In the entire multiverse.
TWO DAYS LATER
After the paramedics wheel Jonas into the emergency room, after the doctors mend him as well as they can, after the x-rays and CT scan, and once he is comfortably stoned on painkillers, the inevitable questions come. How did a dead Nobel laureate wind up in their hospital? Jonas’s first instinct is to answer truthfully. After all, a basic Google search would reveal the work he’d won the Nobel for. If the world was ready for a mathematical proof of the existence of parallel worlds, why not flesh-and-blood proof? The truth would also have the virtue of explaining his eccentric tattoos.
In the end, though, he decides that whatever the world may or may not be ready for, he isn’t ready to become the focus of its attention. He isn’t ready for the avalanche of questions, the assault of media scrutiny, the hurricane of notoriety. He’s not willing to succumb to anything that might pull his focus from Amanda.
And so he lies.
He takes care not to embroider the story with too many details. When the limousine capsized, he was thrown from the wreck. He had amnesia. He lived among the homeless. No one thought to look for a Nobel laureate among Switzerland’s lost and discarded. In time, he recovered his memories. In time, he made it back home.
He has no explanation for the corpse that was recovered from the wreck, but it’s fortunate that this reality’s Jonas was cremated. Of course, in time, someone will assemble all the pieces and conclude that they don’t fit. Perhaps that someone will review Jonas’s Many Worlds Proof and draw the inevitable conclusion. But that is a problem for another day. Maybe it will be a sign that Jonas is finally meant to reveal what he achieved to the world.
In time, he assures himself, he’ll think about what to do with his life’s work, if anything. The formulae on his arms serve as an ever-present reminder of the enormity of what he invented and brought forth into existence. He didn’t set out to change the world, he tells himself, just to repair his own. But having devised the means to travel to nearly infinite worlds, he knows that what he has created could be used to alter the course of humanity, and not just in this reality, but in countless others. The vastness of that possibility, the magnitude of the responsibility, makes his head swim.
As they exit Mount Sinai Hospital, Jonas looks to Amanda, taking comfort in the knowledge that none of these decisions will be his to bear alone.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Nothing.” But Amanda indicts that response with a look. She has always seen through him, seen him better than he can see himself. “Well, not nothing,” he admits. “But now’s not the right time for it. There will be plenty of time later.”
“Whatever it is,” she says, weighing him with a glance, “it’s on your mind.”
He sees no point in denying it. “But not in a bad way. Not in the slightest.”
“Well, there’s something on my mind,” she says. “I haven’t really known how to bring it up.”
“That’s easy,” Jonas shrugs. “Just bring it up.”
“It’s about Victor,” she says.
This reality’s Victor died of pancreatic cancer a year and a half ago. The presence of his corpse on West Fifty-Seventh Street presented yet another conundrum. When the doctors pronounced Jonas well enough to answer questions, he told the police he had no idea whom he had landed on. When they asked how he came to fall from such an apparently great height, Jonas claimed short-term memory loss, transient global amnesia, rather than theorize how passing through multiple universes slowed their descent enough to make survival possible.
With Jonas proving either uncooperative or unreliable—the police couldn’t be sure which—the NYPD ran Victor’s fingerprints without success. A DNA match would be attempted, but it was unlikely to produce results for the same reason that the fingerprint search returned no records. Victor’s biometrics weren’t in any database; he had never been arrested or otherwise associated with law enforcement in this reality. Eventually, a review of his dental records might produce some perplexing questions but only if Victor’s doppelgänger’s dental work matched his own. In any case, Jonas has time to consider his responses in the event that the police return to ask him more questions. He sets the odds of that at fifty-fifty. A coin flip.
“What about Victor?” he asks Amanda. In the hospital, he gave Amanda a truncated version of events: he and Victor both devised the means to travel to parallel universes, and Victor, motivated by a perverse sense of cosmic justice, was trying to stop Jonas from reuniting with her. He left out any mention of the demise of her own doppelgänger.
“Well,” she ventures, “if there was more than one you trying to get back to me . . .” Her voice trails off. During their conversations at Mount Sinai, Amanda understandably struggled to come up with the right words to articulate this strange conundrum. “If there was more than one Jonas trying to reach me, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there would be more than one Victor trying to stop him? I mean, you?”
“I don’t know,” Jonas answers. Apart from the omission of Amanda’s ill-fated counterpart, he would never lie to her. “I don’t know if there are other Victors out there.” He stops walking and takes her hands in his. Not since they exchanged their wedding vows has he spoken to her with such conviction. “What I do know is that I found you again. And no one—in any universe—is ever going to take you away from me.”
