Multiversum

by Leonardo Patrignani

  What am I doing? she thought as she looked at the cover of the inflight magazine: it was a picture of Barcelona as seen from the Parc de Montjuïc. Barcelona … A sweet smile appeared on Jenny’s lips.

  Six months ago, she’d gone on a school trip to Spain. Her first trip to Europe. It had lasted for ten unforgettable days.

  A series of flashbacks went through her mind: the bizarre shapes of Gaudí’s architecture, which so reminded her of the sinuous shapes of the ocean waves; the tour they took of Poble Espanyol, the village with reconstructions of ancient Spanish cities, where she had bought a leather bracelet that she still wore on her wrist; the excursions to the beach with her schoolmates, whenever their teachers let them have a free afternoon to do as they liked. The beach could be reached by metro. Three stops on the yellow line from Passeig de Gràcia, where their hotel was located, to Barceloneta. And then there was the Hard Rock Cafe in the Plaça de Catalunya, where the entire group had taken up a table for sixteen and made so much noise, according to her maths teacher, that they’d driven the waiters and waitresses out of their minds.

  Next to Jenny, a man in a US park ranger’s uniform gave her an odd look, as she smiled with her eyes closed. She also remembered one evening when her classmate Marty, a surfer and ice-hockey player, had come on to her. Sitting next to Jenny on the hotel terrace, he’d moved closer than usual to her and started plying her with compliments. Then he’d tried to kiss her on the neck. She’d avoided his passes and had rejected him in no uncertain terms. Marty was good-looking. Dark-haired, with green eyes, washboard abs, and a sculpted physique, he had enjoyed a certain amount of success with the girls at school. Perhaps the problem was that Jenny, deep in her heart, had always only had room for that distant voice, that mysterious boy who lived inside her head.

  If I hadn’t gone on that trip to Europe, I’d never have had a valid passport and I wouldn’t be on this plane now, she thought, as she watched the flight attendant go through the instructions for what to do in an emergency.

  Twenty long minutes after the plane left the gate, it finally lifted off from Australian soil and into the air.

  I’m actually doing this, Jenny thought to herself. Outside the little porthole, houses and streets were falling away and becoming smaller and smaller. I’m going to Italy. I must be out of my mind.

  Shortly after take-off, she put the magazine back in the seat pocket, leaned her head against the window, and tried to fall asleep.

  When she opened her eyes again, she had a hard time focusing on her surroundings. The lights were too bright. She didn’t know how long she’d slept. But that wasn’t the real problem. As soon as she got a good look around her, Jenny jerked upright in her seat.

  She wasn’t on the plane.

  Right in front of her was an antique wooden sideboard with some family photographs. There was her mother, Clara, as a little girl. There she was, along with Roger, on the day he swam his first race.

  On the right was a painting she remembered well. It was of a sailboat withstanding the impact of a raging storm.

  ‘So you still wear it …’ came the voice of her grandmother Linda, fragile and delicate as ever.

  ‘I … what? Am I dreaming?’ Jenny was upset.

  ‘The triskelion, Jenny,’ her grandfather broke in. ‘You still wear the triskelion around your neck.’

  ‘No, wait … You gave the necklace to Grandma; she only gave it to me when … This doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘My darling girl, is something wrong?’ asked Linda.

  Jenny looked around, even more confused.

  That sideboard … she thought as she looked at the piece of antique furniture again. She knew it well. It had wound up at her house, on the second floor, where her mum and dad slept. Just like other objects from the country house, it had also been transported to the house on Blyth Street when her grandmother had died, the year after her grandfather’s death.

  But right then and there, she saw them both in front of her, each holding a cup of tea.

  ‘I don’t feel well … I think I must have lost my memory,’ Jenny lied. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Is something bothering you, princess?’ Her grandfather’s voice was as sweet and soothing as it had been when he had told her hundreds of fairytales when she was small.

  Jenny couldn’t hold it in any longer. She burst into tears after she heard those words, got up from her armchair, and threw herself into her grandparents’ arms. ‘I miss you both so much …’

  ‘Oh, my love, we’re right here. You can come see us whenever you want!’

  ‘But the two of you … you’re dead!’

  Linda looked at her in bafflement. Jenny seemed upset and … so sure of what she was saying.

  ‘Sorry, I have to go outside for just a second,’ Jenny said, suddenly standing up. She was familiar with this street. She walked up the steps from the cellar kitchen, and came to the front entrance. She walked outside, closing the heavy wooden door behind her. She took a few timid steps on the grass that surrounded the house. The sweet smell of the fields after the rain was inebriating. A few metres further on, she saw a tree: in her world, after her grandparents’ death, she had carved a phrase into its bark: Two new stars in heaven.

  ‘It’s gone,’ Jenny’s voice was cracking with fear. ‘It’s not there anymore. My epitaph. My memorial. It’s vanished.’

  Eyes closed, hands wrapped around the triskelion, she started to tremble.

  Then, in a flash, the vortex swept her away. She was catapulted once again into that maelstrom of emotions and images, as if she were being dragged away from one reality only to reawaken somewhere else.

