The Man Who Turned Into Himself

by David Ambrose

  'There she is!' I pointed.

  He had already seen her, and was pumping his horn and grinding gears as he tried to force a way between the two lanes. It didn't work.

  I gave a yell of alarm as he swung back into the outside lane, making a beat-up old Chevy brake so hard that it was rear-ended by the car behind.

  Suddenly we were speeding up the middle of the highway, straddling the centre line, heading into a long, blind turn against fast traffic coming down.

  I cried out. 'For Christ's sake watch out! It happens just here . . . '

  Then, just as we drew level with Anne's car, I saw it — the truck that was going to kill her. It was going fast, too fast, but it seemed to be under control. For a moment I thought it wasn't going to happen. I thought we were going to get away with it.

  Then, for no reason I could see, the truck swerved towards us, its rig coming around with a terrible slow-motion effect, starting to jack-knife.

  Then the impact!

  I felt myself hurtling through the air, and everything went black.

  ***

  When I came to, I was lying by the roadside and somebody was putting something soft under my head. I looked around.

  There were no cops or ambulances, but the traffic was stopped in both directions and people were crowding out of the vehicles to see what had happened. Obviously I'd only been unconscious for a few seconds.

  I couldn't see Anne. I didn't know whether she and Charlie had escaped the crash, or whether we'd all finished up in it together — the truck, the Mustang, and her Citroen. For all I knew, I might have just made things worse by my meddling and killed Charlie, too.

  Then I saw them. She was carrying Charlie in her arms and pushing through the crowd towards me. She looked stricken, as though she'd seen the whole thing and was sure I must be dead.

  But then she saw my eyes open, looking at her. I saw her give a little cry of relief. I couldn't hear it, but I knew how it sounded. This was Anne. My Anne! I knew the sound that came from her throat when her lips moved like that.

  She ran to my side, still holding Charlie, and knelt by me.

  'Rick, my darling! Are you all right?'

  'I'm fine,' I said. I felt my neck move. And my head. I shifted my legs a fraction. I wasn't paralysed.

  'Lie still. There's an ambulance on its way. Oh, Rick, what on earth were you doing . . . ?'

  She had put Charlie down and was dabbing at a cut on my head. Charlie was holding on to her, silent and wide-eyed with fear and incomprehension.

  'Everything's okay, Charlie. Don't be scared,' I told him.

  But at the back of my mind a dreadful question was starting to hammer at me like a migraine.

  Where was Charlie's 'other' father? Anne's 'other' husband?

  Was he still in the car? Buried in the wreckage?

  Dead? Alive?

  Had no one found him yet?

  What would happen when they did? What would I say?

  From the moment I found myself standing in that washroom with my identical twin, I hadn't thought any further forward than preventing the accident. I certainly hadn't thought about what Anne was going to do with two husbands. Or Charlie with two fathers.

  I suppose that, in some instinctive way, I figured that those kind of logical contradictions were impossible. They couldn't be sensibly thought about, therefore they couldn't happen.

  Wasn't that what Tickelbakker had said? 'Anything possible can happen. But not anything conceivable.'

  Was it possible that the laws of physics would allow such an absurdity?

  But then they seemed already to have allowed it. There had been two of us.

  I heard sirens, running feet, the voices of authority. A moment later I was surrounded by cops and paramedics.

  'What about the other guy?' I said. 'How is he?'

  The paramedic looked alarmed, like he'd missed something vital. 'What other guy?'

  'In the car. The one who was driving.'

  A cop loomed over us. 'There was nobody else in that car, buddy. You were driving. We'll talk about that later. Now get him to the hospital.'

  I didn't argue. Warning lights were going on in my brain. Stay quiet, I told myself. Don't make the same mistake twice. Take your time, let things unfold. Don't give them any excuse to call you crazy.

  It was then, as they lifted me on to the stretcher, that I looked down at the rest of my body. I only caught a glimpse as they were wrapping a blanket around me, but it was enough.

  Emma, if you ever get this, you're not going to believe it. But you are going to get it. And in some way that will make you believe it.

  I'll find a way. I know I can do it. Because now I know — really know — that anything's possible.

  Anything.

  What I saw, Emma, when I looked down at myself, was this:

  I was wearing his clothes.

  Let me try and make this absolutely clear. At the moment the accident happened, the Rick/Richard that you knew, and whom I have been referring to as 'I', was wearing the clothes that Richard had been wearing in jail: blue jeans and a thick grey sweater.

  Rick — the Rick we had come back to warn — was wearing a dark business suit that morning, with a pink shirt and a tie in red and black and with a touch of blue.

  And that's what I found myself looking down at as they lifted me on to the stretcher.

  The suit, the shirt and tie were torn and smeared with blood and dirt, but they were his clothes!

  And I was in them.

  So who the hell was 'I' now?

  ***

  'Rick . . . ?'

  'Mmmm . . . ?'

  'I don't believe you.'

  'I can't help that.'

  We were in bed back at Long Chimneys. Miraculously, I only had a few cuts and bruises, and they let me go home that night.

  'But . . . '

  I kissed her.

  'Don't interrupt.'

