by J. Q. Coyle
I flip the light switch, not expecting it to work, but it does. Hafeez locks the door behind us. I slip my hand around the gun in my pocket.
The apartment is almost completely empty. Nothing on the walls. A kitchen to the left, beyond that, a hallway. The only furniture in the living room is a sofa—an old one that reminds me of the Butlers’ house, the couch Arnie sleeps on and stinks up.
We step inside. “Hello?”
“He’s not here,” Hafeez says. “And this might be a criminal offense. Breaking and entering.”
“It’s my dad’s place. I’m supposed to enter.”
The dining room has an old table with two mismatched chairs.
The bedroom has a well-made bed, a dark blue blanket, one pillow.
Is this all my father owns in the world? I shake my head, wide-eyed. I’m suddenly afraid I might choke up. It’s that depressing.
Hafeez opens the closet—two white shirts and two pairs of pants hung on metal wires. No shoes.
He’s about to say something but then looks at me and reads my expression. I must look fragile, because he says, “I’ll give you a minute,” and he walks back to the front door.
In the bathroom, the regular stuff—a toothbrush, razor, shampoo, soap. I pick up my father’s toothbrush and push the brush onto the back of my hand—dry. The soap too. He hasn’t been here for a while.
I think of what my father said, that I would find out he’s not a stranger after all. How am I ever going to find that out if I never see him again?
What will I do now? Go home? Back to my old life and wait—for what? To get dropped into the Freaks Track for the rest of high school? I’ll have brought Hafeez all the way out here for what? A dead end.
I can’t give up. There has to be something. I’m angry at my father now—like it’s his fault I’m here in the first place, and it is.
I walk back to the living room. “Why’d he show up at all?” I say to Hafeez. “Just to mess with me?”
I flip up the sofa cushions. Nothing. Not even spare change.
“He could’ve just left me alone. I would have figured out how to survive. I was surviving, right?”
“Are you okay?” Hafeez says.
I’m not okay. I storm into the kitchen. No food in the fridge. I yank open drawer after empty drawer.
And then one drawer isn’t empty. There’s an old newspaper, and when I pick it up, a pair of heavy scissors falls, stabbing the floor. I spread the paper out and find that the comics have been cut. “Did he wrap my present with this?”
Hafeez is a little afraid of me right now. “Maybe we should go,” he says quietly.
I open a few more empty drawers and then find one holding a bunch of battered pocket-size foreign-language phrase books, including one for Ukrainian and one for Russian.
I lift the Ukrainian one and show it to Hafeez. “What the hell?” I say. I turn a few pages. They’re rippled as if they were once soaked through. “Look! The Dnieper flows through the Ukraine. The book could fit in a pocket.”
“Wow,” Hafeez says, impressed and also a little scared.
I open cupboards and find three tins marked FLOUR, OATS, SUGAR. I pop them open, one by one. The sugar and oats tins are empty, but the flour tin has sugar in it—and weevils, dark and curled.
I shake the tin, and then see a white sharp edge. I tilt the sugar tin over the sink, letting some of the sugar fall into the basin. “Come here,” I tell Hafeez.
We both look into the canister. I reach in and pull out some photos. They’re faded Instamatic pictures of my father and me—typical childhood shots.
“That’s you,” Hafeez says. “How old?”
“Old enough to remember these places, being with my father, but I don’t.”
In one, I’m about six and I’m cradling a puppy. A bulldog. “In one of the worlds, there’s an ancient bulldog. Could it be the same dog?”
I don’t wait for an answer. I flip to the next picture. I’m having a birthday party, poolside with palm trees around it, and bright balloons. I must be eight or so. I’m opening presents surrounded by kids and a few adults, all strangers to me. Is this somewhere balmy? “My birthday’s in February.”
“Nice place,” Hafeez says.
“It’d be nicer if I remembered it.”
One of the kids is staring straight at the camera, and I feel like I can almost remember him, but he’s smiling so hard that his face is distorted, his eyes squinched up too tightly. I should remember all of these people. I can’t explain how it makes me feel—lost, nostalgic, but without a real place or time or people to grab hold of. The loss of it all crashes into me.
Then I see my father in the background wearing short sleeves, and, for the first time, I can make out the more elaborate tattoos, the vines and branches and small leaves that snake asymmetrically up both of his arms.
I look around the kitchen—linoleum coming loose at one edge, rust spot in the sink. The fridge rattles on.
“These pictures are proof,” Hafeez says, “that those worlds are real.”
“I didn’t have the hallucinations until the past year or so. But I existed in these worlds as a kid. I was there with my father. How is it possible?”
And then I turn to the final picture—which is almost an exact copy of the photo I have in my bedroom—the two of us making a snowman, the flakes swirling around us. In this one, my father isn’t looking at the camera, though. He’s looking at me. It must have been taken just seconds before or after the one I have in my bedside table.
I look out the dark windows of my father’s apartment and then pull out my phone. “Should I call Jane?”
“I don’t know. It might be—”
“Dangerous, I know.”
“All this time she’s been upping your meds, and she had to know, right?”
