He waits for her to speak, buttressing himself against the most hateful thing she could say. But Eva just presses her palms into her face and smudges away her tears. She walks out of the room, trailing heartbreak, leaving Jonas alone. As alone, he thinks, as anyone has ever felt.
THREE YEARS AGO
In the wake of Amanda’s diagnosis and the looming specter of her surgery, Jonas abandoned his work on the Many Worlds Proof and devoted himself completely to her. He wanted to be fully present, the way she had been for him. If he could have gone under the knife in her place, he would have done so without hesitation. Unfortunately, round-the-clock attention wasn’t what Amanda needed as the date of the operation advanced like an invading army. She told him she had to throw herself into her work, to plunge deeply into it, to feel the same sensation of nose-diving that she was trying to convey in the piece she was working on. She spent every possible hour working away on the rooftop of Tower E. It felt to Jonas as though she was trying to outrun the shadow of surgery and illness, to bury her fears beneath her art.
Jonas tried to distract her with plans for their wedding. Almost immediately, they had settled on a beach wedding at sunset out on Long Island’s Montauk Point. But Amanda refused to let herself get seduced. Apart from her art, she said, her entire life was on pause, everything frozen in amber until the surgery, until the growth was excised and someone from hospital pathology pronounced it benign or malignant. Until she knew whether she had a future and understood its shape. Jonas imagined that this is what it must feel like to await sentencing for a crime one hasn’t committed.
The morning of the operation, they walked uptown to Mount Sinai Hospital. Amanda wanted to see and smell and feel the city. Jonas recalled how, a year prior, to sustain his imperiled career, she had suggested moving away from New York. But Jonas knew that was impossible. For Amanda to be removed from Manhattan would be tantamount to being removed from one of her limbs. Her art wasn’t merely an expression of her love for the city but the manifestation of her profound, almost biological connection to it. They both knew this hospital visit might end with a diagnosis that could change her life—and thus their lives—forever, and Amanda wanted to drink in the city one more time before that happened. Before they might be forced to become different people.
In the waiting room, Jonas cracked his knuckles and read magazines that chronicled current events from two years prior. He stared at the television, tuned to a silent CNN broadcast with closed captioning, mounted on the wall. He tried to convince himself he was hungry enough to buy something from the vending machine. It wouldn’t be a long procedure, he was told, but every minute seemed to stretch to hours.
Eventually a nurse materialized, a matronly woman in floral-patterned scrubs. She told him the procedure was over and that he could see Amanda. When he stood up, the world spun, and he feared he might pass out. The nurse led him out of the waiting room and down a corridor. His legs felt heavy and recalcitrant. He asked after Amanda, but the answers seemed to come from far away. He teased out little fragments—“got it all,” “clean margins”—but he understood nothing beyond the need to get to Amanda, to see for himself that she was okay.
The nurse deposited him in Amanda’s room and closed the door. Amanda lay on her side, her back to him. The vertical blinds were half-closed, and shadows raked across the room. Jonas dragged a chair to the edge of the bed and collapsed into it. “Hey, baby.” He whispered but didn’t know why.
Amanda rolled over, and Jonas nearly gasped. Her face was pallid but for the dark rings under her eyes. Wires of hair hung down across her forehead. He forced himself to smile and reached out to take her hand.
“The nurse says they got it all,” he said, without a full understanding of what that meant. Like how he would pretend to understand football by repeating the last comment he’d heard on television. He knew the team he was rooting for but grasped none of the specifics of the game being played.
“It’s benign,” Amanda said. “The growth.”
Jonas felt a cataract of relief. He exhaled and gripped her hand tighter. The room seemed to brighten, despite the blinds. “Oh thank God,” he breathed. “That’s great. That’s—that’s the best news ever.” He felt giddy. Lightheaded.
But then, just as quickly, he paled. He assumed Amanda was tired, her sallow appearance the result of postoperative fatigue or anesthesia or both. But he was struck with the realization that her pallid look was due to neither of these things. He felt his stomach bottom out. Something was still tragically wrong.
Amanda swallowed hard. She started to cry. “Because of the surgery,” she began, speaking with a slow tentativeness, “Dr. Gilberg . . . she says . . .”
Jonas held his breath. He felt little pieces of himself die in each of her silent pauses.
“She says that it’s very unlikely . . .” Amanda clamped her mouth shut against the sobs trying to escape from it.
Jonas put another hand over hers. “Whatever it is, it’s okay,” he assured her, meaning every word. “It’ll be okay. You’re okay. That’s all that matters.” He had never believed anything more.
