The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  The eight-year-old Jemma had recognized me somehow. That look. It was the same look she’d given me when I sat down at my desk in the second world and discovered she was my girlfriend. Like we shared a secret.

  Suddenly, it was like someone had grabbed my heart with a cold hand. Where did I live? It was seven years earlier. My family hadn’t moved here yet. Except that we obviously had in this version of reality. But if we had, what were the chances it was to the same place?

  For a few minutes, I couldn’t move. Another panic attack, but now I knew what it meant. And then, with a rush of warm blood in my brain, it occurred to me—like a file suddenly uploaded—that I must know my way home. A version of me lived here. This was my world. I just had to step out of my old self’s way of thinking and get into the new one. At least for long enough to get home.

  Was this what Gordon meant by floating?

  In this weird way of using my second mind to navigate, I found my way home, the way I suppose dogs and cats do. To my great consternation, but maybe not surprise, I didn’t live in the same building on Hudson Street, but two blocks over on Mohawk. I had never seen the place, but there I was, certain as anything. Out of habit, I checked in the front zipper pocket in my backpack where I always keep my house keys, and there was indeed a set of keys there. Not the same keys I remembered, though.

  One key fit the lock on the gate, the other one—the building’s front door. I guessed it would also fit the apartment. A baby wailed somewhere down the hall, and from somewhere else, the stupid music from the Teletubbies tinkled. I put the key in the door of number 1D and turned it. I didn’t figure it would be very natural to knock on my own door. My heart pounded as I pushed through and into a little entryway—what I’d heard my mom call a foyer.

  It was dark, but light leaked in from just around a corner. I didn’t hear any voices, but the kitchen sounds came from deep inside, and the smell of pork chops cooking. I tiptoed in, not even bothering to take off my jacket because I didn’t know where to put it. I felt like a thief in my own house.

  The light was coming from the living room, and as it revealed itself, I recognized my dad’s old leather armchair, which he’d told me had belonged to his father. A couple of other pieces of furniture were familiar, but only a couple. A lamp, and the carved wooden table it sat on. But the sofa—no way. It was a huge, lime green thing with oversized cushions, the sort my real dad would’ve said belonged on Pee Wee’s Playhouse, which was a show I’d only seen on YouTube. The dining room table was small and round and had a glass top, and something about it tickled my memory. Was this the table my parents had had when I was a toddler?

  The floor creaked under my feet, and a voice called out, “Jerrold, honey…is that you?”

  How do people describe raw terror? Usually by reference to what human biology teachers call “the excretory system,” right? Was it possible I was in the wrong apartment? No. No way. The chair. The lamp. They were part of my life. But who the hell was Jerrold?

  Before I could process this, a woman came bustling out of what must have been the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. At that moment, it was all I could do not to turn and run. I knew who she was, of course, but in the way you know that your mother in a dream is your mother even though she looks like an iguana.

  My real mother had brown hair. This woman’s hair was dyed some kind of red. My real mom was almost too skinny. This woman was more…curvy, not like a Playboy model or anything, but more filled out, as if maybe she’d been doing time at the gym. And she was younger, even the way she walked, but I should have expected that. Seven years younger. But under all that, yeah, it was my mom.

  “Oh thank God, Jerrold,” she said. “I’ve been worried sick. Where were you?”

  And so I learned that my parents had called me Jerrold in another life. I suppose they thought that with the ‘J’ and the ‘double-R’ it was cooler, but it wasn’t a name I would give my kid.

  I’m not sure how long I stood there, frozen in the half-shadow of the entryway. Finally, I decided to go with an answer and see what happened.

  “I’m sorry, mom,” I said. “I met a new kid and we went to get a Julius.”

  She seemed to buy that, but added, “This is why you have a cell phone. Use it.”

  I nodded, but the thing was, I didn’t have a phone.

