Ida

by Alison Evans

  I’m about to protest when a pair of people rugged up against the wind and rain walk through the door.

  ‘Long black it is,’ I say, trying to sound as forceful as I can. I can’t do intimidating, though. ‘Don’t leave.’

  ‘Just make sure you don’t.’

  I stare. They really do know. ‘I’ll be back with your order shortly,’ I say as I smile sweetly.

  As I watch the shots of coffee pour, I look over at the newcomers. They’re removing their scarves and beanies and laughing about something. The one with their back to me, that’s Daisy. There’s a fist in my intestines, twisting.

  I burn the coffee and tip it out, rinse the cup with hot water and end up burning my fingers. ‘Fucking Christ,’ I mutter.

  Pen in hand, I walk over to Daisy. When they look at me, they don’t recognise me at all.

  ‘H-hello,’ I say, trying not to blush. ‘What can I get you two?’

  Daisy looks at their … friend? ‘Did you want a hot chocolate?’

  The girl smiles at them. No, not friend. I’m definitely blushing and I can feel an ache start to form in my chest. ‘Yep. Maybe some cheesecake?’

  ‘All right.’ Daisy leans over and looks at the cakes in the display. ‘A cheesecake and …’ They’re going to order the hedgehog. ‘Hedgehog. And could we have two hot chocolates, please.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ I say as my voice cracks, writing it all down and going to hide behind the coffee machine. I’ve run out of the chocolate powder so I duck into the store room and breathe. Suck in air like it’s running out. There’s weight on my chest, suffocating my lungs. Then I grab the bag of chocolate, clear my throat, stride out to make the drinks.

  I take them out on a tray with the cakes and may have accidentally given Daisy an extra marshmallow.

  ‘Thanks,’ Daisy says, politely, but not really paying me attention. They’re fixed on the girl in front of them, like they used to be with me. I don’t listen to what they’re saying because I can’t.

  The stranger from the gallery catches my eye and looks at me, their face full of sympathy. I guess it makes sense that they know who Daisy is, if they know who I am. Looking away, I clean the bench. I don’t want sympathy. I want to be home with my dad and my cat and my partner and my room how it should be.

  I realise then that I never made the stranger’s coffee. I pick out a macaron as an apology and take both over to them. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ They shake their head. ‘Just don’t leave. Please. I need to talk to you.’

  I nod and find I don’t really care if this person is going to kidnap me, if I’m really honest. I can always escape. Wiping down counters is all I do while I wait for Daisy and the girl to leave. If the person knows about my ability, does that mean there’s a way to stop it? But no, because then I wouldn’t have gotten away the first time in the gallery.

  I jump and the cloth flies from my hands. ‘Oh, no,’ I whisper.

  There’s a doppelganger outside, straightening the ice cream sign in its own universe. The sign in my universe creaks a little, maybe in the wind. My eyes are as wide as anything, but the ghost me doesn’t seem to have seen me yet.

  Daisy and the girl don’t look like they’re leaving anytime soon. I bite my lip. What if I’m pulled out before I can talk to the stranger? The stranger is staring at me now, eyebrows drawn. They beckon me over and I sit down, chair scraping against the tiles.

  ‘I don’t know that we have a lot of time,’ Damaris says. ‘Daisy’s too engrossed to notice us as long as we keep it down. Did you see something outside?’

  I nod. ‘Another me.’

  The stranger’s eyes open wide, too wide. ‘You can see them?’

  Those eyes are so old. ‘I see them all the time.’

  They mutter something that sounds like a string of swears. ‘All right. Have you had any contact?’

  ‘I can’t touch them, but one time I was on my bed and there was one next to me. It was making the mattress sink.’

  ‘But you couldn’t touch it?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Good. Now, the reason you can see them is because you’ve been switching too much. I take it you’ve realised this isn’t time travel.’

  ‘Only recently,’ I say as I nod. Watching the stranger’s eyes. ‘I wasn’t sure what was happening anymore.’

