An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes

by Randy Ribay

  As if that completely settles it, his pastor and grandparents all rise. They put their hands on Dante’s shoulders and bow their heads. Dante keeps his eyes open. He stares at a crack in the wall.

  “Dear, Lord,” the pastor begins. “Here is a beloved son. We raise him up to you. We ask that you bless him. Give him the wisdom to walk the righteous path. Give him the strength to resist temptation. Give him the courage to be whom You created him to be. In the name of Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Dante says.

  You Made Me Strong, But I Am Weak

  Monday

  “I’m gay,” Dante tells his friends.

  In his head.

  In real life, he stands at the sliding glass doors of Mari’s house and gazes into the backyard of the neighbor’s house. A bunch of little kids are playing some chaotic form of football. One of them tosses the ball high into the air, and the others fight to catch it. The one who succeeds then runs the ball back to an imaginary goal line while everybody else tries to tackle him.

  Mari and Archie sit at the table talking about something. Dante takes slow, controlled breaths. His arms are folded over his chest to still his hands from shaking. For the last half hour he has been mentally declaring his sexuality, ready to make the announcement once Sam and Sarah arrive, even though they never usually talked about stuff like this as a group.

  But it does not look like Sam and Sarah will ever arrive.

  As he continues watching the kids, Dante can’t help but remember “Smear the Queer,” a game most of the boys liked to play back when he was in grade school. Whoever had the football ran about in order to avoid getting tackled by the others for as long as possible. Once taken down, the kid would toss the ball to someone else, and that person became the “queer” who everyone else tried to “smear.”

  Like wolves targeting the weakest in the herd, the boys had always measured the look of fear upon the receiver’s face and the amount of tears streaming down his cheeks post-tackle. Those deemed the weakest would be thrown the ball most frequently, as they provided the most entertainment.

  It was a malicious game that could only be the product of childhood or the medieval age.

  Dante never liked to play it and was glad that the other boys seemed to naturally fear him. Nobody wanted to be tackled by the big, black kid. Dante spent most recesses wandering up and down the playground scanning the gravel for unusual stones that he could add to his rock collection.

  But one day the ball had sailed through someone’s hands and landed at Dante’s feet. He picked it up to toss it back as he heard someone bellow, “Smear the queer!”

  Caught in the frenzy of the game and finding confidence in numbers, the boys ignored their natural fear of Dante. They rushed toward him.

  Dante froze.

  They smashed into him. He saw sky and then a flash of red as the back of his head smacked concrete. Bodies piled onto him, crowding out the sky and crushing his lungs. Anonymous fists pummeled his body.

  He struggled to breathe. Bright bursts of pain flashed in a hundred different places.

  He saw a patch of blue emerge between the crush of bodies and, as if by instinct, he flung the ball through the gap. As quickly as they had descended upon him, the frenzy departed. Dante was left a crumpled mess of tears and bruises.

  He waited for the paraprofessional who monitored the playground to rush to his aid, but the man was known for turning a blind eye to the brutality of the children. He believed that such torment built character.

  After some time, Dante pushed himself up and slowly moved into a sitting position. He wiped the wetness from his eyes with dusty hands. He pulled up his shirt and examined his torso to ensure that all internal organs remained internal. He touched the back of his head and was relieved when he did not find blood.

  Dante did not stand and sprint toward revenge. Neither did he seek a teacher to tell. Instead, aching and convinced that half the bones in his body were broken, he rolled onto all fours and searched the ground for the rocks he had dropped when the ball had fallen into his path.

  The other kids left him alone for the remainder of that recess, but word of his softness spread through the school in whispers and giggles. Boys were not supposed to be soft. Big boys were definitely not supposed to be soft. And big, black boys were not even supposed to say the word “soft.”

  They relished his weakness. It became the whetstone against which they sharpened their own inflated senses of strength and self-worth.

  They started to go out of their way to throw him the ball whenever they played. Even if he wasn’t playing, even though he never wanted to play.

