Marco smiled bitterly as he headed back to his bedroom.
‘Go on, admit it. You think that it’s a real spot, don’t you, Alex?’ he’d said to his friend one night, amused and proud of his research. ‘But it’s actually nothing more than a giant storm, a hurricane that’s been raging for centuries on the surface of Jupiter. To us, it looks like it’s standing still. But in fact it’s a fully-fledged natural cataclysm! You see? Everything is relative. Our observations can be deceptive, depending on the distance.’
‘I have to say, I always thought it was just something strange on the planet’s surface. Like a gigantic drawing in the dirt.’
‘Alex, Jupiter doesn’t have dirt. It’s a gaseous planet, not a rocky one like Earth.’
‘I give up, you win. Turn on the PlayStation, and shut up about Jupiter!’
He remembered that exchange as if the two of them had been talking about Jupiter yesterday.
How I miss you, my friend. I wonder where you are now.
Marco set the box on the bed and opened it.
The photographs of his childhood.
The holiday cards he made for his parents, cards that he designed and drew when he was a little boy, with paper windows that opened up and revealed all sorts of surprises.
Pictures of his labrador retriever, Cannone. He’d lost him the year before his parents were killed; the dog had been like a big brother to him.
There must be a dimension where my life turned out well, where I had a life with my family, my dog, my legs …
Marco lingered over a photograph of his father fishing, his arms stretched out to brace the rod, his head turned to watch his son playing with the bait worms. In the days when he could still walk.
His father’s smile, the happiness in his mother’s eyes as she laid out their picnic. A knot of nostalgic yearning. Marco clutched the picture to his chest.
‘I’ve never believed in a higher being,’ he started saying in a loud voice, as if he were declaiming his announcement to an invisible audience. ‘I’ve always believed in science. I don’t think there’s going to be a tomorrow. Our time is over; that mass of rock is going to roll the closing credits. But if there could ever be a second chance, if there really was something that comes afterwards … I just wish I could hold you all in my arms again.’
The tears rolled down Marco’s cheeks and onto the photograph, where they mingled with the faces of that happy day, long since buried in the abysses of memory.
Alex’s closest friend sat for a few minutes with his eyes closed. He sobbed and wept until he was almost out of breath. All the research he had done, all the technological miracles he’d explored and constructed himself … it was all about to come to an end. There would never be another dawn.
Never again would he wake up wondering: What am I going to invent today?
And never again would he be able to open that box, or weep and free himself of the suffering that had been his daily companion for far too many years now.
Marco raised his hands to his face and then ran them through his hair. He sat there for a few more seconds with the photo pressed to his heart. The only place his parents had never left.
Then, suddenly, there was a noise unlike anything he’d ever heard before. It started with a rumbling thunder, followed by the sound you might hear in an earthquake. But it was coming from overhead.
Marco steered his wheelchair to the window and saw.
There was panic outside. People had poured into the streets and piazzas of the city: some stood motionless, peering up into the sky; others ran with no particular destination in mind; and some stood with their eyes closed, doing their best not to see. The cacophony created by the shouting and screaming, the howling of dogs, the voices of people talking animatedly as they looked up at the sky, was terrifying. But it couldn’t drown out the chilling roar that was swallowing up the planet.
It was right up there, overhead.
Enormous.
Powerful.
It was the final chapter, and it was about to be written once and for all. It looked like an incandescent ribbon slicing the sky in two, and not even Marco, with all his knowledge of astrophysics, was capable of predicting exactly where it would fall and the extent of the damage it would cause. He did know that a powerful seismic wave would spread out in all directions, for thousands and thousands of miles, from the point of impact. Like a rock tossed into the ocean, the asteroid would generate circular waves that would reach every remote corner of the planet. It would generate tsunamis in the oceans, earthquakes on dry land, climatic devastation, and a shift in the Earth’s axis. Marco’s hands gripped the armrests of his wheelchair as he braced himself. His heart was racing, and his eyes opened wide at the sight of the asteroid that was about to destroy everything.
The glass in front of his eyes started to tremble, while the walls began to shake and his precious textbooks started falling, one after another, from the shelves on the wall. The trees began to be tossed around like the waves in a giant ocean storm, while the roof antennas flew away, uprooted by the fury of the wind.
From the street came the echoes of screams, the overlapping sounds of people shouting and sobbing. Marco watched in silence, motionless, powerless. He wouldn’t go out into the streets of Milan, he wouldn’t take part in that final apocalyptic chorus, he wouldn’t beg Nature to have mercy. He’d watch the end from his window.
He closed his eyes.
It’s over, he thought, as he clutched the photograph of the picnic tight to his chest.
38
Alex lurched forward, panting.
His legs were still under the blanket, his chest was bare, his hands were tingling with pins and needles.
In front of him was the chest of drawers. On his left, the chair on which he’d laid his jeans and his sweater. Everything was still shrouded in darkness, broken here and there by faint shafts of light from the gaps in the wooden blind.
