“That’s very Buddhist,” Alexa commented.
“Is it?” Halle said.
“No. I have no idea. I don’t actually know anything about Buddhism,” Alexa said, and we all cracked up.
“I like that idea, though. That there are endless versions of us and none of us even knows about each other. That’s sort of beautiful,” I said, lifting my head to look at her, and she nodded back at me, as though she was offering me a gift. I smiled in amazement. I was lying in the grass at Halle’s house with Nick and Halle and Alexa and Veronica. For a moment, it felt like we were a family.
“It’s . . . cruel—the idea that we’re in the dark about ourselves, about our alternate selves,” Veronica said. “Why would the entire universe be constructed that way? Unless there is some sort of God and he just wants to fuck with us.”
“But what if that is the truth of it? Endless versions of us living endless versions of this life?” Nick asked.
“Maybe they’re better versions of us,” Halle said.
“Better how?” I asked.
“Peaceful, compassionate, entirely void of feelings like rage, jealousy. Capable of appreciating what they have.”
I thought then about my own petty jealousies, my own resentments. Could Nick see them, the swell of those emotional cancers that had already begun to sprout within me? But when I looked at him, he was gazing upward at the sky, lost in another world, in that world.
“I wonder if there’s a version of me out there who feels like she . . .” And I paused for a minute, because it didn’t matter. I had found it, in that moment, without realizing it.
“Feels like she what?” Nick asked. His shoulder was pressed against mine.
“Nothing,” I told him. I reached for his hand and held it, without thought. But I still remember what I was going to say on that crisp and clear night, lying with Nick and Veronica on either side of me, a breeze rustling the leaves on trees, Nick’s hoodie around my shoulders.
I wonder if there’s a version of me out there who feels like she belongs.
THIRTEEN
MY father often recounted a memory of growing up in India in the ’80s. There were only two television stations back then—Doordarshan 1 and Doordarshan 2, and every family had just one TV. In the evenings, after dinner, everyone would gather around that one TV and watch the evening news.
“If you were out late and returning home during that hour, you could hear it coming from every living room, see the flicker of the TV screen in the window of every home. The same program, the same image, the same voices,” he told me.
I had never traveled to my father’s ancestral home, and I knew that the Delhi of his childhood no longer existed. And yet, I found my father’s nostalgia contagious. It was a strange feeling, that longing for an experience you never had, for something that was never yours but might as well have been because it belonged to someone you love.
When Nick dropped me home in the wee hours of Sunday morning, I recognized that feeling again. At first, I thought it had to do with the beauty of that autumn morning, the dew on freshly cut grass, the slight crispness in the air, but then I looked carefully out the window of Nick’s Jeep and saw it. Initially, it surprised me that every home on our block had a light on in the living room, at dawn, no less, but when I looked closer, I understood—in each living room, a TV, on each TV, the same program, the same image, the same voices. Different varietals of family, driven by the persistence of a story they couldn’t escape.
“You should come in,” I told Nick. And by the time I realized what he might think of my tiny, shabby house, I couldn’t take it back. Outside of the bubble of Halle’s party, something had happened, and we were both curious to learn what it was.
Any apprehension I might have felt on the ride back—about returning to the emotional debris of my mother’s decision still scattered across the floor, about my parents chastising me for staying out the entire night for the first time in my life—dissipated the moment I walked through that door. My parents turned briefly to acknowledge Nick and me, but they quickly turned back to the TV, the gravity of another planet too great to ignore.
We sat beside them, all of us watching in silence.
“Can you explain to us again what scientists discovered late last night in the US, morning in the UK?”
“Certainly,” said the British scientist, nodding, nervously running his fingers through his hair, “but I’d like to precede my explanation with a brief discussion of MERLIN, which stands for the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network, which is an array of radio telescopes spread out across England. It’s about seven radio telescopes that have been monitoring radio signals from space for some time now.”
“Can you tell us a little about what MERLIN does?”
“MERLIN measures radio frequencies from radio-loud galaxies and quasars, and we also do something known as spectral line observations, which are essentially tools we use to identify the molecular construct of stars and planets.”
“Now, have we ever, in the past, discovered radio signals from other planets?”
“Well, till now, we’ve been looking at different parts of our galaxy, but, as you know, the galaxy is vast, and we haven’t been confident if we’re even looking for life in the right place.”
“But the discovery of Terra Nova changed that.”
“Yes, it did. Since we’ve been able to identify the location of B612, our radio telescopes have been detecting a handful of signals from the planet—first the message similar to the Arecibo signal, then the bitmap image that we decoded . . .”
“The image of the market.”
“Yes, that’s right. And now we’ve received another signal . . . and we’ve been . . . hearing it continuously for the past eight hours. It not only confirms our belief that there is intelligent life on Terra Nova, but, like the bitmap image, also suggests that Terra Nova is perhaps some sort of mirror Earth—or rather, an alternate Earth.”
“For our viewers tuning in now, let’s replay some of the first sounds from Terra Nova.”
