Amanda’s agent, a woman in her seventies with a voice like it was aged in an oak barrel, officiated. She was, by turns, touching and moving and funny. She spoke about how Jonas and Amanda were both only children who had lost their parents. She confided that she’d always harbored a maternal love for Amanda and now felt the same for Jonas. She thanked God for allowing the two of them to meet in the multitude of New York City.
Jonas wore a tuxedo that his friend Peter helped him pick out. Amanda had on a crepe-white Vera Wang dress with a high neck halter. Her hair was trimmed into a short bob for the occasion, and the cut made her eyes sparkle. Or maybe it was just the occasion.
They wrote their own vows.
Jonas spoke from memory. “Amanda, I’m not going to talk about destiny or how the universe favors certain outcomes. You’ve already had to endure endless lectures from me about both. But each time, you’ve hung on every word, endured every tangent, followed me into each intellectual cul-de-sac. And you do it with patience, yes, but more importantly, curiosity. I love how you see the world, which is evident not just in your incredible paintings, but in your heart. You live life with a mindfulness and a presence that others—including, especially, myself—can only hope to emulate. You’re radiant and kind and loving. You make me want to be a better person.” He paused to fend off a tear. He wanted to soak in the moment, as he knew Amanda would, too, to engrave an image of it on the wall of his mind, perfect and vivid and permanent. “I love you in ways I don’t know how to express. But I promise to spend every day, for the rest of our life together, trying.” He smiled at her. “I love you too much.”
“I love you more,” she replied earnestly. She glanced down at the notes she had prepared. “I’m an artist. You’re a scientist. I don’t think anyone could find two people less alike. But that’s just the outward appearance. The truth, like most truths, is found on the inside.” She looked again at her notes, sheets of heavy stock covered with her precise scrawl. But then she folded up the paper and spoke from the heart. “What we have in common completely eclipses our differences. We think the same way. We feel the same way. We both look at the universe and find the beauty in it. I look in your eyes, in your heart, and I find the same beauty. You’re a brushstroke. You’re an equation. You’re the whole universe. You’re my whole universe. And I love you far, far too much.”
He gave his head a little shake. “I love you more.”
The usual pageant of formalities followed. Rings were exchanged. A pronouncement was made. They kissed as the sun descended to the horizon. Phone cameras captured the moment from every conceivable angle.
They held the reception outside, at a small resort on the shore called Gurney’s. A live band played, and they both danced with abandon. Jonas remembered once telling Amanda that he could never discern the purpose of dancing, but that felt like a lifetime ago. In many ways, in all the ways that mattered, it was. That version of himself felt so distant that it was like a separate, parallel universe. He had learned that dancing was one way to convey the feelings that he lacked the words to express.
Jonas thought of his Many Worlds Proof and imagined the other Jonases of the multiverse. Did they have an Amanda? He felt pity for the ones who didn’t. Theirs was a world without music—bland, desaturated, muted. Jonas decided he would rather die than surrender to that kind of existence.
He searched the dance floor for Amanda. Guests swayed in front of him, obscuring his line of sight, but eventually he found her through the sea of people. She moved in time with the music, shaking her hips, one hand raised to the sky, the other corralling the wayward sway of her dress, pulling it up just far enough to reveal that she was barefoot. He stared at her, drinking in the image, so taken with his new wife that he didn’t realize that he had stopped dancing. Bodies twirled around him, oblivious.
Amanda looked resplendent, and Jonas envisioned dozens, hundreds, thousands of such tiny moments in the decades to come. Each one a chance to relive that instant when he first saw her. Each one its own little miracle.
He had no way of knowing that in less than two years, she would be dead.
NOW
Victor’s hands are around Jonas’s throat. In his entire life, he’s never felt such rage. He imagines Jonas’s windpipe cracking beneath his thumbs. He knows they’re falling. He knows that realities are spinning like a cosmic roulette wheel around them. He knows he’s falling to his death, and he doesn’t care. He’s consumed in a mad race against time, driven by the desperate need to kill Jonas before the inevitable impact kills them both. On some level, he knows it’s irrational. What’s important is that it feels imperative, the culmination of his life’s work. Or the eclipsing of it. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in this gossamer-thin moment except that Jonas die at his hand.
But Victor dies never knowing whether he succeeded.
His final act is to collapse beneath Jonas’s weight, cushioning his rival’s fall. In the end, Professor Emeritus Victor Kovacevic ends his life as the equivalent of a human airbag.
Jonas lies in a puddle of sinew and bone and blood. Every nerve ending in his body cries out in distress. He has two broken ribs and a punctured lung. His skull and left tibia are fractured. He would think he’s dead but for the pain.
