Jonas hadn’t cried when he came to beneath the Centralbron, awakening to see Amanda hanging lifeless next to him. He hadn’t cried when the police confirmed the worst, that his wife was gone. He hadn’t cried at the funeral or at the reception afterward. He hadn’t cried after the friends and former colleagues and well-wishers had all departed, and the apartment he had once shared with Amanda felt as lonely as a grave. His grief had been profound, and it expressed itself in a multitude of ways but never as crying.
But Jonas is crying now. Quiet, plaintive tears. They escape unbidden. He’s not even aware of them as they carve lines down his face. In his darkest hours, he had consoled himself with the faith that he’d lost everything there was to lose, that nothing remained inside him to be broken. He now knows he was wrong, as that last surviving piece of himself—that lonely, unbroken quadrant of his soul—fractures.
“I tried,” he whispers, unsure whether he’s speaking to Amanda or himself. “I tried so hard.”
This was my last chance. The thought strikes him center mass. When Amanda died the first time, a small corner of his consciousness was already hard at work on finding a way back to her. That ephemeral strand of hope had sustained him through a despair so deep that it appeared bottomless, that his descent would be forever.
Her lips move, and after a second or two, words manage to escape. They’re barely audible against the approaching sirens and the tumult swirling around them. But she invests them with a commitment that makes them emanate from the depths of her soul.
“I love you too much,” she says.
Jonas’s lips tremble, his mouth trying to form the words of the response—I love you more—but he can’t. There’s a wrongness to Amanda right now. It stabs at his heart, torturing him with the irony that he can still feel. That he’s still capable of experiencing grief. That loss and despair can still find him. It’s her eyes. They’re . . . glassy. Vacant.
Desperate, he shakes her. “Amanda?” But she’s limp in his arms. “Please. Please don’t go,” he pleads, knowing she’s already gone. “Don’t go. Don’t go.” Then, beseeching, this time to the God who delivered him to this moment. “Not again. Please. Not again.”
The world goes blurry with the flood of tears obscuring his vision. Someone is pulling him to his feet. His legs are rubber. He pushes away the cloud of grief and sees two paramedics working to revive Amanda. But the sight of her body, rag-dolling in sync with their ministrations, sickens him. Her head lolls to the side and back as they work in vain to stanch her bleeding and start her heart. But Amanda’s dead, and any manipulation of her body, short of burying it, is perverse.
The hands that pulled him to his feet are strong. A man’s hands. Jonas fights against them, struggling. He wants to be down on the concrete with Amanda. He needs to be with her. He strains and writhes against the man’s grip. Inconsolable.
“Calm down, pal,” the man is saying. He has an accent dipped in Brooklyn. He wears a blue uniform. Short sleeves for the spring. A shield on his chest. A police officer. “Let these guys do their jobs.” He relinquishes his hold on Jonas as more police descend on the scene to hold back the tide of onlookers. Jonas begins to drift backward down the sidewalk, away from the paramedics. But the cop with the Brooklyn accent follows him. “I’ve gotta ask you some questions,” he says authoritatively, narrowing the gap between them.
Answering questions is the last thing Jonas wants to do. He quickens his step, walking backward for a couple of feet before turning around. He’s walking fast now, but the cop keeps pace.
“C’mon,” he says, “you know how this works. I gotta detain you.”
“What?”
“This is a crime scene now. All witnesses gotta be brought in for questioning. C’mon, it’s been this way ever since 10/16.”
Ten-sixteen. Jonas had forgotten he’s in an entirely different reality from the one he knows. He sees the officer’s hand wander down to the handcuffs on his belt.
“I’ve gotta take you in for questioning back at the station,” he says. “It’s mandatory. I’ve got no discretion here.”
A second passes in which Jonas considers letting the officer take him into custody. Let the police arrest him. Let them confiscate his tether, and he can spend the rest of his life passing between universes, like a specter soullessly wandering the earth, unable to find its final rest.
The cop’s meaty fingers reach for his arm when Jonas bolts. He has no idea why. Some instinct propels him to run.
He darts into the street. His arms and legs pump, propelling him forward. His escape is unexpected, and the element of surprise gives him a head start measuring in seconds. He darts into traffic and threads through cars positioned like linebackers. Behind him, the cop is giving chase.
A traffic light must have changed, because now the cars are hurling toward Jonas. A chorus of angry horns Dopplers past as Jonas flies against the steady vehicular flow. One car swipes him, the impact of its side-view mirror nearly spinning him around, but he keeps his balance and continues on. He feels the policeman behind him. The cop’s breathing is labored, but he’s fast.
Jonas jumps a curb and races down a perpendicular street. The cop is yelling now, imploring the crowd to “Get outta the way!” and “Make a hole!” The bystanders barely react. The reputation New Yorkers have for jaded apathy is well earned, no matter the universe.
Jonas is leaping into a congested intersection when a voice from some distant precinct of his brain asks what his plan is. He has no idea. Maybe the cop will get winded and give up. Maybe he’ll trip or get taken out by one of the dozens of cars charging at them both. This is a game of seconds, and whoever ends up with one more than the other will win.
And that’s when the city bus lurches up on him.
