He slowly removes his ring from his finger.
This time, he isn’t panicked. This time, his heart isn’t pounding out of his chest. This time, his breathing isn’t halting. Once again, police are descending upon him, barking orders in foreign tongues, but this time, he is calm. His eyes are wide, his vision clear.
It’s the only way to witness a miracle.
How else to describe what he’s seeing? What no man or woman in history has ever seen? The folding in of the universe itself. Movement across the multiverse like a stone skipping across a pond or like moving along a radio dial, new stations sliding into and out of focus.
Most unexpected is his perception that he’s standing perfectly still. Instead, it’s the world—worlds—around him that is changing. He remains statue still as his environs alter and morph. To his astonishment, the beat of his heart, as tangible as a fist, keeps a steady meter. With each pulse, the worlds around him change.
Pulse. The Swiss police are gone, and the waters of Lac Léman burn with ethereal emerald flames.
Pulse. Bombs fall all around him. Explosions blossom, bursts of fire hurling up dirt with terrifying ferocity.
Pulse. The bombing is over as quickly as though someone threw a switch. And although Jonas knows there’s no connection between the previous fusillade and now, his blood is chilled by the sight of the distant skyline festooned with swastikas.
Pulse. Lac Léman abruptly disappears, and Jonas is standing in the middle of an arcing twenty-lane highway as strange cars, futuristic but possessing a 1960s aesthetic, bullet past, each one missing him by inches, seeming to grow closer with each pass.
Jonas shifts on his feet, afraid that any movement will draw him into a path of one of the vehicles whipping past. But then some animalistic instinct alerts him that he’s standing directly in the path of an oncoming car. He confirms this with a glance over his shoulder. One of the many cars bears down on him, but his feet are rooted in terror.
Some innate part of him is screaming a directive now. Jonas’s mind reaches deep to grasp whatever it is, but the thought is slippery, elusive. Fortunately, the idea is stubborn, an infant wailing ever louder, determined to be heard. Demanding that he feel the metal in his right hand, wedged between his thumb and index finger.
His tether.
FIVE YEARS AGO
At the time of its construction, the skyscraper at 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan was the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, the fifth tallest building in the United States, and the twenty-eighth tallest in the world.
Amanda relayed all these statistics to Jonas during their elevator ride to the roof. The tower is 1,396 feet tall. It holds 125 condominiums, including a private restaurant for residents. She reeled off pieces of trivia, machine-gunning ephemera in impressive detail, all from memory. Every aspect of the building was important to her, and he found the depth of her passion intoxicating.
Jonas felt the air hit his face as they stepped out onto what he assumed was the roof. For an artist, Amanda was surprisingly good at blindfolding someone. He could perceive no light and distinguish no shadows at the edges of his vision as she led him by the hand across the roof.
This was, technically, their third date. But they’d already made love seven times and spent countless hours on the phone, FaceTime, and text. They were already as inseparable as limbs. There were times when the urge to tell her that he loved her was overwhelming, but some corner of his mind implored him to resist. It’s too soon, the voice warned. Whatever their connection and despite their attraction, both of which were profound, Jonas couldn’t assume that Amanda felt exactly as he did exactly when he did. That would be foolish, he told himself. Better to take things slow. There was no urgency, save for the restless beat of his heart and the feeling of longing he had during every minute he spent apart from her.
“You know,” he deadpanned as she guided him across the rooftop, “I grew up on Long Island. I’ve lived in Manhattan since I was a college freshman. I’ve seen the city more than a few thousand times.” In his mind, he calculated how far across the roof they had walked. They had to be close to the roofline, and he was struck by a mild panic.
Then he felt her hand on his shoulder, guiding him, and with the other, she encouraged him to take a step up. And then another. And another. Jonas felt a slight wobble under him and reasoned that he must be climbing a stepladder. As it teetered under him, he felt untethered, despite Amanda’s steadying grip, the stepladder fragile beneath his weight.
“You haven’t seen the city the way I see it,” Amanda said.
And removed the blindfold.
Jonas teetered off the corner of the rooftop’s balustrade. He felt his body shudder in reaction, a jolt of natural panic, but Amanda held him firm. The threat of vertigo hit him before subsiding, replaced by a warm feeling of calm and then a sense of beauty. He twitched and began to wobble slightly, adrenaline electrifying his chest, but Amanda’s grip was a soothing balm, a lifeline.
His eyes widened, and he saw the city as the pigeons did: an endless horizon of glass and steel, rods and shafts of silver and gray erupting from the ground beneath a canopy of blue roped with white. He felt as if he were standing inside one of Amanda’s paintings.
“How did you convince me to do this?” he whispered, already knowing the answer.
“You trust me.”
Jonas chanced a glimpse downward. A concrete canyon spun below him, and vertigo made a return appearance. “That’s what they’ll write on my tombstone. ‘He trusted her.’ After they squeegee me off the pavement.” He was joking, but not. He was terrified, but not. He was, he told himself, merely taking refuge in humor against the strange concoction of astonishment and terror he was feeling. It was, he would consider after, very much akin to being in love.
“You want to get down?”
Jonas smirked. “Eventually. Safely. The slow way.”
“Well, you showed me what you find magical. This seemed only fair.”
Jonas chanced raising an index finger in front of him. “For the record, no one ever died in a planetarium.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not true.” She held Jonas with one hand while reaching up to nudge his chin slightly to the sky. “Look,” she said, her voice filling with awe. “Every car. Every window. Every street corner teeming with life. As many lives as the stars at the Hayden. As many as in the evening sky.” She spoke with the reverence of a rabbi or priest. “But each star here holds someone’s hopes and dreams. Each one, its own tiny universe.”
Jonas peered out, his vision heightened by the reality that the clutch of a single tiny hand was really all that stood between him and death. From this vantage, the city was a labyrinth of color, a sculpture of right angles and vertical lines. He was seeing it as she did, and it was wondrous.
“I try to capture it on canvas,” she said, her voice laced with humility. “Not the image. The feeling. Life. All those people. All those dreams. All those universes.” He heard her gasp for breath, as caught up in the moment as he was, humbled by the majesty before them both. “I’ve never managed it. Not really. Not yet. But one day. One day . . .”
“I’ve seen your work,” he said. “I think you have.”
“You’re sweet. But I haven’t painted anything that captures . . . all of it.” She paused, hit by some epiphany. “You found me in this multitude,” she breathed. The awe he heard in her voice matched what he felt in his heart.
Jonas turned, and their eyes locked. “I’ll always find you,” he said. “In any multitude. In any lifetime.” The promise felt like a vow.
Her body pulsed toward his, and their lips found each other’s, their arms entwining. The altitude and the precarious footing afforded by the stepladder were forgotten. They were over a quarter of a mile in the sky, wrapped in nothing but the open air. She no longer held him. They held each other.
“I love you,” he said, and he didn’t care if it was too much or too fast. It was, and would always be, the truth. “I love you too much.”
“I love you more,” she beamed back.
They kissed again. The city teemed beneath them as they flew.