I looked at Nick, and he turned to look back at me. His mouth was slightly ajar, his eyes bloodshot. He looked adorable and disheveled and exhausted, like a child. I couldn’t believe he was sitting in my living room. I wondered, for a moment, if my parents could tell that we had been drinking all night, but this thought lingered only for a second, an iridescent soap bubble, before it was dissipated by the sound from the television screen. There was static for some time, and then a voice, slightly high-pitched and eager. It was a young man . . . speaking English.
“The Columbian Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Wellington and the Mercurin Theater on the air in The War between the Worlds by H. M. Wells.”
A line of goose bumps trailed up my arm, and my mother reached for my hand. And then there was the sound of orchestral music. It was dramatic music, the kind from old movies. It sounded . . . like us, certainly not like something from an alien planet.
“It’s Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. But it’s their version, not ours,” my mother whispered. “They’ve been playing it all night, the entire broadcast and then snippets of it. It’s exactly like ours.”
“Well, not exactly . . .” my father said, but I waved at him to be silent so I could listen. The music stopped, and then there was that voice again, “Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercurin Theater and star of these broadcasts, Orson Wellington.”
And then there was a different voice, a deep one, projecting gravity. “We know now that in the early years of the twentiest centuria, this world was being watched close by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were studied and scrutinized, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a fractoscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and mu
ltiply in a drop of water.”
The static cut out, and the reporter, looking ashen, spoke again. “A remarkable moment in history. I’ve been listening to this recording . . . all night, and perhaps we’ve all sunk into a bit of a delirium, but . . .” He laughed for a moment, looking crazed as he rubbed his eyes. “What exactly are we supposed to make of this? How do we know it’s not some . . . hoax?” An animated banner ran under his face. AN EDWARD COPELAND EXCLUSIVE, it said.
“It’s an authentic signal, and it’s coming from B612. NASA has confirmed it as well. It’s most definitely not a hoax. You can clearly hear the distinctions between their broadcast and the one recorded by our very own Orson Welles in 1938. Their accents are different—linguists are currently studying their speech patterns. The music is slightly different; names of people and things are different—the Columbian Broadcasting Network instead of Columbia, the Mercurin Theater, The War between the Worlds, H. M. Wells instead of H. G, Orson Wellington instead of Welles. These are small differences.”
“And the content . . .”
“. . . is slightly different. In their version of War of the Worlds, the aliens don’t use heat rays to kill humans, they use psychic rays to influence their thought patterns. The aliens are eventually defeated by the natives rather than falling victim to pathogenic germs. These people—we’re not quite certain what to call them as yet, but they seem to be . . . very much like us, so much so that they’re capable of storytelling. They have their own theaters, their own broadcasting systems, their own fears of what’s out there . . .”
“That is just . . .” The reporter shook his head, speechless.
“Inconceivable?”
“No . . . it’s just . . . if they have their own versions of H. G. Wells and Orson Welles . . . does that mean that there are more coincidences beyond that?”
“The bitmap message we received was the first indication that their world is very similar to ours, but we’re still investigating that, and it’s too soon to know . . .”
“Yes, but . . . what are we supposed to . . . what do we make of this?” The reporter looked stricken, taking a moment to remove his glasses to wipe tears from his eyes. “We can’t travel there . . . at least not for a long time. We won’t meet them, at least not in my lifetime. What if it’s true that there’s another me up there? Another you? I’m sorry if I’m being emotional, but . . . what do we do with this information we’re getting? How do we process it? What do we make of it?”
“Save the tears,” mumbled my father.
“Sudeep, he’s . . . emotional.”
“He’s a journalist. He can cry when he gets home.”
“Like all the rest of us . . .” My mother muttered, and my father flashed her a look. I avoided Nick’s eyes. I didn’t know what he thought of my family, bickering like this, or my home, for that matter—small and shabby and practically two feet from the train station. How did Nick see my life? An entire existence that was so different from his own.
“I should get going.” He looked at me. “I’m Nick, by the way.” He held his hand out to my father, and my father turned to look at him.
“You’re the boy from outside the Starbucks.”
“Oh yeah, you remember. Nice to meet you, Mr. Krishnan.” He smiled.
“I would ask you why you’re dropping my daughter off at dawn, but . . .”
“But Tara’s a responsible girl and we’re all exhausted and let’s at least get a couple of hours of sleep before we talk about all this,” said my mother, getting up. “I’m glad you’re home, honey.” She smiled at me, as though the earlier events of the day had been forgotten. I looked through her, but she continued to act as though everything was normal. “Drive safely on your way back, Nick,” she told him.
I walked Nick to the door. The sun was just beginning to rise over the horizon, painting everything around us a shade of amber. I noticed Nick’s eyelashes for the first time, and a cheesy thought struck me: They were the same color as the sunlight.
“I’ll see you in school tomorrow,” he said, giving me a hug before I watched him get into his Jeep and drive off. All of a sudden, the insecurity I had felt just a moment before was replaced by amazement.
