Side Life

by Steve Toutonghi

  “So, you haven’t looked for your kids in this world?”

  A big sigh. “No. I’m afraid to. Just get reminded, you know, over and over—in every new place—of the damage I did. Sometimes, I can’t face it. You know how that feels.”

  “Um, no.”

  “C’mon. You say you’re looking for your daughter. A world where you share custody, or where your wife hasn’t divorced you. But think about this, maybe even though there are infinite versions of you, maybe every single one of them is an asshole.”

  “Nice,” he muttered. Since that first conversation with Mona, he’d been thinking about multiple universes, remembering stories like The Chronicles of Amber—his favorite books in the seventh grade—and turning over the idea of “infinite versions” of a person. Most “same person but different” stories—The Merchant of Venice, The Prince and the Pauper—pitted a “good” version against a “bad” one, or “happy” against “dissatisfied,” or asked, “What if I changed one important thing in my life?”

  The crèche implied infinite variations though, a smooth function through all possible differences, like a calculus of personality that would progress from one person to another. And if you could evolve through infinitely small variations into one other person, then you could go through similar steps to reach any person; and, if time was an illusion, you could do the same thing for every other person who ever lived. Every individual would be a single point in a function expressing all of human possibility, and then, in infinite steps through the multiverse, humanity would also be joined to every other living thing. But he hadn’t thought of it the way Mona had just put it, that maybe there was an infinite number of universes that each contained a minor, meaningless variation on the same person, the very same asshole everywhere, and that person never gradually morphed into anyone else.

  “Or ask yourself this,” Mona said, “if there’s a version of you that lives in a world where he’s happy, why would he go into the crèche? Even if he doesn’t know that the shot will change the world around him, he knows he’s risking his life. A mysterious little box that fills with blue liquid? Why would someone who’s happy get into that?”

  “Ah,” he said, “fuck.”

  “That’s right. And for a long time, every time I went in, I told myself I was looking for my kids. And then later, when I knew I wasn’t, I still told myself I was.”

  He put his head in his palms.

  “Okay,” she said, “now you can have a fry.” She gestured at the food.

  He bent forward and took a few. Salty, greasy, reassuring. He felt hungry and light-headed. He stuffed more into his mouth, as many as would fit, and pulled his chair toward her as he chewed and swallowed. She eyed him resentfully and chewed her burger.

  “Consider it rent,” he said.

  After the second handful he stood up and went into the kitchen for a glass of water. He leaned on the edge of the island as he drank. “I was in a huge bloody battle, in Africa, I think.”

  Mona placed the last quarter of the big hamburger into the carton and wiped mustard from her mouth. “I’ve never been in one there,” she said. “It always sends you to such fucked up things. Infinite worlds but all of them are in crisis. Oh, and by the way, all that’s a common refrain among shooters. Like talking about the weather. Something everyone agrees on. If you meet someone else, just complain about how shitty all your shots have been. Then go do more.” She smirked.

  His experience had been so far beyond the words she was using that it deadened him. He said, “The man who was . . . hosting me was not all there. In his head. I made decisions. I did things. He just tried to hide.”

  She said, “I have a weak feeling, a nagging feeling that won’t go away that says that people I land in want me there. That they’re willing to do whatever they need to do to get something or do something. They’re desperate for something as simple as maybe just a feeling of security and they’re willing to blow up everything else in their lives to get it. They almost invite me. Almost all the people I’ve been with were thinking about something obsessively, and were desperate to get it. Mostly they’re angry or scared. I was in a monk once who was driving himself insane. He was absolutely fixated and bitter because he couldn’t change the way his little house, this little house he’d built on a mountainside, was settling on the ground.” She moved her hands up and down, palms turned out, as if balancing them against each other. “The house only had a main room and a bedroom. The settling was throwing the angle of the door to his bedroom off of square, so the door wouldn’t close all the way. He had to leave it partially open all night, the front edge just touching the jamb. He pulled the door off its hinges and planed it down. But he went too far and then there was a gap. He tried to stuff a towel into the gap but the door kept moving the towel around. He knew the problem was really the whole house. By the time I got there the house had shifted some more and the door started binding in a different place. He was so angry. It was frustration, but it was this thing that was boiling out of his marrow. Like his bones brewed anger, as much as anyone I ever spent time with.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Vin. “The crèche put you in a man?”

  “Uh huh. That was when I realized that I might have some influence over how it aimed.”

  Vin was tired again. “I want to hear more about that after I get some sleep.” He turned to leave. He wanted to get dressed and go buy something of his own to eat.

  “You’re going to need someone to house-sit,” Mona called.

  “Am I?” he asked as he reached the stairs. “Sophie doesn’t seem to be here. In this world.”

  “If you’re going back in there, then I’d be doing you a favor by staying. Having someone in the house keeps the neighbors from asking too many questions. Besides, why not let me stay? You’ll never be back.”

  She was right. He yelled over his shoulder. “Just tell whoever lands in my body whatever you want them to think.”

