Multiversum

by Leonardo Patrignani

  ‘He didn’t just talk about her … her name was everywhere in our home. He carved it into the furniture, he wrote it on the walls — you can’t imagine what we went through.’

  ‘Let me assure you that I hear these stories quite often, given my line of work.’

  ‘Of course, I apologise. So, you were telling me, it varies from case to case.’

  ‘That’s right. Evidently, in this specific case the problem has presented itself again. And it began to re-emerge precisely in conjunction with the return of this imaginary figure.’

  A line of wrinkles appeared on Giorgio’s brow. His face darkened, and he waited a few seconds before beginning to talk again, in a deep, flat voice. ‘Doctor, I don’t want to start that ordeal again. What do we need to do?’

  The neurologist’s response came as pitilessly as a death sentence, while Valeria re-entered the apartment, pushing the cardboard box into the hallway with one foot.

  ‘We’ll have to repeat the therapy,’ said the voice in the earpiece of the cordless phone. Giorgio shut his eyes as if to ward off that very possibility.

  ‘More shock therapy,’ he replied in a resigned voice after a few seconds of grim silence, as Valeria stared at him from the threshold separating the living room from the hallway. Her eyes were wide.

  Giorgio pushed the red button on his phone and set it down on the cabinet where he’d found the address book. He stood up, went over to his wife, and hugged her close, doing his best to comfort her.

  As he embraced her, his eyes lost in the distance, he saw, once again, the name scrawled on the walls around him, the horrific drawings scattered throughout the apartment.

  Giorgio kept staring straight ahead, incapable of distinguishing reality from the transparent film of memories superimposed on it. He saw his little boy staring up at him, with a chilly, merciless gaze. He kept saying, as if in a nightmarish chant: ‘Jenny’s real … Jenny’s real … Jenny’s real …’

  28

  ‘To hell with it, I want to see what’s happening in town,’ exclaimed Marco as he leaned out the kitchen window. He made a 180-degree turn and steered his wheelchair to the front door, grabbing a heavy jacket from the coat rack on the wall next to the intercom. He put it on, pulled out a bunch of keys, and opened the door.

  Marco guided the wheelchair to a ramp that ran down alongside the steps to the main entrance, left the building, and was immediately hit by a gust of icy wind that made his eyes water, despite the protection of his glasses’ thick lenses.

  The sound of agitated voices in the street was the first alarming thing that struck him. Groups of people, clustering in circles as if to keep the subject of their discussion private, were arguing loudly. The anger and tension in the air were unmistakeable everywhere he turned. Some were complaining that their smartphones weren’t getting an internet connection; others were loudly berating a guard in front of a bank that had been shut early.

  An elderly, toothless man was waving his cane at passers-by and shouting continuously: ‘It’s World War III, I’ve said it for years!’

  Marco followed the sidewalk along Viale Gran Sasso until it reached Piazza Piola. His arm muscles were stiff, as if they had atrophied.

  I’ve been cooped up in my apartment for far too long, damn it …

  From the voices of the people along the way, he gathered a few important snippets of news. First of all, the day’s newspapers hadn’t come out at all. He himself had noticed that the newsstands were locked up tight, without so much as a sign to explain the reason for their closure. He saw a copy of the Corriere della Sera sticking out of a green rubbish bin, with the previous day’s date. Marco grabbed the paper and scanned the front page. The main headline read: Terror of the Unknown. After a quick glance at the smaller headlines of the editorial and the other articles inside, he folded up the newspaper and slipped it inside his jacket.

  As far as he could tell, and as Ricky had already confirmed, there was an internet blackout everywhere in the city. Or, actually, in all the cities. And this, to him, was the most sinister aspect of the whole debacle.

  Moreover, it seemed that a number of shops and institutions of crucial importance to people — such as banks and post offices — had simply stopped operating, and ATMs were shut down or deactivated everywhere. Hence the brawls and protests outside the banks.

  The key thing that triggered people’s panic was the complete lack of answers.

  As he steered his wheelchair towards Piazza Piola, Marco heard people talking about war, terrorism, and even an alien attack. Faced with the impossibility of going online and checking for themselves, the citizens of Milan were pouring into the streets and giving voice to their worst fears, in search of answers that no one intended to provide.

  When he got to the lights at the intersection of Viale Gran Sasso and the piazza, Marco waited for them to turn green, and then pushed the switch that made the wheelchair go. Some traffic was coming towards him from the left, out of the service road and the transit lane for taxis and buses. When he was exactly halfway across the road, right in the middle of the pedestrian crossing, Marco looked up and saw that the traffic light was out. He looked hastily to his right and left to assess the situation in the street. The cars from Viale Gran Sasso didn’t seem to be braking at all. Some of them started honking furiously.

  ‘Stop! Damn it!’ shouted Marco as he saw a postal van about to turn from the piazza into Viale Gran Sasso without even bothering to look, taking it for granted that the traffic light was working. It was about to hit him square on.

