Infinite

by Brian Freeman

  Then my gaze drifted to one man with his back to me. What drew my attention was his jacket.

  It was a leather motorcycle jacket, weathered and black, with parallel seams down the backs of the sleeves. The jacket was just like the one my father had been wearing that night when I was thirteen. That night when my life became Before and After. For years, I’d kept that jacket in a closet, unable to touch it but also unable to throw it away. After Karly moved in, she finally convinced me that the day had come to get rid of it. I burned it. It became ash. It no longer existed.

  So it was a shock to see the man in front of the painting wearing a jacket of the exact same style.

  Except, more than that, I realized that this was my father’s jacket.

  When I looked closely, I could see the chocolate-brown bloodstains. They were soaked into the leather, a permanent reminder of the night that changed my life. Believe me, I’d memorized the pattern of the blood spray long ago, like the paintings I saw in the museum. I would never forget it.

  The man in the coat glanced back, revealing his face. When he did, my knees buckled beneath me. I couldn’t stand; I had to grab for the wall to hold myself up. Our eyes met as dozens of people came and went between us. He looked at me; I looked at him. He reacted. He recognized me. I watched his steely blue-eyed gaze grab on to me like a predator spotting prey.

  The encounter lasted only a second, and then he turned casually away and disappeared into the next gallery.

  But I’d seen him. I’d seen myself.

  My profile. My face. Just like at the river. That was Dylan Moran studying La Grande Jatte and wearing my father’s murder coat. The shock of it left me paralyzed, but he didn’t look surprised to see me at all. It was as if he’d been waiting for that moment, waiting for me to find him.

  I shook myself out of my coma and pushed off the wall. I headed across the exhibit floor, weaving through people in my way, who didn’t understand the impatience of the crazed man pushing past them. My doppelgänger had disappeared, but I rushed after him into the next hall, where I stopped to pick him out in the crowd.

  Where was he?

  Where was I?

  But the man I’d seen wasn’t in the room. He’d already vanished.

  I continued to the next gallery, and then the next, and finally I ran down the stairs to the first floor of the museum and all the way out to the busy traffic on Michigan Avenue. I collapsed on the steps near one of the green lions facing the street. It was a summer afternoon, warm and perfect. People surrounded me everywhere, but there was no Dylan, no man in a biker jacket, no identical twin taunting me.

  I sat on the museum steps and breathed in and out like a piston. I thought about Edgar, his memory failing, his mind drifting around in time, unable to distinguish what was real and what wasn’t.

  Maybe the same thing was happening to me.

  Maybe this was what it felt like to go insane.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Your blood pressure is elevated,” Dr. Tate told me. “So’s your heart rate. But that’s not surprising. All of your other vitals are normal. As far as the scans go, I don’t see any physical abnormalities in your brain that would explain what you’re seeing. No tumors, no aneurysm. So that’s a good thing.”

  “I’m just crazy,” I said.

  The doctor gave me an affectionate smile. “I wouldn’t go that far, Dylan.”

  She got up from the rolling chair and went to the sink in the examining room to wash her hands. When I heard the water, I twitched a little. I’d come to her clinic on Irving Park just east of the river without an appointment, but I knew that Alicia Tate would always fit me in. She’d known me since I met her son Roscoe in sixth grade. After my own mother was killed, she became a kind of surrogate mother to me. As with Edgar, I didn’t make it easy. I could appreciate everything she’d done for me now better than I did as a hostile teenager. I also appreciated that after Roscoe died in the accident, she didn’t blame me for his death.

  That made one of us, because I definitely blamed myself.

  I picked up the picture of Roscoe that sat on her desk. Four years later, I could still hear his voice in my head, and I missed him more than ever. The photograph didn’t show him smiling. Roscoe rarely smiled; he was serious, both as a boy and as a man. That didn’t serve him well in school, where the other kids picked on him because he was bookish, small, and black. I wasn’t much bigger myself, but Edgar had taught me to be a dirty fighter, and I beat up the largest of the bullies who taunted Roscoe. They didn’t bother him after that, and Roscoe and I became best friends. That fight was also the last time I ever felt like he needed any help from me. Instead, Roscoe was the one who became my rock through my many ups and downs.

  The photograph showed him in his priest’s frock and collar. Roscoe was a straight-A genius who could have been a doctor like his mother, but he’d chosen to serve God in a South Side Catholic parish instead, where he railed against guns and gangs with every breath. I wore a tough shell around me, but my best friend—five foot four, skinny, and mostly bald, in his Goodwill sweaters and old-fashioned glasses with Coke-bottle lenses—had been a far tougher man than I’d ever be.

  Alicia sat down in front of me again. She noticed the photograph in my hand. “I still talk to him, you know. It makes me feel better to do that. You can, too.”

  I put the photo back on her desk. “These days, I’d be concerned that he might start talking back.”

  “I really don’t think you’re crazy, Dylan.”