  “Or did you let the battery run out again?” She came over to where I stood, unzipped the small pocket on my backpack, and lo and behold: she took out a cell phone. “Oh, Jerrold,” she said. “It’s not much good if you don’t turn it on.”

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” I said. I almost asked where it was, then instantly realized that I knew. There seemed to be about a half a second’s delay in these realizations, as if it took a little time for the signal to travel across the boundary between worlds.

  “Okay, honey. Dinner in fifteen.” She watched me cross the room. “You can take your backpack off now.”

  I didn’t answer, but before I closed the bathroom door, I turned and said, “Where’s dad?”

  My new, red-haired, curvy mom didn’t say a word, but I knew from the expression that came over her face that something was wrong. As fast as I could, I closed the door, slipped off my backpack, and leaned against the sink to get my wind back. I stared down at the drain, imagining that my life was going down it. It even gurgled at me.

  I turned on the cold water and splashed some on my face. As I came up, I naturally looked in the mirror, and if I didn’t scream, it’s only because no sound would come out of my throat.

  The kid looking back at me from the mirror was my age—that was, fourteen at this juncture—and genetically speaking, I guess he could have been my brother, but not my twin. He had a different nose, for one thing. Not big, exactly, but fleshier than mine. My nose was thin and kind of boney, my dad’s nose. Also, my real skin was what people call ‘fair,’ which is to say I was pretty much of a white boy. The kid in the mirror had a kind of natural tan. More like my mom’s Mediterranean skin. And his mouth was fuller, more pillowy. Like some fashion model or a rock star.

  It was the last observation that did it. I couldn’t deal with those lips. It felt like having a prosthetic face on that I couldn’t peel off.

  I didn’t think. I didn’t say anything. And if I had really needed to go to the bathroom before, that was all forgotten now. I hefted my backpack onto one shoulder, scuttled out into the hall, and then ran the hell out of that apartment, my red-haired mother calling after me. At that moment, I didn’t care. She was calling after somebody named Jerrold.

  It’s only out on the street that it occurred to me. What do you call running away from home when your home isn’t your home and you aren’t you?

  You call it a living nightmare.

  hen you make a snap decision, you’re never prepared for the snap-back, but as soon as I’d run a block and stopped to catch my breath, I knew I was in trouble. The only place I could possibly have gone was Gordon’s, and I really didn’t know where he lived. The loneliness crept over me like a cold, slimy thing. I was in my neighborhood, but I might as well have been in North Korea.

  I felt my face, and it was the face of the kid in the mirror. The lips and the nose, like a Halloween mask, or some fungal growth. But they weren’t either. They were me in this world. And me in this world was a kid whose dad didn’t come home anymore. And the story wasn’t good.

  The only way I could figure my red-haired mom’s expression when I asked about him was that either they were divorced—or he was dead.

  That’s when I started to cry. For my dad, and for a hundred different reasons. The wind snapped a budding branch across my face. It stung my eyes, and the tears came even faster. Close by, a Chicago Police car whooped its siren, and it felt like it was for me. Jacobus Rose, fugitive of the multiverse. I didn’t belong here. I was an interloper, and that felt like a crime. So I did what criminals do. I ran.

  I ran down Hudson, past the apartment building that wasn’t mine
anymore, then down to Laramie, past the apartments of friends who weren’t my friends anymore. The tears fogged my eyes and the headlights and streetlamps blurred and blazed like new stars. When a bunch of drunk teenagers blocked the sidewalk, I ran straight across all four lanes of North Avenue, and then kept running, straight into the part of my neighborhood that people called “the projects,” aka the place where people too poor to live on our side of North Avenue lived and we only went sometimes to get cheap stuff at the Dominick’s supermarket because my mom didn’t think we were rich enough for Whole Foods. I wasn’t thinking. Probably if I had been, some little alarm bell would have gone off in my head when the streets got dark and the buildings got shabby, and the cars parked at the curb came to look like old rusted ships in a harbor that nobody uses. I was in No Man’s Land.

