The Man Who Turned Into Himself

by David Ambrose

  Then I heard Emma's voice again — clear, soft, totally commanding. She was taking me further back. Back into unconsciousness. Back into the darkness that separated there from here, then from now. And I knew with utter, terrifying certainty where I was going to come out.

  Suddenly, just as my nerve failed, I sensed that I was not alone. I don't know how I knew. It wasn't knowledge of something at a distance, but an all-embracing certainty. Someone was addressing me. Not Emma. Not a voice of any kind. Another consciousness. Richard.

  Richard, who was supposedly in trance, sidelined until Emma chose to wake him, had been observing all along, deceiving both of us.

  'It's working,' he said. 'You're going back. That's what you wanted.'

  'I'm scared,' I said. 'Oh, God, I'm so scared. It's too alone, I can't be this alone. Help me!'

  Something in him snapped. A hidden rage burst forth like the blast of an exploding furnace, sending me tumbling and spinning into the long dark corridor that I had feared to enter.

  'Let go of me, you parasite! I don't want you here! Let go!'

  And suddenly, with a terrible certainty, I knew what was going to happen. I understood his willingness to brave ridicule by coming to Emma with a story that he knew would sound absurd. He didn't care about that any more.

  'Richard,' I screamed, 'don't! Your anger! Don't! Don't give way to your anger!'

  'It's none of your damned business!' he screamed back, his fury booming down the long, dark, slippery blackness. 'Get back to your own life, leave me to mine.'

  'Don't destroy it!' I yelled back, not sure that he could hear through the roaring of his thoughts — those awful, bleak, vengeful and defeated thoughts. 'Don't buy the gun!'

  The roaring stopped, switching instantaneously into an equally appalling, deafening silence.

  It was still dark, but it was a different darkness. It was the darkness of my eyelids crushed together against the unendurable truth.

  I opened them. My scream of grief and primitive defiance still echoed in the air, and my wife's blood lay thick and crimson on my hands.

  Her eyes, in the tangled wreckage of her car, had the glazed permanence of death on them.

  8

  The hands of strangers drew me gently back. With quiet tact they turned me from the horror that transfixed me, paralysed my will, immobilised my limbs.

  A woman was holding Charlie. His eyes were on me, unblinking and expectant. I wondered numbly what he wanted. To make it all right? To tell him not to be afraid, it was only a game? I felt a surge of anger at the cruelty of such an expectation, and at the same time stumbled forward and grasped him tightly in my arms. I clung to him for comfort and heard the sound of my own sobbing.

  He knew now. He understood that it was not a game.

  We moved together without moving. Decisions were suspended. Time and space curved around us into a closed mosaic of necessary events. I found that I was answering questions to a sympathetic cop: 'Hamilton. Yes, my wife. Anne. Middle initial E, for Elizabeth. Long Chimneys, Chapel Plains . . . Yes, if you would take us there . . . '

  I realised that a police woman had taken Charlie and was holding him. She had removed her hat, revealing coarse blonde hair that fell forward, softening her face. She was talking to him, distracting him. She handed him back to me, but got with us into the car that was to take us home.

  'Call . . . ? Oh, thank you, if you would. Please call . . . please call my lawyer, Harold Allison.'

  ***

  I refused all medication. The fear of losing what fragile grip on reality I had was greater than my need for comfort. I knew, and yet I didn't know, what was happening. 'It's shock,' I told myself. 'Don't talk, react. Answer questions. Yes. No. Would you? Thank you. You're very kind.'

  Harold arrived, ashen-faced. I was sitting with a cup of herbal tea that someone had put into my hand. I must have held it out awkwardly, not knowing how to coordinate my movements, wanting to rise but for some reason being unable to. He took the cup away and sat with me. I think he held me for a moment, I'm not sure. I had lost all sense of being touched.

  Or maybe it was just Harold's touch. Maybe a part of me that wasn't sure yet what was shock and what was memory had blocked out Harold's touch.

  He took care of everything, of course, even calling an agency and finding a nurse for Charlie. Anne's parents would be coming from Maine for the funeral, but she had not been close to them and I would not have dreamed of asking them to take care of our son. My parents would not be coming from England for the funeral. My father was recovering from pneumonia, and my mother was reluctant to leave him. 'Yes, that's very thoughtful, thank you Harold — a nurse would be a good idea.'

  How do you explain to a child that his whole world has changed? That in the span of a few seconds fate has denied him the right to be sure of anything ever again? How do you help a child make his peace with something that grown-ups still hide from?

  Such questions for the moment pushed all else aside. My own bewilderment found its reflection in his and brought us close together. I debated briefly whether I should lie to him, but saw no way that it would help assuage his sense of loss. And I was certain that Anne would not have lied.

  'You mean she isn't coming back?'

  'No, Charlie.'

  'Not ever?'

  'Not in the same way. But in another way she'll always be with us. In our hearts. If we listen very carefully, sometimes we'll be able to hear her there.'

  He twisted his hands, rubbing the palms together and inspecting them with intense, abstracted concentration.

  'Will she be able to hear us if we talk to her?'