But Amanda shook her head in defiance, rejecting Jonas’s assertion that she was okay. “She doesn’t think I’ll be able to get pregnant.”
Jonas was instantly hyperaware of his surroundings. The monitoring devices Amanda was wired up to, which had previously seemed as quiet as a whisper, seemed to thrum loudly. The blinds hung over the window like garish teeth. Beyond them, a siren warbled past. Outside, behind the window’s divide, life spun on, ignorant of the hopes and dreams evaporating within the hospital room, unaware that futures barely imagined were being erased.
“We never talked about having kids,” Amanda said. “But I always assumed . . .”
“Me too.”
Jonas didn’t know what else to say. In the hours and days that followed, though, he wished that he had. He weighed how he could be so heartbroken over a possibility he had never really thought about before, let alone discussed with the woman he was to share his life with. How had they never talked about whether the contours of that life included children? Had they both been too focused on their work? Or did this omission, shocking in hindsight, speak to a larger issue?
Jonas was seized by a horrible and profound fear. Was this the beginning of their end? He tried to push the thought away. But it was too late.
NOW
In the aftermath of his conversation with Eva, sleep eludes Jonas. He wakes in the middle of the night and tries to work, but he cannot focus. All he can think of is her—the first “her” that isn’t Amanda in as long as he can remember. She’s there, sleeping in the next room, this other woman whom, in the solitude, in the quiet hours of the evening, he can admit that he loves. He can even confess to himself that he might feel the potential of a love to rival what he feels for Amanda.
Eva’s twenty, thirty steps away. She might even be waiting for him, as unable to sleep as he is. She could be sitting up in her bed or staring up at the ceiling, waiting in her bedroom for him to enter, offering everything he needs in his soul. Love and companionship and sex, yes. But also closure. She’s tempting him with peace, the end of his long, difficult struggle.
When he closes his eyes, he sees Amanda. Go to her, she tells him. Move on from me. Move on with your life.
He wants to cry, but the tears won’t come. He wants to scream, but Eva would hear. He is so very tired, but sleep refuses him, and so fatigue just pulls at him like a weight.
Thinking that fresh air is what he needs, he escapes out into the night. His joints moan in protest as he walks. Other Jonas had told him this is a sign of his body losing its ability to reality-slip. Is it possible that he’s lost it already? That he’s waited too long and is now confined to this universe? If so, he’s rejected Eva in the name of a woman he will never be with. He’s marooned in the desert and just refused an oasis.
He walks for hours. Stars glister overhead. Eventually, the horizon glows, and the rising sun renders the sky a brilliant orange. As the world brightens, Jonas wanders the paths of Hijiyama Park. The cherry blossoms are in bloom, tiny explosions of color dangling from branches. He finds a bench and watches the park fill with joggers and dog walkers. As they pass, Jonas thinks of each of their unique lives multiplied by an infinite number of universes. He imagines an endless tapestry woven from threads of such variety that they form a sea of color, rainbows on rainbows.
He pulls a five-hundred-yen coin from his pocket. Flips it. Catches it. Flips it again. Flip. Catch. Flip. Catch. After a minute, it takes on the quality of silent meditation. Flip. Catch. Flip. Catch. Flip. The morning sunlight glints off the coin’s golden circumference as it tumbles in the air. Its motion reminds him of the limousine careening off the Centralbron, gravity causing it to pinwheel like the coin. Flip. Flip. Flip. With the exception of only two realities, the limousine’s fatal roll—in a multiverse of uncountable universes—ends with Amanda’s body broken on impact. Tails, you lose.
Jonas loses himself in the repetition. The light playing across the coin. The faint harmonic ting it makes when launched by his thumb. The percussive thwack as he snatches it from the air. Flip. Catch. Flip. Catch. Flip. The runners and trotting dogs on leashes give way to morning commuters who give way to tourists and bird-watchers. And still he sits. Flip. Catch. Flip. Catch. Flip.
“What are you doing?”
Jonas catches the coin and looks up. It’s Eva. Her eyes are red from crying. He doesn’t think to ask how she found him, and she doesn’t offer. He flips the coin again.
“Birthing universes,” he says. A new one with each flip. Schrödinger’s yen.
“I thought you said it didn’t work that way.”
“I don’t know anything anymore,” Jonas answers. His voice is distant. Unmoored. A moment of silence passes. Another to add to the pile of such moments that by now rises as tall as a mountain. Finally, he rises to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he says, and means it.
“This would be easier,” Eva replies, “if you didn’t apologize.” Her voice remains even, her jaw tight.
“What would be easier?”
“Are you finished?”