‘Jenny!’ he shouted as he turned in her direction. She was stretched out by his side in the bed where they’d made love, her eyes wide. She sat up slowly and stared at him without a word.
‘It wasn’t a dream, was it?’ he began, as their thoughts intersected.
‘I saw the same things. What are we headed for?’
‘That’s the only answer he didn’t give us.’
‘It was the only one we were after.’
‘Let’s get moving. Let’s get out of here.’
They got dressed as quickly as they could. Luckily, their clothes had dried while they slept. When they opened the door and ran downstairs, there was no one to be found. The house was silent, and it also seemed that the gunshots and screams of the night before could no longer be heard outside.
They rushed into the kitchen, but it was empty. No one in the bedrooms, no one in the bathroom.
The basement, thought Alex as he ran down to the room where they’d first been welcomed into this family.
When he walked in, there was no one but the elderly grandmother, sitting in her armchair as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She looked at him with an enigmatic smile. Then she slowly bobbed her head, up and down. She seemed unruffled, with the expression of someone who clearly understood that their time was almost up.
Alex went back to the front hall, locked arms with Jenny, and opened the front door.
They were all outside. Everyone who lived on that street. Petrified. Staring straight up at the sky.
‘This is real,’ said Alex as he looked up. The same sky that Marco could see in his original dimension. The same sky that everyone, in every corner of the infinite Multiverse, was staring at in that exact moment. A tangle of clouds dragged relentlessly by the wind; ribbons of vapours intertwining in the sky and blending with the vivid colours of an impossible sunset; while the asteroid was there, a
t the centre of the muddied fresco, with its majestic, all-powerful appearance, and a long fiery trail stretching out until it vanished into the depths of space.
Jenny looked down the street as a furious dust storm started brewing. The families who lived in the neighbourhood were all there, hugging and holding hands. Women, men, and children. No one was running away; no one was letting themselves descend into the meaningless panic that had spread through the heart of the metropolis. It wouldn’t have done any good, and they knew it.
‘What are we going to do?’ Alex turned to look at Jenny, fearfully, as a vague noise in the distance came closer and closer, breaking through the surreal silence.
‘I don’t know … What’s happening over there?’
From the other end of the street a mob of people was running towards them, surrounded by twisting funnels of dust and detritus. Shouts and cries were echoing through the air. They had come from the city, there were lots of them, and they were coming closer and closer.
‘Jenny, let’s get out of here!’ Alex shouted. His gaze was still locked on the frantic crowd running flat out in the grip of panic, but his body had already swivelled in the opposite direction and was poised for escape.
‘That way!’ she exclaimed, and took off running. The minute she did, a roar of enormous proportions swept through the quarter, shaking the earth for several seconds and rocking every house and building around them. It was like a thunderclap, and it seemed to mark, with all the majestic reverberation of an orchestral timpani, the beginning of the spectacle. The wind began to gust harder, while the dust spun and swirled with the force of a tornado. People in the streets looked each other in the face in pure terror, and then started to run en masse in the same direction as the two of them. As they ran, Alex and Jenny realised they were being chased by the crowd from the city, who were following them hard on their heels, like an all-consuming tidal wave.
There was no longer any law.
No curfew, no evacuation plan.
There was nothing but a world in the grip of hysteria.
Alex and Jenny ran until they were breathless. Every so often they’d turn and glance at the mob close behind them. People would fall and be trampled underfoot; occasionally an elderly person would be swept under or left behind. Everyone was screaming, but their shouts were lost in the din that followed the thunderous roar, a dull and terrifying noise as if the earth were quaking.
A few minutes later, Alex and Jenny found themselves in open countryside.
‘Look … look at Milan!’ Alex shouted, as his eyes focused on the sight that lay just past a highway overpass. A black mantle of smoke lay over the city, engulfing it.
‘Damn it, it’s getting closer! What are we supposed to do now?’ asked Jenny as she looked up at the trajectory of the asteroid in the sky.
Alex said nothing, but he stopped running for a second and stood there exhausted, panting. Deep inside him, he saw the clever, inquisitive eyes of his best friend, trapped in an apartment that before long would be crushed into dust along with the rest of the city.
Marco, my old friend, Alex thought, as he shut his eyes briefly, doing his best not to think of the fate in store for the only person who had ever really believed in him.
Another rumble shook the ground beneath their feet, even more deafening than the one that had preceded it.
‘Down there!’ shouted Jenny, stretching out her arm to point to a service station by the side of the highway. Her voice couldn’t carry over to Alex: it was drowned out by the dull roar that was washing over their eardrums. Alex only saw her lips move, and the direction she was pointing in. They started running towards the service station together.
