The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  The only thing I could think to shout when she was in hearing range was, “You made it!” And when she got closer, I said, “We thought you got stuck back there. Or somewhere between. You must be an amazing swimmer. How far out were you when you splashed down?”

  “I don’t remember splashing down,” she said, breathlessly. “I just came up out of the water. It felt like I came from the bottom of the ocean because my lungs were about to explode. And then I just started swimming. As far as I know, I’ve never done that before. Swim, I mean.”

  Mose was jumping up and down on the shore like a wild man, then suddenly he dropped down and started doing break dance moves on the sand. I hadn’t known he could do that, but then, I was learning a lot about my friends.

  “What matters is that you’re here,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She bobbed her head, still a little dazed. She looked around. “Where is here?”

  “We don’t know yet. We just got here, like, a half-hour before you. I mean, at least in the way time passes here…wherever we are.”

  “Is it an island?” she asked.

  “We don’t know that either. Mose said it might be Jamaica or someplace like that.”

  “So I guess the maps aren’t all that exact,” she said. “‘Cause I don’t see your friend.”

  “Nope. But if he turns out to be anywhere near here, I’m going to be really impressed. I mean, who could ever imagine this?”

  When we got to shore, the three of us just kind of fell into each other like wet seabirds and melted as if we were one person, even though we all knew that someone was missing from our nest. Then Mose said, “We better make some time before the sun goes down.”

  “I’m starving,” said Jemma. “It’s funny. In the other world, food was only what kept you alive, and it was always there, pumped into the hives. But now, I’m…I’m—” She clutched her stomach. “Hungry.”

  “You and me both,” said Mose. “And I’m hopin’ that this is somewhere in the Caribbean because you know what that means…”

  “What, Moses?” I asked.

  “Barbecue.” He smirked. “Jerk chicken. Jerk pork.” And I swear I could smell it.

  As we walked three abreast along that seemingly limitless white beach, hugging the surf because the sand was firmer there, the high coastal mountains began to slope down. It looked as if we might be approaching a bay, maybe even a port. The leafy trees, almost blue-green in color, which had covered the higher mountains now turned into sun-bleached brush with groves of palm trees. I noticed that some of the palm branches sagged with dark, heavy droplets—ovals the size of a melon. I squinted against the glare. Though I’d never seen them for real, I figured they could only be one thing.

  Mose saw them the same time I did. He broke into a run and let out a whoop, kicking up sand as he went.

  “Is it what I think it is?” I called out. And the call came back:

  “Coconuts!”

  I turned to Jemma and said, “Let’s go. Food.”

  Now, I’m fairly sure that Mose had never picked a coconut in his life, but after a few failed attempts at jumping to reach one, he did just what you’re probably supposed to do: he shinnied up the trunk, reached for the branch, and began to shake it. I arrived just in time for the first coconut to drop into my waiting hands. Jemma caught the second one, and within seconds, two more plopped down on the soft, sandy ground. Mose joined us and we sat down, pow-wow style.

  “What’s next, Tarzan?” I asked Mose.

  “Well, Jake, I don’t happen to have a coconut opener, and so…” He began to survey the area. “I’m gonna find me a nice, big rock.”

  “I’ll help you look,” I said.

  “Me, too,” said Jemma, getting up.

  She was the one to find it. Just the right size to grip, with a pointy end to crack the coconut’s hairy shell. Mose put out his hand to take the rock from her. “Want me to do it?”

  “That’s all right,” said Jemma. “Let me give it a try.”

  The first whack was a little tentative, like she thought it might splatter in her face. Once she realized how hard it was, she cocked her arm back and hammered it. On the third blow, a nice crack opened, and from there, it was just a matter of working it. There was juice, milky, semi-clear, running from the crack, and I watched her as she brought the coconut to her lips, leaned her head back, and took a first drink. She smiled, wiped her lips, and handed it to me. I drank, and Mose took the last of it.

