The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  There was someone inside.

  A kid, bent over the sink brushing his teeth in his boxers and a green t-shirt. The shower curtain was open and his pants were hung over the side of the tub. What was he doing brushing his teeth at five-thirty in the afternoon? My mind tried to work the normal, logical way. I didn’t have a brother. He could be one of the neighbor kids, whose unit’s water had been shut off while a plumber fixed their pipes. My mom was the type to offer the whole world the use of our bathrooms. And I did have friends in the building, though for some reason, I couldn’t remember their names. And why hadn’t my mom mentioned a visitor?

  I backed off quietly into my room and sat on the bed. I know what you’re thinking: the normal thing to have done, depending on what kind of kid you were, would have been either to say, “Uh…Hello?” or “Get the hell out of my bathroom.” But that’s not where my head was. Something was off. Maybe I was still spooked from seeing the girl with the curly hair.

  I moved to the desk chair because it felt like the bed wasn’t mine yet. Then, reflexively, I got up and peeled my jeans off, because I felt like I’d had them on for a century.

  I also couldn’t wait any longer to pee. The kid would have to go.

  I pulled a clean pair of blue jeans out of my dresser and padded quietly back into the hallway with them folded over my arm. The bathroom door was still open, but the light was out. The kid appeared to have fled the scene, unless he was waiting behind the door to jump me. Goose pimples broke out on my arms because there was a kind of shiver in the air. I sucked in a breath, walked to the door, and reached my hand around to turn on the light before stepping in. I crouched and surveyed the bathroom. The shower curtain was closed. It had been open before.

  What I felt at that moment was something I didn’t have a word for yet, but much later I learned that a good one was uncanny. It comes from a German word: unheimlich, which literally means un-home-like. Alien. And most important, feeling unfamiliar in a familiar place.

  In one motion, I ripped back the shower curtain and shuddered.

  No one.

  A sweat of relief broke out on my forehead and purged some of the fear. I laid my jeans over the side of the tub and turned to the sink. I remembered that odd thing my mom had said about taking my medicine and swung open the cabinet behind the mirror. Along with the usual stuff, there was a vial with a Walgreen’s label and my name: Jacobus Rose. Something called Propranolol. “Take one at bedtime or when symptoms occur.”

  What symptoms?

  I was suddenly aware that there was still sand from the desert stuck in my teeth. Just a few grains, but enough to cause that annoying gritty feeling. Now, if there are any physics trolls among you, you may be calling bullshit on me. Isn’t that against the rules? The answer is no, it’s not—not if you’re still in two places. I can’t explain the physics of that, but one day I will.

  My toothbrush, sitting in its usual glass, looked like an old friend. Usually, I hated brushing my teeth. This time, I couldn’t wait. I had six worlds of crap to wash out of my mouth. As I squeezed the toothpaste onto the brush, I glanced in the mirror and was very glad to see myself as I knew myself. Jacobus. And as I saw myself looking back at me, I relaxed a little. I gave my teeth a good brushing, and then leaned over to rinse and spit.

  That image began to stutter and repeat like a .gif.

  …leaned over to rinse and spit… …leaned over to rinse and spit… I lifted my eyes slowly to the mirror. There was a kid there in a green t-shirt and boxers, holding a toothbrush. To his right, laid over the tub, were his blue jeans. The light was on, and the shower curtain was open.

  I stood there and stared until the image stopped looping and the intense feeling of déjà vu passed. I couldn’t remember if I remembered having seen all this before. The only way I can put it into words is to say that I had suddenly remembered myself.

  I had merged back into my old life. I was me in this world. Although not yet completely.

  I heard a noise downstairs, and a familiar voice. It was my dad, with the charcoal for the barbecue. Then another familiar sound: my parents arguing. He must have forgotten something she’d asked him to pick up. But it was all right. It was the final confirmation that I was home.

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  -T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

  “This is how it happens,” I said, taking a slurp of Julius. “You kind of ‘slip in.’ Like through a crack in reality. And the reason you can do that is that what’s slipping in is the traveler part of you…the part that Gordon and Youseff said never changes. The PEF. The body part of you—the part that couldn’t slip through the crack—is already there. Only there might be a sort of loop in time for a few minutes. A hiccup.”

  Jemma looked wide-eyed and maybe a little dazed. “But what if the ‘body part’ of me isn’t me?”

  “It will be,” I said. “Because you’re already here. Just like you said about Mose. When you made the choice to come with us, you made sure of that.”

  “If that’s true, Jake,” said Mose. “Then what was with Jerrold? I mean, when you made the choice to come to my world, you weren’t him. You were you. So how did you wind up as Jerrold?”

  “No idea what happened there,” I said. “A random bug in the program? Something to do with whatever time is. I mean, why should a parallel universe have to run on the same clock?”

  “Does that mean we could go back to the Dark Ages and fight dragons?” Connor asked.

  “I dunno,” I said and had to let that one sink in. “I think that would have to be a pretty major bug. And dragons would have to be real.”

