Multiversum

by Leonardo Patrignani

  Jenny, we have to see each other.

  Alex thought he sensed a smile playing over her lips.

  That’s impossible — how can we meet, you … Listen, I know that you’re there, I’ve always known it, but this whole thing is just too strange … it scares me.

  I’m scared too, but I don’t care about that. I don’t know how to explain this to you: your voice has become something I can’t live without, your smile exists in my head, and I know it may really be different, and maybe you’re different, too, but I can’t imagine falling asleep tonight, or any night of my life, with the knowledge that I’ll never see you, accepting that you’re nothing but a dream.

  Alex’s words hung in the air for a few seconds.

  Maybe that’s all I am. Maybe I’m just a dream.

  The best dream I’ve ever had in my life.

  But dreams vanish when you wake up.

  Then I never want to wake up.

  Jenny said nothing more, but now, along with her smile, a pair of large, glistening eyes appeared in Alex’s mind, as well as the facial expression of someone trying to conceal their emotions by biting their lip.

  I’ve never experienced anything like this, Alex went on.

  In his mind, those words lit up Jenny’s face. Her features appeared around the glistening eyes: the trembling lips, the slightly furrowed forehead.

  I feel as if I can see you, Jenny said. Your face just appeared in my mind.

  It was the exact same thing that was happening to Alex.

  What if I was different?

  What if I was different?

  The two questions chased each other around for a few seconds in their thoughts.

  You’re not a dream, Jenny. You’re a part of my life now. I want to see you, even if I have to go around the world to do it.

  Alex’s last words seemed to vanquish her reluctance: two conflicting emotions had been at war in her heart. On one side was what she’d felt from the start: the feeling that warmed her heart, that made her feel alone even when she was surrounded by her friends, alone in the real world where she lived her day-to-day life. On the other was the fear that she’d fallen in love with a dream, the fear that she might suddenly wake up to see that illusion vanish into thin air, and it made her want to stop.

  Their thoughts kept chasing each other without either of them being able to do a thing to stop it. This mental dialogue was beyond their control, and it was giving expression to their deepest emotions.

  When Alex opened his eyes a little later, the blurred image of his bedroom ceiling gradually brought him back to reality. The light in his head was gone now, Jenny’s voice a distant echo. But next to him was the video camera. The blinking red light meant it was still recording.

  He slowly got up off the bed, his limbs numb and tingling, and connected the video camera to the computer.

  The video started with a shot of him after he’d pressed the button marked REC on the back of the camera. Soon, he had collapsed on the bed. Alex noticed that his eyelids quivered in the seconds prior to the moment of contact. Then came the unmistakeable descent into a trance: his muscles became relaxed and his eyes were shut. He couldn’t quite understand what he’d muttered in the seconds just before he regained consciousness. He could make out only the words ‘dream’ and ‘world’.

  In fact, at the end of that conversation, on 23 November 2014, Alex had promised Jenny that he’d find her, that he’d turn that dream into reality, even if it cost him his life.

  He had no choice. He had to do it. It was what his heart commanded him to do. And not just his heart.

  The previous day, his mother, Valeria, had sent him down into the cellar. It had been years since he’d climbed down to that storage unit, only two metres long and three metres wide, through the narrow, dusty tunnel that could only be reached from the interior courtyard of the apartment building.

  It was a Loria family tradition to decorate the Christmas tree one month before Christmas Eve. So Alex had been sent down to get the big boxes filled with Christmas ornaments, the long cardboard box with the artificial tree, and a bag that contained an intricate string of coloured lights.

  The creak of the ramshackle wooden door had welcomed him into the cellar. Luckily, when he flipped the switch he found that the light still worked. The place was a mess. Boxes piled atop boxes, an old ironing board, a pair of crutches, pieces of a mountain bike that he didn’t even remember owning when he was little, and lots of other junk.

  Alex identified the long narrow box crammed into a corner. He could see half of it, with a stylised depiction of a pine tree on top. Then he turned his attention to the large boxes, stacked high. The bottom one had a diagonal red label reading Picture Frames.

  On top of that box was perched another, which had a white label with a scribble of some kind in blue ink. That was obviously his father’s handwriting. Alex ventured a little closer and made out the words Ceramic Tiles.

  When he looked up again, he noticed that the third box was unlabelled. He craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse at another side. ‘Here it is,’ he exclaimed in satisfaction when he read the label Christmas Decorations.

  As he tried, with no great hopes of success, to find the bag of Christmas lights, Alex ran into a real collector’s item that he’d completely forgotten. It was a toy that he’d loved when he was small: a robot that stood about thirty centimetres tall, dark blue with red hands and feet, and on its chest was a logo that took him back ten years, to his childhood. He had a hard time remembering anything from that time of his life, but he recognised that robot. One of its features was that it could serve as a container. You only had to push a button behind its neck, and the chest split apart and swung open.

  When Alex tried it, he was astonished by what he saw.

  ‘What on earth?’ he exclaimed when he saw the video cassette hidden inside the robot. He pulled it out and read the words written on the label stuck to the spine of the cassette.

