NOW
Manhattan’s arteries are clogged with cars and trucks. Tourists and finance warriors on public bikes rocket by—no helmets—over special lanes designated for the purpose. The sounds of jackhammers and construction echo. Steam pours from an uncountable number of orifices. Scaffolding covers a full third of the city.
Victor pays attention to none of it. He walks to clear his head, not surrender it to the overdose of sights and smells and sounds that is New York City. Hedge fund managers on cell phones and pantsuited women in white sneakers impede his progress. The flotsam and jetsam of the capital of the world.
As he rounds a corner, nearing home, he sees Phaedra. Waiting at the building’s entrance, wearing a simple blouse and skirt and an exasperated expression. She’s still as beautiful as she was the day they met. “You told the doorman not to let me up?” she demands.
“You don’t live here anymore,” he answers, working to keep resentment from his tone. He throws in an innocent shrug to sell it, but the effort is halfhearted.
“Dorothy Stanton called me. She’s concerned about you.”
“Then maybe she shouldn’t have fired me,” Victor retorts.
“Suspended you,” Phaedra corrects. “Out of concern for your well-being.”
“And I suppose I’m enjoying that same concern from you right now?” This time, he doesn’t try to conceal his bitterness.
Well traveled in Victor’s darker moods, Phaedra doesn’t take the bait. “Dorothy says you’ve turned our home into a monument to your obsession with Jonas Cullen.”
“It’s no longer ‘our’ home. And I’m not obsessed.” They both know he’s lying.
“Really? Then what destroyed our marriage?” The question hangs, laden with remorse and shared history.
Eventually, Victor says, “I don’t know what destroyed our marriage, Phaedra. I suppose you could say its demise was an example of quantum entanglement, where cause and effect existed simultaneously.”
An experimental physicist in her own right—and a former student of Victor’s—Phaedra understands the analogy, even though she doesn’t agree with it. “You traded our marriage for your vendetta. If I didn’t support you—”
“You didn’t,” Victor bites.
“Because I didn’t understand you. I didn’t understand why you should be so envious of someone else. Someone who was your friend. I didn’t understand why you had him fired, why you kept him from getting published.”
“He stole my work,” comes the simple reply.
“He built upon your work,” she clarifies. “Isn’t building on the work of others what scientific inquiry—if not all human achievement—is about?”
Victor lets out a long fatigued sigh. How many times must they have the same argument? “He used my work as the foundation for his without even asking me first.” That he doesn’t raise his voice is a triumph.
“And you couldn’t forgive him that one transgression?” Phaedra asks. “He was your best friend.”
“Exactly.”
She stares back at him, incredulous.
“I’ve been in academia long enough to expect slings and arrows from fellow colleagues and professional rivals,” Victor elaborates. “But to be betrayed by a friend . . .” He shakes his head with disgust. “I might not have dealt with it in the most . . . positive way, I admit that. And I regret it.” His remorse seems genuine. “But the betrayal just hurt too much.”
He watches Phaedra process this. For a heartbeat, he allows himself to indulge in the idea that he’s come off as reasonable, sympathetic enough to begin repairing his relationship with her. His only mistake was not getting her to see where he was coming from sooner, why he was so pained and vindictive.
“I’m sorry,” she says, confirming his aspiration. She seems sincerely apologetic. “I’m sorry you can’t see it.”
Victor feels a twinge of worry. “Can’t see what?”
“That no one betrayed you, Victor,” she says, exhaling the thought like a sigh. “Jonas invited you to work with him, and you told him to pound sand.”
Now Victor gives full license to his animus. “Invited me to participate in my own work. Yes. Very kind. I can’t believe I was so wrong about him.” The words are drenched in sarcasm, his tongue snapping out each syllable.
“Get help, Victor,” she says, more in surrender than in earnest. “The university has good people for this sort of—”
“Thank you,” he growls. “I appreciate the concern.”
He turns on a heel and heads into what was once their apartment building. Phaedra watches him go, trailing resentment and vitriol.
It’s the last time she’ll ever see him.
NOW
The first thing Jonas notices when he opens his eyes is that he’s not dead. The highway is gone, replaced by the same shoreline as when he departed Eva’s reality. He looks to the skyline. It’s still recognizable as Geneva, but the Japanese architectural accents are gone, as though erased by an artist’s brushstrokes. In their place are trees and leaves and fields of grass. It’s as if the buildings were constructed by an architect and a gardener working in tandem, a perfect blend of cityscape and nature.
It only takes a clutch of seconds for him to shake off the awe of an entirely new world. He’s a man of singular focus. The reality he has randomly traveled to is of interest only insofar as it contains the possibility, albeit gossamer thin, that Amanda is still alive in this universe.
He hikes up the slope that leads back to the Seidenstrasse, or whatever it’s called in this brave new world. As in his home universe and the one he just departed, cars and trucks whip past. He sets off along the shoulder, clutching his torn shirt closed against the gathering chill, the thumb of his free hand aimed toward the passing traffic. A wry thought intrudes: In this world, is an outstretched thumb a signal for hitchhiking?
It is. A car slides up to meet him, its electric engine emitting a faint soothing hum. A gull-wing door rises, and as Jonas climbs in, he notices that the rear of the car’s body tapers back to a single wheel.
The driver, a woman in her twenties, doesn’t speak English, but Jonas’s French is enough to communicate his destination, the offshoot of Geneva where Eva lives. At least, where Eva lived, an entire universe away. The car—a “tryke,” he’d later learn—lets him off five blocks from where Eva’s apartment should be. He walks the rest of the way. When he arrives, the two skyscrapers that had bookended Eva’s apartment building in another universe are still standing. But here, they buttress nothing but air, the ground dedicated to a public garden.
Jonas walks. There’s no point in hitchhiking. Hitchhiking is for people who have someplace to go. But he is lost. Not in Geneva—he knows the city as well as any local—but in the multiverse. Without conscious thought, he walks east before noticing that he’s navigating toward the closest university, the Université de Genève.