“Like you said, ‘These pictures are proof.’ I know I can’t trust her, but I don’t know what else to do.” I look at Hafeez, waiting for his answer.
He nods. “Yeah. Go ahead.”
I press the call button.
As soon as her line starts ringing, I realize she could be getting ready for bed. But I don’t care.
She picks up, and her voice is alert, like she sits up nights waiting for calls from patients who’ve lost their minds. “Hello?”
“It’s Alicia.”
“Are you okay?”
I pace a small circle. “No. You should have told me. Why didn’t you?”
“Where are you?” Does she already know I took off? My mother wouldn’t have known unless she came home early from work. Maybe Alex had someone check up on me and he called Jane. Maybe she was sitting up waiting for a call from a patient who’d lost her mind.
“I’m at my father’s apartment looking at the most messed-up family photo album in the history of family photo albums.”
“Let me come and get you. You’re upset. You need help. Are you still in Jamaica Plain?”
I stop. “You know where my father lives?” I look at Hafeez. Of course she does.
“What?”
“I didn’t tell you where his apartment was.”
“Of course you did. How else would I know?”
But I didn’t.
“You need help, Alicia. Listen to me. You have to—”
My arm goes slack. I click the phone shut. I can feel the expanse of lies opening like a canyon at my feet.
“Let’s get out of here,” Hafeez says.
I slip the photographs in my empty jacket pocket. They belong to my father, and I shouldn’t even be here, but I won’t give them up.
We walk out of the apartment and shut the door. The hallway carpet smells sharply of mildew. Down the hall, someone’s listening to a football game.
The lights flicker, dim, flicker. We take the stairs.
Maybe I’m not right in the head after all. Maybe this isn’t reality, just a deeper layer of crazy, a craziness that’s been amping up in me all my life.
I speed up on the stair
s, sprint through the dark lobby.
Behind me, Hafeez says, “Wait up!”
I burst out of the apartment’s lobby doors.
It’s started snowing.
The phone starts ringing. I look at it—Jane. I don’t answer.
The flakes are small and quick. I start walking, fast. Hafeez catches up. I wonder if I’m going to get sick.
Hafeez says, “I don’t know what we should do now. I wish I did. Maybe we should go home.”
“I can’t go home.”
And then—out of nowhere—I have another memory. My father holding a stick with a butterfly, completely still, perched on it. “A butterfly can flap its wings in one world,” he says, “and because we’ve opened doors and windows between worlds, the beating of its wings can cause a storm somewhere else altogether. You know what I’m saying, Alicia? Do you understand?” I was just a little kid. The sun was warm on my head. The butterfly opened its wings and flew off.
Did I understand?
“What if these memories have always been in my head, just hidden, the way the Butlers wrapped up their chairs and sofas in white sheets when they tried to go live with their alcoholic son for a while. Maybe I’ve always known that something was there—draped in bedsheets—and I just didn’t know to lift the sheets and look.”
“It’s not time travel,” Hafeez says, clapping his hands together to keep warm. “But it is moving between realities. I swear this is the stuff that physicists my dad knows can only whisper to each other about at backyard barbecues after they’ve had some beer, because no one would believe them. But they know it’s all theoretically possible.”
I stare at Hafeez. “What physicists whisper to each other at backyard barbecues? How is that going to help me? In my present situation. I’m asking you, Hafeez. How is that relevant?”
“You could test it.”
“Test what?”
“Try going into your other world, the one where you didn’t take the gun. I think it would be worth an experiment.”
The idea feels huge and powerful and terrifying. “Last time I had an attack of decision-making, I poked my hand with a compass.”
“You did what?”
“I had this theory about blood. Every time I had really moved into one of my father’s worlds, I had cut myself or saw blood from some imagery—like your fat lip. So I set it up.”
He touches his lip. “And?”
“It worked.”
I turn down an alley and lean against the side of a brick building. “But since I took the gun, I haven’t been anxious about a decision.” It figures—now that I want an attack, I’m no longer able to have one.
“Maybe you don’t need those panic attacks anymore.”
“Jane always asked me what it felt like in my body when the hallucinations came on. The ripping feeling in my chest, the aches all over my body. If I applied pressure, I would sometimes fade out faster.”
“That sounds easier than drawing blood, right? I’d rather not take another blow to the face. Try the pressure thing. I’ll be right here.”
“Okay.”
I decide to squeeze the back of my neck. Nothing. I hold on to my arm, where Hafeez grabbed me when I lost it in the cafeteria. I tighten my grip.
Nothing.
I apply pressure to my collarbone.
Still nothing.
My phone rings again.
“Jane,” I tell Hafeez. I take a look and I’m right. I’ve got to get rid of this phone. In one quick motion, I spike it and watch it bounce and splinter.
“Was that necessary?”
“I’m pretty sure it was. Plus, it felt good.” I look up at the snow, coming down quick. I lean against the brick wall again and close my eyes.
“I have whole childhoods with my father.” My knees feel weak. I sit on the ground and bang my back against the bricks. “What if my father didn’t abandon me in any world except this one?”
Hafeez sits down next to me. “It’s going to be okay, Alicia.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Not absolutely.”