Its horn blares a warning, but it’s too late. It might as well be a building flying at him. Jonas has the impulse to throw himself to the pavement, ducking beneath the bus as it surges over him, but a quick, instinctual calculation warns him that he’s too close. The bus will smash through him before he can hit the ground. All these thoughts laser through his mind in milliseconds as he’s swallowed in the shadow cast by the oncoming bus.
Amanda . . . I’m coming.
The cop tackles him with enough force that the impact almost knocks out Jonas’s teeth. He feels the man’s weight carrying them both out of the path of the bus, whose tires clip the sole of Jonas’s left shoe as the sidewalk crashes upward toward him.
His skull bounces off the concrete. He hears a ringing, and tiny projectiles comet around in a starburst pattern, obscuring his vision. He wills himself not to pass out.
The officer is pulling at his arms. It feels like he may dislocate them. “Sonofabitch,” the cop repeats, over and over. It’s unclear whether he’s cursing or addressing Jonas. He expertly pins Jonas’s wrists behind his back with one hand, while the other retrieves the handcuffs. Their jangling reminds Jonas, strangely, of bells ringing. “Struggle and I’ll break your arms,” the cop promises. Jonas has no reason to doubt him.
And then he remembers that he doesn’t have to wait for that to happen. He doesn’t have to be here at all. The fact that he still has his tether was obscured by his grief and his efforts to outrace the officer. His fingers scratch at the ring, but they’re too slick with Amanda’s blood. As he struggles, the cop slaps one handcuff on his wrist, tight enough to close off circulation, tight enough to hurt, to punish Jonas for the temerity of running. Jonas fights against it all, but the tether continues to avoid his grasp.
Click. The second handcuff is applied. Jonas grits his teeth, continuing to strain. He’s losing feeling in the fingers of both hands as they writhe against each other like two fighting squid. Above him, the cop shifts his weight, readying himself to haul Jonas to his feet, but then Jonas’s fingers seize on the tether—a good grip, finally—and pull it from his finger, clutching it tight in his other hand.
Jonas doesn’t know what the cop will think of what happens next. He has no idea how the officer will explain it to himself or his superiors. Surely, he will interrogate the gathering crowd and implore, “Did you see that? Did you see that?” But Jonas doesn’t care. The now-familiar tingling sensation courses through him once again. Light blazes. Space folds. The handcuffs, some cash, a freshly minted United States passport, and an American Express card fall to the sidewalk, and Jonas blinks from the world.
Maybe it’s the fact that Jonas is lying on the ground. Maybe it’s that his heart is now broken beyond repair. Maybe it’s that his body is still processing the quantum radiation with which he’s flooded his cells. Whatever the explanation, the experience of reality-slipping feels different from before. This time, he feels a miasma of physical pain, a thin coating of agony over pins and needles in his extremities.
The concrete sinks beneath his body, as though the sidewalk is absorbing him. But that’s not it, he realizes. The concrete has been replaced by a thick carpet of grass. The blades tickle his face. The scent of pine fills the air. Jonas staggers to his feet and sees that the entire city is gone, its concrete canyons replaced by undulating fields of grass as far as he can see. It’s beautiful. The sky is a violent crimson, a red deeper than any dawn or sunset.
He’s slammed down again. The city has returned, along with its omnipresent pavement. The fall exacerbates the concussion Jonas is sure he’s received, and he’s assaulted again by another volley of what knocked him over in the first place: water. Torrents of it charge past him, the city’s buildings acting like massive sluice gates. The rush rag-dolls him again, the water sending him hurling toward a towering office building. A wall of steel and glass rises to meet him, and once again, Jonas thinks this is the end.
But a reality-slip swaps the building for only slightly more forgiving ground. He lands hard. Once again, New York’s concrete proves a harsh mistress. He fights disorientation as universes cycle past. Each reality-slip is the pull of a trigger in a cosmic game of Russian roulette, and it’s a daisy chain of good fortune that he hasn’t been worse than injured thus far. He has won a few seconds of calm and spends them on returning the tether to his finger. The cascade of alternate realities slows, and Jonas looks down at his hand, where the tether’s white pulse is as soothing as a mother’s touch.
He breathes deep and is rewarded with the smell of shit. The air is also thick with the smell of burnt rubber and electricity. The ground is hard beneath him. Gravel digs into his buttocks. A newspaper wafts past. He sees other refuse—a bottle, a purse, a boot—scattered about him in the darkness. One piece of trash is an empty coffee cup. He has traveled through multiple realities, entirely different universes, to find the Starbucks logo staring back at him.
A rat skitters past, causing Jonas to startle. Wherever he is, it’s not the kind of place he wants to stay for long. But he’s so broken, in both body and spirit, that he can’t summon the energy or the will to stand, much less walk. The blood in his head mounts a fresh assault with every heartbeat. A pain in his side punishes him with every breath. So even though it’s dark, even though he’s surrounded by trash and vermin and the smell of burning rubberized shit, he doesn’t even consider moving. The hard ground and harder wall that presses into his back, cold and unyielding, feel like the downiest comfort he’s ever experienced.
As his breathing slows and his pulse descends to a manageable gallop, the twin assassins of loss and hopelessness steal their way back into his thoughts. Emotion bubbles up from his depths. Grief clutches him and squeezes. His eyes begin to well with tears.
