Jonas hears a second car door opening accompanied by another set of footsteps. This second person guides them, blind and partially deaf, into the rear of the Cadillac, making no effort to be gentle.
They drive for what feels like another hour, but Jonas can’t really be sure. The car navigates several turns, and he asks himself how much of the trip is theater, whether they’re really driving all that far. Eventually, the car begins to slope downward, and Jonas has the sensation that they’re descending some kind of ramp.
The Cadillac stops. Through the headphones’ noise cancellation, Jonas hears the faint ka-thunk of the transmission being thrown into park. The door next to him opens, and hands fish him out. They rip off the black bag and headphones. Jonas blinks and sees that they’re in an underground garage. The idling Cadillac and a lime-green van, paint chipped and dirt covered, are the only vehicles present.
“Who’s your favorite singer?” asks a man in his twenties. He wears jeans, a crew neck shirt, and a leather jacket. He’s the only other person in the garage.
Jonas has no favorite singer, but he answers “Frank Sinatra” just the same, having no idea whether Frank Sinatra exists in this reality.
“Call me Frank,” the man instructs. Everything about him is perfunctory. Let’s get this done as fast as possible. Jonas glances behind him, back toward the Cadillac and Eva. “She’s fine,” Frank says.
He moves to the van and swings open its rear doors. Inside is a table and some equipment, including what Jonas recognizes as a laser printer and lamination machine. On the inside of one of the doors, a white screen hangs off a roller.
Frank points to it. “Stand in front.”
Jonas takes his place as instructed. “Thank you for doing this.”
“Look at the camera,” Frank says. “Don’t smile.” He produces this universe’s equivalent of a Polaroid camera and snaps a photo. As it rolls out of the camera’s mouth, he hands Jonas an ink pad and an index card. “I need both thumbprints.”
Frank climbs in the van, a makeshift counterfeiting studio, and sets to work as Jonas stamps each of his thumbs onto the index card. As he hands it over to Frank, he considers how much Eva has shared about his circumstances. It’s a safe bet, he thinks, that she declined to mention he needs a new form of identification because he’s from a parallel universe.
“I need five minutes,” Frank says as he works.
Jonas notices that neither the van nor the Cadillac have license plates. The garage displays no signage. He has no idea where he is, and no one else would, either, his body having previously been cleared of any GPS trackers or the like by Eva. They’re in an underground chamber invisible to any orbiting satellites. The Partisans are thorough.
After three minutes, Frank hands Jonas his new passport. It’s black, with PASSPORT embossed across the cover in silver letters. Below them, an iron cross. And beneath that, the words FEDERATED STATES OF AMERICA in a sans serif font.
“Thank you,” Jonas says. “I know how dangerous this is for you, and I appreciate it.”
Frank retrieves the headphones and black bag. “Put these back on,” he orders, without a hint of warmth.
Two days later, Jonas presents his new passport to the Deutsche Lufthansa attendant at Himmler International Airport. She returns it to him, along with his one-way ticket to Hiroshima, Japan. Eva has a ticket of her own, which includes a return to New Berlin.
“Last chance to pull out,” Jonas offers.
“I’m pretty sure there’ll be other chances along the way. But I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Assuming I’m not institutionalized, I’ll get a paper out of this like you wouldn’t believe.”
They both smile, the kind of moment of connection that has been happening between the two of them with greater and greater frequency. Jonas has had to draw from the depths of his memory—to the years before he knew Amanda—to understand why they feel so familiar. They are moments of chemistry, harbingers of attraction and the promise of something more. But again, he buries the thought.
“Speaking of your career,” he ventures, “are you sure you can take this time away?”
“Fortunately for you, it’s not considered ‘time away.’ I can easily claim a visit to the Spire as a part of my job.”
“The Spire?”
Eva lowers her voice in the din of the airport. “This universe’s equivalent of your CERN.”
Jonas realizes how far he has come without knowing the specifics of Eva’s plan, a testament to how much he has come to trust her.
“My access to the Spire seems like yet another coincidence to keep us in each other’s orbits,” she says.
“I prefer to think of it as the universe’s way of paying back a little bit of what it owes me,” Jonas retorts.
The remark earns him a warm look. The air between them crackles, and Jonas remembers that the last Eva died unrequited in her love for him. In those rare moments when he was honest with himself about her, Jonas could admit, in the most private reaches of his mind, that the attraction was mutual. The same could be true with this universe’s Eva, if he were to allow it, but he won’t. He can’t. Even if he is no longer married to Amanda, he remains betrothed to the idea of her.
