The Infinity of You & Me

by J. Q. Coyle

  “What about my mother?”

  “She’s already been in to see you.”

  She’s lying. My mother wouldn’t leave me here. Or maybe she would, if Alex talked her into it.

  “Let me talk to Hafeez. I want to know that he’s okay. Then I’ll promise not to say anything to Alex.”

  She glances at the door.

  “Just one call,” I say. “Even prisoners get that much.”

  She takes a deep breath and then reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone. “You can’t tell him where you are.”

  “I don’t know where I am.” It’s the truth, and for a second I feel disconnected from everyone and everything. I could be anywhere, cast off like an astronaut somersaulting in slow motion away from the earth.

  I tell her the number. I know it by heart. She punches it in and hits speaker. It rings once, twice, three times, and I’m sure that I’ll have to leave a message. What the hell should I tell him?

  But then he picks up. “Hello?” he says, his voice muffled.

  “Hafeez,” I say. “Are you okay?”

  “Are you okay?”

  Then I hear his mother’s voice telling him to hang up.

  He shouts, “Just give me a minute. I won’t do drugs just by talking to her.” He then says to me, “Sprowitz drugged me up, dropped me off, and told my parents you’re the bad influence.” I try to imagine Hafeez on drugs. He’s not the type. “I’m not even supposed to be talking to you,” he says. “But, God, it’s great to hear your voice.”

  “Great to hear yours and I’m sorry I dragged—”

  He cuts me off.

  “Sprowitz took the tool.”

  “Yeah, but only here, right?” Exactly. Hafeez and I have it in the other world.

  His mother’s still shouting and closer to the phone now, so he starts talking fast. “I don’t know if I’m going to be much help. Not this me, if you know what I mean. But maybe you can ask—” And then I know his mother’s snatched the phone from him. The line goes dead.

  I hand the phone to Jane, who puts it back in her pocket.

  “You let Sprowitz drug Hafeez so he wouldn’t be allowed to … what? Help me?”

  “It was a compromise,” Jane said. “At least he’s not dead.” I search her expression. She’s serious. I’m scared suddenly in a way I wasn’t before.

  “This is much bigger than you can imagine,” Jane whispers. “Did your father tell you where the atlas is?”

  “What atlas? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “The one in our families for generations,” she says flatly.

  Our families? I don’t say a word.

  “Well, if he did tell you, don’t say anything about that either.”

  She leans closer to me. “Alicia, there are so many things I never got to explain to you.” Her voice is shaky and breathless. “I never answered your question about speaking Russian. You can speak other languages. When you enter a branch, the other consciousness is still there, aware of you, just subservient, and knowledge of life in that branch is a hum of information you can tap into.” Jane pinches the bridge of her nose. “There are a million things I should have said about being a spandrel. I couldn’t.”

  “Spandrel”—the word itself sounds like “spanning” and “tendril”—spanning worlds like tendrils. Like new green branches.

  “Tell me now,” I say.

  Jane grips her hands together and keeps talking. “There are roots, too. Each decision has a thin shadow, an irrational what-if. It bubbles up from the subconscious. Those worlds in the roots aren’t governed by the same laws of nature that we have.”

  I remember the fear that shot through me as I took the gun—a fear that I was insane and I’d never belong anywhere and that I’d be cut off from that moment on. Did that fear form a root?

  “Roots are born from the subconscious the way dreams are.” Jane is talking fast now. “But you don’t have to worry about root worlds. You can’t access your roots, not really; very few spandrels can.” She pauses here, looks at the electrical nodes on my head. “Each of us has to develop our own way of entering the worlds we make.”

  Each of us. Our. “You’re a spandrel, too?” I’m furious. My head’s buzzing. “All those hours of talking! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Shhh,” Jane says, her voice a harsh whisper. “Yes,” she says, “but I’m not anymore. I got cut.”

  “Cut?”

  She keeps her eyes glued to the computer screen. “I had that hyper-evolved part of my brain excised.”

  I ask Jane why she got cut. “Who would do that?”

  “It’s a hard way to live. You might know what I mean one day.” Her face flushes; she looks like she’s going to cry. “When Alex arrives, do what he says. I wish I could save you—from all of this, but I can’t. I’m so sorry.”

  I reach for her but I’m still cuffed. “What happened to my father?”

  She straightens, looks at the clock on the wall.

  “Is my father dead?”

  Her eyes are distant. She’s scared. She whispers, “No. But…”

  As her voice trails off, an older man wearing scrubs, mask and all, steps into the room. He’s tall and angular with light brown skin and large worried eyes. “Everything okay?” he asks.

  “Fine,” Jane says, patting her pocket as if she’s suddenly lost something.

  “Alex wants you to keep her sedated.” He pulls down his mask. He’s a good bit older than Jane.

  “Olsson,” Jane whispers, “please.”

  Olsson. The one I overheard Jane talking to on the phone in her office.

  He strides into the room. “We have no choice.” He touches her shoulder gently, almost fatherly.

  “But you do have a choice,” I say. “You really do.”

  He looks at me, smiles—like he’s happy to see me. I don’t know why. He starts to say something to me, but Jane stops him. “I’ve already said too much.”