  If there was any logic to my course, it might have been in the hope that I could get to Dominick’s, which was open twenty-four hours and where the surroundings were familiar. Maybe some part of me thought I could just hang out there, walking up and down the aisles until it was time to meet Gordon again. But I’m not sure you can call that logic. It was more like desperation.

  Thankfully, the supermarket was there in its normal place in the Division Court Plaza, a high-toned name for a pretty tacky place. The Starbucks that was there in my world hadn’t been built yet, and the Blockbuster Video that had shut its doors was still doing good business—people walking in and out with DVD’s that would be junk in a few years’ time. I headed into the supermarket, and for a few minutes, it felt good just to be inside, with other people who didn’t know anything about me and wouldn’t care about my wrong face even if they did.

  That good feeling lasted about a minute. I’d never before realized how sad supermarkets are at night, at a time when you should be home with your family, cozy and playing a good game or reading a book. None of the people in the store had friends or family with them, and even though they pretended to be interested in the stuff on the shelves, I could see right through that to the loneliness inside. Most of them were probably going home to apartments they rented alone, to eat their frozen pizza while watching reruns of Desperate Housewives. The greenish fluorescent lighting in the store made them all look like zombies.

  The second thing that killed any good vibes was that I realized I was hungry and that I had no money. Gordon had paid for my Orange Julius when I’d realized that my pockets were empty. I had a sudden certainty that the only thing that could take the ache of isolation away was a chocolate donut. And right now, that reality was as far away as my real home.

  Just to torture myself, I wandered over to the bakery aisle, where whatever remained of the morning’s fresh pastries would already be stale. An old guy in the white Dominick’s uniform was taking the empty trays out from the display cases and sliding them into slots on his cart. Sitting behind the glass on an otherwise empty tray were two leftover donuts: one with sprinkles, and one chocolate. The old guy looked at the tray for a second, as if thinking, “Nobody’s gonna buy these day-old donuts. Maybe I should toss them.” Then he shook his head, like, “Nah. Somebody might,” and he left them there to torture me some more.

  I had seen homeless people begging for money out in front of the Dominick’s before. Sometimes, if my mom or dad saw me staring, they’d put a few quarters or a dollar bill in my hand to give to the poor raggedy guy or bag lady. The first time I did it, I was pretty nervous, but they always said something like “God bless you,” and to have somebody ask God to bless you was a reward that was certainly worth a few quarters. I asked Dad once if there were really folks in the world with no money at all, and he told me there were. Occasionally, he said, there were those who went from store to store and who were kind of like professional beggars, but most had lost everything, or been mistreated, or sick, or had run away. Homeless, like me.

  I tell you all this because I had decided that begging was the only way I was going to get that donut. If I’d had my real face on, I never would’ve considered it. Not in a million years. But nobody in this world would know it was me. And after tonight, they’d never see me again. I walked back out through the automatic doors and scanned the long sidewalk in front of the store. People were coming and going to their cars, but there was one old black lady wrapped in so many layers of rags that it was impossible to tell if she was fat or thin, and she had a sign that said, “Help Me.”

  I decide that if I stood in her vicinity, I might be more likely to make donut money. The good souls passing by might think that two good deeds were better than one. She gave me a look, not like I was moving in on her turf or anything, but more to say, “You, too, huh?” After that, she respected my privacy. I didn’t have a sign, or anything to put money in, so for a long time, I just stood there with my hands in my pockets, looking like a total idiot or a teenage drug dealer, whichever is worse.

  Finally, I stuck my hand out. Well, really, I just took my right hand barely out of my pocket and turned my palm up. It was a pretty lame attempt at panhandling. Anyhow, that’s when I saw the black kid. He was about my age, wearing a striped t-shirt and no jacket, and he was eyeballing me from behind a green van that was pulled up to the sidewalk. The look in his eyes was the same look that seven-year-old Jemma had given me, only this kid I was certain I’d never seen before.