A smile blossoms across Amanda’s face. “I can live with that,” she says.
“So can I.”
“But what about other yous?” she asks. “There was already one.”
In the hospital, Jonas had given a lot of thought to a potential legion of Jonases, each one as set on finding Amanda as he had been. The possibility will always exist. That, after all, was the beauty of the multiverse: its penchant for endless possibility.
“Well, if another me were to show up,” he says, thinking of what Eva said to him when they discussed the same question, “then it would certainly make for the world’s most interesting love triangle.”
The thought of Eva surfaces a memory. Jonas digs into his pocket, only now noticing that he happens to be wearing the same pants he wore back at the Spire. He pulls out the Ouroboros patch that Eva sewed for him, cradling it in his fingers, thinking of her. How she risked everything to help him. The feelings she engendered in him. The grief brought on by her dying—twice. The guilt of feeling responsible both times.
“What’s this?” Amanda asks, taking the patch. “It looks like my tattoo. And yours, too, I guess.”
“A friend of mine made this for me,” he says, his voice cracking.
Some instinct pulls his gaze across the street. The sidewalk is choked with tourists and New Yorkers. The steady pulse of Manhattan. Among the throng, Jonas can make out a couple walking arm in arm. A man and a woman. The man wears United States Army Ranger fatigues. Jonas recognizes him from a photograph in a faculty office at Von Braun University. As he walks, the woman rests her head on his shoulder, laughing at whatever it is he just said.
Eva looks happy.
“Is everything okay?” Amanda asks.
“Yes,” Jonas says, staring as Eva and the man she loves disappear into the crowd. “Everything is exactly as it should be.”
Amanda takes his hand and leads him on. “Let’s get you home.”
“Sounds good. It’s been a while.”
As they walk, Jonas looks to the night sky and considers the stars in their multitude. Their light—hundreds, thousands of years old—winks down on him. For each one, he imagines a universe populated with an almost countless congregation of souls. He thinks of their lives and their deaths, their hopes and dreams, their crushing losses and disappointments. Some will die without ever having made a mark upon their world. Others will conjure breathtaking works of art—plays, songs, paintings, poems, symphonies—from nothing. Like Jonas, a select few will give birth to insights that will challenge their very perception of reality. All will experience the exquisite torture, the brutal blessing, of what it means to be human. Each of these lives is its own universe.
Tonight, Jonas and Amanda will return home and try to make another.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some stories want to be told.
My initial notes for what has evolved to become this novel are dated February 26, 2013. The journey has been a long one, and I’ve been blessed with the help of many fellow travelers along the way.
Meyash Prabhu was the first to dig into my pile of work, extricate this story, and find it worth pursuing.
Amanda would have been largely absent from the narrative but for the wise counsel of Palak Patel, Elishia Holmes, and Mike DeLuca.
As they have for well over a decade, Cliff Roberts and Wendy Kirk served as both traveling companions and guides, helping me navigate challenging terrain despite the wide variety of accidents and storms and earthquakes the universe threw at me.
My longtime, long-suffering assistant C. M. Landrus—a wonderful and wonderfully talented writer in her own right—was the first reader I imposed on. Her sharp-eyed observations and insights were as invaluable as a simile or metaphor. (Inside joke.)
My former book agent, Erin Malone at WME, also provided much appreciated feedback and encouragement. Anthony Mattero at CAA took up the baton without costing us even a millisecond in the race. (With apologies to C. M. for the metaphor.)
The remarkable Season Kent graciously donated her time and plied her trade as one of the best music supervisors in film and television—and now prose. She’s one of the best people I know, and I desperately miss working with her.
Some stories want to be told.
But not all stories want to be published. Finding the right home for this one was challenging and at times seemed impossible. It was during one of those moments when it seemed that this story might not see the light of day that novelist Alex Segura volunteered his advice and assistance. Alex and I are familiar with each other from our respective work in the comic book industry, but his help was practically the equivalent of coming to the aid of a complete stranger. The greatest mitzvahs are those done for people one barely knows, with no potential for reciprocation. Through his generosity of spirit, Alex introduced me to Chantelle Aimée Osman at Lake Union. Chantelle was the first editor to recognize what this book was and, more importantly, what it could be. She is, as she said on our very first phone call, this book’s first fan. The gift of her support and encouragement is one I can never adequately repay.
Among the many things Chantelle brought to this project, perhaps the greatest is the involvement of its editor, Jason Kirk. His notes, insights, and line edits elevated every page. He even served as my de facto science adviser. Pairing me with an editor who happens to have more than an armchair understanding of the cosmos is just one example of Chantelle’s prodigious brilliance.