  He nods, takes a deep breath, and walks quickly out of the room.

  “Jane, don’t put me under,” I tell her. “I need to think. I need my head. Please don’t.”

  “I have to,” she whispers. “You don’t understand my role.”

  “Talk to me then. Explain it.”

  She takes a breath. She wants to confess, I can tell. But she stops herself and walks to the metal table, pulls out a box from a drawer. She lifts a needle.

  “Don’t. Please don’t. Let’s talk about this.”

  She inserts the needle into the tubing that leads to my IV. “Close your eyes,” she says. “Right now, you can surrender a little.”

  “Jane,” I plead, even though it’s too late.

  And then I’m suddenly desperately tired. I won’t find my father. Something terrible has happened to him, I’m sure of it. I’m a spandrel—spandrel, spandrel, spandrel—but what does that really mean? I fight to keep my thoughts straight, but the room is already hazy at its edges.

  I stare at her face, but it’s as if the chalk-face I imagined earlier is being splattered by rain, washed away—splotch by splotch. She’s cut. I wonder what that would be like. There’s a Plath poem about a heart being stored in a box and not being able to know who you are. I try to remember it, to whisper it. My lips feel numb.

  And then, Jane is at my bedside, and she leans in close to pull up the sheet, as if tucking me in like a little kid. She whispers, her voice low and ragged with urgency, “Your father told you to get Jax out of that branch. If you don’t, he’ll die there.”

  I think, Won’t they all? and picture Jax’s face, his blue eyes, his stare, but I can’t hold it in place. The memory of his face blurs and then fades to pure light.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A HAND on my jaw.

  A dark room.

  One eye is forced open wide, drilled with light.

  Blinding.

  Then the other.

  My uncle’s face, blurred and dou
bling, leans over me.

  My eyes sting and tear. I blink to clear my vision.

  My wrists are still cuffed. The computer screen glows blue. My head aches, a deep unwavering pain.

  The small windows are dark.

  “Where’s my father?” My throat is rough.

  “I’ll never understand it, Alicia. Your father’s been gone all these years, and I’m the one who’s been here all along.”

  I lift my arms, cuffed to the bedrails. “It’s a relationship based on deep trust, right? Mutual respect? Honesty?” I hate my uncle for wasting years of my life, not telling me the truth—not preparing me. “I know what I am now. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t expect you to understand, but I really have wanted the best for you. And I couldn’t tell you things before. I can now,” he says, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat.

  “I want to know where Dad is. I want to see him.”

  “Your father’s dangerous.”

  “He didn’t seem dangerous to me.”

  “He’s dangerous to the prime. To this world we call our own,” Alex says. “Think about it. If you had access to all of these other worlds, wouldn’t you take advantage of the opportunity?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “These branches,” he says, “they’re useful, essential really, to scientific advancement. During World War II, we tested the A-bomb in the desert of the prime, Alicia. No one has to do that anymore. We have worlds for that. Weapons, alternative fuels, global economic market shifts, responses to emergencies of all kinds. We can test these things out in the branches, and when we do, we strengthen the prime. We’re saving lives.”

  I remember the TV footage of the nuclear bomb going off when the old man was stitching up my gunshot wound in that old hotel room, and then the drone I saw in one of those worlds, the people in hazmat suits, the quarantine camp in the world where Jax is, where my mother is dying. “You think the people in those worlds are lab rats?”

  “Do you want us to play out the apocalypse in the prime? Right now, for example, there’s a branch in which a vaccination called RO Two was tested on a virus. Heard of it?”

  I shake my head no.

  “The virus was developed in a test tube. Biological warfare. It only exists in two locations in this world. Well, as far as we know. And no one has any defense against it. If it fell into the wrong hands here, it would decimate the world’s population in three to four years. So we tested the RO Two vaccine in a branch world. It didn’t work. The company has developed another vaccine, and we’ll test it in another branch until we get it right. And the branches aren’t going to survive if the prime doesn’t. They depend on the prime as their main source. If we’re not healthy, they’re not healthy.”

  “And what does my father have to do with this?”

  “Some people can’t see the value in what we’re doing. Progress always finds resistance, and, yes, your father plays a large role among them. They’re just a bunch of thugs and petty mobsters, really.” Alex stands up, paces. “I’ve had people hunting him down. My own brother. You can’t know how that feels. But I had to, and I’ve got him nailed in every world he has access to. Do you know why he came to your birthday party after all these years?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s hard to say this.” Alex runs his hand over his closely cropped hair and sighs. “But he showed up because you’re finally of some use to him.” He picks up a folder sitting on the computer’s keyboard, opens it, and picks up a stack of photographs. “Your father knows you’re about to get some power and he needs you to get something for him. You think he’s been holding on to these pictures out of nostalgia? He was hoping to show them to you, offer you a little proof of how much you’ve bonded in every world except this one. But he’s been playing you, Alicia. What do you really know about him? What are your actual memories of him as a dad?”