  VIN RECOMMITTED HIMSELF TO ACTUALLY finding Trina. He decided to stick to a schedule, to do three twenty-four-hour shots in the crèche each week for a month. Each time he came back from a shot, he’d look for Kim. If she hadn’t divorced him yet, and if they had Trina, he wouldn’t go back in. If he got to the end of the month and hadn’t found a world where he wanted to stay, he’d re-evaluate. He wouldn’t end up like Mona, deadened and doing it just to feel something. He’d stick to a plan.

  In the first week, he spent a day in Indonesia in the late sixties, and one in China in 1953. Both times he returned to the same situation in the house, with Mona drifting around, no Kim, no Trina, no Sophie. Mona was keeping to herself and every time he saw her she was eating—peanuts and beef jerky, then lumpy nachos from the convenience store—and watching sports or soap operas on television.

  He delayed his third trip because his mind felt like jelly and he worried the world that he had believed in might just be an obscuring mist. His thinking was so jumbled that he found it difficult to keep focused long enough to do simple things.

  On what he took for the seventh day, he did manage to pull himself into the crèche for a third shot. Off he went to Luxembourg. He landed in the head of an investor named Roland Schroeder in a bright boardroom at a glass table with four people whom he loathed. The others were trading loud insults around life-changing financial losses while Roland was trying to remain calm. He stared down at his blueberry poppy-seed breakfast muffin and focused on a rhythm of inhaling and exhaling. It was 2008. The chairman of the board, Jukka Pekka, called a board member named James a hyena and then the locked door splintered open. Arne, a major investor, hove in with a long kitchen knife. Roland/Vin quickly disarmed him. (Arne was in his midseventies and Roland was a body builder.) Roland was very open to Vin’s influence. Within a few moments, they had punched a board member called Max in the throat and slammed Jukka Pekka’s face into the corner of the transparent tabletop, knocking out teeth that left a wash of bloody slime on the shimmering glass. Then Arne had a stroke.


  It was only minor violence after his experience with combat and his day on the march in China, but for the first time he felt a real satisfaction in it. Roland’s mind was a warehouse of efficient techniques for causing swift injury and Roland suspected terrible things about the other people in the room; he believed that his attacks on them were physical expressions of a deep and incontrovertible moral logic. Vin knew he would be safe no matter what happened to Roland. To enjoy it, you just had to get past the question of who deserved it.

  When he exited the crèche for the third time that week, he was clearheaded and felt invigorated. This most recent brutality had almost cleared his lingering sense of oppression from the previous shots. He wrapped himself in a robe that had been draped over one of the eggshell chairs. It felt cleaner and fluffier—newer and made of higher quality material—than the one he had brought down to Nerdean’s office.

  He remembered a song called “Itsi Bitsi” that Roland considered the lead cut on the soundtrack for his life. It had a Dylanesque melody and lyric, and a chorus in a language that Vin couldn’t pronounce or understand any longer but that he remembered was an invitation to a sweetheart to go far away together, to distant Nepal. He hummed his way up the chute, slurring through a few lines.

  At vi er inviteret til lamabal

  Så Itsi Bitsi ta’ med mig til Nepal

  He found Mona in the family room, stepped in and nodded to her. She glanced over but didn’t acknowledge him. She turned back to her show, a daytime soap. He went to the master bedroom and took a shower, singing in the warm water; then dressed and felt refreshed. For the first time in a while, he had a good feeling about how things were going.

  He sat for a bit in a big leather chair in the master bedroom (a nice addition, he felt grateful to himself in this dimension) and stared out the window at the same panorama of Puget Sound that he’d contemplated in so many of the worlds he’d bounced through. The same water. The same hills. The same yellow sunlight. It seemed odd to him that people and events changed but topography stayed the same. But, of course, he didn’t know whether it actually did stay the same. There could be any number of changes and they’d all be invisible to him, because he didn’t really see what was happening out his window. He saw what he expected to see. Water, hills, marina, boats, and no real details. Nothing specific. He saw an idea of what was there. It was all probably completely changed from the last time he had come out of the crèche, but to him it all looked the same. With the world as with people, you know only the tiny percentage you pay close attention to.

  Feeling restless and energetic, he returned to the family room where Mona lay sprawled over the sofa. The dialogue from her television show, a melody of actors’ voices in a stylized rhythm, was weirdly mesmerizing.

  “If Jake finds out how Angela has been lying to him, he’ll come to me, and he’ll ask me what to do next. He won’t ask you. Because he trusts me.”

  “And you’ll tell him about my relationship with Angela, is that it, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, yes, I will. Because I love you. I love you, Donald. Even though you don’t see it. You can’t or you won’t. No matter how often I try to show you. No matter what I do. You throw yourself away on that creature, that lying, scheming woman who cares more about her shoes than she does about you.”

  “Mona,” he said loudly.

  She looked annoyed at the interruption.

  “Have you heard anything from Kim?”

  “Who?”

  “Kim?”

  “I don’t know that name. You sure she’s in this world?”

  He had forgotten what he was doing. He hadn’t been thinking about where he might be or the specific steps he needed to take. He pulled his phone from his jeans and scrolled through the list of contacts. Bill was on it.

  Mona was watching him. “No Kim?” she asked.

  “No.” His voice caught.

