Schrödinger's Gun
Page 3
—maybe Sarah doesn’t hate me—
—maybe she wants to be a cop—
—maybe she wants to get the hell out of this messed-up city—
—but now, something was different. I counted the windows, up and along, trying to work out which was apartment 13B. A light came on just as I found it. The faint outline of a blonde head bobbed past the window.
Longing kicked me in the gut.
The girl—young woman, I suppose—drifted through the room, followed by a thousand other versions of herself. Some had short hair, some had long; some were beautiful, some were not; some had eyes that were grey and heavy, some wore smiles that were full of hope. I knew that she was—that they were—Sarah. My baby girl.
In one universe, faint as the very outside of a shadow, another woman appeared behind Sarah and placed an arm around her shoulders. She was in her early forties: strong chin, dirty blonde hair, hooded eyes. As I watched, I swear she looked right at me. I drank in the sight of her before the curtains closed.
I blinked. It had grown almost fully dark, and my breath was starting to come in clouds. The street lamps were orange. I took the bundle of letters from my pocket and extracted the earliest: coffee-stained, slightly yellowed, grimy from the old rubber band that had held it to the others until a day or two ago. As snowflakes settled wetly on the paper my memory threw up a conversation I had almost forgotten, one that I’d had with Sarah near the end:
“So, the cat is inside the box, okay, and there’s a flask of poison in there, too, which can break open at any time. The cat might die and it might not. Now, we don’t know if it’s alive or dead in there until we open the box to check. Okay?”
I remember thinking that it was a dumb thing to do, trying to explain quantum physics to a six-year-old, but Sarah was a smart kid. She just looked up at me with her big, doleful eyes and listened.
“But it’s not just that we ‘don’t know’, it’s that there are really millions of potential cats, alive and dead, and opening the box collapses them all down into just one, which is alive or dead. That’s what mommy’s head-chip does.”
She considered this, eyes on her lap, for almost a minute, then looked up and said, “The cat must know.”
The Chicago evening closed around me. I looked up at the curtained window and then down at the letter in my hand. I plunged my thumb into the envelope.
* * *
I dozed standing up on West 23rd Street. As was usual by now, I was both there and in my bed in Trumbull Avenue at the same time, my implant straining to keep both possibilities open. It had gotten too cold even to snow: the sidewalks were locked in frost and my breath was as opaque as cigarette smoke. I huddled into the wall/pillow and closed my eyes.
—Kitty Rivers—
—Vincent Quine—
—a blunt-nosed pocket pistol underneath a staircase—
My thoughts ran through the same tired grooves. Who shot Johnny Rivers? Was his death simply a part of the grim business of Chicago—a hit put out by a rival gang and executed by a thug who’d killed before and gotten away with it—or was it a crime of the heart, an act of revenge by the woman he had pushed too far?
I think I started dreaming. Vincent Quine oozed past me, stretching and distorting like he was in a house of mirrors. Kitty Rivers showed me her bruised cheek and started crying, turning into Sarah when I tried to comfort her. For a moment I saw all of Chicago as a mist of endless possibilities. Bullets flew from guns, hit, missed, ricocheted; bodies fell, crumpled, folded, flew, sank, rolled, were discovered or kept secret; revenge was or wasn’t or was almost taken. A million stories hovered in the smoke.
I woke to the sound of a door slamming shut.
It took me a moment to work out which reality I was in. West 23rd Street was chill and bleak and someone had just got out of a car. It was too dark to see them clearly. They opened the trapdoor to the basement and disappeared inside.
I followed, reaching into my pocket. My gun was freezing to the touch. I trod stealthily over to the trapdoor and crouched beside it. The light had been switched on inside, but at this angle I could see almost nothing of the room below. I stood up and stepped over to the stairs.
Apart from Johnny’s body having been cleared away, the crime scene was exactly as I had left it. Distillery equipment glinted dully in the half-light. When I reached the bottom of the steps I drew my gun from my coat and stepped forwards, squinting furiously as my eyes adjusted. I heard a scuff behind me and spun around.
“Chicago Police,” I said to the shadow underneath the stairs. “Step out slowly, hands on your head.”
The figure moved into the light.
My heisen roared. It was impossible. What I was looking at was impossible. I felt my gun drift downwards as my arms lost strength.
They stood there, overlapping, like two different movies projected onto the same screen; a fault line between two universes. A perfect quantum tightrope. I was looking at the cat inside the box, alive and dead at the same time, and I had seconds left to choose which possibility remained when the lid came off. I couldn’t speak. For a moment, two versions of myself stood inside of each other, our hearts beating different rhythms.
The figure that had stepped out from the shadows was both Vincent Quine and Kitty Rivers.
Copyright © 2015 by Ray Wood
Art copyright © 2015 by Richie Pope