  'Yes, Charlie, I think she will.'

  He was silent and very still. I could see there were tears in his eyes and he didn't know whether to fight them back or shed them. I put my arms out to him.

  'Charlie, why don't you come and sit close with me for a while. Let's both try and listen for her, shall we?'

  ***

  That night, when Charlie was finally asleep, I stretched out in a hot bath and tried to think. I knew one thing for sure: there was no one I could talk to. That way lay the Killanins and the private sanatoriums of this world as well as that.

  I thought of Richard. What was happening to him now? Would I ever know?

  In bed I browsed idly through a couple of newspapers. President Lloyd Bentsen had made an optimistic speech on his return from the Middle East. On an inside page a short paragraph announced that an obscure ex-actor called Ronald Reagan had died after a fall at a rest home in Burbank.

  Flipping through television channels I watched the nation's favourite grandmother, Marilyn Monroe, duelling wittily with Carson on the 'Tonight Show' as they watched clips from her classic comedy series of the seventies. Struck by a sudden sense of guilt at being amused by such trivia on the day of my wife's death, I switched the television off.

  But for me this was no longer truly the day of my wife's death. In my terms Anne — my Anne — had been dead for many weeks. I had been living with my sense of loss which, though irreparable, was now a fact of life. The pain was still there but, despite the shock of returning to the accident that morning, a layer of scar tissue was already in place.

  The next few days passed in the formalised limbo of bereavement: the funeral, the grief shared with relatives and friends, the condolences offered with awkward sincerity and accepted with muted thanks. I had asked that, in place of floral tributes, donations be made to Anne's housing trust, which I knew she would have wanted. The only flowers on her grave were two large wreaths from myself and her parents. I was touched by the size of the turn-out and, despite the fact that neither of us had been notably religious, by the few well chosen words delivered by our local minister.

  I thought it better that Charlie did not attend the funeral. The nurse found for him by Harold was a godsend, taking up residence in one of our guest rooms and showing an extraordinary warmth and tact in all she did. Harold, too, was a tower of strength, there whenev
er I needed him and brushing aside all thanks.

  But throughout it all my sense of isolation bore in on me until I felt almost suffocated. Ironically, it was even greater in this, my own world, than it had been in Richard's. Things once familiar had become strange. I found myself constantly comparing even the simplest of objects with its counterpart 'over there'. Was it the same or different? I was like a man who, through some accident or illness, has lost all sense of how to do things that the rest of the world take for granted, and now performs each task with a careful and unique deliberation.

  During sleepless nights I asked myself if I could possibly have imagined everything that had happened since Anne's death. Could it be that others had been through the same experience? Had I merely suffered some rare but known reaction to extreme shock? Where the mind was concerned, anything was possible, but I did not believe it. I believed in my experience. And I wanted to talk about it.

  Then one morning I awoke with a start from a restless doze, and realised that there was one person I could talk to. I rang him and proposed lunch at Chez Audran.

  ***

  Tickelbakker sat across from me in a scene which uncannily mirrored the one I had so recently experienced in that other world. The only difference was that here he was talking with an old friend, not with a stranger. He was subdued out of respect for my bereavement, and my hesitancy in starting up a conversation did not seem as odd as it normally would have. He saw before him a man trying to cope with emotional devastation, seeking temporary escape in the abstract questions which had so often absorbed us in the past.

  'Parallel worlds?' he said, seizing on the topic I had casually tossed out for discussion. 'It must be five years since I wrote that piece for Particle/Wave.'

  'I just happened to pick it up last night,' I lied. 'Fascinating. Has anything happened to confirm or disprove the theory since you wrote about it?'

  'On the contrary. They're even talking now about building a quantum computer that would do half its calculations in this universe and half in a parallel one simultaneously.'

  'But a lot of people are still sceptical?' I suggested.

  'Only because it's such a mind-boggling idea. But it's just as consistent with everything we know as it was twenty-five years ago.'

  'In other words, every time a sub-atomic particle reacts with the system around it,' I said, rehearsing the argument with careful precision, 'whether in you or me, this table, in a rock on Mars, or on an asteroid in some hitherto undetected solar system way across the universe, then the whole of reality splits into a near-twin of itself — identical except for what that particular sub-atomic particle is doing.'

  'There are good reasons for thinking that may be the case,' replied Tickelbakker, holding up his glass to examine the colour of the Vosne-Romanee '78 which had just been carefully poured into it.

  'So that means,' I went on, 'that every single combination of every sub-atomic particle in the universe that could happen actually does happen — somewhere.'

  'Right.'

  'Which means that every single combination of everything made up of these particles also happens — somewhere.'

  'Mm-hm,' he nodded, swallowing reverently. The condition and temperature of the wine appeared to meet with his approval.

  'So there are universes where Hitler won the second world war, America is still an English colony, and where — I don't know — pigs have wings. In fact where anything that could happen does happen.'

  'Anything possible, but not anything conceivable.'

  'I'm not sure I get that distinction.'