  He disappeared for a minute, then popped out on the other end of the van. Finally, he got the courage to step onto the sidewalk, and leaned against a newspaper dispenser, looking me over.

  I put my hand back in my pocket. Then I turned as smoothly as I could and walked back into the store. Once I was in the door, the walk turned into more of a beeline. All I could think about was the donut. The donut was like a drug I had to have to restore some kind of comfort. I reached the bakery section and saw that the old guy had returned and decided that after all nobody was going to buy the day-old donuts, and had removed the tray and slid it into his cart. My donut was five minutes away from being garbage.

  Then the old guy made a fateful decision. He stepped away.

  Maybe he had to pee or something. Maybe it was his break time. Maybe he just figured that no one was desperate enough to steal a stale donut. He didn’t count on the desperation of the floater. With my heart pounding in my chest, I inched along the shelves on the opposite side until I got to the cart. Then I looked both ways, crossed over, and grabbed the donut.

  “Hey!” The old guy shouted from around the corner. “Hey, kid! Put that back, or I’ll call the security guard!” I won’t describe what I did next as thinking. It was more like what squirrels do when they run into the middle of traffic. I froze for an instant, then ran like hell. In the last two days, I had discovered I was a cheat and a rat in my alternative lives. Now, I was a thief, too.

  When I came around the end of the canned fruit aisle, I saw the black kid again. He must’ve followed me into the store. His eyes widened when I almost smashed into him, and for a nanosecond, something passed between us. He took off after me and came through the automatic doors just twenty feet behind me. I tore off into the parking lot, weaving and zigzagging around and between cars, a weight in my chest that must have been my heart. On the far end of the parking lot, the neighborhood got even darker and bleaker. Just empty buildings with broken windows that had once been factories or offices, places where people had worked before they lost everything. I thought that if I could get to Sheffield, I could head back north to the lights. The hope. Then I heard the shout.

  “Jerrold! Yo, Jerrold. Cool your heels!”

  Something about that voice.

  I ducked into an alley and slipped behind a dumpster. It was the black kid, all right. He was coming down the dark street and coughing like he’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes. The cough didn’t sound good. When he got within spitting distance, he stopped and called out.

  “Where you at, Jerrold? Ain’t nobody after you ‘cept me.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Mus’ be in some trouble, huh? Down here s
outh o’ North, stealing donuts. What’s up?”

  Something about his voice told me he wasn’t any threat. And besides that, I really needed a friend.

  “Do I know you?” I said, from behind the dumpster.

  “Know me? Know me? Now that hurts. You’re the only white kid ever had my back.”

  I stepped out into the alley. A yellowy lamp hung over a beat-up garage door on his left, and it outlined the shape of his face. After what the kid just said, it felt rude to ask his name. So I just stood there for a minute, staring at him. Then the name came out of me like an involuntary reflex.

  “Mose?” My lips spoke the word, even if my brain hadn’t. If I live to a hundred, I’ll never have as weird an experience as having someone else’s memories come into my head.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Moses DeWitt. Casimir Pulaski Middle School. Miss Hadley’s homeroom. Same as you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, like I was in a trance.

  “You run away from home, Jerrold?” Mose asked. “You in some trouble?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” I said.

  “First time I know a white kid from north of the avenue to run southbound.”

  “I think home kind of ran away from me,” I said.

  “Say what now?”

  “What about you? Did you run away?”

  “Now that’s what I’d call a permanent state of affairs,” Mose said. “See, my mama took up with a bad man. She don’t know how bad, ‘cause he makes me swear to keep quiet or he’ll cut me.”

  “Where’s your real dad?” I asked him.

  Mose lowered his head. “Somewhere that ain’t home.”

  “Mine, too,” I said.

  “Sorry to hear that. Now break me off a piece of that donut you pinched. I’m damn hungry.”

  I was more than happy to share. And the guilt I felt over stealing had just about killed my appetite. The way we each ate our halves was more like some kind of ancient breaking bread ceremony.