  “I hate that,” Mona said.

  In a daze, Vin walked into the kitchen. If Bill was in this world, then maybe the sequence of events was different here. Maybe this was the place Vin was looking for at first, where neither of them had died. There still might be a chance to salvage his life. He pressed Bill’s name on the contact list.

  “Yello,” Bill answered. His voice sounded different. Peppy. “This is William Badgerman.”

  To Vin’s knowledge, Bill had never before referred to himself as William. He’d always been Bill. Since third grade, at least. “William?” Vin said.

  “Yes.” There was a pause, then Bill said. “And, who is this? Who’s calling?”

  “Bill? This is Vin.”

  “Wha—? Vin. Oh, Vin. Hey, man. Sorry. It’s been so long. I didn’t, ah, I didn’t recognize your voice.” A quiet heh heh heh laugh. “Well, hi. How are you?”

  Vin prepped for a nanosecond and then plunged ahead, saying, “Okay. Bill, I’m, I’m looking for Kim.”

  There was a much longer pause. Bill said, “What do you mean, Vin?”

  Just in case, Vin said, “Kim. Your sister. I’m looking for her.”

  “Vin, what’s going on? Are you doing okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I’m sorry though, sorry to bother you.”

  “No bother at all. But, it’s been so long. After Peg and I helped you with that seed funding you sort of disappeared.”

  “Peg?”

  “Yes. Vin. Peg.”

  “Bill, I’m sorry—“

  “My wife, Vin. And why do you keep calling me that? I haven’t been Bill since—and why were you asking about Kim?”

  “Because—is she—do you have her number?”

  “What do you mean, her number? Do you mean the number of her plot at Mount Pleasant? Or maybe you mean the zip code of the cloud she’s laughing at you from?”

  “Okay, look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called—”

  “Maybe not. But now that you have, I think we should—”

  Vin ended the call. Hung up. He flipped the phone onto the island as if it was scalding him and then leaned on the counter. The phone rang, the same music he had chosen from the “Floe” movement of Glassworks. Even though Bill had called himself William, the phone screen said “Bill Badgerman.” Maybe they weren’t that close in this world. Vin reached over and pressed to decline the call.

  Mona wandered into the room, stretching her neck.

  “I helped somebody,” Vin said hoarsely, without turning to look at her. His throat was dry. “In the crèche, this last time.”

  “That’s good,” Mona said, her voice flat, indifferent. He was conscious of the fact that this was Mona, but a different Mona. The same woman, but maybe taller, and with a face that seemed a little lumpy, something he didn’t remember ever thinking about Mona before. She wore a green velour sweat suit, a fabric that had a mild sheen. He hadn’t seen that before.

  “What about your children?” he asked.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Your children. Are your children here? Mona, do you know how to use that damn thing to find people?”

  “Oh. I guess not. Is that what I told you? Children?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Two of them. You said they burnt, in a fire. A fire. That you set. Is your name Mona?”

  “That’s why I was going into the crèche, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm. That sounds really bad.” They stared at each other for a few moments and then Mona said, “I’m going to watch TV,” and raised a hand to point over her shoulder toward the family room. She made a face, a grimace as if to say, “See how fucked up all this is?” Then turned and shuffled out of the room.

  THE “HEY SWEETIE” DOORBELL RANG early the next morning and when Vin answered, a short and stout dark-haired man with fair skin and irises almost as black as his pupils was standing on the porch, wearing a finely tailored blue serge suit and clutching a leather portfolio to his chest.

  “I have informed you that you need to vacate.” He spoke rapidly, while the door was still swin
ging open.

  “Joaquin?” Vin asked.

  “What?” said the man.

  “Are you Joaquin?”

  “Jason, Mr. Walsh. As always. Are you prepared to vacate?”

  “What?” said Vin. “This is mine.”

  “Yes, you have said that, and I have reminded you that it most certainly is not. I purchased it at auction and, as I have said, I now own it. Homes are repossessed and auctioned if you do not pay your taxes, Mr. Walsh. Surely, even in your . . . condition, you must be able to understand that?”

  “You own it? The crèche—”

  “Yes?” Jason’s gaze sharpened, concentrated, like a raptor spotting a rodent.

  “Show me the title.”

  “I have done that. You have seen the title in my name. Tomorrow, I will bring the police. Please pack and remove your things. Tomorrow, I will be back, and I will search this house from top to bottom. I will find everything that is here. I am tired, tired to my death of your reticence, your confusion and your secrets. I will find everything. You have my word.”

  “Then I won’t leave anything.”

  Jason smiled, a perfect segment from the radius of a large circle. “I am sure you will leave significant things,” he said. “Though whether or not they were ever yours in the first place would be debatable. What a terrible mistake it was to bring you into this. I trusted you and you lied to me. I know there are substantial secrets here, even if I do not know just what they are. You will not remove them. You probably do not understand them.”

  “Is Nerdean real?” Vin asked.

  “Of course she is.”

  “You’ve met her? You’ve talked with her?”

  “I have had direction from her, clear direction. And she pays her bills. People who do not exist, do not pay.”

  “It’s been years since you’ve heard from her though, hasn’t it?”