  “Then what’s the explanation? I’m obviously having hallucinations, but they don’t feel like hallucinations. I’ve seen myself. Twice. Looking as flesh-and-blood real as you are right now. This other Dylan interacted with me. He saw me, gave me this strange stare, as if he wasn’t surprised to see me. How is that possible?”

  Alicia took my hand. Her skin had an antiseptic smell. “The first time this happened was at the river, right? When you were in the midst of a horrific, stressful event that no human being should ever experience? Nearly drowning and losing the love of your life?”

  I nodded.

  “The second time was at the museum today? And ‘you’ were wearing a leather jacket that doesn’t exist anymore—the jacket your father was wearing when he murdered your mother? In other words, another horrific, stressful event in your life that no human being should ever experience?”

  I nodded again.

  Alicia looked at me as if I were a child. “Do I really need to explain this to you, Dylan?”

  “Okay, it’s a mental breakdown. I get it. Of course I do. Grief, loss, stress, shock. My mind is misfiring.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But why a manifestation like this? Why am I seeing other versions of myself?”

  “That I can’t tell you. The brain reacts to trauma in unusual ways.”

  I thought about the poster of Dr. Eve Brier in the ballroom at the hotel. She was a stranger to me, but I could still picture her face in my memory with unusual clarity. “Well, there’s a speaker at the LaSalle Plaza tonight who believes that we’re living in the midst of infinite parallel universes. So I guess there must be a lot of other Dylan Morans out there. Maybe they’re paying me a visit.”

  “Are you talking about the Many Worlds theory?” Alicia asked.

  I chuckled in surprise. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Of course. Most scientists have.”

  “Is it legit?”

  Alicia shrugged. “Many physicists believe it is.”

  “Parallel universes? How the hell does that work?”

  “Well, this isn’t my field, but as I understand it, the math of quantum mechanics creates a strange paradox. According to the math, particles have the ability to exist in two different states at the same time. However, whenever we look, we only see one state. That’s the problem.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “This is about Schrödinger’s cat.”

  “I’m impressed, Dylan,” she replied with a smile.


  “Hey, I watched The Big Bang Theory.”

  “And you’re correct. Erwin Schrödinger used the story of the cat to explain the paradox. There’s a cat in a box with a vial of poison that may or may not be released depending on whether a single atom decays. Until an observer opens the box to check, quantum theory suggests that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Except we all know that’s absurd. Well, a Princeton scientist named Hugh Everett came up with an answer: when the box is opened, the universes split. One observer sees a cat that is alive, and in a parallel universe, another identical observer sees a cat that is dead. That’s the Many Worlds theory.”

  “That sounds insane,” I said.

  “Not according to the math of quantum mechanics. And the math is pretty solid. That’s why we have things like the atomic bomb.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I’m not a cat in a box, so what do I do? I’ve lost everything, and now I can’t even trust my own mind.”

  “Try not to obsess about it,” Alicia suggested. “I can’t really explain why this is happening to you, but I suspect the hallucinations will go away as you deal with your grief.”

  I wanted to believe her, but I kept seeing my doppelgänger in the museum. His face. My face. The way he looked at me. “You know what really scared me about that other Dylan?”

  “What?”

  “It was what I saw in his eyes. I felt this cloud of menace from him. He was capable of anything. And he was me.”

  “Dylan, he’s not you. He’s not real.”

  “Is that the way I look to other people? Dangerous?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “The sheriff called me a violent man,” I pointed out.

  “Well, you’re not.”

  I picked up the photograph of her son from her desk again. “Are you sure about that? Be honest with me, Alicia. We both know I’m the reason that Roscoe’s dead.”

  I’d finally sobered up.

  With my bail paid, it was four in the morning, and Roscoe was driving me to his mother’s clinic, where Alicia was waiting to take x-rays and give me something for the pain. I was sure Roscoe had been asleep when I called. I knew he’d already had a long day, because there had been another shooting near his parish. There was always another shooting in Chicago. But he told me not to worry; he would be there for me. And he was.

  I hadn’t said much on the drive. Roscoe didn’t push me to talk, not at first. We cruised through the green lights on Montrose, and fall leaves blew in the air and slapped across the windshield. The car was warm and quiet on a cool October night. Roscoe wore his white priest’s collar, which fit loosely on his skinny neck. He always wore the collar when he talked to the police. He said they didn’t like to argue with a priest.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked finally, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to open up. He eyed me from behind the wheel, his expression calm and serious, the way it always was. The city lights reflected in his glasses. Even at this late hour, he looked smoothly shaved, except for the neat beard around his mustache and chin.

  “Come on, buddy,” he went on. “Talk to me.”

  “I drank too much. I got in a fight.”

  “You’ve been sober for months. Why fall off the wagon now?”

  “It’s been crazy at work. I just wrapped up a week-long conference. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I went to a bar in Mayfair.”

  “Is that all?”

  It took me a long time to answer. “Okay, it’s also the anniversary.”

  “There we go.”

  “If I went home, I’d think about it, and I didn’t want to do that tonight.”

  Roscoe shook his head. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I needed to deal with this myself.”