Staring at the snow spinning against the sky, it reminds me of my mother’s powder, the flecks of it that I saw when the room started to double. I feel that deep painful buzz again, but this time it isn’t in my arm or neck or collarbone. It’s in the back of my rib cage in the spot where, after things doubled and ripped in two in my mother’s bedroom, there was just that strange dull ache. Now it’s almost as if my ribs are shivering beneath my skin.
I want to hurl myself into the pain. This is it!
I curl forward and push against the brick, applying pressure to the back of my ribs.
“What’s wrong?” Hafeez says.
“Shhh.”
Slowly, everything shifts to points; each snowflake catches on the brick building, and it’s as if the bricks are being snagged and pulled apart by the snowflakes. The snowflakes start dragging pieces of the brick and sky as they pivot in the wind, leaving behind pieces of nothingness—a black, whistling void.
My vision darkens like I’m going to pass out. “I’m either going into another world or I’m going to die in this shit part of town.”
The thought echoes and echoes.
Then there’s nothing. And it is like I have died. The world is still and silent and gray.…
* * *
… Tick, tick, and hissing.
The radiator in my bedroom. It’s night, as dark outside the windows as it was outside of my dad’s apartment building, but I’m in my sweatpants and a sweatshirt, holding the tool my father gave me.
And there’s Hafeez. He’s looking at me intently.
Something’s happened. He’s waiting for a response.
“Well?” he says nervously. “Say something. Anything.”
The room feels electrically charged. I don’t know what moment I’ve slipped into, but a lot is at stake.
“What’s happening?”
“What do you mean? I just asked you … a question and … are you okay?”
“I’m not me,” I whisper quickly. “I called you? You came over, right? And we’ve been in this room, and I told you about, about—”
“I came over, and you were crying, and you told me what happened in your mother’s room. You said—”
“I said that everything ripped in half and there were two worlds, two of me. And one of me took the gun and left, and that one met you as you were riding your bike around the corner.”
“What?” Hafeez says.
And I feel like my voice isn’t mine either. It’s just slightly off. I’m aware of the scratchiness of it because of all the crying. “I’m the one who took the gun.”
Hafeez isn’t sure what to think. I can tell he’s a little doubtful, like maybe he’s wondering if I’m just trying to get out of whatever it is I’m supposed to be saying—whatever this something, anything, is. “Are you serious?” he says.
I nod. “After we met up, we went to my father’s address, his shitty apartment, and I found photographs of my childhoods. My other childhoods.”
I can tell he’s trying to change gears.
He grabs his head and holds it for a second, just trying to line everything up. “So you don’t know what happened here. You don’t remember … how upset you were and how we…”
“How we what?” But then I know. We kissed.
He blushes and smiles and shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “I mean. If you don’t know, I shouldn’t say anything.” And I know that I’m a different person here. I’m the kind of person who decided to go back to the life handed to her. I felt guilty and I wanted to be told it wasn’t that bad, that I was going to be alright. And Hafeez did tell me those things, and I must have liked that part of him, too.
“Have you figured out anything here, from her side of things?” I ask, trying to change the subject.
“Well, one thing: ‘Suicide off Egg Rock,’” he says. They must have looked it up in this world, too. He pulls out his phone as
if he’s about to start reading it aloud. I stop him. “We’ve talked about that poem too, the tattoos in it. Maybe my dad wanted us to look up that poem, and to start thinking about the tattoos as more than just tattoos, right?”
“Yeah,” Hafeez says.
“I’ve seen the tattoos on my dad’s wrists and on his neck, too, little vines and branches. Maybe his ink runs all over his arms and shoulders. All over his body even.”
“The buzzing all over your body before you move into another … world. The tattoos all over his. It can’t be a coincidence. We’re trying to figure it out.”
“Good,” I say, for the first time thinking having two of me and Hafeez might mean we can divide and conquer. “Keep working on that.”
I move to my window. It’s snowing, the same light dusty flakes that were floating down outside of my father’s apartment. But what does that mean? Nothing. It’s now here and it’s now there.
My mother’s car is gone. The street is empty. Not even Sprowitz eyeing me.
“I have to go.”
“What? Where?” Hafeez says.
“Back to myself. Back to the other me.” I walk out of the bedroom, and Hafeez follows me as I walk to my mother’s bedroom.
Hafeez stands in the doorway. “C’mon,” he says. “This is beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. Don’t you see what could potentially be going on here?”
I smell my mother’s lilac powder and hair spray again. “I have no idea what could be potentially be going on here, Hafeez.” I walk to the bedside table, open the drawer.
The gun is still there.
I shut the drawer, walk back out of the room past Hafeez, and head down the stairs.
“It’s amazing, Alicia. You’re moving through space and time and universes!” he says as he follows me out the front door, down the stoop, and onto the narrow driveway.
“Yes, but the question is how do I do it? Any thoughts on that?”
“Mr. Javits didn’t get to parallel universes in Intro to Physics.” He’s only wearing thick socks, so he’s shifting from foot to foot. “Look,” he says, “about what I asked you in there when you showed up.”
“That’s between you and her, Hafeez. I’m not her anymore.”
“Yeah, but I feel like I should back up and, I don’t know…”