The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “Eighty?” I almost shouted. “That’s not fair.”

  “You can’t imagine how weird it is to sit here and look at you with an old man’s eyes.”

  He was right. I couldn’t imagine it. But I was closer to being able to imagine it than I had been before pulling the switch.

  “Can I ask you two questions?”

  “As many as you want,” he said.

  I looked around. The red house made me feel like Alice in Wonderland. It was just a little too small for real life-sized humans, and it didn’t belong in Chicago.

  “What is this place?” I asked. “This house. How did it get here?”

  He laughed a little, the junk in his throat rattling around. He really was an old man.

  “The answer to your second question is the answer to the big question, so I’ll answer the first one first. It’s a kind of ‘halfway house.’ Like a waystation. It’s for travelers, and it’s for coming into and going out of, mostly. But I don’t think they’ll mind if I rest here a while.”

  “They?” Once again, it seemed like the obvious question.

  “Okay,” he said. “For this, I’m going to need a brandy. And I’m gonna pour you one, too.”

  I didn’t object, even though I’d never had so much as a beer in my mouth.

  Gordon got up to get the bottle, but he kept talking as he walked and poured.

  “The universe—let’s just call it a universe because it’s the set that contains all universes and there are no sets outside that as far as I know— The universe is big, but it’s not empty. You’ve heard about all that stuff out there that we can’t see but makes up about ninety-five percent of everything?”

  “You mean ‘dark matter’?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said from the kitchen, “but especially, dark energy. Dark matter is mostly matter that hasn’t become matter yet. But the energy…”

  He handed me a little shot glass filled halfway with amber-colored liquid. “Bottoms up,” he said and clinked my glass.

  We drank at the same time, and the burn went over my tongue and all the way down into my gut, where it became another warm fire.

  “Here’s the best way to look at it. There has to be some force that pushes things over the line from virtual into actual. Like your parents nudging you into the swimming pool or pushing you off on your bicycle for the first time.” He looked at me in a way that I could tell he wanted me to remember. “That force is basically the same one that makes you want to find things out. To live and to love. The one that asks, ‘Why’ and answers, ‘Why not?’”

  I tried to talk, but the brandy still scalded my throat. Finally, I said, scratchily, “Are you talking about God?”

  He smiled like the Mona Lisa.

  “When people can understand it without needing to give it a name or a face, things will be really cool. Until then, all we can do is tell fairytales.”

  I was riding the brandy high. It was like feeling through rubber gloves.

  “The thing to remember—if you can—is that just like the universe isn’t empty, it isn’t soulless. ‘They’… you know, it’s really hard to talk without using pronouns…are just pieces of a mind that can take whatever shape it wants to. That’s why all the old myths aren’t really false…they’re just too literal. But ‘they’ exist. You’ll be one of them one day.”

  We both just sat and stared into the fire for a minute, listening to it crackle, and then I asked, “What do you mean by that? ‘I’ll be one of them?’”

  “You asked who put the switches in, and the best answer is, ‘the travelers that came before us.’ Just the same way trekkers and climbers put markers on the trail and spikes on the mountain for those who come after them. This didn’t start with us, you know.”

  “It didn’t?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “There were pioneers,” Gordon answered. “Since a long time back. But we’re the first, you know, ‘normal people’ to do it.”

  “Gordon,” I said, “you are many things, but ‘normal’ isn’t one of ‘em.”

  He laughed and said, “School tomorrow. Better get you home.”

  “No school,” I said. “It’s Saturday. But you’re right anyway.”

  For old times’ sake, we walked past the playground where we’d first met. Since Gordon wasn’t really much taller now than he had been then, and had exactly the same body shape, it was easy in the darkness to imagine him with the catcher’s outfit on. His voice was the same, too. Lower, and scratchier, but coming from the same place inside him.

  “Am I going to forget everything soon,” I asked. “Even you?”

  “Okay,” he said and stopped, right at the corner where the backstop fence was. “I’m gonna use a computer analogy, but remember…just like myths and religions, it isn’t literal. You’re going to lose random access to those files. But the files don’t disappear.”

  “But I don’t want to forget,” I said. “I need to tell people about this.”

  “There’s a way,” he said. “But not everybody can do it. It’s like pulling things down from the cloud. You just have to let them go back there when you’re finished using them, or life will get confusing. You might even go nuts.”

  “What cloud?” I wrinkled my forehead in imitation of him.

  “The universe is one big information storage system,” he said. “It has to be, right? Not too long from now, in your world, when quantum computing reaches the required level, ordinary human beings will turn code into material reality, just like Orlong did with the iguanas. Only the information that makes up the multiverse is waaay more subtle.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder as we came down Hudson Street, and when we reached the corner of my building, where there was a wrought iron fence, he staggered a little and reached for the post to steady himself.

  “Are you okay, Gordon?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m just not used to being…on solid ground and all. It’s the gravity. It makes me feel really old. I guess I am old.”

  While we stood there, a night chill dropped.

  I spoke first: “You know what the first serious question I ever asked my parents was? I mean, the first deep question.”