  ‘You’ve got to ignore the gangers, the other yous. They won’t realise that you can see them unless you react to them, all right? Don’t look at them.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The paths between the universes are getting worn, slippery. Each time you switch, the barriers between the universes get weaker and your other selves will be able to switch. They’ll figure it out. They’ll be able to pull you out of this universe, if they want to.’

  ‘But they’ve done that already.’

  ‘They what?’ They pinch their nose. ‘Son of a goddamn … Adrastos, I will murder you.’ They say the last part under their breath so I can barely hear.

  ‘Are there more people like me? You’ve done this before.’

  ‘I do this for a job, so yes.’

  ‘Could I do that? Like, as a job?’

  Damaris looks at me curiously. ‘Maybe one day, not anytime soon, your timelines are too slippery.’

  Maybe one day.

  ‘All right, back on track. You’ve been pulled out already, we can work with this.’ There’s a pause while they look at me. ‘You’re far from home, aren’t you?’

  The sudden change in tone is alarming. The stranger looks at me with kindness, concern. I nod and I hate it but my eyes start tearing up.

  I look down at my hands. ‘Some things seem to stay the same, in every timeline.’

  Then the stranger regains their professional com­posure, straightens their back. ‘We call them fixed points. There are some events that will be the same for every Ida, they spread out across all your lives.’

  ‘So I would need to find the most recent one of those? Something that would be the same in every universe. And then I can get back to my life?’

  ‘I think, by now,’ they riffle in their bag and pull out a complicated diagram that I don’t understand. Their eyes wander over it. ‘Yes … by now you’re very far. You can’t just jump to find your way back at random. You have to find the fixed point and aim for that in your mind when you switch. You see all these converging paths around this point? We need to figure out what they’re pointing to.’

  ‘What?’ I blink at the chart. ‘I’ve never tried to aim more than a day or two. When is this?’ I jab the knot of lines, the fixed point. ‘But how do I know what it is? It could be anything.’

  ‘I believe it happened on the seventeenth of June. If you look closely, you can see … Ida,’ the stranger says, the compassion back. I can barely meet their eyes. ‘I will help you get back home.’

  There’s another doppelganger and it’s looking at me. My head turns towards it automatically.

  ‘Don’t look at it, Ida, don’t …’

  I’m shoved out, senses gone, replaced by a vast nothing. I’m going fast and I think I catch the stranger’s voice. I know her name in here, Damaris. She can’t reach me anymore.

  I’m alone in the cafe except for Daisy and the girl. Damaris isn’t anywhere and I don’t know how to find the fixed point. It could be anything on or around that date. I could be stuck wandering forever. I want to try now, to find the Daisy that recognises me. I can see them laughing at something the girl is saying. They don’t know me.

  I should skip out now, but then what if this is the last time I even look at them? They’ve been completely absent in some of my lives, what if they disappear? I can’t decide what to do; my stomach twists. I sit at one of the tables with a coffee. No one else is coming in today. I don’t look at Daisy, I just listen to them speak. It’s only twenty minutes after I sit down that they leave, and then the cafe is empty. My watch ticks and it’s almost synced back to the real time, fiv
e minutes in front.

  I close up everything early. It’s not worth staying open, anyway, and I don’t really give a shit what my boss’ll think if she finds out, in any universe. Maybe if she paid me more.

  I go home, have a shower. If I scrub away the dirt then maybe I’ll feel the tiniest bit more confident. Daisy’s with someone else. My mother is dead. I don’t know if I can do it.

  I open the shampoo and the smell hits me. It was five years ago that Mum died. It wasn’t a dark night, or even night. It was daytime and it was sunny. Someone was speeding and her car got in the way.

  ‘Do you need anything from the shop?’ she had asked before she left that morning. Her hair was tied up in a quick ponytail and I was still astonished by how beautiful she was.

  ‘We need shampoo,’ I’d said where I was sitting, not doing my homework.

