The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  And then the truth of something Youseff had said hit me: this was happening all the time, to everyone. With every choice, a ‘switch’ was flipped and we merged into a new world. But it happened invisibly and mostly, unconsciously. We—the four of us, and Gordon, and Hartūn—had been allowed to put our hands on the switches: a kind of manual override. We’d been allowed to look under the skin of the universe to see how it worked, but we’d been shown the switches in a form we could recognize, just like the ancient gods had shown themselves in human form even though they weren’t human at all. That was why the switch could be on the wall, a telephone pole, a Gameboy, or a cell phone. Those were just representations of something much weirder and more abstract. Something our brains weren’t wired to handle yet.

  This insight left me in less than thirty seconds. Only recently has some of it come back to me.

  Jemma turned and waved, and gave me one last smile before entering the townhouse with her parents’ arms around her shoulders.

  I watched the house for a few minutes, and then said, “Okay, Connor. Menomonee. Last stop of the night.”

  “All right,” Connor said. “I think I’m ready.”

  We walked for a couple of blocks without saying much. In my heart, and in all my nerves and muscle fibers, roiled a mixture of dizzy excitement and deep gravity. I wouldn’t compare the deepness to sadness, but it had some of the same weight. When you’re a kid, you feel things you don’t have words for yet. Kids don’t talk like philosophers, but that doesn’t mean they can’t think like them.

  When we got to Lincoln Avenue, Connor suddenly wheeled on me with his eyes wide. “There’s one thing we gotta do, Jake, before I go home.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “We gotta see if the little red house is still there.”

  Now, I said that Connor’s merge was lagging. That means that somehow the vectors of his travel were still in place. I was ahead of him in merging, so if he hadn’t mentioned the red house, I probably wouldn’t have thought of it. Once he had, and the image came back, I said, “Okay. But we are not going in.”

  It was the darkest side of dusk, so colors and even shapes were muddy and uncertain. We turned onto Cleveland Street, a block north of the corner where the red house had been.

  “It’s there,” said Connor. “Damn…”

  “Yeah, but the truck is gone. Maybe it’s a different house. I can’t see it clearly.”

  “No,” said Connor with certainty. “It’s the same one. They just took it off the truck. Look at the windows on the front.”

  Our pace slowed as we drew closer, as if there were weights on our heels. We stayed on the opposite side of the street and stopped when we got to the corner. The lights were on inside.

  “Somebody lives there,” I whispered.

  “Yeah, but who?” asked Connor, his voice just as low.

  We could see through the lighted window into what looked like the kitchen. A dark form crossed the opening, paused, and turned to face us. It was an old man with glasses, a round head, and a creased face. I knew instantly it was the guy we’d seen in the park. There was barking from behind a gated area to the left of the little house. The bulldog.

  “Now that,” said Connor, “is truly weird.”

  “I think it would be less weird to see an aardvark cooking scrambled eggs than to see that dude in that house.”

  “He’s looking at us,” Connor said.

  “I know,” I said. “And he’s creeping me out.”

  “Have you ever seen him before the park?” Connor asked.

  “No.” I hesitated and said, “I don’t think so.” But I kept looking, asking myself if he could be someone we’d seen along the way, maybe among the crowd on the dock in the hive city or on the island beach. When you start to think this way—that everyone is everywhere—almost anything seems possible. I turned and said, “Let’s get you home.”

  Connor’s place was exactly where I thought it would be, and by the time we arrived, I think he knew it, too. I walked him up to the front gate where the security buzzers were.

  “Expect the unexpected,” I said. “But remember, it’s your life. And I’ll be here in the morning. Pancakes at eleven…my good man.”

  He smiled at that. They buzzed him in, and he pushed through the gate the way I’d seen him do a hundred times before. Just as he disappeared into the lobby, he turned and called out:

  “I’m glad we pulled the switch, Jacobus. Even though life will never be the same for us again.”

  “Me, too,” I called back. I lifted my hand in farewell. “See you tomorrow, Connor.”

  Then he was gone, and I was alone. It was time for me to go home, too, but I wasn’t ready. There was a move not yet made, and I was the kind of gamer who hated to leave the game with things up in the air. I needed to backtrack a little. I needed to see the red house again. I needed to understand why it was, and why it had spooked me so much.

  As they say in books, I was driven to go back. Even though what I really wanted was my bed.

  ecause it was my decision, the second trip to the little house wasn’t as anxious as the first. I won’t say I was totally cool about it, but my heart had settled, which was good, considering the new medicine in my bathroom.

  When I reached the place, the kitchen light was off, but in the room beyond that, I could see a lamp beside a reading chair, and the old guy in the chair with the bulldog in his lap. I watched him for quite a long time from the sidewalk, until a Chicago police car cruised by slowly and made me feel like a stalker.

  I ducked behind a tree and tried to get my thinking straight. Why was I here? Simple answer: because I had to knock on that door,. But what if it sucked me back into the multiverse? I didn’t want to be in the ‘second sphere’ right now, even if it did give me a kind of super-knowledge. Not now, and maybe not ever. I’d just been kissed by the first girl I’d ever loved. It was that kiss that gave me the courage to cross the street and walk up to the little red house.