  “What?” he cocked his head.

  “I asked, ‘where do we go when we die?’”

  “I can tell you that,” he said. “Sort of.”

  “You can? Jeez, Gordon…you never cease to amaze me. Where?”

  “We merge,” he said and gave a little chuckle, followed by a cough.

  “Into what?”

  He gave me that Mona Lisa smile again, and said, “You go on in, Jacobus. Your parents are probably worried. I’ll head home in a minute.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll wait for you to get your balance.”

  “No, please,” he said. “I’d actually like to be alone for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll bring Mose and Jemma by to see you tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll be totally stoked. And Connor… You’re the one who helped me rescue him.”

  “That’ll be great,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It will be.”

  I gave him a hug, and then, looking back all the way, walked to the door and went inside. I watched him from the lobby until he shuffled off into the night.

  aturday. The day of days. The day of freedom. Sure, sometimes there were chores to do, and maybe a little homework if you had a big assignment, but mostly, it was a day that let you play it as you wanted to. For almost as long as I could remember, that had meant gaming. I sometimes got six hours of gaming in on a Saturday—more if my friends were online in the evening—but on this Saturday, there was a new agenda. I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d ever want to go back to the old one.

  I woke up foggy, as if I was in a hotel room on vacation in some alien city, but as soon as I heard my parents bickering downstairs, my mind cleared, and so did my intentions.

  “I’m going to meet my friends for pancakes,” I told them. “I’ll be ba
ck in a couple hours.”

  They stopped arguing for long enough to look at me, and my mom asked, “Do you have money?”

  “Yeah,” I said. There had been a ten-dollar bill in the “savings jar” in my room.

  “Okay,” said my dad. “Take your phone.”

  I picked up Connor first because he lived closest.

  “Everything good in there?” I pointed to his building.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “A few little glitches, like you said. My dad lost his job, and my mom is taking belly dancing lessons. But otherwise, home sweet home.”

  When we had collected Jemma, I said to both of them, “I’ve got something totally mind-blowing to tell you guys, but I’m gonna wait till Mose is with us.”

  That got them, obviously, and they pumped me for information all the way to Clybourn. I didn’t crack. In the bright light of day, things were a little more awkward between Jemma and me. Last night had been magic—a place between two worlds, where we were still heroes who’d survived a harrowing adventure together. I couldn’t wait for the night to come again. All I could think about was our kiss.

  Mose came hopping down the stairs with a big smile lighting his face.

  “What happened to you, dude?” Connor asked. “You win the lottery?”

  “The A-hole is gone,” he said. “My mom stopped drinking. And there’s a very fine young lady in the building. Just moved from Brooklyn.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Shall we go see the Duke?”

  “Sounds good,” Mose said. “I can smell his bacon frying all the way down the street.”

  You can’t step in the same river twice, and you can’t step into the same building twice either. Jemma and Connor had no history in the Hotel Clybourn, so they didn’t share the slightly edgy feeling that Mose and I had. In that fading stash of memory that was now more ominous presence than a clear recollection, this was the building whose basement connected to a very different Chicago: the Chicago of the beehive city. I shot a look at Jemma to see if her face showed any sense of it, but it didn’t.

  The Duke’s hallway was empty, and that felt out of whack. Also, the Duke himself had a shabby little apartment at the end of the hall. Shabby but clean, and hung with colored blankets and Oriental rugs—one of which he was sitting on, tossing his bacon on a hot plate.

  “Where’d everybody go?” I asked him.

  He looked at me oddly. “Everybody who?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “Weren’t there people…out in the hallway? I could swear—”

  “Another world,” said Mose.

  I shook my head. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Do I know you, young man?” the Duke asked, and then he smiled.

  I mentioned before that this whole business of merging back into one world while still carrying the others was like an ultra-déjà vu, and that’s probably as close as I can come. You don’t forget people, and I hadn’t forgotten the Duke. You’re just a little fuzzy on exactly how and why you remember them. And of course, I had been someone else when he’d met me. I’d been Jerrold. So a little confusion was understandable.

  “You’re messing with me,” I said. “We all got your message. Duke…this is Jemma, and my friend Connor. Guys, this is the Duke.”

  “Well, do come in,” he said. “The bacon is grilling, and today, in honor of the occasion, I’m making up some scrambled eggs. Pleased to meet you, Jemma.” He bowed. “And you, too, Connor.” He stopped and looked at me again, and said, “You’ve changed, son. Decidedly.”

  He fed us well, so as it turned out, we didn’t need the pancakes. In addition to the bacon and eggs, he had some sweet honeydew melon and grits with syrup—something I’d never had before but basically tasted like gummier cream of wheat.

  We were so hungry, we ate without talking, but when we’d wiped the last of the syrup from our chins, Mose spoke up: “So, uh, your Dukeship…”

  “Duke is jus’ fine,” said the old man. “No scrapin’ and bowin’ here.”

  “We’ve been some places.”

  “Oh, I know you have, Moses DeWitt.”

  “And you’ve been lookin’ out for us. Only my memory is getting hazy.”

