Multiversum

by Leonardo Patrignani

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Alex said, frowning and leaning forward.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Giorgio replied. Then he pulled a pair of scissors out of the drawer in the cabinet next to the sofa. ‘We were sure that certain things would never happen again. We hoped for that with all our hearts … until today.’

  ‘Why? What happened today?’

  ‘I heard you, when you were in the bathroom. You said her name.’

  Alex froze, baffled.

  ‘It was an obsession you had,’ Valeria went on. ‘Some kind of imaginary friend. You used to write her name everywhere, you wouldn’t talk about anything but her. Usually, children experience this sort of thing as a game. But for you it was a genuine, full-blown obsession.’

  Alex was distraught at this revelation. They were talking about Jenny. ‘My imaginary friend …’ he whispered under his breath.

  ‘You insisted that she talked to you all the time. Once you even defaced the whole apartment with a red magic marker, writing Jenny’s name on the walls and drawing a strange symbol over and over again.’

  Alex shivered. His mother was talking about the triskelion. The amulet that Jenny had with her at all times.

  Giorgio cut through several lengths of sticky tape and opened the box. He reached in and started pulling out folders, drawings, photographs, and a journal. The journal that Valeria kept on her son’s sickness.

  ‘See for yourself,’ Giorgio said, handing Alex a stack of drawings. ‘This is what was going through your head back then.’

  He took them, laid them in his lap, and started to look through them.

  A pier. A beach.

  A woman with red hair looking into a telescope.

  An underground tunnel filled with corpses.

  A series of scenes of death and destruction, blood and suffering.

  That’s impossible, thought Alex, petrified at the sight of those images. A shiver ran down his spine. His whole body suddenly stiffened.

  He was speechless. Some of the drawings depicted all the things he’d encountered over the past few days. There was the beach at Altona and the pier where he had made a date to meet Jenny. There was Mary Thompson, the nanny-astrologer, with her trusty telescope.

  And there was the tunnel with the corpses that he’d run through in the parallel reality where Milan was the scene of a bloody uprising.

  All this was already in his brain, years before it happened. How could that be?

  I’ve already been to these places … I’ve seen it all before, he thought to himself.

  ‘I used to talk to Jenny …’ said Alex as his mother leafed through her journal.

  ‘Darling, we’re afraid it’s starting to happen to you again.’ Valeria’s voice was dull, almost resigned. ‘We don’t want that.’

  ‘I was already talking to Jenny! Damn it, I was communicating with her!’

  Valeria turned to her husband. ‘Oh my God, it’s happening again … He thinks she’s real.’

  ‘Mamma, Jenny is real! She’s real all right!’ shouted Alex, waving the drawings that he was holding in one hand.

  The same words he used to say when he was a child, with that same icy look in his eyes, his father mused. ‘Do you realise what you’re saying?’

  ‘You’ll never believe me. Something’s happening that goes beyond your wildest imagination, so I know that what I’m going to tell you will sound absurd, crazy. But look around you. Isn’t it crazy that the internet has broken down? Isn’t it crazy that neither TVs nor mobile phones work anymore?’

  Valeria turned and gave Giorgio a worried look.

  ‘What does that have to do with Jenny?’ he snapped. ‘The neurologist told me that …’

  Alex raised an eyebrow. ‘The neurologist?’

  ‘The doctor who was in charge of your case, when you were little.’

  ‘What the fuck did you do to me when I was six years old? How could you have uprooted Jenny from my mind for so many years?’ demanded Alex, leaping to his feet in indignation.

  ‘Alex …’ Valeria began, ‘you were taking pills for months and months. But the situation only got worse. Every night you’d wake up from terrible nightmares. You talked about catastrophic things happening. You described cities in flames, and you told us that you kept seeing the Earth reduced to a wasteland of smoking embers …’

  ‘The drug therapy hadn’t worked,’ Giorgio went on, ‘so your psychiatrist sent us to see a colleague of hers, a neurologist, Dr Siniscalco. He treated your problem, in a much more effective method … and he cured you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With electroconvulsive therapy.’

  Alex furrowed his brow and felt his hands start to shake. ‘Are you saying that …?’

  His father looked him right in the eye. He couldn’t hide the truth from him any longer.

  ‘Shock therapy.’

  Alex was speechless for several seconds. His gaze fell on the drawings sticking out of the box. There were lots of them. They were terribly dark. Appalling visions of things to come, filled with suffering and pain. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘A few sessions of shock therapy. It had to be done. Afterwards, it was like you were reborn. You never talked about Jenny again, you went back to being a sunny little boy, you started playing with your friends again …’

  ‘I don’t believe it! You can’t be serious … I, I had a gift, I —’

  ‘What gift?’ Valeria broke in. ‘You were suffering from a very serious case of depression and episodes of schizophrenia. We thought the situation was hopeless, but instead …’

  ‘You don’t know what you’ve done!’ Alex stood up, went over to the box, and started rummaging inside it.

  Valeria and Giorgio didn’t know how to respond to their son’s accusations. Perhaps, they thought, it’s the sickness that’s making him talk like that.