  WATCH THIS ON 22 NOV 2014

  That makes no sense, thought Alex, before slipping the video under his belt and covering it with his sweatshirt. That’s today … When he went back to the house, he left the Christmas boxes in the front room, locked himself in his bedroom, and pulled out the video. His hands were shaking.

  He couldn’t wait. The minute his parents went out to do some grocery shopping, Alex ran into the living room to find the old VCR that, in recent years, had been replaced by a Blu-ray player. He found it in a chest behind the sofa. It was buried under a mountain of rubbish, but it was still there. And it still worked perfectly, as far as he could remember. When he hooked it up to the television set and slid the video cassette in, his face fell. He raised an eyebrow as Marty McFly’s DeLorean went screeching past on the screen, hitting eighty-eight miles per hour as it rocketed back into 1955.

  ‘Back to the Future. Okay … so what?’ he said, as he looked for the stop button on the VCR.

  He was about to push the button and eject the tape when, suddenly, the movie disappeared. The screen went grey and staticky, as if someone had recorded over the tape. Then an image started to take shape. The little boy in front of his eyes was him. He couldn’t have been any older than five or six. Behind him was the old wicker toy chest. Next to it, an enormous teddy bear lay upside down on an old crimson armchair. All these things no longer furnished his bedroom, and hadn’t for almost longer than he could remember. On the walls were posters of various boyhood idols, from Ayrton Senna to Michael Jordan. Little Alex was sitting on the floor with his legs crossed. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Scrooge McDuck jumping off the diving board, about to plunge into a swimming pool full of gold coins. He was also wearing a pair of dark-blue shorts. His blond hair sat on his head in a bowl cut, with a fringe that almost covered his eyes. When he looked up, straight into the lens of the video camera, t
he message that he uttered in his childish voice was as clear as it was chilling.

  ‘This message is for me, for when I’m grown up. In November 2014 I’ll have to leave. Go to her. Before it’s too late.’

  The child stood up and disappeared behind the video camera. The screen went black again. A few seconds later, Michael J. Fox reappeared in a cow barn in Hill Valley in the 1950s.

  This can’t be, Alex thought to himself as he rewound the last minute of tape. When he played it again, he discovered that he had indeed heard it right. He put everything back where it was, took the video back to the cellar, and put it inside the old robot, before his parents got home.

  That VHS bore the date of the day he’d found it, and the message that he’d sent himself was by no means ambiguous. In fact, it was disturbingly exact. Inexplicably exact.

  There was something absurd about the whole story, and he had to figure out how to decipher it. Even if it meant travelling halfway around the world.

  Alex knew this without a doubt: there was only one person who could help him achieve that objective.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a very good idea,’ said Valeria Loria as she was setting the table for dinner. The smell of frying shallots filled the kitchen. Alex’s mother aimed the remote control at the television set and muted the sound, before pouring water into a pitcher that she placed at the centre of the table.

  ‘How long are you planning to stay away?’ said Alex’s father, Giorgio, his voice decisive and strong. ‘A long weekend?’

  Alex limited himself to nodding in agreement.

  ‘I don’t understand what the point of it would be. As if the two of you don’t already see enough of each other.’

  Alex opened his mouth to protest, but his mother stopped him with a wave of her hand.

  He held in his objections and went and sat down at his place. The large kitchen of the Loria home was furnished with antiques made of dark wood, brass handles, and floral wallpaper and decorations. A long wooden table dominated the room. Hanging from the ceiling, over the centre of the table, was a crystal chandelier. On the wall opposite the stove, a 1950s oak sideboard with glass doors displayed the silver used only on special occasions.

  Alex hated that room. He detested it. Just as he hated the rest of the apartment. For him it was nothing more than a sophisticated, gilded prison.

  ‘There’s a school assembly on Friday,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘But it’s not compulsory. I could go to Marco’s Thursday night … and stay until Sunday.’

  His father stared at him for a few moments without saying a word, then he unfolded his napkin and laid it across his lap.

  Valeria looked first at her husband and then at her son. She knew it was her job to find a solution that would make them both happy.

  ‘Don’t you have a match on Sunday?’ she asked, again.

  ‘No, we’re not playing this Sunday.’

  ‘Don’t you need to train?’ Giorgio broke in. ‘The playoffs are coming up.’

  Alex said nothing. He knew that his father had a point.

  ‘You’re still the team captain, aren’t you? They might expect you not to spend your weekends playing PlayStation with that half-crazy friend of yours.’

  ‘Marco isn’t crazy. He’s a genius.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  For the second time, he held in his anger. He couldn’t run the risk of getting into an argument just then.

  ‘Well, so, can I go or not?’

  Valeria exchanged a glance with Giorgio, who had already turned up the volume on the television, as if leaving to her the job of deciding whether or not to give their son permission.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ she replied, as the day’s top stories could be heard in the background, a moment that in the Loria household meant ‘end of discussion’.

  He’d done it.

  He’d passed the first obstacle.