  If he were at the opposite end of the playground, sitting in the shade of some tree looking at leaves shifting in the wind, they would work their game in his direction and toss him the ball.

  Even if he didn’t pick it up, they would still rush over and dog-pile him. Sometimes he would run. Slow and uncoordinated, his attempts at escape only elicited additional mockery later as they reenacted the sad scene.

  Dante usually just picked up the ball, closed his eyes, and braced for impact.

  I’m sorry, he would pray as he waited for the flurry to crash into him. Jesus, I’m sorry you made me strong, but I am weak.

  So Dante stopped going outside for recess. Instead, every day he’d beg the teacher to let him stay inside and use one of the computers. Probably sensing the real issue, she always let him.

  The sound of Archie’s die bouncing across the table brings Dante back to the present.

  “I’m calling it,” Mari says.

  Dante considers just telling Archie and Mari right now. He could always talk to Sam and Sarah later. But that doesn’t feel right. He wants to tell all of his friends at once, to deal with all of their reactions at once. He decides to wait until Wednesday.

  “Okay,” he says.

  Water and Air

  Tuesday

  Dante lowers himself into the pool. He feels his body, buoyed by the water, grow lighter. It is one of his favorite feelings in the world.

  He stands at the end of his lane, soothed by the water’s gentle swaying. As he begins stretching, he watches the handful of other midday swimmers. In the next lane, a middle-aged Indian guy wearing a black Speedo, black goggles, and blue swim cap breaststrokes lap after lap like a machine. On the other side of him, a white woman backstrokes steadily. At the far end of the pool, three elderly people walk back and forth across the shallow end like aquatic somnambulists.

  His grandfather had taken him to the gym, perhaps hoping it would boost Dante’s masculinity. But Dante headed straight for the pool. He’s never competed, but he has always found that the activity of swimming calmed him. Underwater, it is quiet, the real world light-years away.

  Dante pulls on his goggles, takes a deep breath, and lowers himself beneath the water’s surface. He kicks off the wall. His body cuts through the fluid world, and then a moment later he breaks the surface and begins a functional forward crawl, tilting his head every three or four strokes to suck in air. He revels in the reprieve from gravity. He reaches the end of the lane, and because he has never learned to flip-turn, he merely turns around, takes a deep breath, lowers himself into the water, and kicks off the wall again.

  Dante spends the first several laps focusing on his breathing so that he does not drown. But after a few laps, he finds a rhythm and tries to free his mind.

  But instead of reaching a meditative state, he is gripped by anxiety. After church, his grandpa had forced him to box up his PCs and take them to the basement. It was like burying old friends.

  He swims. His thoughts find a rhythm. In spite of the punishment, in spite of the feeling that he has once again disappointed his grandparents—and his father—he discovers something like freedom in being outed, in no longer having to hide the truth from his family. He just wishes he had walked out of the closet instead of being shoved.

  At least he could control how he’d tell his
friends. He should have just told them last night. What was he afraid of?

  Archie was logical. Mari was empathetic. Sam was laid back. Sarah was open-minded.

  He can’t see a universe in which any of his friends will reject him based on this new truth.

  But still. Something holds him back.

  Maybe he simply resents the horrible awkwardness of it all. He hates that the world makes coming out such a big deal. It’s not like straight people have to muster up the courage to proclaim their heterosexuality. Nobody feels the pressure to announce their hair color, their height, their favorite snack food. How ridiculous to have to admit—as if you were a drug addict or an alcoholic—that you are naturally attracted to the same sex.

  But he knows that he cannot change the world. That he cannot control how other people react. He can only do his thing and let everyone else sort through their own feelings. Worse comes to worst, he moves to San Francisco.

  Dante suddenly feels short of breath. He notices that he’s swimming at too fast a pace to sustain. He focuses on the tiled, blue line at the bottom of the pool, and tries to slip back into a relaxing rhythm, pulling his arms through water and air, water and air.

  Dante swims several more laps before pausing for a break. He pulls the goggles off his head and looks around to find that he is alone in the pool.

  Indian guy. White woman. Old people. All have gone.

