Infinite

by Brian Freeman

  Not an endless number of killers named Dylan Moran.

  Just one man. This one. The man who’d figured out how to break the rules.

  I shouted. “Stop him! Hold him!”

  No one did. He headed down the steps, as a new path opened up in the crowd ahead of him. I tried to run, to follow him, to chase him, but I was trapped and couldn’t move. The crush of Dylan Morans held me where I was, and they showed no reaction as I screamed for them to get out of my way. The staircase, like the railing where I stood, teemed with doubles. I had nowhere to go. Below me, my doppelgänger disappeared from view. If I didn’t get to him now, he’d be gone, out the door into another world, where I would never be able to find him.

  I took hold of the railing with both hands. To free a tiny bit of space, I kicked hard to my right, driving the other Dylans back, and then I did the same on my left. When I had a few inches in which to move, I swung my legs over the second floor railing and jumped. It wasn’t far, but far enough to feel as if I were diving from a cliff. My body accelerated, and then I landed hard on the crowd below me, scattering Dylans like bowling pins. They cushioned the blow. I fell, got up, lowered my shoulder, and charged down the last few steps like Walter Payton.

  Over the heads of the others, I saw the museum doors. Through the glass, the sun let in a blinding light. I didn’t know if the doors led to Michigan Avenue and the sculpted lions guarding the museum entrance, or to someplace else entirely. But the doors led out of here. They were the gateway out of the many minds of Dylan Moran, and like a vast parade, my doubles were leaving one at a time. The doors opened. The doors closed. One by one, they headed to different worlds.

  I could see him. Waiting for his moment.

  He stood beside the doors, watching each person leave, studying them up and down, as if he were trying to judge the perfect Dylan for the next perfect crime.

  I thrashed toward him, shouting across the mass of people who blocked my way. He saw me coming, but he made no effort to escape. He watched me with stoic, evil curiosity, a wolf puzzled by the charge of a dog. I got closer and closer. I didn’t care about the others around me. I pushed, kicked, swung my fists, and opened up a trail like a pioneer chopping down one tree at a time.

  When I was six feet away, with only a few bodies left between me and him, everything happened at once.

  One of the Dylan Morans reached the glass doors. This Dylan looked a lot like me: same haircut, same blazer, as if he’d come to meet Edgar in front of Nighthawks and was now heading back to the LaSalle Plaza Hotel. The only real difference I could see between us, when he lifted his arm to open the door, was that he wore no ring on his right hand. Me, I’d worn Roscoe’s high school class ring there ever since the accident.

  I wondered where our choices had split.

  I wondered what road he’d taken in life that diverged from the one I’d traveled.

  I didn’t have time to think about it. The door opened, and a wave of fresh air blew inside, along with noises of the city. Somewhere out there was Chicago. The Dylan without Roscoe’s ring disappeared into the white light, and as he did, the Dylan in the leather coat winked and stepped across the threshold in the wake of the other man.

  Whatever you do, don’t let him follow you out of here.

  The door began to swing shut behind them. I knew, somehow I knew, that when the door closed, the world on the other side of it was sealed off from me forever, just one universe among billions, and I’d never find it again.

  I sprinted across the remaining space and left my feet in a desperate leap. My body tumbled through the door just as it closed, and the light around me got brighter and hotter, as if I were diving into the sun.

  And then there was nothing. No city. No Chicago.

  Nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Hey, buddy.”

  I heard the words through a fog in my head, but I didn’t want to wake up. I was caught in a dream.

  “Hey, buddy, come on, get up. You can’t sleep here.”

  My eyes blinked open slowly, and I tried to focus. Gradually, my senses caught up with my mind. I lay on my back, outside, with the summer sun high in the sky. Somewhere close by, I heard the screech of seagulls and a clamor of children’s voices. The air around me had a strange, sick-sweet smell of body odor and cotton candy. As I turned my head and my face got close to my clothes, I realized that the source of the body odor was probably me.

