by Max Barry
A man at the desk coughed meatily.
Felicity said, “How many times? You said this started ten months ago. How many times has he killed her?”
“About twenty.”
“Twenty?”
“Give or take.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to go.”
“Wait. How do I get back?”
“That was your three minutes plus some. We’re done.”
“How do I get back? It’s the egg, right? I have to use the egg.”
He gestured vaguely. “You can make a life here. It’s not so different.”
“I’m short a cat,” she said. “I don’t want similar. I want to go home.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s one-way. You can’t go back. I’m sorry.” For a moment, there was a hint of sympathy in his expression. Then he turned away.
“What?” she said again, loudly. “Excuse me?” She went after him. “What do you mean, I can’t go back?”
“If people could go back, Clay would have returned to his dream Maddie a long time ago. You can’t go backward. It’s impossible.”
She stopped. He had left this part until the end. He hadn’t wanted to tell her at all. “You son of a bitch.” He ignored her. The doors slid apart, opening onto the street. “Wife-murderer!” she shouted.
He turned and crossed the space between them quickly, fury on his face. He raised a hand and for a moment she thought he meant to hit her. But he only stuck a finger in front of her face. “I did not kill my wife.”
She didn’t move. Anger drained from his face. He glanced around. People were watching. He turned and walked out.
* * *
—
She returned to her room and began to pack things into her overnight bag. As she was zipping, the tablet trilled, and the screen lit up with Gavin running toward the camera, his mouth open, his hair flying. They had been horsing around in Central Park the previous August—no, September, it was the Labor Day weekend. It had been too warm to stay inside. She remembered this.
It’s not so different.
She swiped. “Whew,” Gavin said. “I thought you weren’t going to answer. Police are gone, but the place is still a wreck. We need a new sofa. Unbelievable. How are you? Any news? Test results?”
On their first date, had she stuck a Goofy pen behind her ear?
“Babe?” he said.
“No test results.”
“How are you feeling? You sound strange.”
“I’m just tired.”
“They want me at work, but I can come by the hospital first.”
“No, don’t. I’m fine.”
“All right. I’ll check in with you soon. Take care of yourself. I love you.”
“Okay,” she said, and tapped to end the call.
She stuffed the tablet into her bag. Then she went to the door and closed it. She wrestled a chair onto the hospital bed and climbed onto it. She felt like she was three seconds away from a broken wrist, but she hadn’t fallen the last time she’d done this, and she didn’t fall this time. She eased the ceiling tile aside and groped until her fingers found the tub.
At the floor desk, the bandanna woman was talking to a younger woman with heavy eye makeup and severe bangs. Felicity waited, but there was no incipient end to the conversation. “I’m going home,” she said.
The bandanna woman looked at her. “Did a doctor tell you that?”
Felicity shook her head. “It’s fine. I figured it out.”
“You figured it out?” the woman said, her voice thick with sarcasm.
“Yes.” Felicity walked away. She thought the woman might come after her or call for security, but neither of those things happened. She reached the elevator and pressed the button and waited. She had no idea what she was going to do.
7
Everything about her apartment building was the same: dull hallway carpet, big ball light globes, even the scuff mark on the bottom of the door from when the movers had banged it carrying their dining table. She inserted her key and it didn’t turn; she had to force it. That was new, but when the door swung open, it offered a prosaic explanation: The apartment had been burgled. Hugo, she assumed, searching for the metal egg. Broken drawers and burst cushions were stacked on the sofa. A potted plant sat in the kitchen sink, rescued by Gavin, she assumed. The bedroom was a blizzard of clothing. Every door was open.
She began to tidy. The third thing she picked up was a salmon-pink summer dress she had never seen in her life. She looked at it awhile and hung it in the closet.
By the time Gavin arrived home, she’d put away everything that wasn’t broken and carted the remainder down to the basement. She had thrown a bedsheet over the mess of a sofa, which lent it a college dorm feel. She had restored knickknacks to the TV shelf. Every now and then she came across something new, like a mechanical clock with a carousel of little bears on bicycles, something that might have been sentimental and beloved, but wasn’t. Not by her.
Who was here before? she wondered. There must have been someone. A woman named Felicity Staples, who’d bought a salmon dress and a bear clock. Who had a job at the Daily News and shared a bed with Gavin. Where was that Felicity now?
She could figure two possibilities. In one, they had swapped, which meant the other Felicity was currently coming to terms with a world in which she owned an extra cat. In the other, the woman had been replaced, and Felicity’s arrival was like Dorothy entering the Land of Oz in a spinning tornado house, landing on the Wicked Witch of the East and squashing her flat.
