Mirror in the Sky

by Aditi Khorana

  “Dad?” I called out as I entered the storage room. “How come you’re in here?”

  He had his back to me and was stacking large industrial-sized cans of whole tomatoes.

  “It’s gotten so disorganized,” he said, frustration in his voice. “Everything’s a big mess! I keep telling Amit that we need a system, a process. You can’t just dump things everywhere. Everything has a place, and if you don’t put things in their proper place when they come in . . . this is where you end up.” He gestured to the large burlap sacks of multicolored lentils around him, to the bulging nets filled with red onions and ginger and ghostly white garlic. The pantry didn’t look any more or less disorderly than usual to me. For a moment, I thought he was referring to the restaurant itself—how he had ended up within it.

  He turned to me then, his voice softer now. “Shouldn’t you be at home doing your homework?”

  “I just felt like . . . I don’t know, visiting you.” It was true. I thought about telling him about Mario, but I still wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  “Can you tell me about Schrödinger’s cat?” I asked him.

  He paused for a minute, a large plastic container of turmeric suspended in his hand.

  “What made you bring that up?”

  “I don’t know. Mom said I should ask you about it.”

  My father turned to face me, placing the container on the floor. He sat down on top of a sealed sack of basmati rice. His eyes were distant. “I haven’t thought about Schrödinger’s cat in years. I told your mother about it on our first date. It’s . . . a thought experiment . . . the idea that two contradictory possibilities can exist simultaneously.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, think about a cat. Let’s say you take this cat and you put it in a box with unstable poisonous gas in it. The gas has a fifty percent chance of poisoning the cat and killing it, and a fifty percent chance of doing nothing. It’s a closed box, sealed. So we don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive until we actually open the box and look at it. But the thing is, if you do the experiment enough times, the cat lives half the time, and dies half the time.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “So according to quantum mechanics, before we look in the box, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.” He looked at me to make sure I understood.

  I nodded. “Go on.”

  “The cat’s reality is tied to the experiment—it either sees the radioactive poison released and it dies, or it doesn’t see it released and it stays alive. But our observation of this experiment forces the outcome of it to collapse toward one reality or the other, so we’re part of the experiment too now—if the cat dies, then we see it dead, but if the cat lives, we see it alive . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “So if we apply this thought experiment to us, one has to wonder: Is there someone watching us, trying to observe the outcome of our reality? We live in a world of choices too. Does life for us move in one direction or the other? Or do both possibilities exist?”

  “How can they both exist?”

  “In parallel within a larger multiverse. Possibly alongside many other possibilities.”

  “So . . . do they all exist? All those possibilities?”

  My father shrugged. “No one knows. It’s the biggest question in quantum physics.”

  I wanted to keep discussing Schrödinger’s cat, but my father got up abruptly and rubbed his eyes. “I think I’m going to leave early today. I’ll have someone else close up. Let me check the register, and I’ll meet you out front in fifteen minutes. We can throw your bike in the back of the car.”

  “Okay,” I told him, following him out of the storage room. I watched him duck into the kitchen as I tried to piece together everything he had just told me. I was so distracted that I didn’t even notice the tall figure standing in front of me.

  “Oh my God, Tara! I was hoping I’d run into you!” I looked up to see Veronica’s lean frame pressed against the pink wall of the corridor, a concerned look in her eyes.

  “Veronica . . . what are you doing here?”

  “Just waiting for the restroom.” It took me a moment to register that she had mentioned coming to the restaurant earlier that day. It felt like ages since we had that conversation.

  She turned to face me, blocking the narrow hallway, a conspiratorial look on her face. “I heard about what happened! Nick called me.”

  At first, I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. My brain felt like a broken calculator, unable to add up the information before me. But the mention of Nick surprised me. I realized that he had talked to her about this afternoon, about the dog, about me.

  I slowly nodded, unsure of what to say. “It was . . . yeah, it was awful.” I hoped that this was the end of the conversation, that I could just walk away, but she went on.

  “Halle’s pretty fucked up over it. She loved that puppy. Her housekeeper was, like, driving all over Greenwich looking for it. They didn’t think it could get off the estate and make it to the main road. And Sarah . . . oh my God, I don’t think she has any idea what’s coming. Nick said it was definitely a red Porsche—he saw it, and Sarah’s the only one in our class with a fucking red Porsche. And she has a free period before lunch, so she was definitely off campus.”

  “I . . . I guess. I don’t really know.”

  “Didn’t you see it? You should report her to Mrs. Treem.”

  “No. I didn’t actually see the accident. And telling on Sarah isn’t going to bring that poor dog back to life.” Tears began to pierce my eyes as I thought of it.

  “Are you okay, Tara?” She looked around uncomfortably for a minute.

  I closed my eyes tight, shaking my head, certain that I didn’t want to start crying in front of Veronica. First Meg leaving, then the dog. If the past forty-eight hours were any indication of what this school year was going to be like, I was really in for it. And yet there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t move away, or stop going to school, or get out of any of it. I was stuck.

  “That was really nice of you to stay with him,” she said quietly. “Most people, they wouldn’t have done that. They would have just kept walking.”

