“Your friend still hasn’t returned your calls?” It’s been eleven days.
Eva grimaces. “No,” she says. Her expression is part disappointment, part apology. And yet, it comes off as slightly insincere for a reason Jonas can’t pin down. “I guess Dr. Kobayashi isn’t as good a friend as I thought.”
Stress claws its way up Jonas’s back, a creeping feeling he’s been trying to keep at bay since they arrived in Japan. Back in New Berlin, he explained Other Jonas’s theory that the initial burst of quantum energy he’d taken back at CERN had unmoored him from the multiverse and afforded him the ability to slip realities. But as Other Jonas said, the effect is temporary. Whatever energy he might absorb from the Spire’s Superconducting Linear Accelerator is purely for a one-way trip.
He looks to the trio of whiteboards, each covered in a rainbow of formulae and equations. Two of the three are dedicated to confirming Other Jonas’s calculations. The third represents an inchoate attempt at calculating the rate at which his body is leaching quantum energy, how much time he has left as an interuniversal traveler. He points to it. “I don’t know how much longer I have left before I’m marooned here, unable to reality-slip no matter what. But I don’t think it’s much.”
“It’ll all work out,” Eva says after a few seconds’ hesitation. Her optimism is saccharine, sweet but false. She punctuates it with a smile for good measure. “I’m going to go see if Dr. Kobayashi will meet with me. I’ll be back soon.” And she goes.
After the door shuts behind her, Jonas tries to return to his work. But he can’t focus. A doubt nags at him. He reaches for the prepaid cell phone he purchased upon arriving in Japan and dials zero one three zero for information.
“Moshi moshi. Anata wa eigo hanashimasu ka?” he asks, exhausting almost all the Japanese he’s learned in the past eleven days. Hello. Do you speak English?
“Yes, sir. How can I help you?”
“I need the number for a Dr. Kobayashi. I don’t know his first name, but he works at the Spire.”
Evening has fallen. Eva returns home. It’s strange to think of this rented apartment with its furnishings as anything but a glorified hotel, much less “home.” She is bone tired after spending her day meandering around Hiroshima. It wasn’t her first time taking in the city, but the experience never grows old. To weave herself through a place—wandering without purpose, without concern for being stopped, without fear of being asked to present proof of her residency or commanded to “state her business”—is a freedom as pure and marvelous as fresh air. She looked at every face she passed, drank in every feature, every idiosyncratic nuance of individual appearance. Do they even know, she asked herself, how blessed they are? The truest freedom, she realized, is not to be aware of how free one is.
In the darkness, the living room is a minefield, a shrouded obstacle course. She navigates it with care, taking pains not to upset the wires and electronics and other technological ephemera littering their temporary home. Her concern is less about waking Jonas than about what waking him would mean. For eleven days, she’s labored to avoid any conversation with the potential to be real, anything that could wander into the forbidden territory of their feelings for one another. Her feelings for him, she corrects herself, a secret she keeps with the rigor of an unfaithful spouse. But the connection between them is undeniable, she believes. As unyielding as granite.
She’s inches away from the short hallway that leads to her bedroom when a light comes on. The illumination startles her. She whips around and sees Jonas sitting in a chair. Wide awake.
He’s been waiting for her.
For as long as she’s known him, which isn’t long in literal terms but feels as though it’s been all her life, he’s worn his emotions on his sleeve. Now she sees that figurative sleeve covered in anger and betrayal and disappointment.
“What the—” She startles. “What the hell are you doing there?”
“Waiting for you.”
“In the dark?”
“I was thinking.”
Eva watches him rise from the chair. Slowly. Coiled. She can feel the anger radiating off him. Her heart races. Whatever he has to say to her, she dreads it. Too much has gone unsaid between them for too long, but she’s kept her own counsel for a reason, and she’s not ready to deviate now.
“I called the Spire,” he says.
She’s not surprised. A part of her knew it the moment he turned on the light and revealed himself. “I can explain—” The words are out of her mouth before she’s even aware. An uncontrollable impulse, a survival instinct. I can explain. Could she be any more of a cliché?
“I spoke with Daisuke Kobayashi,” Jonas says. His voice is so distant it might as well be coming from another country. He sounds pained, and that breaks Eva’s heart in turn. “He said he never heard from you. No calls. Not even an email.” He shakes his head as if straining to believe it. “This whole time,” he says, “you’ve been . . . pretending, feigning helping me when you weren’t. Why?”
Eva feels a single tear and instantly hates herself for what she considers a failure of strength. She wipes it from her cheek as though smudging out a mistake.
“You’ve been different,” Jonas says. “I thought I knew the reason, but . . .” His hands spread apart as if trying physically to grasp the problem between them. “But I think I was wrong. I just—” He sighs. “I just need to know what’s going on. You know I’m working on borrowed time. I just—” He stops. Eva thinks he might cry. She sees him willing himself not to. “I just need to know why this is happening.”
And “this,” she knows, is her betrayal. She’s been biding time, waiting out the days until the quantum energy in his body is finally exhausted, and he is unable to leave.
“You know why,” she says. Her voice is barely a whisper.
“What I mean,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “is that I don’t understand why you pretended you were trying to get me into the Spire?” Pain coats his voice. “Why were you burning off time you know I don’t have?”
Eva’s first reaction is to feel amazed. How could he not know? “You know why,” she says, feeling the words emerging from her depths. When she finally says it, it’s like a dam bursting. Like falling, surrendering to gravity. “I love you,” she gasps.
She closes the distance between them until she’s close enough to feel the heat of his body near hers. Close enough to kiss. He doesn’t recoil.
“I know how much you miss her,” Eva says. “I know what it’s like to live with loss. To wish that fate had dealt a different hand. But a life spent wishing things were different . . . isn’t a life.”
The expression on Jonas’s face breaks her heart. It’s a knowing look, an admission that she isn’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know.
Finally he says, “I’m not just wishing things were different. I can do something. I am doing something.”
She freezes him with a look. “What happened to the other me?” she asks. She watches him go pale. “What happened to the me you met before?”
“It’s not important—”
“If that were true, you would have told me already,” she counters. “If that were true, you wouldn’t look the way you do right now. Like you want to be anywhere but here.” She stands her ground, immoveable. “Tell me the truth.”
Jonas swallows hard. She watches his throat piston up and down. A long silence stretches between them as he tries to find the words. Eva waits. She has all the time in the world. Finally, he says, “There is a man. Another scientist. He’s trying to stop me. He hired a mercenary.”
“And?”
Jonas swallows again. His voice cracks. “The mercenary tried to kill me. But you died instead.”
Eva reacts as though stung. Is it possible to be shocked by the answer she was, on some level, already expecting? Yes, she decides, it’s absolutely possible.