  The windows were exactly as I remembered them, one on either side of the front door. Through the one on the right, you could see the opposing wall, where the big red and silver switch had been. It was gone. There was a painting hanging there, of a red house just like this one, with a kid standing at the door in the dark, wearing a striped shirt, just like me. The air around my neck and shoulders trembled again, as it had back in my bathroom. Interference.

  I must have stood there, contemplating the painting, for a few minutes. If it was there, then in some way the house had known I was coming. That’s a pretty strange thing for a sixteen year-old—even one returning from a tour of the multiverse—to process. I finally got up the nerve to knock. Two times, and pretty weakly. My stomach jumped when I heard shuffling, old-man footsteps approaching the door.

  The knob turned, the door creaked open, and there he was.

  He wasn’t any taller than me, and I’m not that tall. It was hard to tell how old he was. My last grandfather had died while I was a baby, so I hadn’t dealt with many geezers. The wrinkles and the thin, white hair on top of his head said maybe seventy? The eyes, magnified by thick glasses, and the barrel-shaped body told a slightly different tale. And then, there was the smile—the smile of someone welcoming a friend to his home.

  I said the only words that came to me: “Is this your house?”

  He nodded, “For now.”

  “Are you the one who put the switch here?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I know who did. Would you like to come in?”

  “Only if you tell me I’m not going to be transported anywhere.”

  “No, this little house is now grounded in this world.”

  Behind him, his bulldog began to growl and fart.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “He’s just excited to see you.”

  I peered around him at the dog. It was an ugly, slobbery thing, but at the same time, lovable. I knelt and let him come and drool on my hand.

  “What’s
his name?” I asked.

  “His name is Orlong.”

  “Run that by me one more time,” I said.

  “Orlong.”

  The name is more in your memory than it was in mine at that moment, and I think now you understand why. But it did ring a distant bell, and the feeling, once again, was like a super-déjà vu. I still had ghost trails of the other worlds clinging to me, but the thing is that our human brain is wired for survival, and survival in one world at a time means letting the other ones go. I think that’s what Gordon, and The Duke, and Youseff had all been trying to say. If you don’t, you become either what’s called a prophet or you go insane. Either way, you hear voices and see visions, and ordinary life with friends and teachers and homework becomes a lot more difficult. The way I’ve learned to handle it, since that night at the little red house, is to use something that’s a little bit like cloud computing. Only the cloud is…everywhere. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “Would you like to come in and sit by the fire?” he asked me. “I know it’s a little late in the season, but I keep the fireplace going until the nights get warm. It keeps me company.”

  That gave me a pang. The old guy was lonely. “Sure.” I stepped in. The room was warm, but in a cozy way, not stifling.

  “Would you like a hot cocoa?” he asked. “Or a Coke?”

  “Thanks. I’ll have a Coke if it’s no trouble.”

  “No trouble at all,” he said and went off to the tiny kitchen and a refrigerator not much wider than a locker.

  He invited me to take his big armchair. I resisted at first, mostly out of politeness, but once I settled into it, it felt really good.

  When he returned, he pulled up the footrest and sat down, facing me. He had made himself a hot chocolate with whipped cream and was stirring it. It made me wish I’d had one, too, but at least the Coke was waking me up a little. Caffeine. Amazing stuff.

  “So, how are you feeling so far, Jacobus?” he asked in a kindly voice.

  I did a major double-take. “Did I say my name?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “No, you didn’t.” Then he took a stick from the fire. The end he held in his hand still had bark on it, but the other end glowed red. He let it cool down to charcoal grey, and then brought the tip down to the stone floor in front of the fireplace. He began to draw black lines on the stone. Six of them, one stacked right on top of the other. Then he traced each of them out to three dimensions as planes so they looked like very thin sheets of paper hovering as close together as they could without touching. He drew a very curvy line that entered the top layer and then wove its way like a needle and thread through the rest, finally coming out the bottom in a completely different place.

  I stared at the design, which was obviously some kind of symbol or a secret glyph. More distant bells went off.

  “I was wrong about this,” he said. “Close…but still wrong. They’re not stacked up in layers like this. It’s not like a sandwich.”

  He went over the glyph again with the charcoal tip.

  “This isn’t any better a description of what you’ve been through than an Egyptian hieroglyph was a description of a trip to the land of the dead. Same with those equations physicists fill up blackboards with. They’re just symbols. Metaphors, like the ones poets use to describe a kiss, but the words are never the kiss, are they?”

  “No,” I said, grateful to finally understand something.

  “The way reality is made is much more beautiful than any picture because it’s all happening at once. Every fork. We can’t see them, of course, because a choice has been made. But knowing they’re there makes all the difference in the world to the way we think. If you shoot a photon through a single slit with a detector on the other side, it will land in one place. But if you make two slits, it’ll go through both of them and show up on the detector as a wave pattern. You get what I mean?”

  I shook my head no.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “You will. One day.”

  He looked at me and nodded. I know I should have felt threatened, or at least weirded out. After all, I was alone with an old guy who drew on his floor in charcoal, spoke in riddles, and said he knew me. And then I saw a twinkle behind the thick glasses, and he wasn’t old anymore.

