Amanda shushes him with a soothing whisper. “Don’t talk. Save your strength. I’m going to get my phone.” She decides she has to chance it. She has no other choice. “It’s right over there. I’ll be right back.” She moves to set him down, but he grabs her shoulder, shaking his head. His eyes are devoid of hope, lids fluttering, on the verge of surrender. Amanda doesn’t have to be a doctor to know that he is fading fast.
“I love you,” he rasps. Amanda can’t fathom the burden, the difficulty of uttering those three simple syllables. She watches him swallow hard and set his jaw and steel himself for the exertion of uttering two more. “Too much.”
“I love you . . . ,” she says, her voice breaking. “I love you more.”
And then he’s gone. His chest no longer rises and falls in jagged spasms. Blood no longer gushes between her fingers with each beat of his heart. His face is frozen in what perversely looks like awe, the beatific expression of someone en route to the afterlife.
Amanda feels sick. She has no idea how or why, but she has just relived the worst moment of her life. That it should come so shortly after she had just begun to put her life back together feels like the lowest form of cruelty. She expects to feel the return of grief, for it to come roaring back, but another emotion rises in its place.
Fury.
Her body warms against the chill of the raging storm. It starts in her heart and radiates outward, building with an intensity so great it almost frightens her. Her body tenses as she reverently lowers Jonas’s body to the rooftop. She cradles his head and sets it down gently. Slowly, she feels herself rising to stand.
Victor remains in the very spot where he raised the gun with the intention of killing her. It’s still clutched in his hand, but she no longer cares. It’s already taken everything from her that she cares about.
“What have you done?” she says, less a question than an accusation. She’s surprised she’s not screaming.
“I balanced the universe,” comes the reply. His voice is as level, as clenched as her own. He looks at her through a veil of driving rain, consumed with a fire—a mania—that Amanda has never seen before and cannot begin to comprehend. Were she not so enraged, she would be terrified.
“What does that mean?” she demands, desperation infecting her voice. She stares a hole through Victor, this man who should be dead, this stranger aflame with hate, and she knows in an instant that there’s no explanation that would make sense, or that would even matter anymore.
The man she loves is dead. Again.
NOW
The elevator tops out one flight below the building’s roof. He explodes out of it and into the nearest stairwell. He pounds up the steps two at a time. Compared to his endless ascent of the Spire, this is as easy as a walk around the block. Thunder echoes above, and he isn’t ashamed to think the storm is meant for him. In one universe, an earthquake; in this one, a parade and a taxi and two gas main explosions. Just the impertinent flailing of the universe. Obstacles to overcome. Unimportant.
He throws himself up the stairs, through the door at the top, and out onto the roof. Wind and rain slap at him. Electric static from the whipcrack of lightning tenses his hair and beard. He stops short as thunder rolls above. Through a curtain of rain, he sees the shapes of three people. His stomach knots. His heart feels as though someone is clutching it. Everything slows and becomes dreamlike. A waking nightmare.
One of the figures is Amanda, but any joy he might feel at seeing her is eclipsed by the sight of the man she’s talking to. Victor has a gun in his hand, the same gun that claimed Amanda and Eva. Even in the heat of this horrible moment, Jonas has the presence of mind to scold himself. He could have killed Victor back at the Spire. He could have shot him. He could have hurled his unconscious body off the catwalk. Instead, he showed the mercy Victor would have denied him. What had seemed an act of decency is now revealed to be one of reckless negligence. If Victor kills Amanda now, it will be like Jonas pulling the trigger himself.
The third person lies lifeless in a pool of water and blood. Between the rain and the angle of the body, Jonas can barely make him out. But he doesn’t need to see much to recognize his own face. Clean shaven and wearing different but similar clothes to his own. Another doppelgänger. Another Jonas in pursuit of Amanda. Stopped tragically short of reaching his goal.
