by Barry Lyga
“Mr. Killian,” the doctor charged ahead with no pleasantries, “my name is Edwin White-eagle. I’m a doctor, and I’ve just treated your son for a life-threatening ailment that you should have—”
“Wait, you what?”
“As I was saying—”
“My son? Is this a joke?”
“I assure you…” Dr. White-eagle’s small, wizened body bunched up in frustration.
“I don’t have a son. I don’t have any kids.” Dad snorted. “I’m not even married.”
Dr. White-eagle pursed his lips and stared at the Wonder Glass. He exchanged a glance with the nurse, then quickly made an apology and disconnected the call.
Zak looked away. Now the tears started. Through the anger they came, unwanted guests sneaking in via an unwatched door. He blotted them away with the heel of his palm. Good. It was good that Zak didn’t exist here. Good that Michael Killian had never had children.
That way he couldn’t lie to them.
“What’s going on here?” Dr. White-eagle asked. “Are you a runaway? Is that what it is?”
Zak gritted his teeth, clenching his jaw until the fluttery sensation in his chest abated. It wasn’t a heart problem, he knew. It was the feeling you get right before you start sobbing uncontrollably. Like when a car skids on ice, you have one chance to get it under control, early on, and he wasn’t about to miss it.
Dad lied to me. I’m not allowed to miss him. Not allowed to get all weepy at the sound of his voice. It’s not even him. It’s just a version of him. He wouldn’t even know me.
After a moment, Zak was able to speak. “You said … you said you fixed my heart. You mean you stabilized me for now?”
Dr. White-eagle frowned. “You are aware you have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, correct?”
That sounded right. Zak had always thought of it as HCM. Other than putting a pacemaker in, there really wasn’t much that could be done for his condition. There were surgeries, but they were risky.
“I know I’m sick,” Zak told him.
Dr. White-eagle shook his head, and when he spoke again, it was with barely controlled anger. “I’m really going to have to speak to your parents. Or whoever is your legal guardian. Are they Jehovists or something like that?”
“What?”
“A simple procedure!” Dr. White-eagle crowed. “A simple introduction of a nanobionic parasite into your circulatory system and you’re fine. You’re, what, twelve years old? Thirteen, maybe? It’s criminally irresponsible for your parents to know you have this condition and not have it corrected!”
Zak leaned up on one elbow and probed at his chest. It was true. He could tell. His heart, which had plagued him his whole life, was now healed. He had taken his last dose of verapamil, had spent his last day in the hospital.
New tears blistered at the corners of his eyes. He didn’t know how to thank Dr. White-eagle. Couldn’t find the words.
“Without the resources of a hospital,” the doctor went on, “I can’t finalize the treatment, but you’re stabilized for now. We’ll need your parents’ permission to finish the process and permanently fix your heart.”
Permanently.
Could it even be possible?
In one day, he’d rediscovered his twin and laid claim to his health. Zak grinned. What reason was there to leave this place? They had science so awesome that it was practically magic. And no parents to lie to him. Moira had been wrong: They needed to rescue Tommy and then stay here. Everything they needed was here. There was no reason to go home. None at all.
Coming to this universe had been the best accident of his life.
* * *
He rested some more and woke up antsy. He got out of bed and went to the window, looking out on the city that was both familiar and unfamiliar at once. His heart jumped at the sight, but for the first time in his life, the jump didn’t startle him.
If anything, Zak was more aware of his heart than ever before, only now because it felt so indestructible. It was as though someone had opened up a rickety old taxi and stuffed a jet engine in there. Dr. White-eagle had said the treatment wasn’t yet permanent, but Zak wasn’t sure the doctor was right about that. His heart felt so perfectly normal and so perfectly … perfect that he couldn’t imagine it any other way. Doctors didn’t know everything.
He was cured.
My whole life, I was half a person and never even realized it, he thought, gazing out the window of Dr. White-eagle’s house. I was half of a pair and half of myself. Now I’m on my way to being whole.
