The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “Is he still super-smart?” asked Jemma.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “He’s the same. Just a lot more wrinkles.”

  “Damn,” said Mose. “Little Gordo. An old man.”

  I have to confess, I considered the possibility that the house would be gone. This was a strange kind of virtual reality game we were playing, and I still felt in-between worlds. None of us had “come down” all the way. But the red house was there, and after stopping to pick up an Orange Julius for Gordon (I remembered how much he’d loved his first one), we crossed the street and made our way to the front door.

  The four of us stood there like overgrown trick-or-treaters, unsure about whether this misfit little house held treats or tricks. It was hard to see inside. The lights weren’t on, and the windows were fogged from the rain and humidity. I rang the buzzer, and then, when there was no answer, knocked. On the second knock, the door creaked open. It was unlocked. I gave it a little push.

  “Gordon?” I called out. “Are you here?”

  “Hey, Gordo!” Mose said. “Your crew is here. Show yourself.”

  I walked in first. Jemma grabbed my hand and followed. Contact was restored, so I knew that last night hadn’t been only a dream. Jemma was my girl. For how long, who knew? But as the Duke said, “You got to be here.”

  Connor stepped across the threshold, and finally, Mose.

  The light inside was as murky and gray as the light outside, but a few shades darker. I noticed that the fire was out. It was dead quiet.

  “Jacobus,” said Connor, with a tremor in his voice. “There’s somebody in that armchair over by the fireplace.”

  “Holy shit!” said Mose, in a harsh whisper. “I see him. I see Gordon.”

  And now, I could see him, too. His head had sort of lolled back against the armchair, and his hands were on the arms. He looked totally chill.

  “Do you think he’s sleeping?” Jemma whispered. When we had gotten a little closer, she giggled softly and said, “He looks so peaceful. And just like himself, except—”

  “How bizarre,” Mose said. “It’s him. I mean…it’s exactly the same dude but with a whole lot of extra miles on him.”

  “Gordon?” I leaned in to shake him.

  As soon as I touched him, I knew he was dead. It wasn’t just the coldness, but the stillness. There was no electricity running through his skin. For a few seconds, only I knew the truth, and it dropped into my soul like an iron weight. I knew what I was supposed to do next. Put my fingers against his neck. Check for a pulse. I also knew there was no use.

  I turned slowly, first to Jemma, then to the others. All this tension gathered in my throat, and my voice broke when I said, “I think he’s—I think he must’ve died last night. He wasn’t feeling too good when he walked me home.”

  And then, I just lost it. Mose pushed in, crying, “Noooo…,” and when he saw him close up, started to sniffle and try and suck back the grief before it hammered him. That got to me even more. I let go of Jemma’s hand and just dropped to my knees in front of the armchair.

  Me. Fearless hunter. Protector of women. My eyes flooded over and the tears ran down my face like blood from a wound. I didn’t care. This was my friend. My pilot. The guy who had shown me the map to a new reality and then become the Mapmaker himself. And more than that: he had come all the way back…for me. He had lost all those years…for me.

  “Oh, God, God, God! He wanted to see you guys so bad.”

  Jemma knelt at my side and put her arms around my shoulders. She kept them there as I shook with sobs. The weight of seven worlds came crashing down and everything I’d held in came pouring out. And she stayed.

  The four of us made a kind of huddle again, down on our knees in front of Gordon’s body. We clung onto each other the same way we had in the desert and on the Leviathan and on the playground. I don’t care what anybody says: dead is dead and there’s nothing normal about it, because what you knew and loved—whatever it is that gets pumped by the heart into the brain and emerges from the eyes like a holy light—isn’t there anymore.

  And then someone spoke from the far corner of the room.

  “Why are you looking for me over there?” said the voice. “I’m here.”

  We all turned at once, not fast, but slowly, because we had been four, and now we were five.