  'The possibilities are limited by the laws of physics. There may be universes in which pigs have wings, but I doubt whether they would be aerodynamically very successful.' He gave me his toothy, boyish grin across the table, glad to feel that he was helping take my mind off the tragedy I had suffered.

  'There's another thing I'd like to understand,' I said. 'I know these parallel universes are all wrapped up in supertime and superspace and don't run alongside each other like railway tracks, but what about the possibility of jumping from one to another? Could that ever be done?'

  'Well, that's what they're talking about with this quantum computer. But so far it's only an idea.'

  'But what about the possibility of, say, "me" in this universe getting across to another "me" in another universe?'

  'That's a little tricky. You could make it work in science fiction, but not for real.'

  'Why not?'

  'If you, this you, wanted to enter a parallel universe and remain aware of what was happening, you'd first have to travel backwards in time in this universe to the point where the universe you want to get into branched off from this one. And that,' he gave a dry little laugh, 'may be easier said than done.'

  'But nobody rules out the possibility of time travel,' I persisted. 'You published a piece only a few months back. You said that both quantum theory and general relativity permit time travel in theory.'

  'You've really been catching up on your reading, Rick. Heck, I think I could use a few sleepless nights myself.' Then, suddenly remembering the reason for my insomnia, he reddened and began mumbling a tremulous apology which I brushed aside impatiently.

  'You wrote about "wormholes" in spacetime,' I went on. 'You described how one could be made. Two metal plates at each end of a tube. Shoot one of them through a loop at nearly the speed of light and return it to its original place, and you find that less time has elapsed at that end of the tunnel than the other. A time machine!'

  'Theoretically possible. It only remains to solve the little practical problems — like shooting a metal plate through a loop at nearly the speed of light.'

  'You know the one thing you scientists never consider?' I was growing excited now. I could hear my voice rising with an insistent, almost hectoring tone. 'You're always dreaming up these fancy machines that can travel at the speed of light, or operate in two realities at once, but you always overlook the most extraordinary machine of them all — one which we already have full use of!'

  He looked at me curiously, not understanding what I was getting at.

  'The human mind!' I said.

  'I'm not sure I follow you.'

  'You entirely overlook the possibility that all your complex maths, with its arrows of time pointing in two directions, and all your theories and thought experiments with their impossible-to-realise physical demands, may only be reflections of things that the human mind is already capable of doing by itself — without any outside help.'

  'It's a point of view,' he commented a little drily, not wanting to argue with a man spouting nonsense as a consequence of emotional devastation.

  'I'm serious,' I said. 'No one fully knows how the human brain works. We know that it's made up, like the rest of reality, of this mysterious wave/particle duality. It's the human brain itself that has started probing this duality — probing it, questioning it, striving to understand the very stuff of which it's made. Who is to say that what lives in this brain, this thing full of curiosity and invention that we call "the mind", or even "the soul", is not capable of making this leap from one universe to another? After all, there are references to Many Worlds in all kinds of ancient religions. It isn't just something dreamt up by modern science.'

  'And how exactly would this mysterious mind mechanism work?'

  'Maybe through drugs, maybe through meditation or hypnosis, or maybe sometimes through emotion.'

  'Emotion? How d'you see that happening, Rick?'

  'For instance, through grief and denial after some terrible emotional blow — the death of a loved one, for example. Maybe sometimes, in the right circumstances, this can create sufficient — whatever — energy to send at least some part of the self spinning across time-space into a parallel reality, a reality in which that loved one has not died . . . but where the price to be paid may be other changes that are as hard or even harder to bear.'

  I realised he was staring at me, unblinking, his fork poised above his plate. I h
ad said too much and was running the very danger, even with him, that had led to such trouble in the other world. I forced myself to lean back in my chair and give an easy grin.

  'Hey, Mike, I know what you're thinking,' I said. 'It's written all over your face. Look, I'm just discussing possibilities, that's all. You're the one who's always saying keep an open mind. That's all I'm doing.'

  'Sure, Rick, I know.' He lifted a forkful of aiguillettes de canard to his mouth and chewed it ruminatively. I had the feeling he wasn't enjoying it as much as usual.

  9

  My lunch with Tickelbakker had been a mixed blessing. It had confirmed the reality of what had happened to me, but also underscored the unlikelihood of anyone ever believing it — even those, like Tickelbakker, best qualified to do so. It seemed as though everything conspired to increase my sense of isolation. I wondered how long my sanity could withstand the pressure.

  In my dreams that night the two worlds mixed in surrealistic patterns. Anne was at the centre of them: a combination of my Anne and Richard's. I knew even before waking what these patterns meant: the spectre of jealousy that I had cruelly dangled before Richard was returning now to haunt me.

  Charlie's nurse insisted on preparing breakfast for us both, although it was no part of her duties to do so. Her name was Peggy. She came from Kansas and was plump, well scrubbed, and with a broad, beaming face out of which shone pure good nature. My only regret was that, as she had warned me from the outset, she could stay only a few weeks before returning home to be married. But, as we sat around the table that morning, my thoughts were far from Charlie's ceaseless chatter, tuned though my ears were to listening for signs of distress or anxiety in him which I would do my best to deal with.