  I opened my eyes, surprised at this revelation. “Most people are horrible.”

  “No doubt.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it. He was this cute little Lab . . . just a puppy. He was running—you know, the way puppies run. All enthusiasm, not even looking. And then that stupid car came out of nowhere and . . . He had no idea that the day would end like that, that his life would end like . . .”

  “But you were there with him, Tara. He was lucky to have you sit with him those last few minutes of his life.”

  “Why do people keep saying that? He was all alone.”

  “That’s not what Nick said. He said that you sat there in the middle of the street for close to an hour. That when the ASPCA came, they told you to leave, but you wouldn’t till they had euthanized the poor thing.”

  “It was heartbreaking . . . the way his big eyes kept looking at me like they were asking me to help him, begging me to take away the pain. He could barely breathe. He just . . . he wanted to die,” I told her. “I’ve never . . . that’s never happened to me. I don’t have any pets; I’ve never watched someone or something die.” I closed my eyes, trying to pull it together. I couldn’t believe it was Veronica, of all people, whom I was revealing everything to. I was rarely this open with people. Not even with Meg.

  I thought she’d jet out of the hallway as quickly as possible, make a run for it while she still could. Smile that false smile of hers and tell me her family was waiting, but instead, she continued to linger in the hallway with me, her head leaning against the wall.

  “Look, all I’m saying is, you were there, not like that horrible Sarah, who just zipped off in her Porsche. And I think Nick was gla
d that you were. You were so thoughtful. You’re a sensitive one, I can tell.”

  I had barely spoken ten words to Veronica in the five years I had known her. She thought I was sensitive? And yet when I looked at her now lingering in the hallway, I had to wonder if in another world, in another dimension, we might be friends.

  “Seriously traumatic first day of school. Listen, come by and say hi to my parents. They heard what happened. I think they’d want to see you. And . . . there’s a party at Halle’s on Saturday. You should come,” she said before she walked away.

  When my father came out of the kitchen, he wanted to know why I looked like I had been crying. “Is it about Schrödinger’s cat?” he asked. I shook my head. I was still sad, but some of the sadness had left me, and I felt oddly grateful to Veronica. But after I said hello to her parents and her younger brother, after Amit nodded goodbye to my dad, promising he’d close up, after we had loaded my bike into the back of the car and merged onto the Post Road, I had to wonder about a fire drill, a tiny dog, Nick Osterman in his Jeep, Veronica in my father’s restaurant . . . was this what my mother meant when she talked about the fluttering of wings, the migratory patterns of small creatures? A series of events—large and small—that seemed to be creating a new path for me, too fast for me to understand how or why.

  NINE

  IT reminded me of the “spot the difference” game we used to play as kids, the one in the back of Highlights magazine. Two images side by side, and you circled the things that were missing, or a different color, or added in. Except none of those games sent a trail of goose bumps up my arms.

  It was after midnight. I was already in my pajamas, about to go to bed, when the alert popped up on my phone. It was Meg. My heart sank when I saw her name, but I was also curious what she might have to say to me. I opened up Instagram and saw the message:

  Megz23 mentioned you in a comment: @TKrish, isn’t this insane?! It’s all anyone’s talking about in Buenos Aires. Hysteria here over Terra Nova!

  Meg was always sending me messages over Instagram, and I wondered for a second if this was her way of apologizing for the way she had acted before she left.

  I clicked on the image. At first, it didn’t make sense. It was two images, small and side-by-side. They looked identical. One of them was blurry, but not so blurry that you couldn’t make out what it was. A street market of some sort. Most of the faces were obscured, but you could clearly see a woman’s face in the crowds. She was looking toward the camera, smiling, wearing a big blue raincoat. All around her, street vendors sold fruit and toys. Signs and billboards written up in an undecipherable language.

  On the right, the same image, but as I looked closer, I realized that it wasn’t the same. It was slightly different. The signs were in a different language. The woman was wearing a red coat instead of a blue one. A vendor sold apples instead of what looked like pears.

  I looked at NASA’s comment.

  On September 1, 2015, NASA decoded the bitmap image received from B612. The image appears to be that of a street market on Terra Nova. We posted this image on our feed right away. On September 2, NASA was contacted by a follower from Tokyo, Japan, alerting us to an Instagram photo taken a year ago of the Ameyoko Market between Okachimachi and Ueno Stations. As you can see, the images are near-identical. The picture on the left, the image we received from Terra Nova, shows a woman at a street market. The composition, the colors, even the location look surprisingly similar to the image from Tokyo, with a couple of small variations. In the image on the left, from Terra Nova, the woman wears a blue coat. Behind her a vendor sells pears. We have not been able to decipher the language on the billboards and signs, but linguists are currently investigating. The image on the right, from Earth, shows a woman wearing a red coat. The vendor behind her is selling different fruit, but the similarities have raised a number of questions.

  I looked at the image on the left, the decoded bitmap from Terra Nova, and then back at the image on the right, from Tokyo, Japan. From Earth.