  He had a couple of options. He could keep going straight ahead in the hope that the postal van would miss him as he attempted to reach the other side before the cars hurtling towards him from Viale Gran Sasso hit him en masse. Or else he could try reversing, making way for the postal van, but increasing the likelihood of being hit by the honking cars.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted in the fraction of a second he had before deciding to take the second option. The important thing wasn’t so much which way he went — it was to go in some direction, and fast. Tyres started screeching as the car in front slammed on the brakes, and the vehicles behind him started crashing into one another in a multi-car pile-up.

  It was total chaos.

  The postal van turned onto Viale Gran Sasso just as Marco was backing up and bracing for impact.

  It was at that moment that, as if in slow motion, he saw everything happen in sequence, before tumbling out of his wheelchair and landing on the cement: the postal van moving away; the chain of collisions on his left behind the BMW that had slammed on its brakes; and then the taxi that, in order to keep from smashing into the car ahead of it, had swerved recklessly to one side, avoiding the line of cars and heading straight for the intersection.

  The last thing that Marco saw before the taxi’s front bumper rammed into his wheelchair was Alex’s silhouette on the far side of the street, his backpack on his shoulders, yelling something at him.

  Everything went black in an instant as he landed facedown on the cement.

  Alex ran across the street while insanity broke out all around him. A number of people had stepped out of their cars to yell at the drivers who had braked at the front of the line. As other cars kept piling up behind the traffic jam, putting on their brakes in turn, the taxi driver nervously got out of his white Opel to go over to Marco’s inert body.

  ‘Christ, I don’t even know how it happened, I just …’ he started mumbling as Alex kneeled down by his friend’s body, which had been thrown several metres away from the crumpled wheelchair.

  ‘Marco! Marco! Answer me, please, say something!’ he shouted as he did his best to bring his friend back to consciousness, slapping him lightly on the cheek. Blood was smeared across his face and his eyes were still closed. ‘Oh God, no! Don’t you dare die on me, wake up, damn you!’

 
His eyes fell on Marco’s right hand: his fingers had started to move. Slowly, his eyelids also flickered, giving signs of life, and he finally opened his eyes and looked at Alex.

  ‘I’m right here, man. Are you trying to give me a heart attack? What the hell were you doing in the middle of the street? Tell me where it hurts, I don’t know if I can pick you up by myself.’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  Alex put his arms around Marco’s hips and tried to haul him up, then he threw Marco’s arm around his shoulder and carried him over to the wheelchair.

  ‘It’s shot.’ His friend spoke laboriously. ‘Look at the wheel.’

  ‘Let’s call an ambulance, Marco. We have to get you to a hospital. My phone doesn’t work at all.’

  ‘Take mine, it’s right here, in the inside pocket.’

  Alex rummaged around and pulled out his friend’s Nokia. ‘It has no bars,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘Take me home. We’ll call from there.’

  Alex set Marco in the wheelchair as best he could, and tried to see if it was at all workable, but the electric motor and control system were down. So he started pushing it down the street, despite the drag from the left rear wheel, which had been completely warped by the impact of the taxi.

  The taxi driver had fled, leaving his vehicle abandoned in the middle of the street. The arguments between the drivers who had been caught in the pile-up had degenerated into a brawl. The congestion behind them was terrible, and the symphony of car horns had risen to intolerable levels.

  Once they got back to the apartment, Alex left the wheelchair in the hall and ran to get the cordless phone. ‘What …? Fuck!’ he blurted out. ‘There’s no dial tone.’

  ‘This, too,’ Marco commented in a frail voice, resigned, as if he’d been expecting it. ‘The professor was right.’

  ‘What are we going to do? We have to get you to the hospital.’

  ‘Alex, come here. It’s not that bad. Yes, I hit my head, I’m bleeding, but I can medicate myself. It could have been worse.’

  He asked his friend to wheel him into the bathroom and showed him where the medicine cabinet was. Alex got out some hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, cotton balls, gauze, and band-aids, and attended to him.

  ‘The wheelchair’s shot. That’s a serious problem.’

  ‘After I fix up the wheel, you should be able to move it by hand, at least.’

  ‘How on earth did you manage to show up at that exact instant?’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it. A lot of things have happened to me, and they’re all things you need to know.’

  Alex told Marco everything that had happened to him in his travels, while trying to improvise some nursing skills. He described it all, except for his meeting with a happy and healthy Marco, whose parents were both alive, perhaps to protect him from a hope that was too great to withstand. His friend listened with growing excitement. Every word that Alex uttered seemed to be a confirmation of all the hypotheses that had taken shape in Marco’s mind ever since the day of the accident that killed his parents.

  The stories that Alex told him left no room for doubt: the Multiverse was real.

  Alex jury-rigged the wheel, straightening it and making it at least useable.

  When he was done, his friend asked him to get out an old cathode-ray-tube television that he’d abandoned in a chest years ago and had almost forgotten he even owned. He thought that it might come in useful, as a way of obtaining a little extra information.