  'Sorry. You were saying.'

  'Believing it in theory isn't the same as believing it for real.'

  I sighed and stroked her hair, pulling her closer. 'You know what I think?' I said. 'I don't think it's important.'

  'How can you say that?' She looked up at me, and there was a note of protest in her voice. 'You abandon your meeting at the bank, climb out of a window so they'll probably think you're a lunatic and never lend you another penny — and all because you had this sudden "feeling" that I was going to have an accident.'

  'A feeling that was strong enough', I reminded her, 'to take me to exactly the spot where you happened to be, and which I couldn't have possibly known about — and at exactly the moment that a truck burst a tyre and jackknifed in the road. Now, if you've any other explanations besides telepathy, I'd like to hear them.'

  She was silent. We made love again. There was nothing more to say.

  ***

  Be honest, Emma. What would you have done in my place? Tell the truth? I doubt it.

  I'd given things a lot of thought in the ambulance and in the hospital. Finally I came to a conclusion:

  I am whoever I want to be.

  And I want to be Charlie's father and Anne's husband. Here, in this life, where everything is just the way it was — with one exception.

  Me.

  But that's my secret. No one will ever know.

  Anyway, I couldn't tell the truth even if I wanted to. You see, no one ever saw the two of us together. Not even the driver of the breakdown truck. He saw only one man at the roadside, and one man driving off like a lunatic.

  Don't ask me how all this can be. It just is.

  I'd rather be accused of driving like a lunatic than sounding like one.

  ***

  Actually, Emma, there's something else that I can't tell anyone but you.

  I've learned how to do it at will.

  Leap universes.

  Weeeeeee-eeeeee-eeeee-eeee-eee!!!

  It's amazing.

  You remember how I said to Tickelbakker that maybe the human mind w
as capable of doing for itself all the weird stuff that it dreams up? He thought I was losing it, suffering from shock, so I didn't push the point.

  But I was serious. And now I've proved it.

  Emma, I've been visiting other universes. Once you've done it a couple of times, it's relatively easy. You don't need to be hypnotised. You don't even have to meditate. All it takes is a moment's concentration. Of a very special kind, admittedly. But it's not difficult. My technique isn't perfect yet and I sometimes miss the target universe. But I've learned something very important:

  You can't change anything.

  All you can do is transplant yourself into one of the alternatives.

  For instance, this universe that I'm in now, the one I use as home base, is not the same as the one in which Anne dies. It branches off from that one at the point where 'I' get back and confront myself in the washroom at the bank. From that moment on, I'm in a different universe. Everything in it is different, even if only minutely. This is the universe where Anne does not die.

  Correction, one of the universes where she does not die. The Anne who survives is as close to the other Anne — my Anne — as a clone, but she's not the same Anne.

  And that other universe, the one where Anne dies, is still there. I'm still a widower looking after Charlie in it. I still have the dream of becoming part of Richard again and killing Anne and Harold. But, in that universe, I wake up from it. It's just a bad dream.

  And they do fine — that Rick and Charlie. I stayed in his head just long enough to be sure. He gets over the Emma thing in a month or two, and even agrees to be Harold's best man at the wedding. That's partly because by then he's met a girl who . . . but that's another story.

  The point I'm making, Emma, is that you can never get back to where you were. Even if I got back into the 'me' that you were dealing with on that day when I died, from that moment on 'we' would be in a different universe, you and I, with a different 'me' and a different 'you'. Only marginally different. But all the same, different.

  That's the one frustration. You can't go back. The universe you want to change goes on just the way it would have — except that 'would have' is a distortion caused by a language that was neither formed out of, nor is capable of dealing with, the reality I am talking about.

  God, Emma, I know that in shrink talk these are the ravings of a madman. But you're different. That's why I want to tell you all this. (If only I could. Incidentally, Emma, in one universe you and I are married. In another we're lovers. There's one where we . . . but no, that must be 'their' little secret.)

  By the way, there's another thing I want to tell you. I've now learned how to move backwards and forwards in time — not as far in either direction as I'd like yet, but I'm improving. I think, if I wanted to, I could spend weeks, months or even years in one of my other lives, then return to home base where no time at all had passed. If I kept on doing it, it would be a form of immortality. Almost. But I'm not sure I want that. Left to themselves, all the versions of me will come to their natural end. Maybe that's how I'll leave them.

  Still, for the moment, I'm enjoying the travelling. Some of the small differences between neighbouring universes can be interesting, but they can also get boring after a while. It's a little like an endless game of Trivial Pursuit. You know — who got the Vivien Leigh role in that 'other' version of Gone With The Wind? Or who was president in place of Jimmy Carter? Who cares? And it doesn't make a lot of difference.

  But some of the more distant universes . .. now they are extraordinary!

  I think I've glimpsed Heaven. I know I've had a whiff of Hell.

  They exist.

  There is no 'Time'.

  All things are contained within a grain of sand.

  Many suspect these things are true.

  But I know. I have seen and touched them.

  Yet I always come back to Anne and Charlie.

  And they never know I've been away.