  “No, you didn’t. How many times have I told you that? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You were alone, and you’d been drinking. Then what happened?”

  “There was this man at the bar,” I said. “He was being a shit to his girlfriend. I told him to knock it off.”

  “I’m sure that went over well,” Roscoe said.

  “Yeah. He threw a drink in my face. The girl said I should mind my own business.”

  “So you hit him?”

  “No. I said thanks, I needed a shower. That was that. The two of them left. I finished my drink and headed out of the bar like fifteen minutes later. But they were still on the street, screaming at each other. I tried to ignore it. I was waiting at the bus stop, and I wasn’t going to do anything.”

  “But?”

  “But he hit her, Roscoe. He just hauled off and slugged the woman in the face. I lost it. I went over there and threw him to the ground. I got down on my knees and began beating the hell out of him. The two of us went at it until the police got there.”

  Roscoe didn’t say anything for a while.

  He eased the car to a stop, because Montrose was closed ahead of us. Overnight construction was underway. Weird, when you add up all the things that make a difference. The little choices that change everything. If some bureaucrat had picked a different night for the construction, Roscoe would be alive. If we’d taken Irving Park east instead of Montrose, he’d still be alive.

  More than anything, if I’d kept my cool outside that bar, my friend would still be alive.

  Roscoe turned onto a leafy side street a couple of blocks from Horner Park. We drove past matchbox homes and old three-story apartment buildings. Cars were parked on both sides, blocking our view. He drove slowly and kept looking over at me, focused on me and my story. He should have been paying more attention, but it was the middle of the night on a deserted street.

  “I’m him,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “My father.”

  Roscoe sighed as he pulled up to a stop sign. The only thing that I remembered from that intersection was a house for sale at the corner. A gold stone apartment building with a sign mounted on the lawn.

  CHANCE PROPERTIES

  I remembered it because it made me think about chance. Chance ruled everything. Chance determined who lived and who died.

  “I’m him,” I said again. “My father lost control that night. That’s what happens to me.”

  Roscoe took a loud breath. I had no way of knowing it was practically his last one. “Why?” he asked me.

  “What?”

  “Why did you attack that man? Why did you go after him?”

  “Because he hit that girl.”

  “Exactly.”

  Roscoe eased his foot onto the accelerator and started across the intersection. He was distracted, and he forgot to look right. If he had, he would have seen the headlights of the truck coming down the one-way street and barreling through the stop sign. I was off in my own world and didn’t see it either.

  “Buddy, you’re not your father,” Roscoe told me.

  That’s the last thing I remembered until I woke up and saw Karly’s face.

  CHAPTER 5

  This was where we’d met.

  The ash tree on the corner still bore the scars of the accident. The truck hit us so hard that it drove Roscoe’s car over the curb and wrapped it around the tree trunk. I ran my fingers over the jagged crevices in the bark, which were the only remaining evidence that something violent had occurred here.

  I hadn’t really intended to come back to this place, but Alicia’s office wasn’t far away. The day had turned dark, and rain began to spit on my face. I looked up at the old apartment building at the corner of the intersection. That was the building that had been for sale back then, with Karly as the listing agent. It was one of her first properties. She was twenty-five years old, determined to get a top price to impress her mother. She’d been working late out of a vacant apartment, and she’d fallen asleep, when the noise of the accident awakened her. That was when she rushed downstairs to find me in the car, broken and bleeding.

  This beautiful stranger promised not to leave me, and she kept her promise.

  Karly rode in
the ambulance with me. She stayed in the hospital room with me and nursed me back to health in her own bed. For weeks, she held together the pieces of a shattered man who blamed himself for his friend’s death. I fell in love with her almost immediately, but I couldn’t understand why she’d fallen in love with me, too. The closer she got to me, the more I kept telling her to walk away.

  I’d made too many mistakes in life, too many bad choices. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t think I deserved to have those bad choices lead me to someone like her. Sooner or later, I expected her to see who I really was, and that would be the end of us. When she slept with Scotty Ryan, I felt as if she’d finally proved me right. I didn’t want any explanations. That whole weekend in the country, I refused to listen.

  Until the last night. Until her last words.

  As we were heading home, with our bags in the car and the rain pouring down and our marriage in ruins, she stopped me at the door and said with resignation in her voice: “May I say something?”

  I didn’t answer. I simply waited.

  “Dylan, you never asked me what I saw in you after the accident, but if we’re really done, I want you to know the truth. From the moment I met you, I realized that we were exactly alike—no, wait, let me finish. I know you don’t believe that, because you have this strange, twisted vision of yourself. But we’re the same. We both grew up in cages we built for ourselves. And when I met you, I thought, here was a man who could help me become the person I wanted to be, and I could do the same for him. I still think that’s true. The thing is, I’m ready, Dylan. I can’t wait anymore. I’m not happy with my life, not because of you, but because I need to be someone different. I’ll do it without you if I have to, but I’d rather do it with you. And deep down, I think you want that, too. My question is, are you willing to try?”