  If I’d been back in my first world, and found a glass of coconut milk in the fridge, yellowy-white and watery with lots of floating pieces and coconut hair, I wouldn’t have touched it. But out here, in this world, it was as good as an Orange Julius. And once we dug out the snowy white coconut meat, I think we all felt the same satisfaction that our primitive ancestors must have felt.

  “Oh man,” said Mose through his chewing.

  “Best thing I ever tasted!” I gnawed off another chunk.

  “Amazing,” said Jemma. “I guess I’ve never had real food before. This…this tastes alive.”

  “It is,” I said. “Or it was…a few minutes ago. I think we killed it.”

  Mose smiled, but a look of concern crossed Jemma’s face.

  “Is that okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “It’s meant for that. It’s fruit. It’s—” I’d never thought of it this way, but I said, “kind of like an offering to us.”

  I watched the wonderment in her eyes turn into something like a memory, and I recalled how it had felt to be in Jerrold’s body and to have his memories suddenly pop into my head. That’s what was happening to her. Through her Personal Energy Field, she was recalling another world, where she’d understood the idea of “fruit.” The words came to me slowly, like a movie credit scrolling across my brain: we don’t live just one existence. We don’t realize it, because there are walls between the worlds and we can’t see through or over them. To be able to do that would probably make most people nuts. But we were different. We were the new humans. We could see the other worlds and still function in the one we happened to be in.

  And this, it came over me all at once, was what the switches were all about. They—or somehow, that mind that Orlong had talked about—were training us to be a different kind of human, and to live in a different kind of universe. One where we were aware that our existence wasn’t just a local thing, but spread out over all of reality. If your life sucked, you didn’t have to pray for another one: you already had it. Of course, I’ve since learned that it’s not quite that simple, but at that moment I felt my self expand like a cosmic balloon until it filled all of space and time. It felt—how can I say this—godlike.

  “I’m as big as the universe,” I said, half to myself.

  A nudge from Mose brought me back down to earth.

  “You okay, brother Jake? You trippin’ out? Maybe these aren’t the same coconuts they sell at the supermarket.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said. A thought came to me, and I looked at Jemma. “Have you ever heard the story of Adam and Eve?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Okay. It’s a story, remember, from a holy book called The Bible. It’s probably not the literal truth, but it’s some kind of truth because it’s been around for a really long time and people still tell it. It’s about the beginning of the world. My world, the one I started from. God makes the earth, and the seas, and plants fruit trees of every kind in a perfect place called the Garden of Eden. Then he makes a man and a woman. Adam and Eve. And puts them in the garden, and says, ‘Eat.’”

  “God?” she said quizzically. “You mean…like Vater?”

  “No, no,” I said. “Vater was just some dictator on a power trip. This God is more like…whoever put the switches in.” I paused. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what God is, or even if God is, but from what we’ve seen? Something’s out there, right?” I returned to the story.

  “So anyhow, this God of the Bible says to Adam and Eve, �
��You can eat any fruit in the garden except the fruit that grows from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you eat that, it will totally screw up the plan.’ But—the story goes—Eve’s curiosity got the better of her, and there was this serpent in the Tree that said, ‘Go ahead. Have a bite. Don’t believe what He told you.’ So she did. It was a big, crunchy apple, and she shared it with Adam. And all of a sudden, they could see way beyond the Garden. They could see a whole world full of knowledge, both good and bad. And God got really pissed and kicked them out of the Garden, and said, ‘Okay, smartasses. Now you think you know everything. But you know nothing. Go deal with it.’ I dunno. Maybe that God was a little bit like Vater!”

  Jemma thought deeply and then said, “Seems to me… Eve was just like us. She pulled the switch. She wanted to see what was out there.”

  I’d never heard the story turned around like that. Not that I’d thought about it all that much. My family wasn’t religious in the churchgoing sense. When I heard Jemma’s angle, it suddenly struck me that stories like Adam and Eve’s had to have many interpretations, just like the multiverse. That’s what kept them going for so long. They had some kind of truth in all times and places, and Jemma’s interpretation made sense for where we were. Back in Bible time, they might not have been prepared for the sort of truth we were seeing.