  ***

  Anne will be having the baby soon. I'm excited about that. Of course, I realise that he's (we know it's a boy) not entirely my son. Genetically, yes. But he's the son of the man Anne married, and I am — in a sense — someone else.

  But I mustn't let myself dwell on that. When I find this depressing sense of secret alienation beginning to envelop me, I go on my travels again.

  On the whole I stick now to a fairly small circle of other universes and other selves. These are all versions of what I call the 'essential me'. I suppose in a sense I've created them. They all branch off from various aspects of the me I was when I first talked to you. So in a sense they're all alienated from their worlds in the way I am from mine, which is comforting.

  We're like friends popping into one another's houses without knocking. Our lives are so nearly identical that we amuse ourselves by comparing minute differences of detail. For instance, last Tuesday one of us sneezed at breakfast, but nobody else did. That was the only difference we could find.

  Imagine, a whole universe hanging on a sneeze.

  Sometimes, Emma, it's only thoughts like that that keep me sane.

  ***

  I'm very tired now, Emma. I've finally reached you, but it wasn't easy.

  The next question is, how am I going to make you believe me?

  I think I know how.

  Reach out and touch me, Emma. Reach out and touch my face. Now . . .

  POSTSCRIPT

  Jo darling,

  So there you have it. You've read it — and the obvious question you're asking yourself is, if Hamilton never regained consciousness before he died, how did I get all that stuff? When did he talk to me?

  Well, the truth is that he did regain consciousness, in a sort of way. Only I knew, and I couldn't tell anybody because of the sort of way that it was.

  You remember that Hamilton was in coma for seventeen days. During that time I visited him frequently because, inevitably, I felt at least partly responsible for what had happened. I had taken a certain risk, albeit in the interest of helping my patient, but it had gone badly. I felt obliged to do everything I could to salvage the situation.

  The day I'm talking about was the seventeenth day of his coma, the day he finally died. It was a Monday. I'd been in the hospital for my usual clinic, and afterwards I stopped by Hamilton's room. I sat there talking to him the same way I'd been doing since it happened, playing some of the tapes we'd made in his earlier sessions, going over what we'd talked about, trying to find that line between coma and trance and bring him back. I suppose I didn't expect any more success than usual, because when the time came to go and I heard some kind of movement, I just assumed there must be somebody else in the room with us — somebody who must have been there the whole time, because I hadn't heard them come in.

  I felt it was kind of creepy that they'd just been there, listening, saying nothing, not moving all that time. I called out, 'Who's there?' But nobody answered.

  I asked again. Still no reply. And then I heard a voice say, 'Emma . . . ?'

  It was his voice. Weak, but unmistakably his voice. He was out of the coma.

  'Richard?' I said. No reaction. So I tried, 'Rick?'

  I heard him chuckle. 'Whichever,' he said.

  'How are you feeling?'

  'Oh . . . that's a little difficult to describe.' There was something in his voice — I don't know how to put it — as though he was somehow amused by the whole situation.

  Then he said something very strange. He said, 'It took me a while to figure out how I got that crack on the head.'

  That made me think. He hurt his head when he fell, but that happened when he was in deep trance. It was a relatively superficial injury — a consequence of going into coma, not the cause of it.

  Suddenly I heard him chuckle again, as though he knew what I was thinking.

  'You're wondering', he said, 'how a guy in a coma knows he's got a crack on the head? That's part of what I'm here to tell you, Emma. Have you got that little tape recorder of yours?'

&
nbsp; 'Yes.'

  'You'd better switch it on.'

  I felt for the bedside table where I'd put it and pressed record.

  'Is it running?' he asked.

  I told him it was. And he began. 'Emma, this is for you. It's only fair you should know what happened. That much I owe you . . . '

  You have read the rest, right down to: 'Reach out and touch me, Emma. Reach out and touch my face . . . '

  I did. I reached out . . . and I felt for the bed . . . and I felt my way up to his face . . . and I touched him.

  And I knew right away that he was dead.

  I checked his pulse, though I knew there was no point. Later we were able to determine at exactly what time his heart had stopped. He had been dead a full twelve minutes before I entered that room. I had been talking to a dead man.

  But that wasn't possible. I had the tape. I could prove what had happened. Other people would hear it.

  I rewound it. And listened.

  The words were exactly the words I had heard, the words you have read. 'Emma, this is for you. It's only fair you should know what happened.' And so on.

  The only thing different was the voice.

  It was my voice.

  Of course I couldn't believe it, and simply didn't believe it at first. I fast-forwarded, rewound, skimmed the tape back and forth from end to end, persuading myself that I would find his voice somewhere if only I searched hard enough.

  But in the end there was no escaping the truth. I had hallucinated. I had heard his voice in my head, but the voice that spoke his words was my own.

  I fought my panic. I could feel reality giving way under my feet.

  Just suppose, I said, just suppose for the sake of argument that all that stuff about parallel worlds, and about his learning to hop between them, just suppose that was all true. Given that, then getting into my head, as he'd got into Richard's, wouldn't have been all that unlikely.

  But even allowing that it was possible, why would he do it?

  To show it could be done, yes. But why was he so keen to show me ? Out of gratitude, like he said? 'That much I owe you'?