“I know someone at Hiroshima. Maybe he can help.”
“Thank you, Eva.”
She gives him a polite nod. “You said we met before. Where? I mean, I know it was another universe, but where in the world?”
“Switzerland.”
A blank stare. “Never heard of it.”
“It’s in Europe.” Another blank stare. “In other realities.”
Eva thinks on that for a moment. “So in at least one other reality, I live in Europe. But you managed to find me in this universe on the other side of the world.”
“Convenient for me,” he admits.
“Considerably,” she says. “Particularly since I seem to be the rare theoretical physicist just reckless enough not to have you committed.”
“Just open minded enough,” Jonas corrects her.
“Either way,” she says, “there’s clearly some force that”—she grasps for the right word—“keeps drawing you to me. And, I suppose, me to you.”
She smiles. And he’s reminded of Amanda. The two women share the same spirit, the same warmth.
“I thought you said that the universe doesn’t ‘want’ anything,” he challenges.
“I’m still figuring out the universe.”
“Aren’t we all?” They share a moment of connection. Like when they had almost the same exchange back in Switzerland. He pushes it aside as irrelevant. Focus on the task at hand. One step at a time. “We’re going to need to get me a passport.”
“If it were only a passport,” she says and turns back to indicate her computer. “I searched on your name too. There’s no Jonas Cullen in this reality. You don’t exist.” She turns back to face him. “We’re going to need to somehow get you a whole identity.”
It takes Eva two weeks to arrange a new alias for Jonas. He spends that time as a virtual prisoner in her flat, sleeping on her couch as he did in Switzerland. Eva is fortunate enough to have a computer in her home, and Jonas whiles away his time alternating between triple-checking Other Jonas’s calculations and researching the history of this reality’s Earth. At first it appeared as if Germany had won the Second World War, but that’s not how events unfolded at all. In fact, humanity didn’t even experience a Second World War in the sense that Jonas understands it.
After World War I, fascism arose in Germany, but it built to a global conflict that more closely resembled the Cold War. Adolf Hitler came to power but had the restraint not to overplay his hand. In the United States, more than twenty thousand people still attended the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City before it changed its name to New Berlin. Nazism passed over the globe like a pandemic rather than a juggernaut. Citizens of democratic countries voluntarily chose the reassuring certainty of authoritarianism, and Hitler became führer of the world almost without firing a shot. An international day of mourning was declared when old age claimed him at ninety-two. Every continent on earth is dotted with monuments to his memory.
In this branch of history, Jonas’s parents never met. It’s disconcerting to exist in a world where one has never existed before. Amanda still became an artist, though, and Jonas finds her works in the annals of Eva’s enhanced internet. They are as beautiful as he remembers, but they lack the inspiration of the paintings he knows. This is a diminished world, and Amanda’s art reflects that.
She married a lawyer, a tax attorney. Her husband wasn’t with her on the Deutsche Lufthansa flight from her mother’s house in Westmunich (California) when it crashed. It seems that this universe took its pound of flesh, too, as had so many before.
After fifteen days, Eva secures them tickets to Maryland. Jonas doesn’t ask why certain states retained their original, non-German names. His focus is on the numerous checkpoints he will have to navigate on their odyssey. Eva has transit passes for them, but at any one of the checkpoints, Jonas could be instructed to produce individual identification. That Jonas would need identification to go obtain identification is a bitter bureaucratic irony.
They take a train that runs the same route Jonas remembers from various Amtrak excursions between New York and Washington, DC. However, bucolic suburbs have been replaced with large apartment buildings, featureless slabs of concrete. Rolling fields and wetlands and forests have been cleared to make way for factories. Smokestacks cough black smoke into already gray skies.
In the privacy of her apartment—after the regular sweep for listening devices—Jonas asked Eva why the world chose oppression over freedom, dictatorship over democracy. She looked at him, apparently struck by his guilelessness. “Freedom,” she said, “is hard for some people. I suppose it’s hard for most people. Life is easier when there’s someone above you telling you what to do.”
“There’s nothing easier about living in constant fear that you’ll be informed upon by your neighbor,” Jonas contested, “or imprisoned or worse for saying the wrong thing.”
Eva just wagged her head the way one does when a child asks where the water in the tap comes from. Your innocence, your naivete, is adorable. “No one is afraid,” she said. “Because no one ever thinks it’s going to be them.”
Not that Eva approves of her world, and she’s not alone. She explained to Jonas that a group—they call themselves “Partisans”—works quietly behind the scenes to resist global fascism. Knowing even a single member of the group is dangerous, carrying with it the threat of life imprisonment or worse, but Eva knows a Partisan cell in Baltimore. It took two weeks of dead-dropped messages, transported by couriers risking their lives, to arrange the meeting.
After the train lets them off, Jonas and Eva walk for five miles to the agreed-upon rendezvous point. On the way, Jonas poses the question he’s been putting off for two weeks. “Why would your friends help me?”
“They’re not my friends,” she corrects him. “I share my internet with one of the Manhattan cells. But it’s the Baltimore cell that can fabricate documents.”
“Which brings me back to why would they help me?”
“They’re helping me,” she counters. “They owe me more than a few favors.” She doesn’t elaborate, and Jonas judges that it would be bad form to press the point.
They arrive at a small intersection of bisecting streets in the shadow of a looming power plant. Shoots of green strain to rise through the cracked asphalt. Jonas can’t help but think of them as a metaphor.
They stand in place for almost an hour. Jonas feels as if he’s being watched. He tries to indicate as much to Eva with a look, and she answers only with a sober nod. They very well may be under surveillance.
“They’re not coming,” Jonas finally concedes, as much to himself as to Eva.
Her response is to point to the road ahead, where a black Cadillac makes its way toward them. Its windows are tinted, and its headlights shine against the day’s oppressive gloom as it pulls up and stops in front of Jonas and Eva.
“Don’t speak unless spoken to,” she advises. “And do whatever they instruct. Don’t ask questions.”
A woman alights from the rear of the car. She wears a putty-colored pantsuit and no jewelry. Her haircut is utilitarian. She seems to be no more than thirty but has an air of experience about her. “Spread your arms,” she says. Eva does as she’s told, and Jonas follows suit. The woman pats them down, a thorough and professional job. “Wait here,” she instructs. She moves to the Cadillac’s trunk, which dutifully pops open, and she pulls out a few items and slams it closed. She returns to Jonas and Eva, handing them each a pair of noise-canceling headphones. “Put these on.”
They do.
“And these.” She tosses two black bags cinched with cord. Jonas and Eva pull them over their heads as instructed, and the woman pulls the cords tight around their necks.
