To keep that thought at bay, Amanda stepped in front of Jonas, looked him in the eye, and reminded him, “I’m not going anywhere.” She had repeated the assertion countless times in the previous year, and with no less sincerity.
Jonas thumbed his phone to answer the call. “Yes,” he managed, his voice tentative. “This is Dr. Cullen.”
Amanda studied his expression, his body language, anything, to glean a hint of what was being said on the other end of the call. Her heart galloped.
“I see,” Jonas said. He offered no sign of whether the news was good or bad. “Yes.”
Amanda searched his face for a hint, any clue she could decipher, and saw nothing. The tension was unbearable.
“Thank you,” Jonas said, his voice as level as the horizon.
She watched him tap the phone to end the call. He stared at it while she stared at him, searching for any sign of hope, resisting the urge to ask, willing herself to wait for the verdict.
After an eternity, Jonas finally said, “They’re going to publish it.” He sounded stunned. The thought escaped him in a breath.
Amanda let out a scream. She clutched Jonas tightly and yelled her joy in his ear. Still embracing him, she jumped up and down. In her heart, she knew she was feeling relief and elation in equal measure, but she didn’t care. This news was a year in the coming and well worth the wait, and she felt unburdened immediately.
Then, strangely, something struck her in the back. She pulled her arms from around Jonas. Whatever had hit her flopped to the ground. Her first instinct was that a bird had flown into her, but looking down, she saw it was a fluorescent-pink disk. A Frisbee.
A goateed hipster with a stud in his nose ran up. “Sorry!” he yelled. “My bad.”
Amanda shook her head, recalling her first time meeting Jonas two years before. Life had an ironic way of repeating itself. She looked to Jonas and mock-chided, “Did you pay him to do that?”
Jonas didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to face her and got down on one knee. Something disconnected in Amanda’s brain. Was what she thought was happening actually happening?
Jonas shrugged. “So what if I did?”
The world stopped. Everything seemed brighter, louder, more real. Amanda’s mind oriented itself to record each second, full with the knowledge that this was one of life’s most important moments. Her fingertips tingled. She couldn’t feel her legs. The entire world shrank to the patch of grass where she was standing.
Jonas handed her the Frisbee. There was a spot beneath its surface, like the anticyclonic storm on Jupiter that Jonas had shown her at the Hayden Planetarium. She flipped the disk over to get a better look and gasped. Taped to the underside was a diamond ring. Her breath caught in her throat, but she managed to remark, “You certainly timed the hell out of this.”
“Yeah, that was a lucky accident,” Jonas admitted. “But it’s like I’ve been telling you, the universe—”
“Favors certain outcomes,” she breathed. She held the Frisbee in her hands and stared at the ring. It held a single diamond, its facets catching the sunlight and reflecting it back through the tape. The hipster snapped a photo with his phone. She looked at Jonas, who was still kneeling. “You know you can get up now, right?” She wanted to kiss him, to tell him she was desperate to marry him, though in her heart, they were already committed beyond marriage, and she didn’t care if that made any sense at all.
“Not yet,” Jonas said. A puckish grin formed on his face, and Amanda wondered what was next. His smirk grew a little wider, and then he asked, “Why do I do just as you say? Why must I just give you your way?” It was like when he described his work to her; she recognized the words as English, but they made little sense.
Then recognition dawned. Her eyes widened. “No,” she whispered through teeth bared in a wide grin. “You’re not actually going to . . .”
Yes. He started to sing.
Amanda beamed and laughed. She could never remember being as happy, and her joy was so potent, she didn’t even feel the tears gushing from her eyes.
“Why do I sigh, why don’t I try to forget? It must have been that something lovers call fate . . .”
“I love you too much,” Amanda cried. In that moment, it was all she knew and ever wanted to know.
“Kept me saying I have to wait,” Jonas bellowed, shooting to his feet. His hands waved. People started gathering to stare in slack-jawed astonishment, but Jonas didn’t seem to care. He was scream-singing, fueled by joy and abandonment, with no regard for who was watching. “I saw them all, just couldn’t fall, till we met!” He drew out “met” to at least four syllables. His voice cracked. He was leagues away from being on pitch. “It had to be you! It had to be you!”