  “You might be right about that,” I told her. “If I had wanted to stay safe and cooped up, I never would have pulled that first switch.”

  Mose knitted his forehead. “You think God’s pissed off with us, too? You think maybe there’s some shit…we’re just not supposed to know?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m pretty sure that he—” (I thought about Orlong doing his sex change thing.) “Or she. Or it… wouldn’t show it to us if we weren’t supposed to see it.”

  “I think we better go.” Jemma wiped the juice off her hands. “I don’t like the dark.”

  “Hey,” I said. “You’ve got two Adams, Eve. You’re in good hands.”

  She gave me a smile that melted my insides. And then we moved on.

  After another fifteen minutes of walking, we rounded a small promontory. A crescent-shaped cove with a wide, sandy beach sheltered by hundreds of palm trees, came into view. In front of the wall of palms, and almost blending in with them, were what looked like grass huts. Populated huts. There was movement on the beach out in front of them.

  People. Standing, sitting, walking. Mostly sitting. Vegetating.

  What kind of people we couldn’t guess. After our last experience with the Reds, I was prepared to find a tribe of cannibals with Connor being cooked in a big stewpot over a fire. And so, we cautiously worked our way back into the trees so that we could approach without being seen. As we got closer and had a better look at things, my cannibal scenario began to seem less bizarre than the plain, ordinary facts. The moving figures on the beach were people in swimsuits—mostly, it seemed, girls in bikinis—and waiters in bow ties and black vests carrying trays to patrons sitting in beach chairs—trays loaded with the sort of tropical cocktails my mom and dad used to order at Trader Vic’s in Chicago. And in the middle of all of them, lounging in a Hawaiian shirt and bright orange Speedos with a pair of matching bright orange wraparound sunglasses with blue lenses, was Connor.

  A waitress in a bikini trotted over to him with a tray bearing three bluish-colored drinks in ginormous glasses with paper umbrellas sticking out of them. One of the drinks was for Connor, and the others—for the two incredibly beautiful girls who were sitting on the sand to either side of him and laughing like hell over some joke they must have been sharing. Now let me remind you that back in world one, Connor was exactly my age and, if anything, had less experience with girls than I did. He didn’t look like he’d aged any, but the girls hanging with him seemed to be circling eighteen. Not only that, they acted as if there was no place in the world they’d rather be. In fact, everyone on the beach came across that way, and as we watched through the low palm branches, every so often, the whole bunch of them would break into laughter, as if the same joke had been instantly whispered into every ear.

  “Wow,” Jemma said. “Your friend may not want to go home.”

  “He may not be the only one,” added Mose.

  At that moment, smoke and licks of flame rose from a bank of grills lined up in front of the huts, and a few seconds later, the aroma of what they were grilling reached our noses.

  “Thank you, Jesus,” said Mose. “Barbecue.”

  Through the smoke, I made out that the grills had these rotating skewers, and on each skewer was a whole baby pig. I’d heard about this, but never actually seen it, not even at Trader Vic’s, where my dad had often ordered some pretty exotic stuff.

  “Is that what barbecue smells like?” asked Jemma.

  “You’re right about that, sister,” said Mose. “Now how do we get some for ourselves?”

  “Well.” I stepped out onto the beach. “We start by asking for it.”

  t was hunger that drove me on. I realized then what animals that only eat what they can kill must feel like, and why dogs go crazy over the smell of cooked meat. Curiosity was part of it, too, and of course, wanting to put things right with Connor. But hunger makes you bold.

  I was halfway to Connor by the time Mose and Jemma stepped out to follow me. I walked up from behind his chair, so neither Connor nor the babes he was lounging with saw me coming. On my way, I walked past other people in swimsuits with great tans. They didn’t seem to notice me—or if they did—they didn’t care, even though the way I was dressed was from a whole different movie than the one they seemed to be in. Maybe I was invisible to them.