  “That’s right,” said Mose. “The Mapmaker said that we usually follow the closest link.”

  “How does that explain where I came from?” Jemma asked. “That wasn’t close at all.”

  I stared out the window from our high table. The light was getting soft and dark pink outside. “That crazy world was a lot closer to this one than we might want to think. That was Chicago. Only one that wasn’t in the U.S.A. anymore.”

  “We could walk right now to where you lived,” said Mose. “Somewhere on North Michigan Avenue near the Billy Goat Tavern. But you wouldn’t recognize it. Man, what a drag that a world that messed up could be just a few bad choices away from this one.”

  I got up from the table and went to pay the owner, my Pakistani friend, Mr. Khan, with the money my dad had given me. He asked me how my mom was, and said how sorry he was about our dog.

  I was going to say, “What dog?” But something told me just to let it pass. That was the second glitch, along with the medicine. I walked back to my friends in a semi-trance state.

  “What’s up, Jake?” said Mose. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  I sipped the last of the Julius and looked at Connor. “It isn’t exactly the same world,” I said. “Be prepared. There may be some changes.”

  They all faced me with the same uncomprehending look.

  “Small ones, though,” said Connor. “Only small ones?”

  “Well,” I said. “So far.”

  Connor looked up. “There’s this thing my dad likes to say. ‘You can’t go home again.’ From some famous book. Maybe, that’s the downside of traveling. The world you come back to is never exactly the one you left.”

  “Well, anyway,” I said. “This is where we are now. I’m not ready to travel again yet. I think we should go. I don’t know how much longer we’ll remember where we’ve been or how we got here. At some point, we’ll just be here.” I looked at Mose, and then at Jemma. “I’d like to make sure you two newbies get home. I made up a story and told my dad that Connor was having a crisis because his girlfriend broke up with him. So we could stay together a while longer. I’ve got until ten.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” said Connor. “At least, I don�
��t think I do.”

  “I said I made it up. Let’s go.”

  If you had looked down on Clybourn Street in Chicago at 7:26 pm that evening, you would have seen four friends—three guys and a girl—strolling along in no particular hurry. Every so often, laughing at something. Then you would have heard an old casement window being opened on the fourth floor of a run-down building, and seen an old African-American man lean his head out and call down to the street:

  “Mos-es De-Witt! The pigeon flew home!”

  We all looked up. The face looked a little fuzzy in the twilight, and his name slipped my mind like a familiar word you suddenly can’t grasp, although it’s on the tip of your tongue. How strange to know and not know at the same time. My dad had told me once that you could remember dreams if you wrote them down as soon as you awoke. I could see already that some serious mental effort was going to be required in order to hold on to all I had experienced.

  But Mose answered right away because this was a world he knew.

  “Say, Duke! How you doin’?”

  “Jus’ fine, Moses. Jus’ fine. You’re in 1142C. Just up the street. But you prob’ly know that already.”

  “Thank you just the same,” Mose shouted up.

  “Your mama’s waiting,” said the Duke. “Come see me tomorrow. Bring your friends. Got a few things to show you.”

  The window closed, and the street was quiet again. Quiet as Chicago can be. Cars on North Ave. whooshed by with the sound of skiers on slush, because it had rained earlier and the pavement was still wet.

  “Crazy old guy,” said Mose. “Crazy but cool.”

  “I’m losing track of when I first met him,” I said. “It’s driving me nuts that I can’t link my memories together. They’re all separating like chemicals in a…what’s the thing scientists use that spins around really fast?”

  “A centrifuge,” said Jemma, out of the blue. “I don’t know how I know that.”

  “You must be the smart girl in our class,” I said with a smile.

  “We’ll pay him a visit tomorrow,” Mose said. “Maybe he can clear some things up. I’m getting a little hazy myself.”

  Like I said earlier, the story splits, because we were merging. Try to stay with me. If you can, you’ll be way ahead of the rest of the world.

  We didn’t run into anyone else on our way to Mose’s. By the time we got there, I already knew the place, and exactly what the building and the peeling green paint on its door would look like. And why not? We were friends in this world. I’d been there a dozen times or more. Mose stepped into the entryway, where there was a broken security system and all he needed was his key. He turned back to us.

  “See y’all…tomorrow?”

  “For sure,” I said.

  We all gave him a good night wave, except Connor, who reached in to give him a fist bump. And then, for some reason, I just felt the urge to step up and give him a hug.

  “I’ve still got your back, Mose,” I said.

  “I know you do, Jake. And I’ve got yours.”

  “You sure you’re okay? You want us to wait till you call down?”

  Mose gave me an in-between worlds sort of look. That’s the best description I can give you because that’s where it seemed we were. Our memories were being replaced, but in whatever part of the mind the emotions live, we still carried the weight of having been through a multiverse together.

  “No.” Mose tried to control the jitter in his voice. “I’m cool.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Until tomorrow.”

  “G’night, Mose,” said Jemma.

  “G’night, Lady J,” he said.

  And I thought: Lady J?