If Godfrey was right and there was a way to rescue both him and Tommy from beyond death … then that would be the final step. Zak would finally be the person he’d been meant to be. He wasn’t sure exactly how he would manage a new life here, in a universe where he hadn’t been born, but with his twin by his side, he was sure he’d figure it out.
His twin … and his best friends. If you have to be lost in another universe, Zak thought, it might as well be with your best friends, right?
The skyline of this version of Manhattan was all wrong, of course, what with the taller skyscrapers and the excised chunk of the island below Houston Street. Still, it was familiar enough to comfort him, though he missed the overwhelming presence of the Freedom Tower dominating the view.
It wasn’t always there. There were the twin towers first. But they weren’t really twins. Not entirely. One had a spire. And of course they were different on the inside.
Like him and Tommy, he realized. Different on the inside. One with a bad heart, one with kidneys that didn’t work right. But Dr. White-eagle had fixed his heart, and he was certain that when he brought Tommy back to the land of the living, someone here would be able to help him, too.
Supertechnology. One more reason to learn to love life here.
He pressed his forehead against the window and willed himself out into the city, wishing he could melt into mist and spread himself over the landscape. To find Khalid and Moira. He vaguely remembered them in an alleyway with him, but not much else. They had to be looking for him, which meant he had to be looking for them. Three Basketeers. Simple as that. They weren’t his twin, but they were closer to him than anyone else in this universe, his old one, or any others that might exist.
A thought occurred to him: What if something had happened to them? What if they’d been hurt or detained somehow? What if they couldn’t find him because they couldn’t even help themselves?
Don’t think like that. We’ve made it this far. We traveled from one world to another. There’s nothing that can hurt us.
It wasn’t true. It wasn’t even close to true, and he knew it, but he repeated it to himself anyway, the way children shut their eyes tight against fear and hope for the best.
A buzzer sounded, and Zak looked over his shoulder through the open door. Out in the main room, the nurse—whose name might as well have been “my dear” for all the times Dr. White-eagle used it—opened the front door to the house. A smallish, scruffy man wearing beat-up overalls and a baseball cap stood there. His face was round and filthy but somehow familiar. Zak wandered into the outer room and leaned against the wall, studying the newcomer.
“Can I help you?” the nurse asked.
The visitor said nothing; he just stared at Zak. Then, he whipped off the baseball cap, revealing a fall of bright red hair, and said, “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye, laddie.”
Zak flung himself at Moira, throwing his arms around her and squeezing her tight.
FORTY-SIX
On the way back to the office, Khalid paid careful attention to the world around him, this time not allowing himself to be distracted by the surface differences between his world and this one. He noticed for the first time that all the women walked a few steps behind the men, their eyes downcast. Even little girls hung back by a few paces. And no female, no matter what her age, was out on the street without at least one man accompanying her.
The men, he noticed, wore cool, open, relaxed clothing. Exact
ly what you’d expect guys to wear in August. The women, though, were bundled from head to toe. He half expected them to wear hijab, like in the pictures his parents had shown him from Iran.
But this was America. It was insane.
N♀ and ♂NLY jumped out at him from signs and window hangings, along with another one: ♀NLY COMPANIONED. Women were barred from certain restaurants, from stores of all kinds, from a freakin’ bookstore. Khalid was surprised to find that he wanted nothing more than to pick up a rock and fling it through the nearest window.
“How do you live like this?” he asked Dr. Bookman. He tried to imagine his mother—a very proud and capable publicist—meandering down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, eyes on her feet, dutifully trailing behind his father.
“It’s always been this way.” A note of genuine sadness lingered in Bookman’s voice. “Not that I’m excusing it on that basis. But no one alive could ever tell you of a different time.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever tried to change things?”
“Some have. Every so often, someone or other has published a paper or written a book about the capacity of women, their equality with men. But entrenched interests and old assumptions die hard. They’ve all failed.” He sighed heavily. “Surely the same could be said of tragedies in your own world?”
