paul’s Walther PPS. This just gets wilder and wilder.

  “Hope the blow job was worth it.”

  “Fuck you!” snarled Paul, bound into the rocking chair, trying to project strength rather than the helplessness he was feeling.

  “Au contraire. Fuck you...” Brandt slapped Paul, pitching him back in the chair, before he rocked forward into a backhand. “Ole!” said Brandt, “I can do this all night. Keeps me fit.”

  Nelson flashed a cautionary look. Not too hard. Make it look like an accident. Brandt nodded his understanding. Not that some mild contusions on the face would matter. The autopsy would say anything they wanted it to.