He rolls off Victor’s prone form and immediately discovers what real pain means. He should feel elation or relief, but every emotion is eclipsed by agony. He tries to draw breath and ends up coughing, which produces a jet of blood and nearly causes him to pass out. He fears he’s going to drown in his own gore.
There are no sirens, he notices. No ambulances rushing to save him. No one is coming to his rescue. There is no hope. The universe is daring him to take solace in the fact that he outlived Victor. And there is some consolation in that, he must admit. He’s never thought of himself as a killer but finds joy in the fact that Victor is dead, and he is not. Even if that will last only a few moments. And the joy shames him.
A part of him will always blame himself for Victor’s vendetta, suspicious of the possibility that Victor was right, that his own achievements were the result of Victor’s brilliance. “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The thought plagues Jonas. Had he stood on Victor’s shoulders? And if so, was there anything so wrong in that? Shouldn’t what was good enough for Newton be good enough for Cullen?
Jonas has no answer, despite years of asking himself the question. Lying on the cold, hard ground—his lungs bleeding, his bones broken, each breath a labor—he starts to believe that this is what he deserves. The world grows dark, and the basic act of keeping his eyes open begins to feel impossible.
Voices begin to leak into his reverie, but they sound distant, walled up.
“You okay, buddy?”
“Don’t move, okay?”
“Help’s on the way.”
“I’m done, Amanda,” Jonas mutters. “Wherever you are . . . I’m done. And I’m sorry.”
“Don’t talk,” one of the voices says. “Save your breath.”
“I’m sorry. You—” Jonas’s voice catches. He feels a tear escape. A memory tortures him. “You can’t swim against the tide of the universe.”
He feels no electricity, no pinpricks beneath his skin. Whatever quantum phenomenon that has made his recent trips possible is now spent. This universe, this reality, is finally—finally—the last one he will ever know.
And the thought that Amanda is still alive, that she will now mourn a trio of Jonases, is more painful than anything his body has endured.
So Jonas lets go. If there’s an afterlife, there’s an Amanda there waiting for him. He goes to her.
NOW
Somewhere far away, a child is crying. Jonas is barely cognizant of it and completely unaware that it’s really the wail of a siren. He is deaf to the murmur of the crowd, to the commotion of the paramedics as they strap a blood pressure cuff on him and check his airway.
Questions and commands are barked at him. “Sir, can you hear me?”
“Can you look at me, sir?”
“Can you feel that?”
“Can you squeeze my hand?”
The answer to every question is no.
His body moves in response to each of the paramedics’ manipulations as though dead. They poke and prod him, needles are produced, veins are punctured, but nothing changes.
Jonas hears someone calling his name from a million miles away. No, not calling—screaming. A woman’s desperate voice. Amanda’s voice.
If he could open his eyes, Jonas would see her pushing through the throng of onlookers, tears streaming down her face, which is pale with terror. One of the paramedics turns from Jonas to hold her back, but she keeps screaming his name.
One of the cruelties of death is its capacity for delusion, for creating hallucinations of divine perfection as one slips the bonds of life. This, Jonas is convinced, is the reason he’s hearing Amanda’s cries. “I’m coming, my love,” he gasps. “Don’t worry. I’m coming.”
“I’m here,” she replies, and for the first time, it doesn’t sound distant. For the first time, he feels hands on his face, sliding over his sweat and tears. “I’m here,” the voice repeats with an urgency he can’t make sense of.
His mind, always his most reliable asset, fights through a fog of pain, laboring despite lack of oxygen. If the voice belongs to Amanda, if the voice isn’t from whichever plane exists after death, if what he’s hearing is real, it would mean that of all the universes he fell through, he somehow landed back in the one where Amanda is alive. The odds of such a thing are beyond even Jonas’s ability to calculate. The only explanation is that, deprived of blood and oxygen, he’s hallucinating, a predeath psychosis.
But her lips feel so real on his. The tears falling from her eyes and onto his face are beyond his capacity to imagine. Her pleas, her desperate cries for him to open his eyes are . . . beyond his ability to ignore.
It feels impossible, the hardest thing he’s ever done, but Jonas opens his eyes. And the image he sees is watery, a photograph slowly coming into focus. But he can’t deny it. He’s looking up at her. Amanda. Crying and smiling. Terrified and relieved. Grieving and joyous. All at the same time.
“I knew you’d find me,” she says through tears.
Jonas tries to speak, but the words don’t come. It’s all he can do to keep breathing, to keep looking at her. To feel the grip of her hand. To see her face. To know that, somehow, he’s home.
The crowd is chattering as the paramedics work, and suddenly an entire city reasserts itself. But as Jonas stares up at the woman he loves more than his own life, the two of them are the only two people who exist in the entire world.