  Gordon was…how to say this? He was there, as real as us, but in another place. Another place in the sense that Youseff had meant when he’d talked about where the traveler saints were. He was as we knew him, and as I’d first seen him. Thick glasses magnifying his eyes to twice the size, and a barrel-shaped body that made him look like a living work of 3D animation. He was slurping the Orange Julius we’d bought him. And something else: he had his catcher’s gear on.

  He motioned, and we followed him out the door and onto Cleveland Avenue.

  The rain had stopped, but a thick fog hung from the trees. The air was fresh and smelled of newly opened flowers.

  “How in the hell did you do that?” Mose gasped.

  Gordon shrugged. “You know what Einstein said, right?”

  “E equals MC squared?” Mose volunteered.

  “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. And dude—he said that even when he was talking about one universe.” He flipped up his face guard. “It all keeps going. It’s designed to. We keep going. I won’t be able to see you again in this world.” He cocked his thumb toward the little house. “In this world, I’m a corpse. But in another world…who knows?” He put the guard down again. “We all go on.”

  “But—” Mose began, then looked at me, with just the faintest trace of a smile.

  Jemma grabbled my hand and squeezed it tight, and Connor…he just started laughing and didn’t stop, because I think he finally got it.

  “I’ll see you out there, Gordo,” I said.

  Gordon stuck the straw through his face guard and slurped down the last of the Julius.

  “Count on it,” he said. “Thanks for the drink. I probably won’t be able to get these where I’m going.”

  “Hey,” said Connor. “If you see Youseff—”

  “I’ll give him your best,” Gordon finished.

  Then he spun on his heels and walked off down the street. At the corner, he dematerialized into the fog, and the four of us stood there a long time before going back into the house to do the right thing for the old man whose body had—briefly—been a waystation for Gordon’s soul.

  I called the Fire Department from my cell phone because I’d once been told that’s what you do in these situations. The fact that there was a dead body in the house didn’t affect me the way it once would have. For one thing, I’d now seen what death looked like and it had lost some of its power over me. But mainly, I now knew that that body wasn’t Gordon. Or maybe I should say, it was only a passing form of him. His traveler’s soul would go on.

  When we went back inside, we saw that Gordon had left something behind. Curled up, sleeping and drooling on the old man’s lap, was his loyal bulldog.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “He forgot Orlong.”

  “Should I try to catch him?” Connor asked.

  “I don’t think he forgot,” said Mose.

  Jemma smiled.

  “I think you just got yourself a new dog, Jake,” Mose added.

  I walked over, and immediately, the bulldog began slathering dog spit on my hand with his slobbery tongue.

  “He’s slightly disgusting,” I said. “But he’s friendly.”

  “I think he’s adorable.” Jemma took my arm. “Just like you.”

  stood at the door of Mr. Bohm’s classroom, shifting my weight from foot to foot, trying to arrange the words in the way I wanted them to come out. The memories were fading fast and soon all I would have were the voice recordings on Youseff’s phone. The final bell had rung five minutes before, and school was out, but as usual, little J.T. Slivowicz was in there pestering Mr. Bohm about some physics quest
ion.

  Mr. Bohm motioned me to come in and take a desk. It looked as if J.T. was going to be there for a few more minutes. As I sat down in the front row and set my books on the floor, I picked up a few stray words of their conversation and realized they were talking about wormholes in space-time, and what it might feel like to go through one. I laughed to myself, but it must have been louder than I thought because J.T. turned and looked at me and said, squeakily, but in every other way in the most normal way possible:

  “Oh, you’re back.”

  Mr. Bohm raised his eyebrows a little. “I didn’t realize you’d been gone, Jacobus.”

  “Neither did I,” I said. It was only partly a lie.

  Mr. Bohm turned back to J.T. “Okay, Slivowicz, you plot it out on paper as best you can. Then bring it in and we’ll see if the computer can model it in non-Euclidian space. The school’s computers aren’t the fastest, but we’ll try…”

  As J.T. passed my desk, he leaned in and whispered, “We’re the first kids to know. How cool is that?” Then he tried to fist-bump me, but missed, and left the room.

