“Like a roulette wheel slowly coming to a complete stop.”
Eva furrows her brow. Taking all this in. Turning it over in her mind, examining the whole impossible, incredible situation from all available angles.
“You’re taking this all very well,” Jonas observes.
Eva barely acknowledges the compliment, still thinking, still probing. “What about your clothes? Paul didn’t mention you showing up naked.”
Jonas plucks at his shirt. “All-natural fibers and materials. Even my shoes.”
“So you’re not carrying any money,” she notes.
“Good point. You’re going to have to pay for our drinks.” They share another flash of connection even in the face of a conversation that seems, at best, on the outer edge of sanity.
“So, your tattoo . . .”
Jonas rolls up his sleeve, turning out his forearm. “The collider needed to be calibrated very precisely.”
“I’d imagine.”
“I couldn’t chance leaving all this to memory, and I needed a way to bring my notes, my calculations, with me. I considered keeping them on cotton parchment, writing with something like squid ink, but that would mean risking losing the formulae, so I employed the obvious solution.”
Eva’s gaze flits across the tattoo. Once again, her eyes spark at the Schrödinger equation at the center of the calculations, the cornerstone of the Many Worlds Theory. “If the Jonas Cullen of . . . of my universe wasn’t a Nobel-winning scientist, I don’t think I’d believe any of this.”
Jonas smiles inwardly, taking some small measure of pride in being a Nobel winner in at least two universes. “What did I win for?” he can’t help but ask.
Eva winces, searching her memory. “Something about the control of particles in entangled states?” she grasps. “But forget about that a second.”
“Forget about winning a Nobel Prize? Sure. No problem.”
“I’m serious,” she insists. “This is serious. I have to ask . . .” She pauses, measuring her next words. “I just . . . I don’t understand why you’d go through all that trouble. I mean, you were risking your life to travel to a reality where you and your wife are both dead.”
Jonas breathes out a sigh. “You strike me as much smarter than that, Dr. Stamper.”
“You’re lost.” The conclusion escapes her in a breath. The conspicuous answer, present all along.
Jonas runs a finger along his tattoo, across the arcane mélange of letters and numbers and symbols, feeling like they have betrayed him. “I thought I’d correctly determined how the LHC needed to be calibrated in order to arrive at the universe where Amanda’s still alive.”
“And how does that work, exactly?”
“It’s highly technical,” he demurs.
“Really?” she says sarcastically. “That’s almost hard to imagine.”
Jonas leans forward and parts his hands. Okay. I’ll play. “I altered the Large Hadron Collider so that it would leak out a small amount of quantum radiation. Radiation is nothing more than the emission of energy in the form of waves. Waves have frequencies. Change the frequency, and you alter the quality of the radiation. Alter the quality of the radiation, and you change the effect it has on the cells of the human body. In this case, mine.”
Eva shakes her head. “I’m afraid you lost me.”
“I did warn you,” he chides playfully.
“Yes, you did.” He catches her staring at him. There’s no mistaking the look on her face as attraction, but Jonas compels himself not to dwell on it.
“Bottom line, I intended to use the quantum radiation to untether myself from my home reality, but in a very specific way. Think of it like letting go of a helium balloon with the intention that it floats up through a skylight.”
“And this theoretical ‘skylight’ leads to a reality where your wife is still alive.”
Jonas feels a pang of disappointment. “I thought I’d located a reality where Amanda was still alive and I wasn’t. Clearly, something was lacking in my calculations, because I originally ended up in a reality where she was already dead.”
Eva seems confused. “Originally?”
He tells her about his arrest, his encounter with Gillard. During the interrogation, Gillard had mentioned Amanda’s “passing.” At the time, Jonas didn’t know he’d reality-slipped, so he thought Gillard was referring to his Amanda, but with the realization that Gillard was from a parallel universe came the conclusion that the Amanda in Gillard’s reality was dead as well.
Jonas recounts the confiscation of his tether and how its loss led him to arrive in this universe. He explains that when he reality-slips, he doesn’t move in space or time: if he’s standing on the third floor of a building that disappears because he swaps universes, he’s liable to plummet to his death—unless, say, a car breaks his fall. Hence his arrival at Dr. Guyer’s hospital.
“So now what?” Eva asks. “What will you do next?”
“I don’t know,” he says, trying not to sound hopeless.
Almost a minute passes. In the silence, the sounds of the bar fill the breach: the indistinct chatter of dozens of overlapping conversations, the chime of glasses being set down on tables, a pop song struggling in vain to be heard over it all. Jonas returns his attention to Eva, and in her eyes he sees a familiar emotion, one he’s seen countless times since Amanda passed away.
It’s pity.
It’s not pity.
Eva stares at Jonas with empathy and the understanding of a fellow traveler on the road of loss. She’s further down that path than he is and recognizes in him a despair akin to hers, which has scarred over with the passage of time. But for Jonas, the loss of Amanda is still fresh. To hear him talk about it is to take in the extent of his grief. However, rather than see it as pathetic, Eva finds it alluring. His sorrow is as pure as his love. Who wouldn’t find such devotion attractive? Who wouldn’t want to be coveted the way Jonas covets Amanda?
“I’m sorry if I seem . . . pathetic,” Jonas says.
