The doorbell startles him. Apart from the occasional food delivery, he hasn’t had a visitor in months. He shucks the coat he wore against the chill of an evening in Switzerland and pads to the door, opening it without bothering with the peephole.
Columbia Dean Dorothy Stanton stands there. He should have known. He should have expected his boss to visit weeks ago.
“Hello, Victor.” She’s five foot three, in her late seventies, and Victor would swear she’s lost an inch since he saw her last. Her skin reminds him of a dried-up apple.
“Dorothy,” he says, willing warmth into his voice. “How are you?” He hopes he’s smiling.
“Can I come in?”
Victor takes more time to consider the question than he should. Eventually, he remembers his manners and waves her inside. “Can I offer you a drink?” he volunteers out of some moribund sense of propriety. She doesn’t answer. He watches her take in the apartment. He knows how it appears, an eight-million-dollar Manhattan penthouse on the Upper West Side reduced to a scientific laboratory. He knows she thinks it’s perverse.
“Your TAs came to me,” she ventures. Victor can tell she’s choosing her words with care. “En banc. They say they’ve been covering your lectures.”
“That’s what teaching assistants are for, isn’t it?” He’s trying to grin, but the image it conjures in his mind is grotesque.
“They say they’ve been covering for you for the past three months.”
“I’ve been consumed with a recent project.”
Dorothy’s head bobs toward the massive device, the elephant in the room. “I can see that,” she says, her tone bone dry. She turns to him with that look he’s learned to despise, that look he’s seen in too many faces, in too many sad expressions. That look he has to clench his fist against, lest he lose his temper. Pity. “I heard about Phaedra. I’m very sorry, Victor.”
Victor swallows his rage. Like anything, it’s become easier with practice. “I know the hour’s late, but I’m really quite busy, so . . .”
“I’m worried about you, Victor.” For once, she sounds sincere. “Everyone at the university is, in fact.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” he asserts, believing it.
“I don’t think that’s true,” she says in a way that suggests she hates to say it. But Victor knows better. He knows how they all see him, how they all judge him, despise him.
“I might be too focused on work at present,” he says, a suspect under interrogation repeating a rehearsed cover story. “But really, I’m fine.”
“This isn’t the home of a man who’s fine, Victor,” Dorothy says, apparently having decided to drop any pretense.
Victor wills his temper to remain in check. He tells himself he’s simply here to play a part. “It’s the home of a newly single man who’s thrown himself into his work. Work that fulfills him.”
“I think you need some time off,” she says, sounding like she’s been practicing the line in her head. “To take care of yourself. Deal with the divorce and whatever else is . . . ailing you.”
“I told you. I’m fine.” The words come out more clipped than he cares for.
The moment yawns, and Victor can see Dorothy is working herself up to bad news.
“The board voted for your suspension tonight,” she finally says. “One year. Half pay.”
A year’s suspension is an ivory-tower death sentence. Victor commands his voice to remain level. “Without a hearing? That feels extreme,” he says, as if all they did was move his parking space.
“It was all I could do to save your job.” Her tone conveys a genuine sympathy. That’s what angers him most of all.
“Well, thank you for that.” He spits out the platitude, devoid of even a glimmer of sincerity. Dorothy begins to talk again, but he cuts her off. “Get out, please.” She tries again, uttering some crap about a therapist that one of the faculty recommends, but it’s just static. He endures as much as he can manage before thundering, “Get out!” Even he is surprised by the might of his rage. The light fixtures tremble in the wake of his outburst. He calms himself, breathing deep, and quiets. “Please.” The word escapes his lips like a prayer.
He moves to his device and begins making adjustments. His ministrations are reminiscent of a lover’s, seeking refuge in the work. He’s so singularly focused on what he’s doing, he barely hears the door shut behind her.
Eva lives in Switzerland. Her apartment is in a diminutive building sandwiched by two skyscrapers. After Jonas’s first week there, when it becomes clear that no solution to his problem is imminent, he offers to get a place of his own. He doesn’t want to intrude on her life any more than he already has, but she reminds him that he has no job and no money. In fact, he doesn’t even possess any form of identification. She has opened her home to a man who doesn’t officially exist.