Probably so. Khalid knew there were problems back home, prejudices and bigotries and just plain stupidities that often led to people being hurt or worse. But somehow it felt more aggressive here, thrust into his face with every sign and every window. It was depressing and rage-inducing all at once, and he found he had nothing more to say about it. They fell into silence as they made their way to Dr. Bookman’s building.
When they got there, a woman was waiting for them, standing against the wall in the hallway outside Dr. Bookman’s office. She wore a neck-to-toes outfit, like all the other women Khalid had seen, with no jewelry. Her hair, blond, was tied up in a tight bun, and her skin was extremely pale. Dr. Bookman sighed at the sight of her.
“Lorraine,” he said very gently, “we’ve discussed this before. You cannot keep coming here.”
“Dr. Bookman, you have to help me.”
“I can’t help you.” He took her hands and rubbed them as if to calm her. “I wish I could, but I can’t. Please leave—you’ll get in trouble if you’re found out by yourself.”
“I have a ticket,” she said, and produced from her pocket a slip of something thin and foldable that didn’t quite seem to be paper. “They think I’m off to the market, but I came here. I only have a little while. Please, Dr. Bookman.”
The urgency and terror in Lorraine’s eyes and voice momentarily made Khalid forget about Zak and Moira. Help her, man! he thought fiercely.
Dr. Bookman unlocked his office door and gestured for Khalid to enter. Inside, Khalid ambled over to the cockroach experiment. Not much had changed. The dead roaches were still dead, and the living ones were still living. He settled into an old, cracked leather chair. He realized it was the first time in two days that he’d sat on a piece of furniture. Every muscle in his body relaxed, and he nearly groaned with relief and pleasure. Through the closed door, he made out Bookman’s low murmur and Lorraine’s higher-pitched rejoinders. She was becoming more and more agitated, while Dr. Bookman remained calm.
After a few moments—during which Khalid almost drifted off to sleep, so comfortable was he—Dr. Bookman entered, tossing his dreadlocks to and fro as he shook his head.
“You’re not going to help her? After she risked coming here?”
Dr. Bookman began gathering things from his bookshelves—papers, books, small trinkets—and placing them on his desk. “She wants me to meddle in a man’s mind,” he said. “To destroy the memories her husband has of her, such that she never existed.”
What could be so bad that someone would resort to that? Khalid gulped and glanced at the closed door. He wondered whether Lorraine still lingered there or had gone. “Can you do that?” he asked. “Is that even possible?”
Dr. Bookman harrumphed and peered at Khalid over his glasses. “I’m not a street performer. I’m a doctor of wild science.”
“So you can’t?”
“I won’t. There’s a difference. I keep forgetting you’re not from around here. You don’t understand. Wild science is strictly regulated. Only a small number of people are permitted to study it and perform it. The sorts of technologies that would allow me to breach a man’s brain and intrude upon his thoughts are among the most highly regulated. What could be more sacred than our own minds?”
“I see. I guess.”
“There are, of course, those who dabble in the wild sciences without a license. Dangerous men, they are. They may be willing to risk their lives for her, but I am not. I took an oath to harm no one with my skills, Khalid. I take it very seriously.”
“Even if someone’s in trouble?”
“Especially when someone is in trouble. It is in those moments that we are most desperately tempted to commit a small evil in the name of rectifying a greater one. But evil is evil, Khalid. Vanquishing one in the name of another accomplishes nothing.”
Khalid wasn’t sure he believed that. It sounded noble and high-minded, but it rankled him at the same time. It felt like a dodge, not a principle.
But he did not have the luxury of kissing off Dr. Bookman and moving on to a “doctor of wild science” with a more lax brand of ethics. Zak was somewhere in the city, dying. Moira was somewhere in the city, doing who knew what. Khalid needed whatever help was being offered, whatever was right in front of him. And he needed it now.
Sorry, Lorraine. Really. But my friends come first.