* * *
—
Gavin arrived home and began to organize pots. She watched, interested. He had never been a cooking guy before. He filled a pot with water with one hand, flicking on the heat with the other, like he’d done it a million times, then pulled a stick of something she didn’t even recognize from the fridge and began to chop. Spring onion. That was what it was. “Before I forget,” he said, “that position with Twine Medical is available. I ran into the guy.” He looked up. “Do you remember?”
She shook her head.
“They’re after a technical writer. You said you were interested.”
Huh, she thought. Even here, she was losing her job.
“The position will be open next week,” Gavin said. “No rush.”
She watched his hands. No wedding ring. She had kind of gotten it into her head that their marriage was inevitable. But this Felicity and Gavin weren’t engaged, either.
The meal was an Instagram-grade concoction of noodles and eggplant. The Gavin she knew could never have cooked this in a million years. “Hey, I bought you a new phone,” he said. “You just have to sign in. It restores from the cloud, so it’s like you never lost it.”
“That’s neat.” She was reacting badly: to the meal, to Gavin, to all of it. She was being like her college friend Alice, who had spent a summer traveling across Europe, and afterward, they couldn’t go anywhere without Alice pointing out everything that was different. “In Paris, they have bicycles you can just take for free,” Alice would say, and, “In Amsterdam, they leave their babies outside in strollers even when it’s snowing, it’s actually much healthier.” At a bus station: “Pharmaceutical ads like this are illegal in Europe.” In a McDonald’s, Alice gazed at the menu and said, “You really do get a new perspective on your own country when you go abroad,” and it was really unbearable.
Where I come from, Gavin doesn’t really cook.
Where I was before, I actually had two cats.
When you move, you really learn a lot about where you came from.
He slid a white box toward her. Her old phone really was lost forever, she guessed. It literally no longer existed.
While she was tapping, Gavin dug out his own phone. He began to read, forking noodles into his mo
uth. She found herself watching him. She was sure his hair was longer.
“Huh,” he said, not looking up.
“What?” she said.
Seconds passed. She watched his eyes move back and forth across the screen. “Huh.”
“I hate it when you do that,” she said.
He looked at her. “What?”
“When you’re reading and say, ‘Huh,’ and I say, ‘What,’ and you ignore me. Then you say, ‘Huh’ again.”
Gavin blinked.
“You do that all the fucking time,” she said, and got up and walked into the kitchen, her arms swinging, she was so mad.
“Can you come back here?”
She went to the cupboard and took out a bottle of wine. She poured a glass and drank it all. She was considering a refill when he walked in.
Behind his glasses, his eyes were calm, composed, and too green. “Can we talk?”
“What do you want me to do? Sit there saying ‘What?’ over and over?”
“I didn’t realize I was doing that.”
“You were.” He was being reasonable. She was the crazy one. “I’m going out.” She grabbed her bag and walked to the front door.
“Felicity,” he said. “Wait.”
She slammed the door on her way out.
* * *
—
After a while it became clear that she was heading for the subway. Because of course she was: That was where it had all started. She had her bag and the plastic tub and the egg. She had a phone. It was after eight when she arrived, and the northbound platform at 42nd and Eighth was populated with teenagers. She loitered. A train came through; the teenagers piled on board; the train pulled out. She walked to the platform edge and looked down. She sat, dangled her legs, and jumped down.
She landed awkwardly. No one shouted; no one came rushing to the platform edge. She dug out her new phone and activated its light. The cavity beneath the platform was larger than she remembered. Maybe it felt smaller when you were trapped inside it with a train rolling by. She crawled inside, trying to avoid catching her clothes on the pipes.
She didn’t know what she was looking for. A door? A latch that, when pushed, revealed a tunnel of swirling light? There was nothing like that. She unzipped her bag and opened the tub. She had no idea what it was or why Hugo had given it to her. But it was connected somehow. She hesitated, remembering Gavin’s theory of toxic chemicals, then grasped it. It was ice-cold, but did not change anything.
She looked around. What had she done the first time? Cowered here with her eyes shut. She tried that: shifting into the same position. She opened her eyes. She knocked the egg gently against the wall. She said, “Open sesame.”
Maybe she’d moved worlds and not realized. Could it be that subtle? She didn’t think so. There had been a sensation of pressure, which at the time she’d thought was from the train.
A wind stirred. She was expecting it and stayed where she was. The light grew. The wheels began to scream. She plugged her ears with her fingers. The egg was a deep chill in her palm. She closed her eyes against the bite of flying dirt, and when she opened them she saw one of her old friends, a steel pizza cutter. Above, the rumble of doors. Voices, too, raised in alarm. “She’s down there,” a woman said. “She went down there.”