  ‘Tea or coffee, miss?’ The flight attendant stood looking at her with a tray in her hands.

  ‘Miss, would you like some tea or coffee?’ repeated the young woman in the airline’s dark-blue uniform.

  ‘Nothing for me, thanks,’ Jenny mumbled in a daze. She was back on the plane, travelling towards Alex.

  21

  Marco was microwaving some bread as he thought about what Alex had said. He imagined his friend stretched out on the beach, with his head craning up and his eyes fixed on Orion’s Belt.

  He heard a noise coming from the living room: it caught his attention and made him open his eyes. A background hum, continuous and annoying, like the sound of interference on a phone line.

  Marco steered his wheelchair as quickly as possible towards the living room.

  ‘What the hell …?’ he exclaimed, seeing a full-screen image on his laptop.

  The video transmission was patchy, interrupted by black-and-white horizontal lines moving up and down. The view was of a black leather armchair. Behind it, a wooden plank, held up by a couple of sawhorses, was covered with piles of papers and books.

  An old man walked into view in front of the lens and sat down. The faint light in the room gleamed off his bald head as he buttoned a jumper all the way up to his neck.

  With his eyes focused on the camera, he started talking.

  ‘The Multiverse is about to be destroyed.’

  This must be him, Marco thought to himself, and then the man started speaking again.

  ‘Memoria exists.’

  Becker paused, looking around. The connection was very choppy. The image appeared and disappeared jerkily, and suddenly went dark.

  ‘At the very moment in which our consciousness is eliminated, Memoria will be the last and only alternative.’

  What does that mean? Marco wondered.

  ‘The last days are approaching.’

  A shiver ran down his spine as the screen went black again after Becker’s brief message. The window shut itself and gave way to the computer’s desktop background, a photo of the American flag being planted on the moon’s surface.

  ‘The last days …�
�� Marco repeated in a monotone, staring into the air. Then he grabbed the mouse, opened the program again, and searched through its history for the file that he had just watched.

  There was no trace of the video.

  A quick glance at the block of Post-it notes next to the Mac’s keyboard on his desk brought that name to mind again: Memoria.

  He picked up his pen and wrote: At the very moment in which our consciousness is eliminated, Memoria will be the last and only alternative.

  Marco took off his glasses, set them down on his desk, and looked up at the ceiling, frightened and confused. He didn’t even realise that he was far more worried about what might happen to his friend than he was about the apocalyptic revelation he’d just heard from the old man.

  How the hell can I warn Alex? he wondered, before turning his wheelchair around to go back to the kitchen. The bread was completely burned. Marco decided to skip his snack and tossed the charred scraps of bread into the rubbish. Then he turned off the kitchen light and steered his wheelchair back to his bedroom.

  The last days … Becker’s words kept echoing in Marco’s head as he lifted himself with his arms and dragged himself onto his bed. He felt tired, weak, and scared. What Thomas Becker had said sounded like a genuine prophecy.

  Seated cross-legged on Altona Beach, Alex was lost in thought. Night was falling: the sun was a huge orange disc sinking beneath the horizon. The ocean was calm, the sky was clear. Tonight I’ll see Orion’s Belt again.

  At the same time, Jenny was leaning her head against the aeroplane’s porthole window. From time to time she’d glance at the screen. They were showing The Truman Show, which she already knew by heart. She was sleepy. She kept yawning, but she still couldn’t seem to get to sleep. Her legs were aching and she couldn’t wait to land.

  Marco, on the other hand, had just woken up. A couple of hours’ sleep was all he could afford. He hoisted himself back onto his wheelchair, and the first thing he thought of was Becker’s video message. He had to warn Alex. But how?

  He wheeled into the living room, the green remote control in his hand. He pushed a button and the wooden shutters started to rise. The sky was grey, and it looked like a typical Milanese winter’s day. He went over to his computers and switched them on.

  Once the computers had booted up, he noticed that the wi-fi signal was showing zero bars out of four: he couldn’t connect to the internet.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Marco steered his wheelchair around to the far side of the desk, where the modem was located. He arched his back and tilted his head to one side to take a look. All of the lights on the modem were off, and when he tried to turn it off and on again, nothing happened. It was dead.

  ‘Damn it!’ Marco exclaimed.

  A gust of warm air enveloped Alex’s body. He had been sitting cross-legged on Altona Beach for two days now.

  His isolation had been interrupted by very few breaks. The previous day he had bought some sandwiches and a few bottles of water, and filling his backpack so that he wouldn’t have to leave the beach at all. He needed to eliminate all external stimuli and immerse himself in a meditative state that, in his opinion, would provide the solution to the problem. So he was determined to devote as much time as necessary to meditating, even if it was by no means easy and, to tell the truth, even if he had no real idea of what he needed to do or what his objective was. But a new confidence seemed to guide his actions: the idea that every thing that happened, every act of his, was part of a larger plan.

  When the moon started rising over the waves, casting a trail of milky light over the water straight towards him, Alex began to scan the sky with renewed focus.