  The sloshing water and Dante’s labored breathing echo, trapped by walls and water.

  Exploding and Reforming

  Wednesday

  Dante’s spirit deflates as he reads the text from Mari. No Magic. She probably still hasn’t heard from Sam and Sarah. His plan ruined, Dante starts to wonder if the universe is trying to tell him not to bother.

  Sick of the universe, he gets in his car and drives over to Sam’s.

  He knocks on the door, ready to drag Sam over to Mari’s so he can make his stupid announcement and be done with it. And then they can play their game.

  A moment later, Grace, Sam’s little sister, opens the door.

  “Sam’s not here,” she says.

  “Who is it?” Sam’s mom calls from within.

  “Dante,” Grace answers over her shoulder.

  “Who?”

  “Sam’s black friend. The big one.”

  “Oh.”

  Dante’s not sure how he feels about this exchange. Why couldn’t she have said, “Sam’s nice friend?” or even, “Sam’s friend who’s good with computers?” Why must he always be reduced to the things that he cannot control? Unfortunately, he is certain that soon enough he will be known to others as “that big, black, gay guy.”

  He sighs. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I don’t know. You could check the playground.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Yup,” she says as she closes the door.

  Dante drives to the elementary school. He parks in the empty lot under an orange street lamp, gets out, and walks over to the playground. The place seems empty.

  He circles it a couple times to confirm that there’s nobody else there beside himself. He must have missed Sam.

  Dante climbs to the top of one of the slides and sits down. He tilts his head to the stars. They seem so still, so peaceful, but everything—everything—is exploding and reforming infinitely in every direction.

  Crazy Orgies

  Thursday

  Tonight, Dante is supposed to meet a guy at a coffee shop downtown.

  Unfortunately, he’s also scheduled to work. A fact he’d overlooked last Friday night when he agreed to the plan. A plan he hasn’t gotten around to cancelling yet.

  To make matters worse, that morning his grandpa had declared that he was no longer allowed to drive until he conquered his temptations. He took Dante’s keys and then handed him a small one that paired with a bike lock, just like Archie’s. Like the pastor, his grandpa had quoted the Bible during the exchange. A verse about cutting off a hand and removing an eye.

  His grandpa had also taken Dante’s smartphone and presented him with a brick-like cell phone. It hailed from an era before social networking, before touchscreens and Wi-Fi. It could not access the Internet. It could not take pictures. It had an actual keypad and a small, greenish screen that displayed information in a boxy 8-bit text not designed to be nostalgic. Texting on it was more trouble than it was worth.

  He had sadly concluded that the only thing the phone would be good for was calling people.

  But as he bikes to work that afternoon, Dante tries to make the best of his situation. The phone? It can double as a self-defense weapon. No computer? Time to reconnect with the real world. The bike? Exercise. And a new perspective. The world looks different on a bike.

  He sees more, such as the two-story houses and manicured, green lawns of his neighborhood giving way to ranch-style homes with patchy, brown lawns, busted chain link fences, and children’s toys left outside. The sidewalk is as crooked as bad teeth.

  He pedals out of the residential areas and begins passing strip malls comprised of payday loan places, liquor stores, and pawn shops. He passes an old, bearded, white guy plodding along the sidewalk while pulling a vacuum cleaner. A car driving in the opposite direction lowers its passenger side window and ejects a fast food bag that bulges with trash. The bag rolls a few times and then comes to rest in the gutter, which is full of shattered glass and cigarette butts.

  Arriving at work, Dante hops off the bike. He looks around and notices for the first time that there is no bike rack. He locks it to a signpost, wipes the sweat from his forehead, and then slips on his uniform shirt and chicken hat. Dante enters the restaurant.

  “Your old set of wheels crap out on you, son?” calls out Marco, a scrawny coworker whose arms are sleeved in tattoos.

  “Something like that,” he says, the truth too difficult to explain. “Hey, what was up last Friday?” Marco had been the no-show.

  “Sorry about that, man. Had some stuff to take care of. You know how it is.”