By now Dr. Bookman had a collection of things before him on his desk. Khalid got up and walked over to examine them: Two books—one thick, the other thin—each opened and flat on the desk. A set of papers with lines and circles drawn on them that, when aligned properly to each other, formed a sort of ring on the desk. A small box filled with a reddish powder. A vial of something thick and green and viscous. A chunk of glass with a yellow flaw at its core. And what appeared to be a small, overripe watermelon.
“What’s all this for?”
“We’ll be using a technique from the voodoo methodology,” Dr. Bookman explained.
Khalid looked around. “Where’s the chicken?”
A laugh. “So, you have voodoo in your world?”
“Well, yeah. But, I mean, it’s not real or anything.”
Dr. Bookman ran a hand through his hair. “I would like to visit this world of yours someday. This place where they have voodoo but don’t have voodoo at the same time. Fascinating. In any event, there is no need for anything so crude as a chicken. That was the historical methodology, before wild scientists came to understand the superphysics behind voodoo. The dead animals, the fresh blood … these worked because they were convenient metaphors to focus the mind of the practitioner, permitting psychoempathic manipulation of M-particles. I need no such accoutrements.”
He arranged the papers to form a five-pointed star on his desk, then sprinkled some of the red powder along its edge. The green liquid (more like sludge, Khalid noted, as it oozed from the vial) went into the center of the star. Dr. Bookman consulted the thick book, nodded to himself, and chanted something in a language Khalid did not recognize.
Then there was silence in the room. Khalid held his breath, lest his own breathing break the tension-filled air.
“We’re ready now,” Dr. Bookman murmured, his eyes closed, his hands waving over the ring. “This procedure connects like to like. Classic voodoo. I will communicate with Zak. Give me something of your friend’s.”
Khalid thought of voodoo dolls back home, and it made sense. A voodoo doll used hair or whatever to connect to a victim, right? So, yeah, with something of Zak’s, maybe Dr. Bookman could actually connect to Zak. Only instead of sticking pins in him, he could just figure out where Zak was.
He raced his palms down both legs, feeling for anything at all
in his pockets. But other than his useless phone and a few bucks, there was nothing. Certainly nothing of Zak’s. Sweat formed along his brow and on his upper lip. Nothing. At all.
“I don’t have anything,” he whispered fiercely.
Dr. Bookman remained calm, eyes still closed, hands weaving a complicated pattern over the desk. “Nothing? Really?”
“No.”
“You are his best friend and you have nothing of his?”
Frustrated, Khalid blurted out, “It’s not like we exchanged friendship bracelets or anything.”
Dr. Bookman’s lips quirked into a flash-fast grin. “You’re thinking of the purely physical. Surely you have something of his that is less concrete…?”
Less concrete? What did that mean? Dr. Bookman seemed to be sinking deeper into a trance, his expression slackening, his body swaying just slightly. Khalid didn’t want to interrupt whatever sensation or emotion he was experiencing.
Emotion. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was something “less concrete.”
“He’s my best friend,” Khalid said slowly. But that, he knew, wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to say it. He needed the force of it, the pull of it, the rampant tug and swallow of it. The way only best friends know each other, understand each other. The way only best friends connect.
Dr. Bookman picked up the melon and shook it. Something rattled inside.
“We’re the Three Basketeers,” Khalid said. “Moira and Zak and me. I’ve known Zak my whole life. My parents came here—well, came to my America—before I was born. Zak and me … we played together as kids. Our parents were friends, and I remember when his parents got divorced. He told me it was happening, and he didn’t cry or anything, even though he wanted to.” Now Khalid closed his eyes, surrendering to memory, sinking into what could only be described as his own Secret Sea, a foam of life and remembrance and emotion. It was as real to him now as it had been then: younger Zak, eight years old, his jaw clenched and his left hand gripping tightly to a pole on the playground at the park, saying, “They said they don’t get along. Who cares if they get along? Why is that such a big deal? Why do I have to put up with all this stuff just because they can’t get along?”