Amanda was suddenly aware of the Frisbee still dangling from her hand. She turned it over, peeled the ring away, and slipped it on her finger. She felt her tears at last. One day, she would look back and examine why she had given herself over to such emotion. Why would a ring and a promise mean anything when she’d already given herself to this man and committed her life to his? She reminded herself that her tears and her joy weren’t the products of the promise of marriage but rather her appreciation of Jonas, a man who had gone from thinking that singing was “silly” to doing it as loud as his lungs permitted in front of anyone around to witness it.
It was the most perfect moment her mind could conjure, and Amanda had never known such joy.
NOW
Hiroshima, like Japan itself, has thrived in a world without a Fat Man or Little Boy, without bombs, without a pair of nuclear holocausts. Here, 150,000 souls never died by fire in the time it takes a bird to flap its wings. Japan never entered the Axis alliance, sidestepping the descent into authoritarianism made by many of its sister nations.
Nevertheless, the city retains many of the same qualities Jonas remembers from his lone visit, six years and several universes ago. The streets remain clean enough to eat off. The people are buoyant and polite. The food is exquisite. Everything is done properly or not at all. It is a country populated by proud citizens who have every right to their national esteem.
The skyline is largely unchanged but for one notable exception, a massive tower that erupts out of the ground to claw at the sky. Jonas estimates that it’s even taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It is sleek and bright, a shard of silver planted in the middle of the city as if by God. Little wonder why they call it “Za Supaya”—the Spire.
Two days after his arrival in Hiroshima, Jonas walks, carrying two plastic bags laden with new purchases. He’s relieved to have left an electronics store without having stolen anything. The apartment he’s renting with Eva is a five-minute walk from the Spire, a prefurnished lodging of the kind favored by businessmen on long trips. The apartment has only one bedroom, but Jonas takes comfort in the routine of sleeping on the couch.
He enters and finds Eva working on her laptop. He pulls a charger from one of the bags. “Will this do?”
“Perfect,” Eva says, reaching for it gratefully. “Can’t believe I forgot to pack mine.”
“Well, we left in a hurry.”
“What about you? Did the store have everything you need?”
Jonas begins emptying the bags. He spreads a coterie of electronic items out on the coffee table, including circuit boards, copper wiring, and an AC adapter. “Mostly. There are a few precision tools I’ll need to find at a jewelry store or something. I’m not worried, though. If I can’t find them in Japan, they can’t be found.” He could have made his purchases in New Berlin, of course, but that would have meant trying to get them through security at Himmler International, and the risk just wasn’t worth it.
“This is all for your tether?” Eva asks.
Jonas gestures to his work. “I don’t know how it will react to the recalibration of the particle collider. Seems like a sensible precaution just to overhaul it entirely. Of course, I’ll need to replace the lithium-ion battery.”
“Of course,” Eva says dryly. “But I thought if you take the tether off”—her fingers flutter like a flock of birds—“you’ll leave this universe.”
“That’s what makes it tricky. I’ll have to work with one hand while the other maintains contact with the capacitance sensors on the inner circumference.” Eva greets this news with a blank stare, and Jonas just waves the notion away. “At any rate, I hope it’s all moot. The idea is to leave this reality for my final destination. Either way, I won’t need the tether anymore.”
“You know,” Eva says, “for some reason, I find it mildly offensive that you keep referring to my reality as ‘this’ reality.” Her tone is playful.
“I apologize.” Jonas bows his head in mock penitence. “I need to make sure your reality’s Linear Accelerator will do the same job as my reality’s Large Hadron Collider.” He looks down at the formulae on his arms. “I only have one more shot at this,” he continues. “Speaking of which, have you received any word from your friend?”
Eva hesitates for a fraction of a second longer than Jonas expects. “He says he’s still working on it.” Her voice sounds far away.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Fine.” Something in her voice still sounds less than convincing. “I made us reservations at Sushitei Hikarimachi tonight. Hope you like omakase.” She forces a smile and carries her laptop and new charger off into the bedroom.
As Jonas watches her go, he wonders what’s bothering her. For someone so warm and inviting, she has moments of inscrutability.
Dropping the thought, Jonas turns back to the parts he’s collected. He has a lot of work to do.
Victor’s Cray has lost the scent.