  ‘All right.’ She kissed the top of my head. ‘I won’t be long.’

  She left and her car crunched on the stones of the driveway. Dad wasn’t home. He’d said goodbye to her in the morning while she was still half-asleep, had tried not to wake her.

  I’d gone through that morning more times than I know how to count. The last word I’d said to her was shampoo. I can’t think of a more ridiculous word.

  Stop it, I tell myself. This won’t help.

  I guess Mum dying was a fixed point, too, or at least something similar. That’s why it was so hard to change, why I couldn’t. I found my brother, but I’ve only found him once.

  Now I need to find the recent point somehow. It’d have to be something big, right? But what? All I did that day was go to work. Then Daisy came over, nothing really happened. Why couldn’t Damaris tell me what it was? She had that diagram thing. She knows more than I do, doesn’t she? But she said I could find my way back, and maybe if I can find that, a safe place, maybe then I could stay there.

  I get dressed and everything is tired, my arms are too heavy. Maybe tomorrow I can figure out a way. I don’t have any energy to do anything even though it’s only three in the afternoon. I crawl up the stairs and look out the window, at the valley in front of me. So much green, and it stays the same whatever I do.

  It’s then that I’m pulled out.

  A moment

  I don’t know where I am until I see the huge Landcruiser hurtling towards me and I’m gripping the steering wheel. My throat’s ripping, the car’s getting closer, the number plate larger, I can see every detail of the front of the car. Covered in dead bugs and dirt. I’m going to be strewn all over that.

  Everything in the world shatters as the Landcruiser’s front collides with my window and the glass splinters all over my face. I close my eyes.

  The space is cold. I wait, and wait, there is no path yet … and then a heat starts. It burns, it’s too intense. I’m dying; it’s too hot.

  The heat loosens my body and I float slowly, calm. I can feel something that at first is my heartbeat, but it’s coming from something else, something I don’t know.

  I stay in the scalding hot for an age. Then I know it’s time to leave. I’m not dying, I’m going back.

  The sun shining through the window momentarily blinds me when I open my eyes. The air around me is cold, and it’s jarring coming from that intense warmth. I’m lying in the middle of my bedroom floor, and I pull on the nearest jumper I can find. I’m exhausted from the heat, my bones are made of concrete and I feel like I can barely move. My eyes are burning.

  I blink away tears and wipe them with the back of my hand. I wince when something digs into my skin. I draw my hand and it’s covered in blood and tiny scratches.

  The crash, of course. The heat made me forget. Maybe that was the fixed point?

  In the mirror, there are tiny cuts all over my face and my right arm. I test my arm but it’s not broken, everything moves the way it should. Only the window bits must have hit me, not the door or the steering wheel. I start to pick out the little pieces of glass in my skin and soon there are tiny pinpricks of blood chasing each other down my face. They don’t get far before drying, there isn’t enough volume to them.

  I pull out the biggest piece of glass, the one that cut my hand, and flick it across the room. Which I’ll never find now, until I step on it, dammit.

  In the mirror I can see another me, standing behind me. I don’t look at it directly, just concentrate on the glass in my face. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be, not looking. The air is cold although I don’t really feel it as much anymore, not just because of the jumper, but there’s just something that lingers from the in-between, a left-over warmth.

  I try not to look to the left, it’s moved and it keeps staring. From the parts I can see, it’s even more beat up than I am, and one arm hangs limply by its side. I turn my head to look at it, get a clearer picture, but then keep turning my head, not letting my eyes stay on any one point.

  If I’m forced out of the universe again, it might be closer to the impact of the crash, or something worse. Being switched into the past could be highly problematic – there’s no shortage of near-death experiences.

  Some of those near deaths would be real deaths for the other versions of me I realise, as I run a hand up my punctured arm, looking sideways at the limp arm of the doppelganger. One of me probably just died in the car crash. In that universe, I am dead. Dad doesn’t have a daughter and he lost me the same way he lost Mum.

  How many other universes is he alone in?