Jonas’s mind flashes back to the fascistic iteration of Manhattan and remembers the feeling of someone lurking behind him, perhaps even following him. Even now, in this most pregnant of moments, a part of him marvels at the immaculate order of the multiverse. Of all the Jonases in the multiverse, it stands to reason that he wouldn’t be the only one with the means and drive and tenacity to scour the multiverse for the woman he lost. One such Jonas now lies dead at Amanda’s feet.
She turns from Victor and sees Jonas. He watches her straining to make sense of what she is seeing. In turn, Victor reacts to her reaction, and Jonas’s stomach twists.
“Jonas?” she whispers.
He doesn’t hear. He’s racing across the rooftop—his footfalls producing tiny geysers of splashing water—running with a desperate urgency. Lightning fires down in front of him, but he does not stop. He cannot stop. Through the downpour, he pictures Victor raising the gun. He imagines Victor aiming at Amanda, his finger closing around the trigger. Fear speeds his steps. Fear and terrible fury.
“Get away from her!” Jonas thunders. Thunder roars a reply.
A gunshot sounds, and Jonas hopes it’s lightning as he feels himself collide with Victor, driven by a preternatural need to get him as far away from Amanda as possible. He hears a clatter, a mechanical thunking, and hopes it’s the sound of Victor’s gun dropping to the roof. Still tangled in a kind of macabre dance, the two men assault the rooftop’s balustrade before it disappears. Inertia carries them over the side. Jonas might have heard Amanda scream, but between the driving rain and the rushing wind and the thundering of his own heart, it’s impossible to know for sure.
He and Victor remained tangled as they fall. Synchronicity strikes again, he thinks, reminded of the balletic free fall of his limousine as it leaped the bonds of the Centralbron. He and Amanda tossed around like dice in a tumbler. The floors of the Central Park Tower strobe past. Jonas and Victor fall, racing the raindrops.
Gunmetal flashes in front of Jonas, a glimpse of steel wrapped around Victor’s wrist. His tether bracelet. Jonas’s fingers splay toward it as they drop. A fall from this height will kill them both, but before he goes, Jonas is consumed with a singular thought, a pure, naked instinct: I’m going to die destroying Victor’s work.
Victor appears to sense what Jonas intends. Both men are geniuses in their own ways. Victor retracts his hand, but Jonas is faster, clawing at Victor’s tether. Feeling its metal frame beneath his hand, Jonas rakes his fingernails against Victor’s skin. He hears his nemesis scream and knows it’s more in rage than real pain. His fingers close around it, grabbing skin and steel, not letting go.
Like Jonas’s, Victor’s tether is a delicate piece of technology. It practically falls apart in Jonas’s grip. Tiny pieces spiral off. A nearby flash of lightning illuminates their tiny edges. Victor bellows, but the roar of the wind drowns out his rage. Jonas is about to surrender to his imminent death, to rest at last, when the storm blinks from existence.
As he falls, reality changes all around him. Rain is replaced with sunlight. Sunlight gives way to nighttime. The Central Park Tower disappears, only to be reborn as another structure entirely. The city winks in and out, its skyline rising and falling as though filmed in time lapse.
Jonas knows this shouldn’t be possible. Other Jonas told him that the reality-slip from the Spire would be a one-way trip. Jonas checked and double-checked his doppelgänger’s math, and it was sound. But the shifting kaleidoscope of universes now suggests otherwise. Or maybe the “top-off” he received back at the Spire operated differently than predicted. Or proximity to the destruction of Victor’s tether is to blame. Either way, Jonas thinks—as he witnesses a cornucopia of reality shifts, each one a different die roll of Creation—it’s an appropriate way for him and Victor to meet their ends, tumbling through universes.
He thinks of Amanda, hoping the gunshot he heard was either errant or lightning. His only wish is that she live on. He’s never wanted anything more, and now, in his final moments, he understands that he wanted so much—he has wasted his life on wanting.
