Reality begins to slide all around him. He thinks he should be used to it by now—the human brain becomes accustomed to anything over time—but he can’t imagine ever becoming inured to the world, the universe, changing all around him. The walls of the bathroom disintegrate, revealing a desolate cityscape with broken skyscrapers looming like the skeletons of giants.
A Manhattan he recognizes flashes in front of him before being replaced by a more upscale restroom. In a blink, the room transforms into a broom closet. Another blink and the closet is covered in drywall and wiring and piping, the conduits all lancing Jonas for a single agonizing millisecond before snapping away, revealing a congested city street.
A crush of humanity flows toward him. The people wear gas masks. Rubber tubes snake from the masks to tanks slung over their backs like humps. Jonas takes an instinctive breath and is punished with an acrid smell that sears his lungs. He coughs uncontrollably, then the reality blinks away, and he’s deposited yet in another universe.
The sound of sirens pummel his ears. People run past him in every direction, buffeting him and knocking him about. He hears the crackle of fire and the whine of a missile. Figures on gurneys, burned to the point where they resemble zombies, are shuttled past. Screams ring out. Desperate wails compete with the bleating Klaxons. In the center of the tumult, an ashen-faced toddler sobs alone.
Jonas laces the tether back onto his finger, and the shifting of the universes instantly ceases, like slamming into a wall. He looks around and sees that he’s back in familiar environs. A mirror. A sink. A towel dispenser. A toilet. You can travel across the multitude of realities, he thinks, but you still end up in a bathroom.
Fortunately, this one is much nicer than the one he departed. He smells the prominent aroma of bleach. The mirror is unmarred, except for a business card wedged into its bevels that advertises “Tantric Sexual Healing & Orthodontics.”
If Other Jonas is right, and Jonas has no reason to believe he isn’t, this is the second to last time he’ll be able to take such a trip. He feels the downward pressure of his quest, the multiverse’s odds stacking against him, but he pushes those doubts aside. One step at a time.
The first step takes him out of the restroom. He’s met with the same long corridor and bad lighting. Another caustic smell, but of a new variety. He walks out into a space draped in neon and filled with mannequins standing at attention, dressed in black leather studded with metal ornamentations. The room is devoid of tattoo chairs, but the glass case in front of the cash register remains the same. Behind it is a woman who must be at least sixty. Her hair is cut back to a silver mohawk. Light glints off the steel piercings that dot her cheeks, nose, eyebrows, and ears.
“Help you with something?” she asks, eyeing him with suspicion after his abrupt arrival from the rear of the shop.
Jonas shakes his head and heads for the door. He can feel the lady’s gaze tracking him as he goes.
Out on the street, he is surprised by daylight. It had been evening when he’d entered the previous reality’s tattoo parlor, and he apparently spent the entire night and into the morning getting his new tattoos.
People walk past him, their heads down, hands shoved into their pockets, their backs hunched. The sun shines, yet the sky remains slate gray. The effect extends to buildings and clothing and even street signs, like the color has been bled from the world. A desaturated Earth.
The traffic on the streets cries with the labors of overtaxed engines. Tailpipes belch black clouds. Vehicles lumber past with little variation in style and even less in color. Utilitarian, nondescript. What little aesthetics they possess seem frozen in the 1960s.
Looking around, Jonas thinks that this Manhattan feels more reminiscent of eastern Europe than the New York City he knows. The metropolis seems old beyond its years, an aging barfly hunched over his drink on the stool he’s kept for decades. The architecture is brutalist and bland, evoking the feeling of Soviet-era Russia.
He approaches a corner and sees a soldier in ebony body armor stationed there, assault rifle at the ready. His face is hidden beneath a helmet, goggles, and balaclava, all black with a matte finish, offering no reflection, no hint of light. The man’s biceps is wrapped with an armband displaying a black iron cross on a white field.
The soldier—though “storm trooper” would be more accurate—turns in Jonas’s direction. Jonas pivots and walks as fast as he can across the street without giving the appearance that anything is out of the ordinary. As he goes, a large armored truck slips past, as lumbering as the storm trooper and as black as the man’s gear, an iron cross stenciled on its side.
Another storm trooper awaits on the sidewalk. He stands next to a street vendor, who has a landscape of T-shirts and baseball caps laid out on a listing card table. All the items are festooned with an American flag, but these, too, are different. The red has been leached to a lifeless maroon, the color of a scab. The blue has been traded for black. And the field of fifty stars is gone, replaced with that same iron cross.
Unease washes over Jonas as the vendor catches him staring at his wares. “You want to buy one? Maybe two?” Jonas can discern no New York accent. He thinks he might be mistaken, but he believes he can detect a trace of German.