  No matter how hard a kid like J.T. tries, he can never act cool. He’s not wired that way. But I had a new appreciation for guys like him. They were the sorcerers of our time, which was more than sufficiently proven by the fact that he knew I had been traveling.

  How he knew was a whole separate issue.

  “What’s on your mind, J. Rose?” asked Mr. Bohm.

  “Two questions.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “The whole many-worlds thing…”

  “Right?”

  “It hasn’t been proven yet, right?”

  “No, and it probably won’t be. Not in our lifetimes, or for many lifetimes to come. You can’t make a genuine proof of something that can’t be either experimentally demonstrated or used to make predictions about the outcome of other experiments.”

  “Would the proof have to be written as math? Like an equation?”

  “As opposed to what?” Mr. Bohm asked.

  “Um…” I hesitated. “Experience?”

  “Well, you’d still have to be able to demonstrate it. Math provides an abstract demonstration of things that can’t be shown in any other way. But not everything. Take certain paranormal phenomena. Things like lucid dreaming and near-death experience. There’s considerable evidence that they occur, but it’s proof only to the person who experiences them. No way to replicate that.”

  “What if you could bring something back?” I asked.

  “You mean, from another universe?”

  “Yeah.”

  Youseff’s cell phone was in my pocket, burning a metaphorical hole in it. I wanted to show Mr. Bohm, but I knew it would mean zilch to him unless I could show him what it did, and I couldn’t do that.

  “Well, you see, Jacobus, all of this exotic theorizing is based on scientists observing and predicting the behavior of things at the subatomic level. The micro level as opposed to the macro, where we live. Take teleportation. They think now that they can do it with a single electron. But teleporting a Toyota is something else.”

  “But shouldn’t what’s true of the micro level be true of the macro level? Don’t the same laws apply?”

  “You’ve just stated the central problem of modern physics. How to reconcile the laws that apply to big things, like planets, with those that apply to very small things, like quarks. Einstein couldn’t do it, and so far, neither can Stephen Hawking. They act like different worlds, with different laws. But we know they can’t be.”

  “Different worlds with different laws,” I repeated.

  “So far,” Mr. Bohm affirmed.

  “That’s the problem, all right,” I said. “And if I told you that there’s a universe where this city—Chicago—has been replaced by a colony of human beehives ruled over by a dictatorship of redheads who worship some Great Leader?”

  “Then I’d say you’ve got a heck of a science-fiction book in you.”

  “But you wouldn’t deny that it’s possible…”

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t deny that it’s possible. All of history is just one outcome influencing another. From where we sit now, it doesn’t seem possible that they ever built the Pyramids, or that we landed a man on the moon. But we know both things happened—”

  “Because we have physical evidence,” I finished.

  He nodded. “And documentation from multiple observers.” He sat back in his chair and chewed on his pencil for a moment. “You might want to get together with J.T. …Mister Slivowicz. He thinks he can derive a differential equation that proves that certain variables can move a macro object into an alternate universe.”

  “Is he a genius or crazy?” I asked.

  “Probably both,” said Mr. Bohm. It was an answer that none of my other teachers would ever have given. That’s why I liked him.

  He dropped the pencil on his desk and leaned forward. There was something he was thinking, or feeling, that he didn’t know how to say. Finally, he did. “Is there something you want to show me, Jacobus?”

  What the hell, I thought, and took the phone out of my pocket. I got up from the desk and walked over to where J.T. had been standing. I figured it might give me more credibility.

  “Mr. Bohm,” I said, “I’m gonna tell you something I’m not gonna tell anyone else. Please don’t call the men in the white suits. I brought this phone back from a desert in Syria in a parallel universe, where it was given to me by a guy named Youssef, who told me to dial 1-2-3-0-0 to switch back to this world, which is where I am now. If you open up the voice recording app and listen to the file labeled ‘Travelers,’ you’ll hear me and the three people who came back with me talking about everything that happened. All of us are here now. I don’t know if that counts as ‘documentation from multiple observers.’ I want you to hear it for yourself.”

