The bracelet glows, lambent with power. Space folds in on itself, and a second explorer of the multiverse blinks from Other Jonas’s apartment.
NOW
Jonas throws himself into the city, plunging into an ocean of light and steel, glass and neon. A multitude of humanity swells around him. He flows into the current and walks, swimming in a sea of anonymity.
It dawns that he should have asked Other Jonas for money before he left. But he could no longer resist the compulsion to get away from his doppelgänger. He had no longer been able to face himself. Literally.
And so he walks. And walks. And walks. The night air is bracing. He tells himself it will bring him the focus he needs to think and figure out his next move, but the truth is he’s just cold. So he walks faster. And thinks. And thinks.
He reaches into his pocket and feels the paper folded inside. His doppelgänger’s work. The quintessential answers to the test. His salvation. If he can leave this universe and travel to another that has a CERN. If he can gain access to its Large Hadron Collider or an equivalent machine. If Other Jonas’s math holds and he’s properly calculated the universe where the third and final Amanda is still alive. If. If. If. And all without help or money.
A neon sign across the street winks in the darkness. A tattoo parlor. Another coil of neon announces ATM INSIDE. It’s a burning bush, a sign from on high. A plan takes shape in his mind.
He drifts across the street and into the shop. Every surface is either ebony or glass. It smells of incense and cheap pizza. His arrival draws curious stares.
Jonas pushes toward the counter, where the cash register is manned by a guy in his late twenties. His face and arms are given over to a tapestry of dragons whose forms undulate over each muscle. Fire issues forth from fanged jaws, flames dive-bomb toward his wrists. If he has a patch of skin on his body not covered in ink, it must be under his clothes.
“Help you with something?” the man behind the counter asks. He makes no effort to hide the annoyance in his voice. He looks like he’s getting ready to tell Jonas that the restrooms are for paying customers only.
Jonas pulls the calculations from his pocket and lays the paper down on the glass counter. “I need this done.”
Dragon Man picks up the paper and smirks. “Well, this is new. Ain’t nobody asked me to ink ’em up with math before.”
“But you can do it.” Jonas doesn’t ask so much as assert, willing the answer he wants.
Dragon Man considers, his attention never leaving the equations. “Quite a bit here. You’ll be more comfortable if we spread this out over a few sessions.”
“I need it all done tonight.”
Behind Dragon Man the wall is covered with artwork and designs. Fodder for potential tattoos. A menagerie of religious symbols and superheroes and a variety of flowers to rival any nursery.
Jonas points to one. “That one too,” he says.
He pulls up his sleeve to expose his un-inked forearm as Dragon Man reaches behind to pull down Jonas’s selected design.
A snake eating its own tail, twisted into an infinity symbol.
The floor of the tattoo parlor is linoleum, but it’s as sticky as flypaper as Jonas stands from the chair. The skin of his inner right forearm burns with hours’ worth of inscriptions. Not for the first time, the tattoo artist remarks on Jonas’s stamina, his threshold for pain. “Never seen anything like it, brah. And definitely not in, well, a guy like you. Someone who comes off as, y’know, academic. No offense.”
“None taken. Thank you.” Jonas considers his new tattoo. The lines of equations glow with crimson halos on his skin. The artist is right to comment on Jonas’s tolerance. He had moments when he would have allowed himself to pass out but for the embarrassment and the possibility that the artist would stop. “You did very good work,” he offers.
“It’s no problem,” the man says. “But it is five hundred.”
Five hundred dollars that Jonas doesn’t have. “Where’s your cash machine?” he asks as casually as possible.
“In the back. On your left.”
Jonas nods his thanks and walks toward the rear of the parlor, where he finds a long hallway. He walks straight past the mobile ATM and into a unisex restroom. He locks the door behind him. The room is as small as a walk-in closet—smaller, in fact, than the one where he discovered his twin’s corpse. It smells just as bad. A fluorescent bar flickers overhead.
The mirror is scratched with crude hieroglyphs of male genitalia. Jonas catches his reflection beneath the graffiti. The face staring back at him reminds him more of Other Jonas than of himself. The stubbled face. The unkempt hair. The fatigued eyes that nevertheless burn with desperation. And the menagerie of bruises he’s accumulated in the past several hours. They mottle his skin beneath the eye and on the side of his jaw. He didn’t realize he looked so bad. It’s a miracle the tattoo artist didn’t comment on it or, worse, turn him away.
Jonas runs the tap and stoops to splash water on his face, as if that will improve his appearance. The water has a fetid smell. It runs down the sides of his face like tears.
He breathes deep, mentally preparing himself to risk his life by traversing the multiverse for the penultimate time. Once again, he pulls the tether off his finger. Once again, he unmoors himself from the universe and surfs the multiverse.
His entire body tingles. Electricity courses through him. The pangs in the core of his limbs return. The sensation of the quantum energies leaving his cells is a reminder that he has only one of these interuniversal trips left.
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.
