“Actually, I don’t go here.” Amanda gave the Frisbee a little wave. “Just playing with a friend.”
She started to turn away, and again Jonas’s mind grasped for a way to keep her engaged, to spend just another few seconds with her. “Could I call you sometime?” turned out to be the best he could come up with. He was instantly mortified by his lack of game, as his students liked to say, but in a world of dating apps and anonymous hookups and one-night stands, it came across as unexpectedly endearing.
“You could if you had my number,” Amanda replied, seeming genuinely interested.
“Yes. That was kind of my way of asking you for it,” Jonas confessed.
Whimsy passed over her face, and Jonas could have sworn he detected an actual twinkle in her eye. “I don’t need to give it to you,” she said. “You can figure it out on your own.”
“I don’t know your last name.”
“This is true.”
“And you said you don’t go to Columbia.”
“Also true.”
Jonas blinked. “Well,” he ventured, “there are one point six million people in Manhattan.”
“It’s kinda cute how you just happened to know that number from memory. Also, you don’t know if I live in one of the outer boroughs, or Long Island, or even”—she faked a horrified gasp—“New Jersey.”
“Exactly.”
“C’mon,” she said, “it shouldn’t be too hard for a rocket scientist.”
“Quantum physicist,” he corrected. He was smiling. Maybe flirting wasn’t so difficult after all. “My point being, detective work isn’t exactly my field of expertise.”
“Something tells me you won’t have a problem.”
Gripping the Frisbee, Amanda bounded off across the quad. Jonas watched her go, drinking in every detail of her form, her gait, the way her ponytail bounced with each exuberant step, its sheen catching the afternoon light. He carved each detail into his memory. It wasn’t every day that one’s life changed forever.
NOW
The room is an oppressive gray. Gray walls. Gray floor. Fluorescent lights hang from the gray ceiling, casting a sickly gloom. Even the sparse furniture, two steel chairs and a table bolted to the floor, are the color of gunmetal. The only exit is a single door—gray, of course—with a window cut into it. Thick panes of milky glass sandwich steel mesh between them.
He sits at the table as he has been instructed. The guard was kind enough to remove his handcuffs, but his wrists are still bruised and the skin still raw where the metal bracelets had been cinched tight. His head throbs where the rifle butt struck him. There’s no mirror or reflective surface of any kind in here to confirm his suspicion that his face is badly bruised.
He’s been relieved of his ring, the only object left on his person after he’d discarded the Glock. He imagines the French police had some questions about that when they accepted custody of him from the military. He had no wallet, no form of identification whatsoever. Just a ring and an unusual tattoo. The police took pictures of it when they processed him.
He thinks of Macon, the image of the mercenary’s head exploding. The way it jerked back sharply, as if in spasm. The blood flecking Jonas’s face. He still feels it on him, caked dry and itchy. He wonders if the entire team of mercenaries suffered a similar fate. If there are any survivors, he reasons, they’ll be interrogated before it’s his turn to be questioned.
He has no idea how long he’s been here. No clock on the wall. No watch on his wrist. He left his phone back in the hotel, with no expectation of returning. He cracks his knuckles, but the ritual doesn’t quell his disquiet. He doesn’t fear prosecution, or even imprisonment. The thought of either feels alien, unreal. The idea of being branded as a criminal is academic, an intellectual abstraction. Ironic, even. Of the multitude of ways his plan could have gone awry, he never considered his present circumstances as a possibility. He had forecasted any number of setbacks, curated a complete menagerie of failures. Most scenarios had involved his own death—being obliterated by the primordial energies he had unleashed or ending up underwater or fused to a solid object. It never occurred to him that his attempt simply wouldn’t work. The oversight now feels like an act of vanity, a blindness born of ego. Of all the forms of failure he had imagined, Jonas had never contemplated actual failure.
Now his life is over. He has nothing left to live for. And what life he has will be consigned to a room even smaller than the one he’s in right now.
After an eternity, there’s a jangle of keys, and the thick metal door creaks open. A young man in his thirties enters, navy blue uniform, gold badge on his chest, sidearm on his hip, file in his hand. Without preamble he sits down at the table opposite Jonas. “I am Inspector Gillard.”