In just a few seconds they were on the other side of the building. They ran around it and found themselves at the front door of the Autogrill, just as hail starting pouring like shrapnel out of the sky, cutting through the blanket of smoke and dust overhead. The hail was accompanied by dazzling flashes of light, as if someone out in space were using an enormous flashbulb to immortalise every instant of that disaster.
As soon as Alex shut the door behind him, they both saw what things were like in there. Six or seven people stood in front of the windows, looking up, hypnotised. Others, mostly women and old men, had thrown themselves on the floor. They were huddled behind the counter or near the shelves, their hands over their ears in an attempt to protect themselves from the explosion of decibels that was deafening them all.
Through four speakers mounted on the wall, a radio was playing ‘Moon River’, but Frank Sinatra’s voice barely made itself heard, drowned out as it was by the hailstorm raging outside the windows.
‘May God carry you to glory …’ said a woman, grabbing the bottom of Alex’s jumper and staring at him, eyes wide open and brimming with tears. Her words were almost inaudible, while the windows of the Autogrill were shaking and seemed on the verge of bursting into a thousand bits.
Alex gave Jenny a quizzical look, then pulled her towards him by one arm and stared at her intensely.
I don’t want to die in here. We’re going to find that damned place!
Alex took a deep breath, then he nodded. An instant later they were back outside.
They ran down the four-lane highway, away from Milan. More importantly, away from the furious gusts of wind. Their legs were heavy, and the force of the storm was pushing them in the other direction.
They stopped under a bridge, in an area that appeared to be deserted.
‘I can’t go on …’ said Alex, his hands on his knees, his shoulders hunched forward. His face was covered with dust, the dust that had taken the place of normal air, making it hard to breathe.
Jenny went over to him with a determined look on her face. ‘Becker said that the only hope of salvation is Memoria,’ she said. ‘But how do we get there?’
‘If only he’d told us what the hell it is … We’re all going to be roasted alive here before long!’
Alex shot a look beyond the bridge. Where they were was exactly like the eye of a tornado. Lightning flashes and thunderclaps were now following on the heels of one another, echoing through the improvised shelter where they were huddling.
‘Marco’s down there. In the middle of all that smoke. He can’t possibly survive.’
‘We’re not going to survive either, if we don’t find that place at once.’
39
Alex glanced out from under the bridge and realised that time was running out. In the sky, the fiery ribbon seemed to announce the imminent end of its trajectory. Closing time, ladies and gentlemen, last orders, last round.
It all happened in an instant. Alex’s eyes closed as the words of the Malaysian fortune teller began whirling through his head.
I see you take great leap … great leap in black ocean.
Then a flash took him back to the night before, when he had seen the symbol on the hardhat worn by the father of the family that had taken them in.
That symbol … it was on the fortune teller’s card. He showed it to me. It was my future.
‘Follow me, Jenny! We have to get to the excavation site!’
Alex grabbed her by the hand and they started to run past the bridge, along the highway, as the land on either side of the road was enveloped in flames. Now and then they went past burning cars and clusters of people fleeing to nowhere in particular. The hailstorm intensified, kicking up more and more dust. They realised that there was no rain in that thunderstorm. There was nothing but grit and detritus. Millions of tiny fragments that pelleted in all directions, like a mass of pawns preceding the arrival of the king.
And the king was about to make his last move.
Alex and Jenny ran through the middle of that tornado of whipping shrapnel, their arms bent over their foreheads to protect their eyes. He knew the area, which was the same as it was in his origin
al dimension: the construction site for the new shopping mall was just a few hundred metres away, a place he knew well, a place that he had visited frequently with his father. It was one of those details that both his and Jenny’s realities had in common. In both worlds, at the same point along the highway, a new mall filled with shops of all kinds was being built.
They moved as fast as they could, never stopping, going past a small supermarket with a sign reading Ben’s Corner and a shattered window. Both their minds went to the story they’d heard about looting. They realised that the last meal they’d ever eat in that lifetime had been stolen from that ravaged supermarket.
When the excavators with the logo Caterpillar written on them first heaved into view in the distance, next to a construction crane, Alex started running even harder. Jenny kept pace with him, panting, her heart in her throat and her hair flying in the wind that filled it with dust and grit.
‘This is it,’ he said, slowing down when he came up to a line of blue portable toilets. ‘The fortune teller already knew where we’d be today. It’s incredible …’
‘Why are we here, Alex?’ Jenny asked after they made their way past a series of barriers, and the gigantic excavation for the foundations of the shopping centre gradually appeared before them: an enormous cavity in the earth at least one hundred metres wide, two hundred metres long, and a good twenty-five metres deep. The wall of fire coming towards them out of the countryside was getting dangerously close to the crater.
‘Because so it is written,’ Alex replied, staring into space.
I see you take great leap … great leap in black ocean, the voice of the fortune teller continued echoing through the walls of his skull. Now even Jenny could hear it.
‘Everything we’ve done has led us here. It had to lead us here.’
Multiversum Page 23