Multiversum

by Leonardo Patrignani

  When people finally regained the use of their voices, Alex heard a vast array of disparate comments as he continued to run towards Porta Venezia. There were those who claimed that there was no reason to be afraid, for the Americans must have foreseen the arrival of the asteroid and that a missile would surely be launched any minute now to take it down — they were just waiting for it to come within range. Others believed that with the passing hours the Earth would rotate onto an angle that meant the asteroid would plunge into the Atlantic Ocean, triggering a tsunami that would flood the entire Iberian Peninsula. ‘Oh well,’ they were saying. ‘As long as the water doesn’t come this far.’

  Alex didn’t stop or even slow down to listen. When he reached the gate outside the public gardens, it was locked. He was forced to climb over.

  He hauled himself up with all the strength he had left. The dry branches of a tree inside the stone wall got tangled in his hair. He pushed off with both arms and landed on the gravel.

  The domed structure of the Planetarium loomed before him.

  The front door was open. Alex took a few cautious steps beyond the signs announcing a school lecture series that would never take place, then he crept past the second set of doors inside, slipping through a set of heavy curtains and into the auditorium.

  The hall was shrouded in darkness, but it didn’t seem to be deserted. On the other side of the stage, several homeless people were stretched out on three or four seats in the distance. Luckily, they were asleep.

  ‘I’ve got to do this,’ he whispered as he sat down in a corner where the people wouldn’t see him, even if they did wake up.

  When he was finally able to close his eyes to find the proper concentration and block out all outside stimuli, his mind kept showing him the cold and powerful picture of the asteroid. He tried to get rid of it, but it stayed there, like a slide that was stuck, preventing the carousel from turning and projecting anything else.

  Then he settled back in his seat and opened his eyelids ever so slightly, looking up at the ceiling. The artificial reconstruction of outer space had been turned off, but that was the same ceiling where he had first seen Orion’s Belt, when he was little. The same ceiling that he had admired with Jenny not so long ago, in the dimension he was now trying desperately to get back to.

  In an instant he glimpsed the entire sequence of events again. Jenny’s eyes. Their first kiss. The triskelion. The Milky Way. Her fingers intertwining with his.

  The vortex seized him with extraordinary force. It flung him into a tunnel of blurry voices and colours, as thousands of nameless faces hurtled towards him and shot through him.

  He woke up with a stabbing pain on the right side of his forehead.

  He was sitting in a bed.

  When he focused on his surroundings, he understood that he was now in his bedroom in a parallel dimension. His eyes flew immediately to the shelf next to his desk. The Athlete of the Year award was gone. In its place, there was a gold medal hanging on the wall. He got up and went over to read the inscription: Regional Basketball Tournament — First Place.

  Alex smiled for a moment. In his dimension, they’d lost that championship game by one point, with a three-point shot by Alex that had hit the backboard and rebounded, out of play just as the horn sounded, ending the game: he’d been only a few centimetres off. In Jenny’s reality, those centimetres had shifted slightly in their favour.

  Her voice perforated his eardrums without warning.

  Alex, I can hear you! You’re back! Please, please, tell me it’s true.

  Yes, I’m here. I just woke up in my own bedroom. Why aren’t we together?

  I ran away. You didn’t know who I was anymore. You practically attacked me at the Planetarium.

  I wasn’t myself, Jenny. I’d lost control. Where are you now?

  I’m hiding. There’s some kind of curfew all over the city.

  What do you mean?

  Everyone’s locked up inside, I don’t know why, but the sky’s turned all weird — apparently a hurricane is about to hit, or maybe something worse.

  Damn it. It’s going to happen here, too. Where can I find you?

  What’s going to happen here, too?

  I’ll explain when I see you. How can I get to where you are?

  I don’t know. I walked and walked, I ended up in front of a train station. There was a blue signboard that said Lambrate. Then I kept walking straight ahead.

  Did you see the name of the street?

  Yes, Via Rombon. It’s like a war’s going on out there: the army is on every street corner …

  The army?

  Yes, there were loudspeakers issuing orders to stay inside. Government orders, as far as I can tell. It’s a matter of national security.

  That’s crazy …

  Please come, as fast as you can. You’ll find me underneath a bridge, next to a highway sign.

  Got it. You’re right underneath an on-ramp to the ring road.

  Hurry, Alex. I’m afraid. There are some hedges next to the road. If army trucks come by, I’ll hide behind them.

  I’ll be there as quickly as I can.

  Alex rushed into the street and started running as fast as he could. He ran towards Piazza Piola and turned into Via Pacini, heading for Lambrate. The silence that had settled over the city imparted an icy sense of death to him. Looking up at the sky, he saw only big black clouds piling up, preventing him from catching a glimpse of the asteroid. A siren suddenly broke the silence, followed by an incomprehensible warning shouted over a megaphone. The voice came from behind him, but it sounded fairly distant.

  In the meantime, Alex could already see the train station. As he cut diagonally across the piazza, he noticed that the blinds on the windows of all the apartment buildings were shut tight. He thought of his parents, barricaded in their apartment, back in his original dimension.

