Once Paul leaves the room, Eva searches the recesses of her mind for traces of those years she spent studying physics. Equations in the stranger’s tattoo tug on her memory. She tries to piece together what she knows. Jonas Cullen isn’t dead. He’s right in front of her, as real as anything she’s ever known. But his wife is dead, and he appears to be . . . surprised at that? Eva plays with these disparate thoughts. It’s like a puzzle, but one where the pieces don’t fit . . .
“How do you know who I am?” he says. His voice rises barely above a whisper.
Eva shrugs. “I read about the accident on Google News last week.”
“Last week? Not two years ago?”
“Last week. Tragedies have a way of”—she strains for the right words—“of making an impression on me. Your wife was pregnant, wasn’t she?”
The man droops in the chair, nodding as though the effort to do so exhausts him. He seems utterly lost, his eyes devoid of life. Eva’s seen eyes like that before, in hundreds of hopeless patients: despairing.
She expects him to start crying, but he doesn’t. She has the sense that all his tears have been spent. “The formulae on your arm,” she ventures. “I’ve seen some of them somewhere before. At university. That’s a Schrödinger equation, isn’t it?”
She’s rewarded with a hint of recognition. “That’s right,” he says, slowly emerging from his fog. “What do you remember from your university days?” The words come out with the croak of effort.
Eva bends to study the formulae, trying to disregard the letters and symbols she doesn’t understand, working to excavate the Schrödinger equation from both the tattoo and her memory. She can feel the man watching her think. She senses that she’s stumbling toward the truth, a marathoner straining in the final inches to cross the finish line.
“It’s a linear partial differential equation,” she breathes. “It describes the state function of a quantum-mechanical system.” Her thoughts begin to gather momentum and form, like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up mass and speed. “The reason you’re here, and your wife isn’t . . .” She stops, not yet ready to say it out loud.
“For someone convinced that she’s meeting a man from a parallel universe,” Jonas deadpans, “you’re rather calm.”
“Do I look calm?” she asks, knowing the answer.
He stands from the chair. “I’m sorry to have unnerved you. Thank you for coming to see me, but I’m afraid Dr. Guyer wasted your time. I have to get out of here.”
He moves for the door, but she stops him. “And go where?”
Jonas turns toward her. Eva stiffens her back. She has no idea why it’s important to her that this person, this apparent miracle, not walk out of her life. She feels a sense of fate. Of destiny. She knows she can’t—shouldn’t, at least—let this man from another world get away. “I don’t need to be a psychologist to know you need help.”
“I don’t have a mental illness,” Jonas assures her.
“I’m not talking about that kind of help. I’m talking about help with . . . with whatever your situation is.”
A bitter chuckle escapes his lips, like ice cracking. “You don’t know what my situation is.”
“Then tell me. Tell me, and I’ll help. Do you believe in destiny, Dr. Cullen?” She watches him ponder the question.
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, maybe you will. Because a psychologist with a working knowledge of physics has just been placed in your path. I don’t believe that’s either accident or coincidence.” Her eyes lock on his. “And I think it’s only a matter of time until you don’t believe it’s accident or coincidence either.”
Eva watches him ponder that. She knows many, many smart people, but she doesn’t think she’s ever met a bona fide genius until now.
“Is there a place to drink around here?” Jonas asks.
Eva’s surprised. “You . . . want to go to a bar?”
He offers up a shrug. “You’re right, I could use some help.” He pauses. “And I bet you could use a drink.”
She takes Jonas to a quiet pub that’s a five-minute walk from the hospital. Every bone in his body croons a chorus of pain from the same broken hymnal, but it’s good to be out in the open air. Even though his stretch in police confinement proved mercifully short, freedom is a cool drink on a scorching day. On the way, she tells him her name: Dr. Eva (pronounced “Ava”) Stamper. She is, he cannot fail to notice, stunning. Almost six feet tall, she wears a tan blouse and a dark gray pencil skirt. The simple outfit complements her ocher skin and striking black hair, which frames her piercing green eyes.
As they walk, Jonas notes that this portion of Switzerland has the same Japanese-influenced architecture he’d witnessed back in France. They pass a newsstand, and he is compelled to stop and examine its offerings, his first exposure to the news of an alternate reality. He doesn’t recognize any of the celebrities on the covers of the glossy magazines. An English newspaper’s headline proclaims, “US PRESIDENT CHANG ISSUES STERN WARNING TO RUSSIA.” The article is accompanied by a photograph of a Chinese man in his sixties whom Jonas doesn’t recognize.
He can sense Eva studying him, taking in his astonishment. She watches as he takes inventory of all the different ways this world is different—and yet not so different—from the one he knows. He expects her to pepper him with questions, but she waits until they’ve both had a chance to get a drink.
The pub is called Pub des Vergers. In English, the name translates to “Bar of Orchids,” which strikes Jonas as a very strange name for a bar. Bottles of beer and liquor stand at attention against a red brick wall, up lit by violet lights. Jonas finds them a table while Eva orders two local beers.
Eva sips hers and laments, “Maybe I should have ordered a stronger drink. Given what I think you’re going to tell me.” She sets her bottle down. “Where should we begin?”
“What do you know about the Many Worlds Theory?” Jonas asks.
“Only what I learned in Introduction to Quantum Mechanics.” She smirks. “Got an A, though.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Jonas says, impressed. A puckish intelligence winks back at him, the same inner glow he first saw in his wife. The warm dazzle he fell so deeply in love with.
He asks Eva for a coin. After digging in her purse, she hands him a two-euro piece. Jonas turns it over in his hands. His intention is to explain multiverse theory to Eva as he did with Amanda. On their first date. The first time their hands touched. The moment comes alive in his memory, and his eyes tingle with the threat of tears.
“Are you all right?” Eva asks.
“Fine,” Jonas croaks, shaking away the memory. He flips the coin, its patina glinting in the light of the pub as it tumbles back into his hand. “Heads or tails?”
“Tails,” she shrugs. Jonas reveals the coin in his palm. Heads. Eva grimaces. “Too bad for me.”
“Not exactly. You see, the Many Worlds Theory holds that there is now a universe—a parallel universe or, if you prefer, an ‘alternate reality’—where the coin came up tails.”
Eva furrows her brow. “That’s never made much sense to me. What you’re describing would lead to an incalculable number of realities. If the universe favors efficiency, it doesn’t make sense that a new one is created every time someone flips a coin.”