  A man leaned over me, blocking out part of the sky. “Up, up. Come on, let’s go.”

  I pushed my stiff limbs until I was sitting up, fighting off a wave of dizziness. My muscles ached, as if I’d been motionless for hours. I winced as I massaged my neck, and I looked around with a terrible feeling of disappointment. Nothing around me had changed. I was still on the same bench at Navy Pier.

  Even worse, the man standing in front of me was a Chicago police officer. He was medium height and stout, with wiry red hair and florid cheeks. “You got some ID, buddy?”

  My mouth felt gritty. I tried to talk through the dryness. “Um, yeah. Yeah, sure.”

  I dug around in my pockets and found my wallet, and rather than fumbling for my driver’s license, I simply handed him the whole thing. He opened it, and I tensed as he read my name. I didn’t know if the search for Dylan Moran had made its way to every street cop yet.

  The police officer made no effort to pull his gun or his handcuffs. His mouth mushed into a frown as he tried to make sense of me. I probably had the hygiene of a vagrant, but my wallet contained the identification and credit cards of a downtown professional. “Dylan Moran? Is that you?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “You okay, Mr. Moran? You don’t look like you’re having a good day.”

  “You’re right. I’m not.”

  “The thing is, parents don’t like to see homeless people sleeping on benches when their kids are around here. You made them nervous. A couple folks thought you were dead.”

  I tried to smile. “I’m not dead.”

  “You need help or anything? A doctor?”

  “No, thanks. It’s just the aftereffects of a rowdy office party, I guess. I don’t remember a lot of it.”

  “Well, next time you want to tie one on, party on the buddy system, okay? You get drunk, make sure somebody knows where you are. When you crash out on a bench down here, you’re likely to get rolled, know what I mean?”

  “I do. Thank you, Officer. I’ll be heading home now.”

  “Good plan. A shower might not be the worst thing, either.”

  “Yeah.”

  I got to my feet, wobbling as I did, and offered the cop a weak smile. I wasn’t really ready to move, and I didn’t know where to go, but I didn’t want to linger in case he got the idea of calling in my name and having it bounce back with a red flag. A few tourists on the pier looked at me curiously. Suspicious mothers tugged their children a little closer. I tightened my tie for whatever good it did, wiped some of the dirt off my sleeves and pants, and headed toward the city. When I checked my watch, I saw that it was already past noon. Several hours had passed since my early-morning rendezvous with Eve Brier.

  As far as I could tell, having Eve inject me with her hallucinatory drugs had accomplished nothing, other than giving me a weird dream and a splitting headache. I didn’t know why I’d expected anything else. In the harsh light of day, the idea of jumping between worlds inside my head sounded like what it was. Impossible. And yet if I was wrong about my doppelgänger, I also couldn’t explain the murders of Scotty Ryan and four innocent women.

  Meanwhile, Eve herself was nowhere to be found. She’d injected me and then left me alone, which made me wonder if she’d hoped that I would never awaken. I dug out my phone and dialed her number. I wanted to tell her I was still here, still in trouble. However, the call didn’t go through. I didn’t get her voice mail; instead, a recording told me that the number was out of service.

  Eve had disconnected her phone.

  Her
message couldn’t be more obvious: she didn’t want me anywhere near her.

  When I got to the end of Navy Pier, I stayed by the water, heading toward the downtown skyline. The trouble was, I didn’t know what to do when I got there. Wherever I went, the police would be looking for me. A part of me thought about turning myself in, but I had no idea what to tell them. I had no way to prove that I wasn’t what they thought I was.

  A killer.

  As I stared out at the water, debating my next move, my phone rang in my hand. When I checked, I saw Edgar’s name on the caller ID. I answered the phone hesitantly—Edgar almost never called me—but I heard my grandfather’s unmistakably raspy voice on the other end.

  “Hey, where are you?” he demanded.

  “Why, what do you need, Edgar?”