  Dante does not. He clocks in, washes his hands, looks at the schedule to see what position the manager assigned him for the day, and then takes his place behind the fryers.

  “So. S’up, Papi?” Marco asks.

  Dante focuses his eyes on the red digital numbers that indicate the time remaining before he should take the chicken out of the oil. “Not much.”

  “Cool, cool. You guys start up next week, too?” Marco goes to the other high school, the one on the same side of the highway as McCluck’s.

  “Yup. Tuesday.”

  “School is some broke-ass, shit, man. I ain’t never gonna use that stuff, real rap. But ya know what the weird thing is? I’m kind of glad to go back. I been bored as fuck these days. I just been smokin’ and drinkin’ and shit all day, playin’ Xbox, shootin’ hoops when it ain’t too hot, gettin’ my ass to work to fry up chicken for these fat fools, ya feel me?” He turns to the customer whose order he’s punching into the register. “No offense, sir.”

  Marco turns back to Dante and continues. “At least at school I get to show off some fly-ass threads I bought this summer and bag me some pussy. Feel me?”

  Again, Dante does not. Nonetheless, he feigns solidarity with a grunt of agreement.

  “Your order number is forty-two, sir. It should be right up—but for real, Papi, this year you and me gotta chill, son. I’ll introduce you to some black chicks, some back-to-Africa type chicks. I know you ain’t got none of them at that fancy school you go to. I’m tellin’ you, son, they’ll put a smile on that sad, Eeyore-looking mit of yours. Ain’t no way those skinny white bitches be enough for your big ass. And maybe you can hook a brother up with some of that preppy ass I know you must be gettin’. Some rich bitches, so I don’t got to work no more. Some chick whose Daddy Moneybags owns some mansion on a beach. We could live there and walk along the beach and shit during the day, and I could watch the sun set over the waves and shit as she goes down on me. You and your new black chick can com
e over and we could get mad high and have crazy orgies, real rap—Good evening, Ma’am. How can I help you?”

  Dante marvels at Marco’s oddly poetic daydream. As alien as Marco seems to Dante, at least Marco had invited him to visit the imaginary beach house.

  But how can he tell Marco that he does not want a girl, that it’s another guy’s arms he wants to feel around him? Would Marco still want to have “crazy orgies” with him?

  Probably not.

  The fryer beeps as the red numbers flash zero. Dante lifts the basket, lets the oil drip from the chicken for a few moments, and then dumps the sizzling pieces onto the trays under the heat lamps. He retrieves a new batch of floured chicken and begins the process anew.

  Some vague sentiment in Marco’s vision lingers in Dante’s brain. Dante imagines himself on a beach at sunset. He smells the salt water. He hears the waves crashing. Seagulls cawing. He feels the warm sand pocked with tiny shells beneath his feet. Cool, foaming water running over his toes as it approaches and then recedes, approaches and recedes. His feet sink into the sand. He feels a hand grasp his.

  Yes, he wants that.

  “Hey, Marco?” Dante says.

  Marco’s wide eyes peek over the chicken. “Yeah, Papi?”

  “I’ve got some stuff to take care of. Cover for me?” Dante removes his hat. The manager walks over and tells him to put it back on. But Dante tells him he’s about to throw up, and the manager moves out of his way.

  Marco stifles a laugh. “Real slick, D,” Marco says once the manager is out of earshot. “What you really got goin’ on?”

  Dante punches out. “Meeting someone. Sorry to ditch you like this.”

  Marco waves away the apology. “You got me last Friday. Just do me one favor, all right?”

  Skeptical, Dante asks what that favor might be.

  “When you up in your girl later tonight, tell her to call you ‘Marco.’”

  Dante steps off the bus and then jogs through the rain to the coffee shop at the end of the block. He is drenched and short of breath when he steps through the door. His heart is a hummingbird. There’s a long line of customers in various states of soaked. The baristas scurry about behind a display case that contains only a few remaining pastries and expensive bottled drinks. Conversation fills the air, punctuated by bursts of noise from the grinder and steamer.