  Alex hunted around for the antenna cable. He found it sticking out of the living-room wall, next to the mini-fridge, and hooked it up to the back of the TV set. Then he got the remote control out of a compartment on the side of the set and handed it to Marco.

  ‘It’s no use,’ Alex commented as his friend flicked through the channels, finding nothing on each one but a blue background with the same phrase:

  We apologise for this interruption in service

  Our broadcast will resume as soon as possible

  ‘There are people who know, but they’ll never tell us what’s really happening,’ Marco said, holding in his rage. His hands trembled as he let out a sarcastic sneer while staring at the wall in front of him. Then he picked up the remote control and flung it against the wall, shattering it into several pieces. ‘You bastards!’

  ‘Becker told you, didn’t he?’

  Marco turned to look at his friend. He manually steered the wheelchair straight ahead and braked when he was only a few centimetres away from Alex. ‘That’s right. The end is near. You have to get back to Jenny. The two of you might just have a chance.’

  ‘But how am I supposed to find this Memoria? I have no idea what it is or where it is. And what does it have to do with everything that’s going on?’

  ‘That’s something we’re going to have to find out,’ Marco replied, before tilting his head towards the living-room window. ‘Even if it’s the last thing I do before dying along with all the rest of these people.’

  Alex shook his head, but he didn’t know what to say. He hugged Marco, holding him tight for a few seconds. With his eyes closed, he tried to imagine what might be the cause of the global panic, but he came up with nothing.

  Thanks, my friend, he thought, but he didn’t have the strength to say it out loud.

  The silence that accompanied those moments of sadness and resignation was charged with significance. There was no need to say anything more. Marco broke away from the hug and wiped the tears that had started to well up in his eyes, and that was when Alex saw inside him.

  The memory hit him violently, practically nailing him to the ground in the face of those events, unable to resist the power of the images in any way.

  He saw the Jeep being driven by Marco’s father lurch out of control on one of the mountain’s hairpin bends before hitting the guardrail, crashing through it, and hurtling out into the void, while the blizzard raged, covering the roads, trees, and rocks in a blanket of snow. He saw all this through the eyes of his best friend, trapped in the back seat while just a few centimetres away from him two human lives were about to be snuffed out. The two most important people in the world to him. The two people who had always been by his side. The overwhelming feeling of emptiness as the Jeep plunged into the ravine gave Alex a sense of vertigo. His legs started trembling and his body was wracked with shivers. It was like being there, in the back seat of that Jeep. It was like witnessing the end.

  A stupid, banal sound — yet at the same time unexpected and sinister — broke the spell of Marco’s memory as it began to take hold of Alex’s mental vision.

  It was the sound of the intercom, just a short distance from the two of them. They exchanged a brief, stunned glance, as if Marco had felt the same disorientation that Alex had while he was delving involuntarily into his friend’s memory.

  Marco reached out a hand towards the intercom.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, worried. Then he waited a few seconds and turned to Alex. ‘It’s your father.’

  29

  Giorgio Loria strode through the front door. ‘I knew I’d find you here.’

  His father’s tone of voice was truly surprising. There wasn’t a hint of accusation. Nor was he threatening. He was almost more compassionate than angry. Alex took a step back without thinking, as if afraid that this strange demeanour of his father’s concealed intentions that were much worse.

  ‘I … had to help Marco and …’

  ‘Yes, but now you need to come with me. This is important. Later we’ll call someone to look after your friend.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Come on.’

  Giorgio grabbed Alex’s arm and dragged him out of the apartment. Neither of them said a word during the short walk home. They did nothing more than exchange a look of worry as they walked past the gridlock o
f cars, some of which were dented, at the intersection of Viale Gran Sasso and Piazza Piola.

  When they walked into the apartment, they found Valeria sitting on the sofa, her eyes glistening, her face in her hands, and her elbows propped on her legs.

  ‘You found him …’ As she spoke, her eyes came alive again for a moment.

  ‘Yeah. Alex, sit down. Please.’

  Alex complied: he went over to the armchair opposite the sofa and took a seat. Giorgio sat next to Valeria, across from the large cardboard box with Picture Frames written on all its sides.

  ‘We know why you pulled off your little escapade. Now listen carefully to what we have to say. What I’m about to tell you is probably locked somewhere in the depths of your subconscious. It’s possible that memories that you had buried deep will emerge.’

  Alex didn’t have the slightest idea what his father was talking about. But he could see the anguish on both his father’s and his mother’s faces. ‘What do you mean?’

  Giorgio stared at him. ‘You don’t remember anything about being five … or say six years old … do you?’

  Alex shook his head and grimaced, as if to say ‘not much, anyway’.

  ‘You see, when you were very small,’ Valeria broke in, ‘you came down with a terrible illness. It’s quite likely that you have no memories of that period, and of whatever it was that was troubling you. Let’s just say that these unfortunate episodes have been …’

  ‘… forgotten, or buried,’ concluded Giorgio.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Well, you see,’ his mother continued, ‘you were sick, very sick. You had a terrible depression, along with episodes of schizophrenia and psychosis.’