  “I’m here at the Art Institute. Where are you?”

  “Edgar, we just did that yesterday. We meet on Thursdays, remember?”

  “It is Thursday.”

  I sighed. It wasn’t uncommon for my grandfather to get his days mixed up. On the other hand, I was also suspicious that the police had arranged this call for me as a trap. “Stay put, I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I told him. Then I added, “Was anything happening at home when you left?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like police in the neighborhood.”

  “Well, yeah, a cop said they were trying to find you.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Did you say you were going to meet me?”

  “No. What you do is your business, not mine. You’ve made that pretty clear over the years.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that.

  “Okay, Edgar. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I hung up the phone.

  Meeting Edgar felt like an ordinary day in an ordinary life, but nothing about my world was ordinary anymore. I walked briskly toward the museum, along sidewalks I’d taken throughout my life. It would have been faster to take a cab, but I wanted to preserve my cash for when I really needed it.

  When I was back in the heart of the city, I cut through Millennium Park, passing the Pritzker Pavilion, where the wide-open stretch of green grass was crowded with people eating picnic lunches. On the sidewalks, every bench was taken. I passed an old man who was reading a copy of the Chicago Tribune, and he’d left the front section on the bench next to him. My eyes went to the headlines automatically, and I spotted a notice on the very top of the page about the Cubs completing a three-game home sweep of the Phillies. That made me stop in surprise. Not just because the Cubs had swept anybody. No, if there’s one thing I keep a close eye on, it’s Cubs baseball, and I knew they weren’t supposed to be hosting Philadelphia until next week.

  Then I glanced at the date on the paper and saw that it was next week.

  It was Thursday, just as Edgar had said. I didn’t understand how that was possible. Somehow, I’d lost almost an entire week of my life after my encounter with Eve, and I remembered none of it.

  I thought about her question: Have you been having blackouts, Dylan?

  Up until that moment, I would have said no, but I’d sat next to Eve Brier on Navy Pier in the early hours of Friday morning. Now it was six days later, and I had no idea what had happened in between.

  The old man on the bench looked up from the sports pages. “Help you?”

  “I was wondering if you’d finished the front section of the paper.”

  His eyes narrowed as he studied the state of my clothes, but then he shrugged. “Yeah, take it. I’d just throw it away.”

  “Thank you.”

  I took the front section with me and kept walking until I found an empty bench. I sat down and ripped through the pages, not even sure what I was looking for. Somehow, I wanted to believe that I’d made a mistake. Or maybe I hoped I would see a news article that would trigger my memories of the past several days. Instead, the stories confirmed that events in the world had gone on without me. Nearly a week had passed, and I hadn’t been here to see it.

  With my headache getting worse, I closed the paper.

  That was when I noticed an article in the lower left corner of the front page. The headline jumped out at me:

  Woman Stabbed to Death in River Park

  I didn’t have to read far to discover that the murder had taken place two days ago, barely a hundred yards from my apartment. The body had been found in the dense trees on the riverbank by a couple of teenagers who were exploring the trails, the way Roscoe and I used to do.

  The victim’s name was Betsy Kern. Twenty-seven years old. She was an IT programmer who’d gone out for a nighttime run and never come back. The boys had stumbled upon her body the next day.

  There was a picture of Betsy Kern accompanying the article. I didn’t know this woman, but I spotted the resemblance immediately.

  She looked just like Karly.

  I felt a strange nervousness walking into the Art Institute. Part of me expected to find a seething mass of Dylan Morans inside, the way I had in my drug-addled dream. Instead, all I found was the usual crowd of visitors. Even so, when I climbed the grand staircase to the second floor, I had a vision of jumping from the balcony that felt so vivid it seemed like more than a nightmare. I even noticed that I felt a sharp pain in my ankle, as if I’d sustained some kind of fall in real life.

  Upstairs, Edgar was waiting in the gallery. He had his hands cupped behind his back, holding his cane, his pants hiked high on his waist, in the way that old men do.