  Getting “Lady J” home was a little different. Now that I’m able to recapture the experience, I think we must have felt something like shamans do when they’re having visions. Some things were kind of cool. Other things were just way too strange. There was a hazy glow around the streetlights that wasn’t night fog. Colors stood out boldly, even in the dark. Sounds were really sharp, as if blasting through some really good earbuds. But the sidewalks were a little rubbery. Not quite solid, and quivering, as if we could feel the spaces between the atoms of concrete. As we turned onto North Ave. and got ready to cross to Laramie Street, Jemma lost her footing, and I caught her.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “My friend Khan didn’t spike the Orange Julius, so you’re not drunk. I feel the same way. But wow.” I leaned in close. “The black part of your eyes, the pupils. They’re really big.”

  A car rushed by, and then Connor shouted, “Get ready!”

  “So are yours,” Jemma said to me in a soft, slurry voice.

  And then we started making out, right there on the streetlighted intersection of North and Laramie, and Connor shouted, “Oh, Jeez. Give it a rest. Let’s cross.”

  That part, I have to say, was strange in all the right ways.

  When we got to the other side, Jemma stopped, looked around, and said, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I do know my way home.” What I think she meant was that she couldn’t yet remember her way home, which made sense. What didn’t was that I said, “I do.”

  She lived on Dickens Street, back up toward the school and near Oz Park, which was called that because at each entrance, there was a statue of one of the characters from The Wizard of Oz. We’d had grade school picnics there, and I guess it must have been where my family had walked the dog that Mr. Khan had said he was sorry about, and that I was just now remembering we’d had. It was a white cocker spaniel named Ladybug. One minute, I had no memory of knowing where Jemma lived. The next minute, it just hit me.

  When we came into the park, at the entrance guarded by the Cowardly Lion, dusk was falling hard and the leaves had turned a deeper, purplish shade. There was no one out but a little old man with a round head and lots of wrinkles, whose black coat dragged along the ground because it was too long for him. He was walking a white bulldog.

  Connor said, “I wonder if my parents are freaking. I’m probably supposed to be home for dinner.”

  “You can tell them the story I used,” I said. “But make it about me.”

  Jemma let go of my hand and pointed.

  “There it is!” she exclaimed.

  Through the tree branches, I saw a white frame townhouse, with flowers in front and an old-fashioned carriage light spilling a golden glow over the front steps.

  “That’s a nice house,” I said, but my voice caught as it anticipated the pain of leaving her. “So you remember it?”

  She nodded. She must have felt a queasy, uneasy excitement.

  “Pretty soon,” I said. “Her memories—I mean…”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “The other me that’s been living here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Her memories will start to be inside your head. At least, that’s the way it worked with Jerrold. I don’t know if it’s going to be the same for you. It seemed like he got into the swing of it pretty fast. But it might take a while for you to stop feeling like two people.”

  She smiled, and in that light that only city parks have—dark on the inside but surrounded by the city glow—it was a magical smile. “I think I can handle that. You gotta remember where I came from, Jacobus.”

  We exited the park at the statue of Dorothy, and as I walked her across the street, the wind picked up her hair for a few seconds and made her look like a pirate queen at the prow of her ship, sailing into the wind. And I knew that this girl could handle anything.

  Maybe that was the point—if there was a point—of our travels, of the revealing of the switches to us, of this new awareness: to make us, the new pioneers of the multiverse, capable of handling anything.

  “That is a sweet crib,” said Connor, and it shocked me a little to hear his ‘island’ voice. “I hope my house is that nice.”

  “Connor,” I said. “Your house is the house you’ve always had. On Menomonee. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, bu
t I had the feeling his merge was lagging a little.

  “We’ll get you there, dude. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

  “Well,” said Jemma, standing in the middle of that quiet old Chicago street and flapping her arms the way teenaged girls do to shake off feeling socially awkward. “I guess this is it.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “Lady J. I’ll come by tomorrow. There’s a pancake house on North Avenue. You’ll probably remember it by then…”

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s a date.” She kissed me full on the mouth, in a way I’d never been kissed, and it nearly took the air out of my lungs. Then something else happened that was, in its own way, just as great.

  As Jemma walked up the stone steps to her townhouse, the front door opened, and the two nicest people I think I’d ever seen—her parents, logically—came out on the stoop to greet her. As if somehow they knew she’d come a long way and wanted to welcome her. But they couldn’t have known, of course. Not in any way I can explain yet. I remembered seeing these same people at a school band concert once, and thinking even then that they looked nice. Not nice in a phony way, but in the way of being totally open and caring, the way parents should be.

  The couple waved to Connor and me. It was a true sci-fi moment, because they obviously knew us, but what did I expect? If Jemma now had a life in this world, then a new thread of history was woven through it, and Connor and I were part of it. And so, naturally, we waved back.

  It wasn’t two worlds side-by-side, it was more like one world folding into another—the two of them becoming continuous and mending any crack there’d once been between them. By this time tomorrow, I knew, that crack would be more like a seam, and soon after, entirely gone.