In awkward silence, they make their way through the terminal, which is far less congested than Jonas expects. Most of the travelers are men in business suits and military uniforms of various stripes. Eva is one of only a handful of women. There are no tourists.
Thinking on this, Jonas asks, “Was it difficult to get a travel visa?”
“Just the ordinary bureaucracy. Which means the ordinary bribe.”
“All this money you’re spending,” he says, “how much are you cutting into your savings?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I do.”
“I receive a bereavement stipend from the government,” Eva says, her voice slightly distant. During their nearly three weeks together, Jonas has intuited that the subject of her husband is off limits. This is no more apparent than when they board the plane. Once in their coach-class seats, Jonas spies Eva staring at a soldier across the aisle from her. He resembles the man from the photograph in Eva’s office. She wipes away a tear.
The flight attendant makes announcements in English and German. The passengers are lectured on how to fasten a seat belt. Jonas doesn’t see any children aboard, and the hush of the cabin is disquieting. Then the plane’s engines whir, and the floor beneath him vibrates. They taxi almost immediately—no interminable wait on the tarmac, no endless queue of jets awaiting clearance for takeoff.
Their flight path takes them over the island of Manhattan. From his window, Jonas can see Ellis Island, or whatever it’s known as here, but the Statue of Liberty does not stand watch in front of it. In its place is a towering iron statue of a figure with its arm and hand outstretched, fingers straight as a ruler. It’s too far away for Jonas to get a proper look, but he’s confident that the figure is Adolf Hitler.
THREE YEARS AGO
The first week in March had always been Amanda’s favorite, when New York City shrugs off the shackles of winter, and gray skies yield to blue. She enjoyed watching the city reawaken, the world wrapped in sunlight, the air smelling of new beginnings. Spring in Manhattan felt like a second chance.
She and Jonas walked hand in hand through Central Park. The sun felt warm and seemed to make the whole world glow. They both wore shorts and T-shirts. His read MAY THE F=ma BE WITH YOU. Amanda’s ponytail was threaded through her Mets cap. They didn’t speak as they strode across the slab of green carved into the heart of Manhattan. They didn’t need to. The feeling of their fingers intertwined, their bodies close together, moving in time with each other’s steps, was enough.
She heard Jonas’s phone buzz in his pocket. She weaved a finger through her ponytail, a nervous habit, as she watched Jonas pull out his phone and blanch at the screen.
“It’s her,” he said. His voice was laden with uncertainty.
Amanda didn’t need to be told. She knew from his reaction, and the instinct was confirmed with a twinge in her stomach. The call was from the managing editor of the Journal of Applied & Computational Mathematics, and she felt her heart begin to canter. This was one of those moments when their life together could change. She nodded encouragement. “Answer it.”
“If they don’t—” He stopped, unable to give voice to the thought, lest it become true. “If they don’t publish it, I’m out of options.”
It had been a year since his dismissal from Columbia. A year of watching as Jonas’s friends and colleagues peeled off and abandoned him one by one. It wasn’t that they believed the allegation of plagiarism, they insisted, with varying degrees of sincerity. What went unsaid was that they were more afraid of Victor than loyal to Jonas. Amanda fumed to herself and her girlfriends and raged on Jonas’s behalf, but he weathered each defection and betrayal with stoic composure. Amanda had watched as he threw himself into his work, devoting countless hours to his Many Worlds Proof, diving deep into theoretical minutiae that she thought she had no hope of grasping.
He had tried to explain his work to her. He had a knack for conveying quantum physics in terms she could understand, but invariably he descended into a tangent and left her behind. She recognized the words he was using as English, but their arrangement made no sense. What mattered, though, was the way he lit up like Times Square when he talked. She didn’t understand “relative state formulation” or a “wave function collapse,” but it was of no consequence. The spark in him—the spark she’d fallen in love with—was all that mattered.
She didn’t know whether he would be able to complete his work, though she had faith in him. If he completed it, some scientific journal would publish it, she hoped, and for a year she had been sustained by the absence of the hopelessness Jonas had felt that night on the bench at the Columbia campus. She lived in dread of seeing that look on his face again, knowing that to see him so broken would break her in turn.