  7

  At 9.30 on Thursday night, in an apartment on Viale Gran Sasso, the doorbell rang. It wasn’t the usual annoying noise. Instead, the intercom emitted a sound more like a mobile-phone ring tone of the Rocky IV theme. Marco Draghi pressed a button on a small green remote control, and the front door opened. Alex ran upstairs and entered the apartment with a basketball duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

  ‘I got your message,’ his friend shouted from the bathroom. ‘Are you going to tell me what the hell’s going on?’

  Marco pressed the button on the remote control again, and the door now closed. Alex was accustomed to these ‘tricks’, as his friend liked to call them. The tricks of a genius.

  In Marco’s apartment, almost everything was operated by switches, remote controls, or even voice commands. Doors, heaters, kitchen appliances, stereos, and lights all responded to a remote control, like certain modern apartments designed according to the laws of domotics, with the difference that, in this case, every single microchip had been patented and built by Marco himself.

  In February 2004, more than ten years ago, his parents had decided to head up to the mountains for a long weekend. They were thinking about buying a holiday house, and they’d turned the house-hunting trip into a family weekend. Marco’s father, a former professional skier, had infected both his wife and his son with his passion for the slopes. They were expecting a weekend of magnificent freestyle descents and lavish dinners at the alpine hut, high atop the mountain.

  It was drizzling when they drove out of Milan. By the time they got to Piedmont, they were caught in a fully-fledged downpour. When they left the tollway and turned onto the local highway that would take them up into the mountains, the rain had stopped. The worst seemed to be over. But as they climbed higher, the weather got worse. A violent blizzard was lashing down onto the tight bends that ran up the mountain slopes. The gusting winds started to make their Jeep fishtail. Weighed down by snow, a tree had collapsed onto their windshield, pushing the car over the side of the cliff. Marco, shaken around in the back seat, never even knew how his father lost control of the vehicle. He’d only heard the crunch of impact. Then, silence.

  Marco’s life was never the same after that. His parents were killed instantly. He survived, miraculously, and was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. He stayed with them until he was nineteen. Then he decided to live on his own in the apartment on Viale Gran Sasso.

  For the first twenty years of his life, he’d dedicated himself entirely to the study of computers and electronics. He loved to take things apart and study their components, and he filled the house with mechanical devices. He could operate them from an array of remote controls scattered throughout every room. There was the green control, for doors and windows. There was the blue control, whose buttons were linked to the electric oven, the microwave, and the stove top. The yellow control governed the temperature inside the apartment. The red one, meanwhile, was designed to control the lighting system: a panel with changing colours in the bedroom; rows of blue neon bulbs in the living room to give a futuristic appearance to his ‘domain’, as he called it; and a vast array of tiny lightbulbs scattered throughout the apartment, transforming it into a sort of gigantic pinball machine. Marco was immensely proud of it.

  For the past ten years, his brain had been operating considerably faster than the average speed, which meant he was able to design and engineer increasingly sophisticated devices, from the controls he used at home to a diverse array of software. When it came to computer technology, he was a prodigy, a freak. Whatever problem his friends might have, Marco was the solution. As Alex always liked to say, he was ‘light-years ahead’.

  But the difference between the two of them was not confined to the five-year age gap between Alex and his friend. It was also their legs. Marco had left his at the bottom of that ravine.

  Marco’s electric wheelchair emerged from the bathroom and turned down the hallway, headi
ng for what he dubbed the ‘engine room’.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ he observed, turning his back on his friend. Alex was radiant.

  ‘In a way, this is the best time of my life.’

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’ Marco turned his head towards Alex, who was looking around the room. Every time he came into that apartment, the first thing he looked at was the photograph of his friend’s parents, happy and smiling on their wedding day.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  Marco had a small red refrigerator, shaped like a Coke can, next to one of the three computers that occupied the table in the middle of the room. He pulled out a couple of cans and handed one to his friend.

  ‘I need your help,’ said Alex, getting straight to the point.

  Marco smiled, and with one finger he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His stubbly face, his unkempt hair with long fly-away locks: for Alex, that was what he’d always looked like, ever since the two of them had met at the finals of the PlayStation tournament.

  ‘Quit staring at my wheelchair,’ he’d said to him that day. ‘I don’t want to win because you feel sorry for me. My legs don’t work, but my hands sure do.’

  Alex had been struck by the confidence of his opponent, who he’d initially pitied. Then they’d exchanged a handshake, before starting to play. Marco had won the match in overtime. Since that day, they’d been like brothers, with an enduring bond between them.

  Alex tried to snap back to reality. That memory was burned into his mind. It was one of the most important moments of his life: a simple twist of fate had led to the start of a wonderful friendship. He often stopped to reflect on the fact that if he hadn’t happened to see the ad for the competition in the morning paper the day before the tournament, he’d never have met Marco at all.

  ‘So talk to me. What can I do for you?’

  Alex stared at the row of blue neon tubes on the opposite wall and found himself having to rub his eyes.

  ‘Do you keep them on all the time?’ he asked, tilting his head in the direction of the lights.