  In the now-black sky arching over the ocean, the constellation that he’d been waiting to glimpse was suddenly there, twinkling before his eyes. With a shape like an hourglass, Orion shone forth in the firmament. The belt, with its line of three stars, was there before him.

  While Jenny was landing at Milan’s Malpensa Airport, Alex had finally managed to find the key that she had spoken of. The vortex dragged his thoughts far away from that vision. It violently tore his mind away from his body, which toppled backwards onto the sand. It was like a journey through a dizzying succession of faces and landscapes. He heard an echoing chorus of cries, wails, weeping, and laughter … he felt the sensation of rocketing at the speed of light down a tunnel until everything disappeared. The deafening din ended all at once. Silence enveloped him.

  All around him was blackness.

  Where am I?

  A few minutes went by. He could perceive nothing of his surroundings.

  All of a sudden, there was a wave of heat, getting closer and closer, intolerably hot. He seemed to be using every muscle in his body to focus on what was before him, but no colour, no shape, nothing at all was clear to his mind’s eye. In fact, he wasn’t even looking anymore.

  His first perception of reality was the sound of a bell. It came from far away. It rang several times, separated by short intervals. His mind was just getting used to the heat, while the first noises were starting to filter through from the outside.

  Suddenly, Alex opened his eyes. He opened them wide. A blinding light made it impossible for him to see where he was. He tried to concentrate, but then his five senses all arrived at the same time. Alex began to feel his limbs, the movement of his arms in the surrounding space, as his surroundings began to take shape in front of him. Before his eyes, white tiles came into sharper focus. He began to smell the first odours, and he detected a number of voices in the distance.

  One of these voices came closer and closer, until it finally aroused Alex’s attention.

  ‘Are you going to get moving or not?’

  Fully aware that he was inching his head to the left, Alex turned and saw a red-headed boy in a tracksuit. The boy was looking at him quizzically.

  ‘We’ve got philosophy: you want to get off your butt?’

  Alex’s eyes opened wide. He nodded yes, and then looked around. I’m in a locker room! He got to his feet and followed his classmate. As they went down the school’s corridors, his mind was flooded with new information. As if he had just woken up from a coma, or had recovered his memory after a serious accident.

  Alex walked through the halls, following the usual route to his classroom. He felt as if he’d known these corridors all his life. Just as naturally, he sat down at his desk at the back of the classroom. He did it all without thinking and yet, at the same time, he found it utterly amazing.

  As the teacher shut the door behind her and greeted the students, Alex looked down at what he was wearing. He had on a grey tracksuit, running shoes, and a black T-shirt. On it was written Parental Advisory.

  In his mind, a thought informed him that he had just finished PE. They’d played volleyball in the gym. Alex’s team had lost, but he remembered clearly that he’d blocked a couple of smashes by a classmate named Stefano. He also remembered that he didn’t like Stefano one bit.

  His eyes travelled at once to his rival, just as the philosophy teacher was asking a girl in the class to read a passage from their textbook. Stefano turned around to shoot him a glare, as if to challenge him.

  I … remember that guy! We got in a fight in the corridor, and the hall monitor had to pull us apart …

  Alex kept his eyes fixed on his classmate while his memory patiently fished up fragments of this apparently unknown world.

  He tried to sift through his past in search of other details of a life that, evidently, was only his in part.

  There was no trace of Marco.

  Maybe he had never entered the video-game tournament and the two of them had never met. Or maybe there had never been a tournament in the first place. But his parents were both there in his memories, and they seemed to have led mostly similar lives. He still lived on Viale Lombardia, he still played the same sports — basket
ball and tennis — and after a quick check of his musical tastes, he realised that there wasn’t such a huge difference between the life of his alter ego and his own.

  Aside from Marco, then, many aspects of this parallel dimension were similar, if not identical, to his original dimension.

  But there was a fundamental difference, and Alex knew exactly what it was.

  If his journey had taken him to the right place, Jenny was alive and healthy in this reality.

  While Alex was familiarising himself with his alternative world, Jenny was clearing customs at Malpensa Airport.

  22

  Alex …

  He heard the voice entering his head all of a sudden, as the clock on the classroom wall showed the time was four minutes to one. The last period was almost over. Jenny’s voice was so clear and immediate, so close …

  I hear you. I’m here, Jenny. I’m here!

  I’m shaking all over …

  Where are you?

  In Milan. I just left the airport a little while ago, I took a train that’ll take me to the city centre.

  I know the one. It’s a line that connects with the metro. You’ll get to Cadorna station. Get off there. I’ll be waiting for you. I get out of school in a few minutes, and I’ll come to meet you.

  Will we recognise each other?

  I’m sure we will.

  As they communicated in thought, Alex went on staring at the clock. The teacher turned to look at him every so often, frowning as she noticed his complete lack of attention. But the Alex in that dimension had an A– average in philosophy. She could allow him one day of slacking off. He must be in love, thought his teacher. She wasn’t far off the mark.

  As soon as he got out of the building, Alex broke into a run. He ran without stopping until he reached the Loreto metro station. He boarded the first carriage on a green-line train. On the train, his thoughts were tangled in confusion. He was about to meet the girl who had lived in his thoughts for as far back as he could remember.