The storm trooper glances his way. Despite being faceless, his body language suggests suspicion.
“Just browsing,” Jonas manages to croak back to the vendor. “Thank you.”
He moves off. The storm trooper’s eyes follow, so Jonas quickens his pace, faster but not too fast, falling into step with a passel of citizens, camouflaging himself in the anonymity of the city.
He walks for blocks and blocks. Once-familiar street names reveal themselves to have German analogues. The normal soundtrack of the city—the honking and jackhammering, the yelling and cursing, the music playing out of open windows—is absent here, replaced by an eerie shuffling silence.
As he weaves himself through Midtown, he senses a presence. Something, someone, following him. He tries to catch a glimpse of this hunter in the reflections of shop windows, in the side-view mirrors of parked cars, but each time, the man slips away, disappearing, but not before offering the hint of a glimpse. Jonas’s first thought is that he’s being pursued by Victor or maybe an incarnation of Macon. But those reflected glimpses, almost subliminal, suggest otherwise.
Jonas stops abruptly, spinning to look behind him. There, at the end of the block, hidden behind a curtain of passing pedestrians, is . . . himself. Another doppelgänger.
Jonas steps toward the man, drawn like a magnet, as people pass between them. As he pushes through the throng, he loses sight of the man. The doppelgänger now has his back to Jonas, receding down the block, hiding himself in the crowd.
Jonas starts shoving people aside, desperate not to let this latest twin get away. Some bark, “Hey!” or “Watch it!” He ignores them all. His quarry is almost at the end of the block when Jonas grabs him by the shoulder and pulls the man around toward him.
The face he sees is a stranger’s.
“Excuse me,” the man says, politely perturbed.
There’s enough of a resemblance to cause Jonas to question whether the doppelgänger he saw was a mirage.
“I’m sorry,” Jonas says, relinquishing his grip. “I thought you were someone else.”
Eager to disengage, Jonas spins away without looking and almost collides with a baby carriage. The mother pushing it hisses at him for his clumsiness. The incident draws the notice of another storm trooper.
Jonas pinwheels away from the mother and child only to catch his own reflection in the window of an electronics store, his face superimposed over a crush of computers and tablets and heavy monitors burdened by cathode ray tubes. He begins to turn away when an idea seizes him. Maybe, just maybe . . .
He heads inside. The interior of the store is narrow. On the left is a wall dotted with sun-bleached fliers and posters advertising various technologies that strike Jonas as decades old. The right half of the store is taken up by a long glass display case that doubles as a service counter. Inside the case is a menagerie of electronics. A man with a paunch and a receding hairline is the store’s only employee. Behind him, small items hang from hooks on a wall of pegboard. Mobile phones in clamshell packaging dangle. The magic words PREPAID MOBILE wink out at Jonas from behind the plastic. Hope springs for a moment, until he notices that none of the phones have keyboards or displays larger than a matchbook and, therefore, are ill suited for the purpose he has in mind.
“Excuse me,” he asks the clerk, “but do you have any smartphones?”
The clerk just stares back at him. “Excuse me?”
“You know, with internet access.”
The clerk regards Jonas as if he’s an idiot. “An internet phone.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
The man jerks a thumb over his right shoulder. “I keep ’em in the back. Do you got a license?”
“A license?”
“You know . . . a permit,” the clerk says, his patience fraying. “You need to be permitted for internet access.” He says this as though he’s explaining that a car has to stop at a red light.
“Yes, of course,” Jonas rallies. “I have a permit.” He doubles down. “Government issued.” This earns him a curt nod, and Jonas presses his luck further. “Do you have one I could demo?”
“Demo?”
“Yes. You know, try it out?”
The clerk brightens with understanding. “Demo. Never heard that before.” He disappears into the back. When he returns, it’s with a simple slab of charcoal-colored glass. “Here you go.”
Jonas activates the phone. A staircase of reception bars appears in the upper left corner of the screen. This may be a demonstration model, but it has cellular service or whatever passes for the equivalent in this reality.
“Must be some kinda big shot if you got a permit to access the net,” the clerk observes. “You work for the State Directorate or something?”
“Yeah,” Jonas says as he brings up the phone’s web browser. “I’m in . . . science.”
Even though Jonas knows she’s not here, he still has to search for Amanda. Other Jonas could have been just as wrong as Thibault. He searches Amanda’s maiden and married names but finds nothing, as expected. His own name is next. Again, no luck.
“You wanna buy that?” the clerk asks, making no attempt to hide his annoyance.