  When I turn around, the doppelganger is gone. The walls are painted a darker shade than the one I’m used to. It’s warmer, maybe a little more inviting.

  I blink at the wall for a few seconds, then launch myself over. I place my hand flat where the tea should be. I lean in close, narrow my eyes. No, they’re still there. They’re faint, recently scrubbed off.

  I wriggle my toes in the carpet, noticing it properly. It’s new. My whole room is cleaner, not a speck of dust anywhere. The paint around the window that was cracked has been redone.

  The front of my watch is cracked. I’d almost forgotten it in the past few days, lost without Dad and Daisy and everything. I tap a fingernail on the glass and feel the steady tick-tock, tick-tock. How could I have forgotten about the watch? I’m not alone if it’s with me.

  Now all I have to do is find home, if that crash is the fixed point.

  I go downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. In the driveway there’s a car I don’t recognise. Dad must have a new one. We have a lot of new things here; Dad must have a different job.

  No one’s in the kitchen or the lounge, but the newspaper is laid out on the table. The coffee beside it is warm, and too milky. I must’ve just missed him; he must have had the night shift and is asleep.

  Once the tea is made, I go back upstairs and look for Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s not on my bedside or my bookshelf, so I pick up a random book on the shelf.

  I get under the doona and wriggle around till I find the comfiest spot. Tea in one hand, book in the other, I sigh and lean into my pillows.

  There’s a light knock on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ I say, not putting the book down.

  The door opens. ‘Ida, did you want to come watch a movie with me?’

  I stare because that is not Dad. That’s not my father.

  That is my mother. She stands in the doorway, alive, well, a smile on her face.

  Evasion

  Damaris leans towards the Ida with different eyes. ‘Ida? Ida, tell me you didn’t switch.’

  The Ida in front of her grins. ‘I did.’

  ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘She shouldn’t drive into car accidents.’

  ‘I was telling her how to make it stop!’ Damaris curls her hands until her nails dig into her palms.

  ‘But if she dies then it all stops.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’ Damaris pinches the bridge of her nose between two fingers. ‘The power will spread to the most recent self. It’ll keep spreading until every single version of her – of you
– will have the power. You’ll switch every second, do you understand? Goddammit, you don’t know what you’ve done.’ She swears some more under her breath. ‘This is why it’s so important.’

  Daisy and the girl are looking at Damaris, now. She glares at them and then they look at each other, having a quick whispered conversation before deciding to leave. Daisy leaves money on the table.

  ‘What?’ the Ida says. She does not look happy.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Damaris says. ‘Can’t you let me do my job for once?’

  ‘I-I thought …’

  ‘No. Don’t.’

  The Ida looks at her.

  ‘I think you’ve got a coffee to make.’ Damaris stands, drawing herself to her full, considerable height. ‘I won’t be bothering you again.’

  Damaris leaves the cafe and walks down the path in the rain. She is sure no one is around and closes her eyes.

  Damaris doesn’t sleep in the next twenty-four hours. She wanders, trying to find the right Ida but she’s too tired. She can’t concentrate. Her eyes burn. Maybe she does need that holiday.

  As soon as she completes her assignment, she’ll leave.

  She enters the thirtieth universe and tries again for the right Ida. Everything is too slippery. She’s not there.

  It’s after she’s stopped counting that she can’t skip anymore. At around the fifty mark, she wasn’t able to choose at all, just had to follow the paths where they led her.

  And now, standing in the middle of the supermarket, she can’t switch at all. She tries again, gives herself a nosebleed. She turns on the spot and finds herself in the middle of Melbourne, twenty years from before. She can move back and forth in this same universe, but to go any other way, to go into other parallel universes, is impossible right now.

  There is a strength

  I blink. That’s Mum. Mum who is alive. Mum who is standing in the doorway, not realising how amazing she is. Her hair is up in a bun but half of it’s fallen out; she’s wearing a loose grey long-sleeve shirt with a pocket on it. Black jeans. Socks.