When the ground finally rises to meet him, it’s a mercy.
But Jonas doesn’t die. This should be impossible, but he’s in too much agony for it to be otherwise. Despite all the tortures his body has suffered since leaving his room at NH Genève Aéroport, he’s never felt like this. His head throbs. Each beat of his heart brings a new volley of pain. His chest is on fire. He moves a hand to palpate the offending area, but it gives way, sinking beneath his touch. He feels two ribs swinging free, and the ensuing pain clouds his vision with black spots.
Every breath is an effort, and his only reward for each is a new spasm of suffering. And yet he manages to get to his feet, where he sees why he’s not a smear on the pavement. He’s not on pavement at all. He’s on an elevated pathway—a kind of footbridge—that stretches between skyscrapers, part of what he now sees is a latticework of pathways connecting the city’s buildings, each one offered up by the multiverse to break his fall.
Jonas is about to take this as an Eva-like sign that perhaps the universe isn’t working entirely against him when he’s thrown back down to the footbridge’s laminated metal. He knows who the attacker is, the moment reminiscent of their fight back at the Spire, two men atop a thin expanse. But this time, Victor is fueled by the memory of his earlier defeat. He refuses to let up, to cease, to stop his fists from hurling down.
The only saving grace is that Victor appears focused on Jonas’s head, mercifully avoiding his shattered ribs. If anyone is on the footbridge to witness this attack, they’re not interceding. Victor releases another punch, and Jonas feels his nose collapse. His mouth feels wet and tastes of copper.
His hands preoccupied with defending his head, Jonas brings his knee up—as hard as he can, grateful it’s not as broken as the rest of him—and connects with Victor’s groin. Victor howls in pain and redoubles his efforts. He swings a fist against Jonas’s flank, and Jonas feels one of the wayward ribs stab his lung. Now it’s his turn to scream, but he can’t catch enough oxygen.
Sensing his advantage, Victor grasps at Jonas’s throat. Jonas reaches up to pry Victor’s fingers away, but Victor maintains his grip, his knuckles as firm and white as ice. He stares down at Jonas with a cold intensity. Jonas feels a hunger, a primal drive, to plead for his life, but the words won’t come. There’s nothing in his chest but fire and blood and two jagged talons tearing him apart from the inside.
His flailing thoughts grasp for hope and seize on the idea that maybe there are more versions of himself out in the multiverse. That maybe at least one more exists and can find his way back to Amanda. That in a multiverse with as many realities as grains of sand on a single earth, there could still be one—just one—where he and Amanda are together. And happy. Maybe even with a child.
The thought brings him peace, which warms his soul as his body begins to grow cold. His eyes slowly close, and he stops struggling against Victor’s grip. He’s ready to rest now. He’s ready to go.
But then he’s falling again, the footbridge having disappeared out from under him. Gravity tugs, pulling him down, while Victor, still atop him, hands still wrapped around his neck, pushes down.
Reality changes around them again. Snow scratches at them for a heartbeat. In the next, they plunge through fire. The sky runs from gray to black to blue to an incandescent orange.
Deep within himself, Jonas summons the strength to struggle one final time. He writhes and wriggles, and still Victor’s hands remain clasped around his throat. He manages to shift his weight, and then he’s rolling over, atop Victor. And Victor, in turn, rolls over him. They’re tumbling end over end, like Amanda’s and Jonas’s ill-fated limousine, like the five-hundred-yen coin Jonas flipped in Hijiyama Park.
Jonas or Amanda.
Heads or tails.
Each fifty-fifty flip with the potential to birth a new reality.
Victor or Jonas.
One will break the other’s fall.
The universe favors certain outcomes.
TWO YEARS AGO
They married beneath an azure and coral sky on a beach at the eastern end of Long Island. Waves kissed the shore behind them as a small group of guests sat on white folding chairs arranged in an arc. The wind gusted gently off the water, and the air smelled of salt and charcoal.