“Hold the train,” called a man. There was more shouting. For the next forty-five minutes, the train sat still while a procession of people spoke to Felicity to verify that she was safe. Then, with plenty of warning, the train began to roll forward, very slowly. The tracks were full of brightly jacketed workers. They helped Felicity out of the cavity and onto the platform.
“Thank you,” she said. They were being very nice, considering what an asshole move she had pulled. She had, she was pretty sure, inconvenienced about a million people.
She recognized an MTA man with a turban: Ravneet, who had attended to her the last time. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head.
“I must tell the police that you have done this before. You will be in trouble.”
“Okay,” she said. A question occurred to her. “Am I the only one? Has anyone else been down there lately?”
“I assure you, it is only you.”
She nodded. Two officers were already approaching. She tried to think of what she would say.
* * *
—
So it probably wasn’t the cavity. There might be nothing special at all about that place. Because Hugo hadn’t used it, if she believed Ravneet. On the Q, heading home after an hour spent refusing mental health services from the police, she turned ideas over in her brain. Her phone kept pinging. It was restoring from the cloud, and during her iBlackout she had missed a lot of calls and messages. Her family seemed to have the idea that she was barely clinging to life. Felicity tapped out a few replies, just enough to reassure everyone that she was still kicking, then put her phone away. She didn’t want to speak to anyone. She didn’t want to hear her mother’s voice slightly altered, or her father’s stock of well-worn expressions, but with changes.
A loss isn’t a loss until you sell. That was one of his. It meant you shouldn’t give up just because things were going badly. But another way to interpret it was: You could avoid dealing with a situation by ignoring it.
When she unlocked the apartment door, Gavin was in a chair, reading a book by the tall lamp. He set it down and looked at her, his glasses reflecting. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She owed him an apology, of course. It was nearly midnight.
“Are you going to bed?”
“Yes,” she said. They did that. She rolled over, putting her back to him, and he turned off the light without a word.
* * *
—
In the morning, when Gavin went to work, she absorbed herself in cleaning the apartment. She left her phone on mute to concentrate on where things were supposed to go. She opened the fridge and stared at its contents, trying to imagine how one might combine the menagerie of ingredients within. Then she went to her local deli, which was familiar.
Her inbox was filled with work: follow-ups to stories she didn’t know, replies to emails she’d never sent. She would have to figure all that out, she supposed. If she was stuck here, she would need to integrate. But instead of dealing with that, she dug through her contacts for the name of a professor at Columbia, a man she’d interviewed previously about budget cuts to science who had given great quotes. He agreed to meet her on campus.
She wasn’t sure whether to take the egg—it seemed risky to bring it along and risky to leave it—and wound up stashing it inside her mailbox in the lobby. On the train, she sat opposite an ad for something called Medivox, a spray that promised to cure colds. What was that, she wondered: a miracle product that didn’t exist in her own world? Or just run-of-the-mill bullshit, like herbal teas?
Professor Ken Creighton’s office was a narrow slice of the Northwest Corner Building, between the elevators and a supply closet. One wall was shelves, stuffed with books and papers. On the desk sat a travel mug that said: sweetened with the tears of my postdoc students. Creighton didn’t look the type to evoke tears from anybody, though: He was a small, tidy man with silver hair and a warm smile. He shook her hand with both of his and took a seat not behind his desk but directly across the cramped space from her. “So you’re interested in the Multiverse,” he said, as if this was amusing.
“It’s a kind of ‘imagine what’s possible’ piece,” Felicity said, even though the Daily News would never run an article like that, not in any universe.
“Amazing,” said Creighton. He was fiftyish, or maybe older, but in a way that suited him. If Felicity had been taking physics classes, she would not have been devastated to get Professor Creighton. “They say everything comes back into fashion, if you wait long enough.”
“The Multiverse is
n’t fashionable?”
“It was exciting for a while. As ridiculous as it sounds, once you accept that the universe runs on quantum mechanics, it follows logically that our world is only one of many. You need a good reason to believe otherwise. However, it’s untestable. Which means it’s not a hypothesis so much as an open box you can rummage around in for whatever kind of theory you like. It won’t completely go away, though, so we kick it between the Math and Physics Departments every few years.”
“It’s not disproven, then.” She took out her notepad. “It might be real.”
“I cannot disprove the existence of invisible pink unicorns,” said Creighton. “Those, too, may be real.”
“I see,” she said. “If it’s real, how does it work?”
“Depends which theory you believe.”
“Could I describe a scenario and you tell me if there’s one that fits?”
He looked delighted. “That is, in fact, how most people do Multiverse thinking. Go ahead, and I’ll do my best.”