“Jonas. Dr. Jonas Cullen.”
“I know who you are, Doctor.” The inspector lays the file open in front of him on the table. Despite his youth, he speaks with a calm reflective of long experience. “Of the four men you were with, three are dead.” He pauses for effect. “The fourth told me all about you.” Another pause. “He had some very interesting things to say.”
Jonas knows he only has one card to play here. He had decided it was the first thing he’d say if given the opportunity. “I want to speak with my embassy.”
“He said,” Gillard continues, as if Jonas had said nothing, “you paid them a quarter of a million euros so you could break into CERN to conduct—and this is his word—an ‘experiment.’” Gillard makes no effort to keep the incredulity from his voice.
Jonas remains stone faced, offering as little as possible.
“Quite an interesting approach,” Gillard observes. “I was curious why you didn’t simply make a formal request to CERN—a physicist of your renown—but then I was informed that you’d made six petitions in the past two years.” Gillard pushes the file toward the center of the table like a poker player cashing out. “All of which were declined.”
Once again, Jonas says nothing. When your life is over, he has discovered, you have all the time in the world.
“Well,” Gillard continues, “you certainly managed to come up with an unconventional solution to your problem. One can’t help but ask,” he adds delicately, “if this is somehow related to your wife’s passing.”
Jonas reacts, surprised that Gillard would know about Amanda. For some reason that he now knows was unfounded, he hadn’t expected the French authorities to know about Amanda’s death.
This must be evident from Jonas’s expression, because Gillard raises an incredulous eyebrow. “Do you imagine I wouldn’t at least google you before walking in here?”
A fair point. Jonas finds himself liking Gillard, despite the situation, which places them in a naturally adversarial relationship. Initially, he had no intention of explaining himself, but now he sees no reason not to be forthcoming. “I was trying to get to her.”
“Excuse me?”
“It wasn’t an experiment,” Jonas insists. “I was trying to get to her. To Amanda. To be with her.”
Gillard blanches. Jonas watches him shift uncomfortably in his seat. He knows what the inspector must be thinking: the man thought he was interrogating a renowned scientist but is now starting to consider the possibility that Jonas has some kind of mental illness. Gillard speaks slowly, choosing his words with some delicacy. “Dr. Cullen . . .” He pauses, searching for the right phrase. “Your wife is dead.”
Jonas remains patient. He knows this is a difficult concept for anyone to grasp. “She’s dead in this world. But there are others. A near-infinite number.” Gillard still seems confused, so he adds, “I was trying to get to one—a parallel universe—where she survives. A reality where she’s still alive.”
Gillard’s reaction is barely perceptible. Jonas can see it’s taking all the man’s effort to hide his distrust and skepticism. “All right, Doctor,” Gillard says. “We’re in contact with your embassy. As you can imagine, this incident presents a number of diplomatic complexities.” An understatement. The inspector is droning on—“You’ll be transferred to a holding cell, pending your arraignment . . .”—when Jonas first sees it.
Gillard’s military watch. Numbers orbit the center: 1, 2, 4, 3, 5, 6 . . . counting up to 12.
The sight jolts Jonas like a subway’s third rail.
The 4 and 3 . . . are transposed.
Jonas shakes his head. Blinks. The 4 and 3 remain swapped. He reminds himself that he was struck in the head with a rifle. He’s concussed. He’s not thinking strai—
But wait.
Gillard’s file, still open on the table. From Jonas’s vantage, the papers are upside down, but he can make out strange symbols where familiar vowels like “A” and “I” should be. Hope sparks. He tamps it down, preventing his mind from racing like it wants to, forbidding it from grasping at that tiny spit of hope. Such anomalies are replete with possible explanations, particularly in a foreign country.
“Doctor?” Gillard asks, sensing that he no longer has Jonas’s attention.
In the end, the answer is right in front of him: a French flag pin on Gillard’s left breast. The flag is the familiar “Tricolore,” a vertical banding of three colors. Blue. White. But green has replaced red. Jonas supposes this could be some eccentricity of design, but the instances are starting to multiply, defying coincidence.
Jonas grabs the folder, flipping it closed to reveal the French flag emblazoned on its cover. The same flag. Blue and white and green.