  The deserted city echoed back only the sound of his footsteps and his panting breath. Now and again, the siren went off, followed by the warning. Alex didn’t slow down at the intersections, nor did he even bother to check whether the traffic lights were green or red. There was no need. There wasn’t the shadow of a car on the streets. When he shot under the bridge and emerged on Via Rombon, he heard someone shouting. He slowed down and tried to peer into the distance, to where the shouts seemed to come from. To his left, he could see the street that ran into Piazza Udine. The voice was coming from there. Now he could see him: a man stood there, completely naked, with long hair and a rifle in his hands. He was in the middle of the road, at least two hundred metres away. Alex made sure he wasn’t being observed, then went back to watching the man, wondering what on earth he was up to.

  ‘And the time of the Last Judgement will come upon us,’ he was shouting, in the throes of hysteria, ‘and the chariots of the Lord will come to take the souls of the damned! And the Angel will come, to bring redemption! Accept me, O Jesus Christ, take me into Your arms, and with me my brothers, and with me my people …’

  Alex didn’t even have time to hear the end of that plea, because an army truck appeared out of nowhere and two soldiers opened fire on the man, who collapsed to the ground.

  ‘Damn it,’ Alex whispered, before turning and taking off at full speed again.

  He continued running as hard as he could, racing past a service station, a market, and a series of shops. He finally reached the bridge that Jenny had told him about. He turned around. The army truck was at the far end of the street. Heading straight for him. They’d spotted him.

  ‘Jenny! Jenny! I’m here, Jenny!’ he shouted in the loudest voice he could muster.

  She popped up from behind a bush, but Alex looked past her to where a second army truck was coming from the opposite direction.

  The two of them ran straight into each other’s arms.

  Alex hugg
ed Jenny tight as the truck continued coming towards them. She surrendered to his embrace and saw, over Alex’s shoulders, the truck full of soldiers who had killed the man. It was about a hundred metres away.

  They were surrounded.

  There was no place to run.

  In the deserted setting of that part of the city, a boy and a girl, locked in an embrace, found themselves caught between two army trucks full of soldiers, ready to open fire.

  A huge man in uniform leaped out of the first truck, and a number of soldiers got out and arranged themselves in a semicircle around Alex and Jenny.

  ‘Fire!’ the man ordered.

  Alex looked Jenny in the eye. These men wanted to kill them. But why? They weren’t a pair of crazy fanatics shouting in the middle of the street. They weren’t armed. They were just two kids looking for shelter. It made no sense. Just as it made no sense that a six-year-old child should be subjected to shock therapy by his own parents. The two thoughts merged, while a new truth emerged in Alex’s mind. What could his parents have in common with a platoon of soldiers? Nothing. And perhaps that was exactly the answer. There was no enemy: it was the very end of life itself that pursued him like a black hole swallowing everything in creation.

  Jenny’s eyes opened wide; her knees were trembling as she wrapped her arms around Alex’s body.

  Look inside me, thought Alex.

  They gazed into each other’s eyes as the soldiers trained their rifles on them, fingers resting on the triggers, ready to execute them both.

  A sudden ray of light burst out of their embrace and filled the area immediately around them. A series of light beams exploded in every direction, creating in the space of a few instants an enormous white dome that illuminated the streets, the buildings, and the sky overhead.

  ‘What the h-hell is g-going on?’ a soldier stammered.

  ‘I don’t understand it …’ responded his commanding officer, who had just issued the order to fire.

  The sun had already set on that chilly afternoon in early December, but the light blazing from Alex and Jenny was strong enough to light the entire neighbourhood.

  The soldiers stood motionless, their eyes staring blankly into the air. In a split second, all the orders they’d received, all their training, the oaths they’d taken, the regulations to be respected — they all turned into nothing more than bland memories buried in time. There was only an overwhelming force that paralysed their limbs. None of the soldiers opened fire and, after just a few seconds, they let their submachine guns fall to the ground. Their arms hung limp at their sides, their gazes were lost in the luminous light, they stood side by side without moving an inch. They felt their muscles weighed down, frozen in place. There was no kind of training that could help them fight the force that was petrifying them.

  They were in the magic place.

  The magic place is me and Jenny, together.

  33

  Jenny and Alex stared at the surreal scene for a few seconds. Then, with nothing more than a glance and a nod, they both took off running in the same direction, racing past the bridge, leaving the soldiers rooted to the spot, desperately trying to figure out what was happening to them.

  Incredible — it’s as if we’d drugged them or something, thought Alex as he ran towards the industrial district. The two of them cut through a one-way street that took them off the main road and into the neighbourhood, and they soon found themselves in an area with few residential buildings and lots of factory sheds.

  ‘Where should we go?’ asked Jenny, as her breathing grew laboured.

  ‘We’ve got to hide.’