  “Gordon?” I whispered, even as the tears spilled from my eyes.

  “I’ve been looking for you for a while, Jacobus. It was harder than it should have been. Like I said, the multiverse isn’t a sandwich.”

  “But why?” I asked, my mouth open. “You had the maps. And how did you get so—”

  “Old?” he said. “Good question. Time recalibrates at every point on the grid. Einstein would’ve figured that out except that he never fully accepted non-locality. The time I spent as Mapmaker was equal to almost sixty years here in this world.”

  “Does that mean you’ll get younger if you stay?” I asked. “That would be cool.”

  “It would be,” Gordon said, “but I don’t think so. Once we enter a worldline, we’re in its time flow, but only from the point of entry.” He paused to put another stick into the fire. “As for the first question, Orlong taught us that the maps aren’t perfect. They can’t be. Things are changing too fast. But I worked out a sequence I believed would get me to you eventually. It did. There are random moments of synchronization, like matching symbols on a slot machine, and I learned how to play them. It’s a little like hacking the cosmos.”

  “Why, Gordon?” I asked. “I mean, I’m really glad you did. Really. But why’d you go to all the trouble?”

  “Because I discovered a break in your worldline, and I wanted you to know that.”

  “A break?” I suddenly felt a little faint and noticed that my fingers and toes were cold, even near to the fire on a spring night. “I thought maybe something was off. This isn’t really my world, is it?”

  “It’s very, very close. Not even the thickness of an atomic nucleus away. But in this world, a mutation occurred in your mother’s genetic material, and as a result, your heart condition is more serious.”

  “How serious?” I asked.

  “Your heart may become dangerously arrhythmic by the time you’re nineteen. Right now, it’s just what they call an atrial flutter. That’s what you’re taking the medicine for, and it’s no big deal. But I saw something on the worldline—”

  “Something?” If my heart was already messed up, what he was telling me wasn’t doing it any favors. I could feel it pounding beneath my right ear. “Like what?”

  Gordon leaned in and put his hands on my shoulders, the way a doctor would. I’m sure he meant it to comfort me, but it only told me the news was about to get worse.

  “Nothing is ever a hundred percent certain, Jacobus. It’s probabilistic, not deterministic. So, all we can do is watch for little changes, like earthquake scientists waiting for the needle to move on a seismograph. But in about thirty percent of people with your condition, you get what’s called a ventricular fibrillation, and in about half of those…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I get the picture.” I hadn’t realized until I spoke that my hand was on my chest. “This isn’t the same thing I had before, is it? This is worse.”

  “No, it isn’t, and yes, it is,” he said. “Related, but not the same. And I can’t explain why, except by using that old saying, ‘you can never step in the same river twice.’ Have you ever heard that?”

  “I don’t think so.” My throat was dry, and before I spoke again, I felt the need to swallow. “It means—”

  “We can never go back to exactly the same place we left. That’s the one ‘bug in the program’ for travelers like us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I kinda figured that one out.”

  I got up and walked to the window. Two guys on skateboards whizzed by outside, and just behind them, a girl with long nut-brown hair like Jemma’s. When I saw it blowing in the wind, it took me back to that moment in the park. Then it was quiet again. I turned back to my friend, half
-expecting to see the young Gordon I’d left behind in the castle in the air.

  For a split second I spotted him, like a ghost behind the old guy’s glasses. The boy is always inside the man, and the girl is always inside the woman. I knew that now. I think I also knew what I was going to tell him, but I went through the formalities anyway.

  “So you came all this way to help me,” I said. “To tell me that I could switch out if I wanted to? Try again?”

  “We could bounce you onto another track…a tangent world with a very similar wavefunction but slightly—”

  I raised my hand. “But in this world. The one we’re in now…Mose is happy, right? His chest thing is gone and so is his mother’s douchebag boyfriend. Connor’s here, and we’re good friends again.” I stopped for a moment to clear a frog from my throat. “And Jemma…she loves me.”

  Gordon didn’t say anything. He just nodded.

  “And there’s no guarantee that if I switch, all those things will still be true, right?”

  He nodded again.

  “In that case,” I said. “I think I’ll take my chances. I have a slightly different outlook now on…you know, death and all that.”

  Gordon got up and stirred the fire, then set the stick down and picked up his cup and my empty glass, carrying them to the kitchen sink. When he returned, I swear he looked like he’d aged another five or six years.

  “And what about you, Gordon?” I asked. “Can you go back? Can you still be the Mapmaker? Do you even want to?”

  “There’s a new Mapmaker,” he said. “Youssef.”

  After all the bad news, that brought a big smile to my face.

  “Damn!” I slapped my thigh. “That’s great! He made it out. That makes my day!” I thought for a moment, and then added, “But he told us he’d never take that job.”

  “After what he went through out there,” Gordon said, with a little smile, “I think he decided to hang up his traveling shoes for a while. He’ll be an excellent Mapmaker.” He sat back down with a sigh that sounded a little like a groan. “Well, Jacobus, you’ve made up my mind. I think I’ll stay, too. I need a little break from the road. I’m pushing eighty in your years.”