Each night, Jonas converts the living room couch into his bed. By day, the makeshift bedroom becomes an equally makeshift laboratory, filled with rolling whiteboards he’s purchased on Amazon with her credit card. He works diligently, often for hours, covering and erasing and re-covering the whiteboards with color coded equations sketched out with dry-erase markers. He buys a refurbished MacBook Pro and coaxes every ounce of processing power out of it. He promises to pay Eva back for all his expenditures, but they both know that once he leaves, he won’t be coming back.
Weeks pass into months. One morning, Eva walks into the living room clutching her bathrobe around her with one hand and a mug of scalding coffee in the other. “You didn’t sleep?” she asks, eyeing the couch, which hasn’t yet made its nightly transformation into a bed.
“Lost track of time.” Jonas moves to the whiteboard, erasing an equation with the heel of his hand and replacing it with a different calculation.
“Your wife’s a lucky woman,” Eva observes. Is it a trace of envy Jonas hears in her voice?
“Being dead, she might disagree,” he notes.
“What I mean is, any woman would be lucky to have a man willing to search the world for her. Your wife has a man willing to search an infinite number of worlds.”
Still at the whiteboard, Jonas stops writing. He’s only gotten this far by denying the enormity of his task. He could do without the reminder.
“Have you ever heard of Henri Thibault?” Eva asks.
“Of course,” Jonas says, finally turning from the whiteboard. “His paper on Bohmian mechanics served as one of the foundations for my Many Worlds Proof.”
“Have you thought about asking him for help?”
“I certainly would, if he hadn’t died eight years ago.” He hopes he doesn’t sound patronizing.
Eva arches an eyebrow. “You strike me as much smarter than that, Dr. Cullen,” she says, playfully parroting the words he’d used with her back when they’d first met.
The epiphany hits Jonas right in the center of his chest. “Thibault is alive in this reality.”
“He’s a very difficult man to get an appointment with. Fortunately, one of my patients knows someone who knows someone who was willing to make a few calls for me.” She pauses, as though about to reveal a secret. “Do you want to meet someone even smarter than you?”
By the end of the day, Jonas and Eva are standing in the middle of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s sprawling modern campus. Students and faculty shoot across the quad, its concrete peppered by patches of fake grass meant to convey the image of protons in flight.
Jonas studies the man sitting on the bench in front of him, peering intently at the glow of Jonas’s MacBook. Apart from the consequential quality of being alive, this universe’s Henri Thibault, PhD, is no different from the one Jonas knew back in his own reality. This Thibault favors the same wire-rimmed glasses and tweed sport coats, appears older than his years, and coughs with the rigor of an ex-smoker. Jonas considers telling Thibault that his doppelgänger died of lung cancer and thinks better of it.
It feels to Jonas as though it’s taking a dozen lifetimes for Thibault to render a verdict on his work. Hoping to prompt some response, any response, he tries humor. “I’m relieved you’re not calling for the men in the white coats.”
If Thibault considers this amusing, he doesn’t show it. His focus never leaves the computer’s screen as he remarks, “You and your wife died two years ago, Dr. Cullen. I read your obituary. And yet, here you are, standing opposite me, talking to me. If I were to call for a psychiatrist, believe me, it’d be for myself.”
“Both of you can relax,” Eva says. “I’m a practicing psychologist, I’m a licensed and published psychologist, and I’m here to tell you I don’t find either one of you to be the least bit nuts.” Then, apparently as impatient as Jonas is, she adds, “What do you make of Jonas’s equations?”
“I could spend the rest of my career studying them and barely scratch the surface,” Thibault says. He pulls himself from the screen to marvel at Jonas. “Your work is the stuff of Einstein and Heisenberg. Of Podolsky and Rosen. Theoretical physicists spend their entire careers hunting—praying—to identify a paradigm shift like you have here.”
That paradigm shift, as Jonas had explained to Eva, had been that the scope of the multiverse isn’t limitless. The universe favors certain outcomes, and minor differences aren’t enough to prompt the birth of a new reality. “With the multiverse reduced to a series of calculations,” Thibault exults, “the mathematics changes to one of probabilities. And if the universe is predisposed to some realities, it becomes possible to calculate the likelihood of those realities.”