  Alex was sure of one thing: the layout of the city in this dimension wasn’t much different from the one he’d lived in for sixteen years. In fact, when he turned into a private laneway with a sign that warned it was a dead end, he still found the entrance to an underground passage he knew very well. A staircase led down into a graffiti-covered tunnel that ran under an old railroad line and came back up to the surface two hundred metres later. Down there, it would be hard for any army truck to find them.

  They walked down the steps, then they stopped and sat down on the ground, their backs against the tunnel wall, where there was a piece of graffiti that read Rebirth.

  ‘It was Memoria, Jenny! What saved us was Memoria! Memory is me and you. It’s the two of us together.’ Alex kneeled before her. ‘I … I’d lost everything, every fragment of my childhood, because I was given shock therapy.’

  ‘Shock therapy? But who on earth would —’

  ‘It was my parents, Jenny. My parents did this to me. I know that it must seem crazy, but we’re starting to figure some of this out. There’s someone or something out there that wants to destroy us.’

  ‘Alex, I … no one ever subjected me to shock therapy when I was small. I remember my childhood pretty well, but then I started to hear your voice a few years ago, during my first fainting spells.’

  ‘Of course!’ Alex’s face lit up, his eyes still staring into space as he went over that incredible story again, rewinding the film of his own memories. Jenny watched him in silence, as if waiting for a verdict.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ he went on. ‘We’ve always been in contact because, before the shock therapy, I used to talk to the Jenny in my dimension. And I’d even met her once, right in that same Planetarium — in fact, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu when you and I walked in. But I’m guessing you’ve never been to Italy …’

  ‘Never, as far as I know,’ Jenny said. ‘What does all this mean?’

  Alex waited a few moments, looked her in the eye, and realised that the time had come to tell her the truth.

  ‘In my dimension … you died when you were just six years old.’

  Jenny looked stunned, as if his words were yet to produce the effect that such an enormous revelation would normally have.

  ‘I waited to tell you, because things were already complicated enough …’

  ‘How do you know?’ she replied in a cold, detached voice, looking away.

  ‘Do you remember when I told you that I’d seen the triskelion before? You weren’t willing to talk to me anymore, but that’s when you changed your mind.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I saw it at your house. Actually, at Mary Thompson’s house, if you want to know the truth. In my dimension, it’s your nanny who lives there now. You died when you were six, and your family moved away.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about? It can’t be! It doesn’t make sense! And … how… how could I be dead?’

  ‘Believe me, I’m not making any of this up. When I was little I was in contact with her. Not with you. I know it’s crazy, it sounds like I’m talking about two different people.’

  Jenny chewed her fingernails, irritably, and turned her back on him. On the wall in front of them another piece of graffiti said Foreverlove, all one word, with gigantic rounded letters.

  ‘Then who am I?’ asked Jenny, turning to look at Alex once more.

  ‘When I got my telepathic powers back, six years after the shock therapy, I hadn’t been able to get back into contact with the Jenny in my dimension because you were … she was dead. But somehow, it seems, there’s something of her still in you, or you both shared something that allowed me to go on communicating with you after she died.’

  The girl leaped to her feet. She looked like she was about to run away.

  ‘Jenny,’ Alex called to her, sensing her fear, her rejection of that inconceivable truth. ‘We don’t have much time left.’

  She ignored him, so he went over to her, took her by the shoulders, and forced her to turn around and face him, more roughly than he had intended to. Their eyes locked deeply for an instant.

  Alex’s vision blurred. His eyelids began to quiver as a photograph took shape in his mind. A photo in a fra
me. The outlines of a human figure began to appear in the rectangle. It was a girl. She wore a one-piece bathing suit, dark blue, with the number seven on her chest. Alex looked down. There was a podium. The girl was standing on the highest level. It was Jenny.

  All at once he felt as if he had been sucked into the photograph. He didn’t know how it had happened, but he was standing on the podium. He could see through the eyes of the champion. He admired the crowd of friends and relatives that were cheering her name, while the banner in the distance said 21st School Challenge. Behind the people, he could glimpse a swimming pool divided into eight lanes.

  Alex tried to shake his head, but he felt as if he were paralysed in that memory.

  Then everything went dark, and he had to wait several seconds before he could focus on a few shapes again.

  There was a tree. A line of trees. Shifting his gaze to the right, he saw a well-dressed middle-aged couple. Behind them were some younger people, also nicely dressed, in black formal wear. Even further off to the right, a parish priest was dragging his cassock over the muddy soil, his shoes squelching into the muck. In his hands he held a metal container with incense pouring out of it. He stopped next to two holes in the ground. Next to each hole stood a coffin, ready to be lowered by a group of adults standing by. A woman came over, blew her nose, and through her tears said: ‘Your grandparents loved you very much …’

  Everything went dark again. One after another, a number of blurry images overlapped. Landscapes. People. Increasingly vast landscapes. People, bigger and bigger.

  Seconds of silence, darkness. Nothing.

  At last he saw it. The memory that he was searching for. This time he watched it as if it were a scene in a movie rather than experiencing it himself. The voices were muffled but clear enough to understand, the colours and outlines almost too realistic.