  In freshman-year biology, we watched a video of an amoeba splitting into two—pinching in half, its nucleus dividing till there were two identical organisms where there had once been only one. From this day onward, that was how I would feel—physically, I was still the same, but in some part of me, I had become divided. Just the thought that maybe there was another Tara somewhere in the universe made me half of a whole now, not just one. How could this not change everything about my world?

  I dropped my phone to the floor, my hands shaking.

  TEN

  AT school the next day, everyone was talking about it.

  “Oh my God, and they’re, like, trying to track down that lady in the picture.”

  “I heard she’s already come forward but they’re, like, interrogating her or something?”

  “That’s, like, so stupid. Why would NASA interrogate her?”

  “Not NASA, like, the Japanese government.”

  “Nuh uh. The Japanese government can’t hold her hostage. She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Not like a hostage, you idiot. They’re just questioning her.” This was Veronica, getting impatient with Alexa again.

  “They have, like, Instagram, dude,” Jimmy Kaminsky announced to everyone.

  “What, the Japanese?”

  “No, the aliens, you idiot.”

  “Don’t call me an idiot, you moron. And there’s no way to confirm that. It’s just an image.”

  It was just an image, but it had left me tossing and turning in my bed, scouring the Internet on my phone for information all night. But there was nothing new to report. Even the experts were perplexed. Who would have ever thought that my mother, of all people, had been right? Maybe they are us, she had said, her eyes wide, a conspiratorial tone in her voice. But she was right. I felt certain, somehow, that there was another me up there—the only other person in the universe who knew what it was like to be me. I wished I could talk to her. I wondered if her mother was acting strangely too.

  When I left for school that morning, my mother was still perched in front of the TV, her eyes rimmed red.

  “Mom, you’re going to work today, right?”

  She waved her hand at me. “I can’t call in sick forever.”

  But I was dubious. And rightfully so, because just then, she turned to me, a grin on her face.

  “Unless you want to stay home with me today . . .” she said. “We could order in and watch this stuff together. It’d be so much fun!”

  On any other day, I probably would have joined her, or felt grateful that she had asked, but I shook my head, and she looked back at me with disappointment in her eyes. For a moment, I felt as though I was the disapproving parent and she was the child, which was odd, because we’d never been like that. My mother rarely expressed disapproval of me, and I felt uncomfortable with the judgments floating through my head in that moment. But I couldn’t stay home with her today. There was something depressing about sitting in front of the TV with my mother all day. And besides, for the first time in years, I was excited to go to school, eager to hear what people were saying. Plus, I wanted to see if Nick and Veronica would speak to me again.

  I crossed the student center slowly that morning, making sure that I walked right by Veronica, Halle, and Nick’s table. “Oh hey, Tara, come here,” Veronica called out to me now. I had been eavesdropping on their conversation, and I uncomfortably wondered if it had been obvious.

  “Hey, girl, feeling better?” she asked me, giving me a slightly tentative hug. “Halle stayed home today, but she wants me to let you know she’s super grateful to you. Oh, and . . . I totally forgot to send you the invite to the party, with all this Terra Nova news going on!” she said, pulling out her phone. “Where is it? Hey, Nick? Will you forward Tara Halle’s invitation?”

  I knew it for certain then—that Veronica’s invitation to Halle’s party wasn’t an
empty one, a sympathetic gesture that could easily be undone once she came to her senses, like untying a shoelace to remove a restrictive shoe. I felt a wave of excitement when I realized this, followed by momentary panic. Everything had somehow sped up in a way that I couldn’t make sense of. I thought about Mario, running too fast around the bend. The joy in his eyes, his blind enthusiasm. Was I the one running too fast now? I was standing at their table, surrounded by Hunter and Jimmy and Janicza Fulton and Ariel Soloway. I looked around the room then, realizing that I had never before seen it from this vantage point.

  “Oh yeah,” Nick said, whipping his phone out of his pocket. I was the human equivalent of a pinball machine, finally landing on the unexpected and thrilling conclusion: I was actually invited to Halle’s party. Veronica had invited me. Nick was forwarding me the e-mail.

  “Dude, the last time Halle threw a party, I ended up drunk, naked, and spread-eagle on a diving board!” Hunter exclaimed.

  “Hunter, when are you not naked and spread-eagle on a diving board?” Ariel asked.

  “You’ll come, right, Tara?” Jimmy asked me. He put his hand on my arm, his thumb stroking my wrist in a way that surprised me.

  I hesitated for a moment. “Yeah. I guess so,” I said.

  “Awesome,” he said, a grin on his face. “Gives me something to look forward to.”

  “I’m bringing lemon bars,” Janicza announced. “I think they’re good party food.”

  “Yeah, at, like, a 1950s Tupperware party.” Ariel laughed.

  “Laugh all you want, but you’re going to be the first person gorging on those after a couple of drinks. Remember the first time we all got drunk at Halle’s?” she asked.

  “Oh my God. And, like, Sarah was wearing those pajamas with the hearts on them and she, like, puked all over herself?” Ariel laughed.

  “Halle’s so done with her,” Veronica announced.

  “What do you mean, done?” Alexa asked.