Nick Osterman was just in my living room, I mused to myself. I was in his car. We talked about what we wanted to do when we grow up. He made a pact with me that we’d meet up when we’re twenty-five.
By the time I returned to the living room, my parents were gone. They must have decided to finally give in to sleep, exhausted from a day that seemingly had no end, a whorl of events that left us with little to hold on to.
I was spent too, and yet exhilarated, both from the party and from the latest discovery. I had often thought about people who lived through strange and compelling times—World War II, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement. These were periods that shaped people in some indelible way. I wondered how this moment would define us. I had never before believed that there was anything special about the era I was growing up in.
I arranged myself on the sofa, a cushion under my head, a throw over my legs, the remote in my hand. In that threshold between dream and wakefulness, I listened to the rebroadcast of another Orson Welles, on another planet, far away. I dreamt of another Tara, in the arms of another Nick.
FOURTEEN
IT was different after that. For the next three weeks, the stock market plummeted, rebounded, then plummeted again. This financial roller coaster would continue its course for the next year. People took to the streets, demanding that the government cut military spending and devote more resources toward scientific research. At school, teachers continued to tie discussions about Terra Nova into the curriculum. The student center buzzed with excitement over any news. People forwarded around all kinds of hoaxy e-mails.
Then there were smaller, subtler changes—the butterflywing kind that my mother talked about. The air seemed to fizz with glorious static—the electricity of the Possible. It was as though the Impossible had closed up shop, shuttered its storefront, and gone into hiding.
I never ate lunch in the library again. There was always a seat for me at the best table in the student center. Veronica would seek me out during free period, and we’d drive in her Range Rover to the café on the corner of Hamilton Avenue to grab a latte or a kale-avocado smoothie. At the end of the day, we’d all look for each other in the student center before we separated for sports practice. Nick would give me a high five. Halle would walk with me to the athletic department. Alexa would buy a cookie from the concession cart before it closed for the day, breaking it in four pieces, giving one piece to me, another to Halle, another to Veronica. In physics, when we had to team up in threes for an egg-drop competition, Nick and Halle both called out for me at the same time.
“Hey, Tara, come here.”
“Come on, teammate, we’re gonna win this thing.”
When I walked down the glass corridor, people I didn’t even know—underclassmen, even teachers (who, let’s be honest, are never immune to the sway of popularity)—said hi to me. They actually knew my name.
“Hey, Tara.”
“What’s up, Tara?”
“Love that skirt, Tara!”
At lunch, we’d push two tables together in order to seat some sixteen of us, the girls in their wool skirts in hues of camel, fuchsia, and slate, their skinny leather belts and their cashmere scarves, talking about their vacations in San Miguel de Allende and Lisbon, the boys in their torn jeans and dingy caps and polo shirts making jokes at each other’s expense.
When we broke into raucous laughter, every pair of eyes in the room turned to look at us, wondering what we were laughing about, and I couldn’t help but think, I used to be out there, but now I’m in here. And now I knew what the endless amusement was about. Most days were the same—Ariel Soloway and Janicza Fulton making raunchy jokes, Hunter and Veronica bickering as Jimmy fed the f
lame of their daily fracas, Veronica making outrageous statements. And Halle, of course. It was impossible to ignore her reign over all of it, as though much of this entertainment was for her benefit.
Everyone wanted to make Halle laugh. Everyone wanted her friendship, her respect. A word of disapproval from her might ruin the entire day. Ariel and Janicza made fun of everyone else, but never Halle. Even Hunter and Veronica’s fights had a performance quality about them, and it was Halle who often played moderator, the Gwen Ifill of our group.
Out in the world, cults were forming on a daily basis—this I knew firsthand, and it was impossible to think of it without thinking about my mother, who had received her “induction packet” in the mail. I had seen it on the kitchen counter, a shiny catalogue that looked jarringly like the college information packets I was beginning to receive on a regular basis.
But at Brierly, the cult of Halle reigned supreme, and her greatest worshipper was Nick. Halle was at the center of Nick’s orbit. Sometimes I thought of her as that big sun of Terra Nova’s, so bright that it obscured everything else in its proximity. But Nick practically glowed in her presence.
One day in late September, we were sitting in the student center when Sarah Hoffstedt, now a consummate pariah, sheepishly walked up to me.
“Hey, Tara, can I talk to you?”
I barely saw her around anymore and was surprised at the fear in her eyes. I was chewing on a BLT, and a piece of lettuce lodged itself in my throat, making me cough.
“Why would she want to talk to you, Sarah?” Veronica responded on my behalf as Nick thumped my back.
“It’s none of your damn business, Veronica.” Sarah glared at her, but I could see that the corners of her mouth were twitching nervously.
“Well, whatever you need to say, say it in front of all of us.” Veronica crossed her arms over her chest, leaning back in her chair. Something about her broad shoulders, her very angularity, made her seem physically powerful when she adopted this pose. Nick and Alexa exchanged glances. Halle continued eating her yogurt. She was giggling with Hunter about something. Jimmy whispered something to Janicza, making her laugh so hard she almost spit out her milk.
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