  My hands started to shake as I held the phone over his desk, and as they did, a few stray grains of sand fell onto his pad. He glanced down at the grains. I knew it meant little. The sand could’ve come from the North Avenue Beach. But it was a nice touch.

  “I will listen, Jacobus.” He took the phone. “No good scientist dismisses things out of hand…but—”

  “I know you don’t think I’m a genius,” I said. “So maybe you’ll just think I’m crazy. But something happened to me and my friends, and I want someone who at least understands the concept to know.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, but I could detect his skepticism.”1-2-3-0-0?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “But I wouldn’t advise dialing that number.”

  “Fair enough,” he said again.

  I backed away from the desk, and the last thing I said was, “Don’t erase anything. I’ll pick it up from you tomorrow, okay?”

  He gave me a nod and a little salute, and I said, “Thanks, Mr. Bohm. Thanks for hearing me out.”

  I left the building by way of the side door that led onto the outdoor basketball courts. I have to say that my head was pretty well up in the clouds, and I might not have noticed the altercation under the far hoop if not for that thing my dad taught me about looking at the world from the corner of your eye. There was a sort of hulking form in a red jacket looming over a smaller form scrunched up against the fence. I heard a yelp that had a familiar squeaky tone, and I headed across the court. This was clearly a bullying incident in progress, and I—as one of the travelers—figured I should intercede.

  I stopped about ten feet from the scene of the crime and called out, “Hey. Leave him alone!”

  The red-jacketed hulk turned slowly, and with a certain threat.

  It was Hartūn. Pretty much as I remembered him, although the jacket was a new touch.

  “Lookin’ to get your ass kicked, Rose?”

  As he strode toward me, I saw that the kid he’d been harassing was none other than J.T.

  “No,” I said. “But that guy you’re beating up on could probably save yours in a parallel universe.”

&n
bsp; “What the f– are you babbling about?” he crossed his arms defensively in front of his chest.

  “Oh…and by the way, I wanted to thank you for owning up to stealing my Game Boy.”

  I couldn’t tell if the slight flicker of recognition was guilt or some cross-current of memory from the hive city, but whatever it was, it seemed to soften him just a bit. So, I decided to play it a little more, and got into a stance. “Hey…buddy bump, for old times’ sake?”

  “You’re nuts,” he said and then added, without any conviction, “Faggot.”

  I walked over to Slivowicz and held out my hand. “C’mon, J.T. We have a few things to discuss. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  The kid pulled himself upright and retrieved his fallen books. Hartūn made no move to stop him, just kept staring at me as if he was trying to figure out who I really was.

  “Make better choices, Hartūn,” I said, as we walked off the court. “You might make some friends.” What I didn’t say was, ‘me included’. But I thought it.

  On the following day, I had science class, Mr. Bohm, fourth period. I was, to say the least, a little apprehensive about how he would see me after listening to our audio diary. I half-expected him to greet me with a straightjacket. Instead, he just smiled his usual slightly absentminded smile and kept writing on the blackboard.

  After class, he called me up to his desk, opened one of the drawers, and handed me back the Samsung phone with its special satellite sleeve that was somehow much more than that.

  “I think you’ll be wanting this,” he said. “Very interesting. We’ll talk after I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit more.”

  “So you’re not shocked?” I asked.

  He hesitated, and then said, “No. That wouldn’t be the word.”

  After school, Jemma, Connor, Mose, and I, along with our new “Gordon,” J.T. Slivowicz, went for a Julius. I took out the phone to make sure our recorded journal hadn’t mysteriously disappeared. When I woke it up, it was still on the phone setting. I glanced down at the call log. The last number dialed was 1-2-3-0-0.

  I held the phone up for everyone to see, and only J.T. failed to get the joke. I felt a big smile spread across my face. Somewhere out there, Mr. Bohm’s traveling soul was getting the science lesson of a lifetime.