  Would my father just use me? My head is ringing. I push it back into the pillow. I suddenly see all of my father’s worlds in a twisted way. What kind of father lets his daughter run around in a sinking cruise ship while being hunted down by men with guns? What kind of a father leaves his daughter with her grandfather in a world boiling with chemical fires or where the television loops an image of a mushrooming nuclear bomb?

  And what kind of father abandons his daughter when she’s just a toddler? Abandons her and doesn’t come back for a dozen years, and then only when he needs her? All my old fear and anger surfaces quickly, like it’s been waiting for my father to disappoint, to prove he’s unreliable, never loved me, and is just going to abandon me all over again. “No,” I say. “He’s not using me. That’s not true.” I can’t give up on him, because it means giving up on some part of myself.

  Alex puts the pictures in the pocket of his lab coat. “He didn’t mention something that’s important to him? A certain kind of book that’s been in our family for generations? My father was supposed to give that book to me, Alicia. Did he tell you what’s in it?”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t want Alex to know what I’ve been told.

  “All of the old spandrel families, all of their access points, all of their triggers. The atlas unlocks worlds, Alicia. The possibilities are endless.”

  “Use your own damn worlds for your experiments!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s genetic. If your father has blue eyes, maybe you won’t, but maybe your brother will.”

  “You’re not a spandrel.”

  He shakes his head.

  “So you just sell off spandrels’ worlds? I guess it would be nice for you to have the atlas, too? Not just my father.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me as much as you do,” Alex says.

  I lean forward, held back by the restraints. “Bullshit! If you care so much about me, why do you have me locked up here? And”—I think of Sprowitz pushing the gun under his own jaw—“you sent Sprowitz to drag me in. He works for you. Did you set Sprowitz up across the street from me, too?”

  Alex nods calmly. “Sprowitz was supposed to keep an eye on you. Maybe help create a situation where you’d have to make a real choice. Have you branched already?”

  I keep quiet.

  “You did.”

  I don’t respond, and Alex presses his thin lips together and shakes his head. He turns toward the darkened window. I can see his reflection in the glass, his face shadowed with anger. “Stubborn, like your father.” He sighs, pacing. “If you really are like him, Alicia, then you might not even just be an ordinary spandrel. You might be one of the rare ones, and it’s one of the rare ones that we might need.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some rarities can move a physical object between branches. They can piggyback things, sometimes even people. A spandrel with the power to piggyback can even bring a nonspandrel into another world.”

  “So my father could piggyback you into another world if he wanted.”

  “I never asked him to. I believe in loyalty—to people and to your world. Your father took off when he was around your age. When I was twenty, he showed up again. He was already leading multiple lives, jumping from one branch to another. When one life got too hard, he’d leave—dodging responsibility, taking the easy route, hopping from world to world. I wish he’d never found us again. But I’ve stayed. I’ve been loyal.”

  Should I wish that my father never showed up in the backyard with the birthday present? Maybe it wasn’t much of a present after all. Maybe he gave it to me only to help me do what he wants me to do.

  “Tell me what it feels like, moving between your father’s worlds.” Alex reaches into his pocket and pulls out the small flashlight he used to check my eyes. He points it at the floor and clicks it on and off and on again. “Is it like running away?”

  I think about how I would sometimes lean into those worlds, hoping to disappear. But it’s not like running away. If anything, it�
��s like running toward.

  “Your father was good at running away,” Alex says. “I wouldn’t have done that to you. I never would.”

  I can’t help but defend my father. “Maybe he didn’t do that to me, either.” The birthday pool party, the bulldog puppy, the butterfly beating its wings while clinging to a stick—those were real, weren’t they?

  Alex turns and walks toward me. “You know there’s one world that he’s dead in, Alicia. I’ve heard spandrels can sense the deadness of a world’s creator. Isn’t there a world where you just don’t feel him anymore?”

  I refuse to answer, but he’s right. Jax’s world. I’ve never sensed my father in it.

  “He lives a dangerous life and it caught up with him there.”

  I don’t know whether or not to mourn a version of my father that I never knew existed. I feel the grief anyway—even though I don’t understand it. I want my head to stop hurting. I want my uncle to stop talking. I want to close my eyes and start over. But I can’t. The questions are in my head. “Are all of my father’s worlds doomed?”

  “Worlds are like any living organism. Survival of the fittest applies to them as well. If enough people die, there aren’t enough to perceive the world. If there aren’t enough to perceive the world, it’s no longer fixed. It begins to crumble.”

  I think of Jax’s world, of the tree—half alive and half dead. Jax said it was an experiment, that the people only gave their attention to half the tree, the living half. Maybe enough people have died in that world to start the decaying process. That means the survivors—the few of them left, including one version of me, my dying mother, Alex, and Jax—will die with it.

  “But I exist in those worlds.…” I whisper. I feel like my chest is too full of blood. It’s pumping too hard.

  “You have to get on my side, Alicia. I can take care of you in a way your father can’t. Even when I made mistakes, I was always trying to do right by you and your mother. I was trying to protect you. What has your father ever done for you?”

  I stare at the ceiling. And then I see the picture in my head of my father and me as a toddler. The snowman. The flakes swirling around us. The picture I’ve looked at all my life.