  ‘I have to go,’ he exclaimed, as he grabbed the box and started to pick it up.

  ‘Alex, stop right there!’

  Giorgio leaped to his feet, his eyes puffy and filled with despair, his hands stretched out like claws, his swollen veins like ropes on his reddened flesh.

  ‘Don’t touch me! You’re not my parents. Not anymore.’

  ‘Please, Alex!’ Valeria shouted from the sofa, her hands in her hair, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  Giorgio reached out a hand to his son, trying to hold on to him, to stop him from leaving. They exchanged a glance full of rage and anguish, then Giorgio froze.

  And Alex saw.

  He saw the white gurney.

  He saw his wrists and ankles strapped to the rail on the side of the gurney.

  He saw a broad white gauze strip stuck to his mouth.

  He saw white lab coats and fluorescent lights.

  Once he’d managed to drive that memory away, Alex looked at his parents in horror. They sat helpless in the presence of that gaze.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and then turned, picked up the cardboard box, and left the apartment. Only Marco could help him figure this out now.

  30

  ‘I’m speechless,’ Marco said after hearing his friend’s revelations. ‘You’ve always had this gift! Now I see why you made that videotape when you were a kid …’

  ‘We need to study the drawings. See if we can find some more information.’

  ‘Sure. Let me take a look.’ Marco pulled a few sheets and notepads out of the box. Meanwhile, Alex was holding the painting of Mary Thompson in his hands: her curly hair was thick and dark, and the strokes of the magic markers wandered outside the outlines of that stout, plump body. Next to the woman was a sofa and a painting with the moon’s surface in the foreground. The same painting that he had seen at the home of Jenny’s nanny.

  ‘What I can’t u
nderstand is why me. What am I? What are we, Jenny and I?’

  ‘Alex, maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s not the two of you.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean, you might not be the only two. Maybe there are others out there. In fact, it’s reasonable to think that you’re not alone. Becker is one of you.’

  Alex looked at his friend anxiously as a growing cacophony of noise arose from the street: car horns, shouts, sirens, like a wave that was sweeping over the city.

  ‘Let me keep going through your things,’ Marco said, pulling another stack of papers out of the box.

  Alex took out a diary with a purple leather cover. He opened it and immediately recognised his mother’s handwriting. This was her journal. He started to leaf through the pages. Aside from a few notes about his birth, such as his weight, size, and some important moments from the first few months of his life, the journal focused mainly on his illness.

  He looked up towards the window. The city was tinged in grey: a dense fog had fallen like a thick blanket over the streets. Alex glimpsed a woman’s silhouette in the apartment building across the road. She was leaning forward, collecting some dry laundry. An ordinary, everyday act that made Alex think of how his life had been turned upside down and inside out in the past week — and how everyone’s lives would soon be changed forever.

  ‘This seems interesting,’ Marco commented, as he looked at more papers. ‘I dreamed that Jenny’s going to go away,’ he started reading from the sheet in his hands, ‘that she’s going to abandon me. But it’s not her fault. One day we’ll meet again.’

  Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. All of that’s already happened, he thought to himself. ‘Marco, who the hell was I when I was a kid?’

  ‘You were a special person,’ his friend replied as he went on rummaging in the box. Then all of a sudden he stopped, as if he’d had a flash of inspiration.

  ‘Perhaps the infinite dimensions are simultaneous,’ he said, half shutting his eyes as if to capture a fleeting thought. ‘Like a CD.’

  ‘What does a CD have to do with any of it?’

  ‘There are various theories on the subject. When I first started thinking about the Multiverse, I stumbled across one of these theories. A CD has a beginning and an end, and if you play it, it has a certain duration. But if you pull it out of the player, then, at a given moment, you hold the disc’s entire span of time. It’s possible that universes, too, are simult —’ Marco suddenly stopped, his eyes widening.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Look,’ said his friend as he held out a sheet of paper to Alex. It showed two guys, crudely drawn, in a room. One of them was sitting in an armchair, and written underneath was the name Alex. The other guy was sitting in a chair with a large wheel in the foreground, and the name Marco written next to him. The figure in the armchair was holding a sheet of paper that had a tiny reproduction of the same drawing. In the bottom right-hand corner of the page was a date: December 2014.

  Alex was petrified. He didn’t know what to do. His mind was paralysed by the idea that whatever he might say at that instant, in all likelihood he’d already said it once before.

  ‘Do you realise what this is?’ Marco asked, as the noise from the street was replaced by the sound of the downpour that had begun all over the city.

  ‘This is us. It’s us … now! I drew this picture ten years ago!’

  Alex remained dumbstruck for a few seconds, his eyes staring at the prophetic drawing. Then he started shaking his head, his eyes downcast. Marco started leafing frantically through the other drawings. Somewhere in those papers, he might find their destiny written, and perhaps not theirs alone. A few moments later he froze when he saw a wrinkled sheet of paper.

  ‘No … it can’t be.’

  ‘What have you found?’ asked Alex. Marco said nothing, and simply held out the drawing so he could see it for himself.

  When Alex had the drawing before his eyes, he went pale.