  “Hey, Connor,” I said, from about five feet back.

  There was no reaction. Maybe it was the sound of the waves or the buzz of his fellow beach bums talking and slurping their blue drinks. Mose and Jemma came up on either side of me.

  “This is bee-zaar,” Mose said. “It’s like they’re all in a dream.”

  “Do you think they can see us?” Jemma asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so, or this could be really hard.”

  “Or really easy,” said Mose. “If we’re invisible, we can just snatch him.”

  “Connor,” I said again, louder and closer, and his shoulders flinched. Of course, I knew by now he might have a different name in this world, and that it might as well be Rumpelstiltskin. I stepped around the chair and stood right in front of him. The sun was setting over the ocean, so my shadow fell across him and one of his eighteen-year-old groupies. He looked up, the straw in his mouth.

  “You’re in my light,” he said. “And this is the hour of the blue tan.”

  “Connor. It’s Jacobus. From Lincoln Park. Can we talk?”

  Connor turned to one of the girls, then the other. “Ladies, I believe this young man has some business with me.”

  I swear they got up and walked off like it had been rehearsed a hundred times. Connor took a long slurp and squinted up at me through his orange-rimmed sunglasses. “How many times have we been through this, Jacobus? I’m not leaving.”

  For thirty seconds, I was totally speechless. I didn’t think my mind could be bent any more than it already had. I knelt down on the sand.

  “I’ve been here before?” I asked.

  “Oh. Yeah.” He laughed. “Like…yesterday? I dunno. The days are long here.”

  Now, this is what I’ve since learned is called a hiccup. I’m sure there’s a more technical name, but hiccup will do. Jumping from one universe to another, as Orlong had shown us, is a kind of interdimensional jumping of circuits, and a whole lot of information is being moved across. Which, if you think of it like frames in a video, it makes sense that sometimes the frames get stuck in a loop and repeat like a .gif. The problem is that you don’t know you’re in a loop.

  I accept this now, but I can tell you that hearing it for the first time nearly pushed me around the bend.

  “So.” My tongue was heavy with the
thought that I might have said before what I was going to say now. “You know why I’m here…”

  “Hellyeah,” he said, like some sort of surf dude. “You want me to go back to some crappy city where it’s cold for half the year.” He raised his arm to the sun. “You want me to give up my rays, my ladies, and—” He held up the blue drink. “This.”

  “And why do I want you to do that?” I asked him.

  “Becaauuse…we’re friends?”

  “Very good,” I said. “Now, since I forget between visits, tell me where the hell we are.”

  “I think they call it the Antilles,” he said. “I believe, in point of fact, that we are in the Lesser Antilles. But Paradise by any other name…”

  Okay, I thought. I’ve heard of them, so I know it’s a real place. “Did you come straight here from Chicago?” I asked.

  “Oh no, my good man,” he drawled. “I’ve traveled widely in my time. I have lived both large and small.”

  “So have we,” I said. “Connor, this is Jemma and Mose. You might remember Jemma from Chicago. Only she’s different, so maybe you don’t. But anyhow…Jemma and Mose, this is my best friend, Connor.”

  Mose gave a nod, and Jemma a quick, “Hi.”

  Connor lowered his sunglasses (the lenses were tinted the same blue as his drink) and gave Jemma a long look. I couldn’t tell if he made the connection.

  “Have a seat, cousins.” He tipped his drink toward us, motioning to the sand. “Some liquid refreshment? On the house.”

  “No, thanks,” said Mose. “But we will have some of that barbecue.”

  “Coming around presently, mon frère.”

  Now, you don’t know Connor like I do, so you’d have no way of knowing that this phony way of speaking—things like “liquid refreshment” and “my good man,” and “mon frère”—this was all new. My Connor was a bit of a wiseass, but he wasn’t any kind of global bon vivant, and he wasn’t a ladies man.