  “Hey, Edgar,” I said.

  He harrumphed at my late arrival, and we both stared silently at the characters populating Edward Hopper’s diner. After a while, Edgar’s mood improved enough that he told me his usual story about Daniel Catton Rich, which I listened to as if I’d never heard it before. As we stood there, other people came and went to admire Nighthawks.

  “So you said the police were looking for me?” I murmured when we were finally alone again. “Did they tell you why?”

  “Nope. They just said that you were missing. I wasn’t worried. I figured you’d turn up sooner or later.”

  “Did they say how long?”

  Edgar shrugged. “Couple of days.”

  My brow furrowed. “That’s all? Not like a week?”

  “How could it be a week? We had dinner on Monday.”

  “You saw me on Monday?”

  Edgar stared at me through eyes that were sunk into the bags on his face. “You got bats in your belfry, kid? Of course I did. You brought in fried rice and chop suey from Sam Lee’s.”

  I shook my head. “Edgar, Sam Lee’s closed six years ago.”

  “Well, wherever, some Chinese place. I thought it was Sam Lee.”

  “You’re sure it was Monday? Three days ago?”

  “I know you think I’m losing my marbles, but yeah, it was Monday. Shit, Dylan, what’s wrong with you?”

  I ignored his question, even though I was wondering the same thing. “Was I acting normal? Did I tell you about anything strange going on?”

  “We didn’t talk. You and me never talk, remember? We watched the Cubs beat up the Phillies and ate chop suey. I got a fortune cookie that said, ‘Love is a four-letter word, but so is hell.’ I laughed so hard I snorted.”

  I shook my head. Three days ago.

  Three days ago, I was awake, conscious, and having dinner with my grandfather. If the police were looking to pick me up, why didn’t they do it then? Why didn’t I remember any of it?

  And where had I been for the past two days?

  I was quiet for another long stretch. More people came and went to stare at the painting. I thought about what Edgar had said: We didn’t talk. You and me never talk. That was true. We’d been hostile strangers since I was a teenager.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Edgar didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. So I plunged ahead.

  “What happened to my dad? Did you se
e it coming?”

  Edgar looked at me as if I’d started speaking a foreign language. We never talked, and we definitely never talked about that. He chewed on the question like it was a bad shrimp, and I didn’t know if he’d actually say anything or just pretend that I’d never even brought it up.

  “No,” he told me finally. “No, I never saw it coming. Your dad was an angry drunk, I knew that. And things were bad between him and your mother. But I never thought he’d go that far. Definitely not.”

  “Do you hate him for it?”

  Edgar sighed. “Hating my son’s not in the rulebook for parents. No matter what he did.”

  “Well, I hate him. I hate that I’ve lived my whole life afraid of becoming him. Every time I get angry, I think, ‘This is the moment when I snap.’”

  “You? Snap?” Edgar snorted. “I’d like to see that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, a turtle’s more likely to walk out of his shell than you.”

  “Are you kidding?” I practically laughed at the absurdity of that comment. I couldn’t imagine Edgar saying something like that about me. The kid who’d argued with him at the top of his lungs practically every day of his teenage life. The kid whose fighting nearly got him kicked out of school half a dozen times. If I was afraid of my temper, it was only because it had gotten the best of me so often.

  “Kidding?” Edgar retorted. “Hell, no. Yeah, it was awful what your father did, but I think the worst thing was that it turned you into a goddamn robot. Face it, Dylan, you run away from emotion before it has a chance to get anywhere close to you. I thought maybe you’d change when you got married, but you froze her out, too.”

  “That’s not true. I only froze her out over the affair, and that’s because I couldn’t stand the idea of being angry with her.”

  Edgar shook his head. “Affair? What affair?”

  I realized I had never told him what Karly had done. “It’s not important. Not anymore.”

  “Look, Dylan, you feeling sick or something? You’re not looking good.”