  On the right side of the sheet, there was a circle with a number of brown shapes surrounded by larger blue areas. The strokes, made by a crayon with a broad tip, often strayed outside the thick outlines. It looked like a planet, and it could easily be a sketch of the Earth.

  Alex shifted his gaze to the left side of the sheet.

  Another round disc, bright red in colour, with a trail ahead of it as if to indicate the direction it was travelling in: straight at the large blue sphere.

  Below that, on the bottom right, a date.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Marco. ‘Here on Earth. What happened before is about to happen again.’

  ‘No, it isn’t true, I can’t believe it. It must be some kind of mistake.’

  ‘Alex, this is no mistake!’ Marco picked up the various drawings, and showed them one after another to his friend. ‘You drew the parallel realities you travelled to over the past few days. And you drew the pier, you drew Mary Thompson …’

  ‘Are we about to die?’ Alex asked in a faint voice.

  Marco looked him in the eye with an expression that had suddenly become melancholy. ‘Yes, I’m afraid we are.’

  In an instant, Alex was swept away by an image before his eyes. He saw it as if it were there, just a few metres away, right there in the room, next to Marco. It was the Malaysian fortune teller, sitting behind his stand, with the cards in his hands.

  The man’s words pounded on the walls of his skull like a chorus of bells, tolling at full volume, while his penetrating gaze hypnotised Alex.

  All of us in great danger … You important.

  ‘It can’t be,’ Alex whispered as he looked at the drawing that had fallen to the floor. ‘How can it be that no one has said anything? Did you know anything about it?’

  ‘A small meteorite can be seen as many as several days before impact. But that wouldn’t cause the end of the world, like Becker has predicted. Clearly, in this case we’re talking about a major asteroid.’

  ‘Then what? Then it must be a mistake, and this drawing isn’t —’

  ‘Alex, a major asteroid might well have been sighted ahead of impact. But … it could also have been kept secret.’

  ‘What does that mean? That we’re all going to die and nobody thought to tell us about it?’

  ‘If they’ve prepared a city-sized bunker, or something like that, they obviously can’t afford to throw the whole planet into a state of panic.’

  ‘But the whole planet’s in a state of panic now, and then some! Even without anyone knowing a thing about an impending cosmic impact …’

  ‘Of course. Because they’ve realised that in the third millennium it’s no easy feat to keep a piece of news this important under cover. So in the days leading up to the catastrophe, they made sure they eliminated all channels of communication.’

  ‘But who are they? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know who they are, Alex! All I know is that the internet doesn’t just vanish from one day to the next by chance. Something’s happening. There are some who may survive, and there are others who might be kidding themselves that they can. And you … you and Jenny, perhaps, have a chance.’

  As he uttered those words, Marco thought back to what the professor had told him. They can save themselves, but death will take them all the same.

  Alex stared blankly. Everything he had seen and experienced up till that day was about to be destroyed. Marco slammed his fist down on the table and went on: ‘Becker isn’t crazy. It all adds up. And if you can save yourselves by reaching Memoria, then do it and don’t think twice. You have to find it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’

  ‘Then go back to Jenny. The one thing I know for sure is that you have to find it together. I can’t say whether anyone else can be saved. But I do know this: I’m a goner.’


  Alex kept staring into space. Finally, he could no longer hold back his tears. He stood up, leaned forward, and hugged his friend tight. ‘No.’

  ‘Alex, I’m done for. I can’t travel into another dimension. I can’t see the future. I’m just an ordinary person and I’m going to die, like everyone else.’

  Alex said nothing. He knew his friend was right. And he was pretty sure he’d be facing the same fate. But now he still had one chance: go back to Jenny and find Memoria, whatever that might be.

  ‘I love you, man. But Marco, you could still —’

  Marco shook his head to stop Alex saying anything more. ‘You have to do it. This is your path. You can go to her. You can cross dimensions. Perhaps in her reality nothing bad is about to happen at all. Maybe that’s the point of your gift: you can escape from here. I’m doomed no matter what. Go on, Alex. There’s no time to waste.’

  ‘I can’t handle this, honestly. I just can’t do it.’

  ‘Get the hell out of here! Don’t piss me off now. I don’t want your sympathy!’

  Alex stared at Marco, his eyes puffy and glistening.

  ‘Goodbye, my friend. Whatever happens tomorrow, you’ll never leave this place.’ Alex placed a hand lightly on his chest. Then he turned and walked to the front door in silence.

  Marco watched him walk away. All the years of their friendship reeled before his eyes, hitting him like a cyclone. He saw them laughing together as they played video games. He saw the nights they spent reading horror stories, surrounded only by flickering candlelight. He saw the hugs and tears at his grandmother’s funeral, when Alex was by his side, the only one of his friends who had been there. As always. Someone who’d been more than a brother to him was leaving his apartment, his home, never to return.

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Marco as Alex shut the door behind him. In that single word there was a fresh burst of enthusiasm.

  Alex was caught off guard. He spun around and hurried back into the living room. ‘Did you think of something ?’

  Marco looked at him with a determined gleam in his eye. ‘I might’ve just figured out what Memoria is.’