  “It will do that,” said the Duke. “Until you get the knack.”

  “The knack?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  “The mem’ry of all your travels is still there. Only you have to go retrieve it. To have it right there in your head would get in the way of living. You’ll get the knack, though. You all will.”

  “Yeah,” I blurted. “That’s what Gor-” But I stopped myself.

  “Anyhow,” Mose said. “Now we’re here.”

  “Now we’re here,” the Duke agreed. “And we can appreciate it all the more ‘cause we’ve seen what fate can do.”

  “You call it fate,” said Jemma. “Does that mean that everything is already planned out?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not the way I mean ‘fate.’ Fate is an arrow, all right, but it shoots in every direction.”

  “I saw you,” I said. “I saw you in another world.”

  “Only one?” he asked.

  “Well, technically, two,” said Mose. “If you count the message from Youseff.”

  “I saw you in this building,” I continued, “but like twelve stories underground, wearing a white coat… Damn. Why can’t I remember it clearly?”

  “Well,” the Duke began. “I don’t doubt that you did. I’m prob’ly bouncing around lots of places. We all are. Most of ‘em, we will never, ever know about, and that’s just as well. Then there’s what I call the traveling soul. The traveling soul’s the one you set loose when you decide to go exploring. Not everybody has one o’ those because it’s got to be earned.”

  “Youseff said something like that,” Mose noted.

  The Duke thumped his chest for emphasis, and then added, “You got to be all here, but you got to know that here ain’t all you got.”

  That one, I knew I would remember. We finished our breakfast and helped the Duke clean up. Then we said our goodbyes—for now—and headed north.

  We were three blocks up Everett Street from North Avenue when Connor’s patience finally gave out.

  “Okay, Jacobus,” he said. “Enough of the mystery. Where are you taking us? I know it’s not for pancakes.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s find a place to sit down.”

  There was a bus stop at the corner with a bench and one of those plexiglass shelters to protect you from the rain. I motioned everybody over. The timing was good because a Lake Michigan spring thunderstorm was blowing in. “This is going to mean a little less to you, Connor, because you never knew Gordon…”

  “Gordon?” Mose shot out. “What about Gordon?”

  Jemma looked a little dazzled, as if she couldn’t quite connect the dots. Then finally, she said, “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so. But it’s weird.” I turned to Connor. “Okay, you remember the old guy we saw last night in the little red house?”

  “Yeah,” said Connor. “The same guy we saw in the park.”

  “Wait, wait, hold on now,” said Mose. “What little red house?”

  “The one where Connor and I first pulled the switch,” I said. “It’s a couple blocks from here. Near the school.”

  “Okay,” said Mose. “What’s up with it?”

  “Last night in Oz Park. We saw an old guy with a bulldog. Remember?”

  Everybody nodded, a little vaguely.

  “He lives in the little red house. And after I dropped Connor off last night, I went back there and knocked on the door.”

  “You went back?” Connor exclaimed. “You got more guts than me.”

  “He invited me in for a Coke,” I said and then spilled the rest of the mind-blowing details.

  My crew went limp-jawed one by one, and I added, “He said he came all the way back to give me some information.”

  “Come again,” said Mose.

  “What kind of informa
tion?” Jemma asked.

  The rain began to spatter on the hard plastic roof of the shelter.

  “It’s just…about me. Personal stuff.”

  A worried look crossed her face. “Is everything…okay?” she asked me.

  I put my hand on hers and answered, “Yeah. Yeah. It is now.”

  “Must’ve been pretty important,” Connor said, once he got over his shock. “If he was traveling for that many years.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s another thing,” I said. “Time. He got a lot older up there in the Mapmaker’s castle. Pushing eighty, he says.”

  “Eighty!” Mose exclaimed. “How’s that possible? I mean, it’s probably a stressful gig watching over the multiverse, but that’s sixty-five years in a handful of days.”

  “That’s the thing, though,” I said. “He hasn’t just been up there for a couple of days. Don’t ask me how that can be, ‘cause I don’t know. You’ll see for yourselves. It’s about time. You know how in the ‘Our Solar System’ exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, they have those displays that say, ‘this is your age on Jupiter, or this is your age on Mars?’”

  “Yeah,” said Connor, “but I always figured that was just a number, because of the time it took to orbit the sun. You’d still age at the same rate…right?”

  “Maybe on Jupiter you do,” I said. “I dunno. You have to figure in gravity and stuff like that. But we’re not talking about a nearby planet. This is a different universe. And also, he said that the journey to get here added a lot of those years. The dude made a hell of a sacrifice.”

  “Why didn’t we get old?” Jemma asked. It was a perfectly reasonable question, to which I had no answer.

  Mose got a very philosophical look on his face, and I suddenly saw what he would look like at Gordon’s age. “Maybe,” he said, “it has something to do with what happened to us in that crazy time tunnel we fell through to get here. It seemed like that could’ve been a minute…or a century.”

  I stood up and threw my hoodie over my head. “Anyhow, I told him I’d bring you guys by today. He liked that.”