The officer takes the credit card and types some information into her computer. She considers her display and sours. Jonas knows what’s coming but tries to act surprised when she says, “I’m sorry, Mr. Cullen. But our records show you as deceased.” Her expression is impenetrable.
Jonas shrugs with as much charm as he can muster. “I feel a little tired, but I’m pretty sure I’m not dead.” He adds a smile for disarming effect. “You know, I happened to read an article in Wired about how hackers are altering public records like that,” he says, hoping Wired exists in this universe, or at least that it doesn’t rouse suspicion. “I guess it makes identity theft easier somehow.”
“Sounds right,” the officer replies, but coming off as disingenuous. “If you could just wait here for one moment . . .” She stands and moves off with Jonas’s credit card in hand.
Jonas cranes his head, trying not to draw attention, and sees the officer talking to a marine embassy guard. Although he can’t make out what she’s saying, she speaks urgently, stabbing at the air with Jonas’s card.
This is wrong.
The thought arrives unbidden, and Jonas is gripped by a powerful instinct to leave. If it’s a choice between that and waiting to retrieve his card—and getting arrested and detained for questioning—there’s really no choice at all. He’s free from the fear of being deprived of his tether, but he’s terrified of any development that could keep him separated from Amanda for even a minute longer than necessary.
He slowly rises from his seat and begins to pad toward the lobby, hoping the officer will remain focused on her conversation with the marine long enough for Jonas to slip out of the building. It takes him three minutes to reach the outdoor gate that surrounds the embassy. Two more marines stand guard. The gate is maybe eighteen feet away.
“Sumimasen. Tomate, kudasai,” a voice calls from behind him. He ignores it, but then the man switches to English. “Excuse me, sir. Could you please wait a second?” The voice carries enough steel to leave no doubt that it isn’t a request.
Jonas keeps walking toward the gate, fourteen feet away, pretending the marine isn’t addressing him. Footsteps sound behind him. The marine has summoned reinforcements. Jonas feels nauseated.
“Teishi,” the marine says. “Stop right there.”
Jonas starts to slow. He feels the marine drawing close. He looks ahead to the gate.
And he bolts.
The marine and his cohorts are yelling now, barking commands to stop. Up ahead, the gate begins to close. Sprinting, Jonas collides with a woman but doesn’t break stride. She spills to the ground in his wake. He feels the stares of everyone witnessing the commotion, but his focus is on the gate, slowly closing like a maw.
As he races toward it, a guard moves to grab him, but Jonas slips the man’s grip. He throws himself through the gate, barely threading the gap as it closes. It bites at his shirt. For a second of panic, Jonas’s sleeve is pinched in the gate, but he yanks his arm, tearing the fabric, and shoots out into the street. A chorus of the pursuing marines tells the ones at the gate to “Open it up! Open it back up!”
Jonas darts down a narrow street, dodging cars and mopeds. He chances a glance back and sees the marines in pursuit. He fights the tide of traffic, parrying against the current, and comes face to face with a huge bus. It bears down on him, thirty thousand pounds of metal, just like the one in New York. This time, though, he surges across the street, drawing an arc around the front of the bus such that it flies past him, forming a makeshift bulwark between him and the pursuing marines. It takes only seconds for the bus to clear, but that’s all Jonas needs to slip into the closest store. A mannequin provides cover as he watches the marines fan out and disappear into the crowd.
NOW
Eager to put as much distance between himself and the marines as possible, Jonas heads out of the city. He finds a man willing to trade a peacoat for his shirt. It does little against the creeping chill, but it’s better than nothing.
The escape from Tokyo brings the problem of getting to America without a passport. He doesn’t even have a change of clothes. The soles of his shoes feel threadbare, as though they’re sucking up cold from the ground and channeling it straight into his feet.
In a bookstore, he finds a guidebook for Japan. A plan begins to take shape. It will require luck, for certain things to break his way, giving the universe more opportunities to thwart him.
Using a map torn from the guidebook’s pages, Jonas walks along the shoulder of a highway, traveling west. His thumb remains poised toward the road, but no one stops. At night, cars whip past. The halogen headlights of oncoming trucks envelope him in brightness before thundering on.
Exhausted beyond description, Jonas eventually stumbles. His legs refuse to take another step. On the side of the highway, a sign straddles a culvert, where he takes refuge. He is cold and hungry and thinks he has never been so tired. He doesn’t fall asleep so much as pass into it as if crossing a border, awake one moment and unconscious the next. A deep slumber without dreams.
In what seems like only a minute, the rising sun and roar of traffic snap him awake, and his odyssey continues. He keeps his thumb out, despite the fact that his hand weighs a hundred pounds and his shoulder burns with the effort of holding his fist aloft. He tries walking backward to change arms, but he’s too fatigued to summon the coordination required.
It would take five days of walking nonstop to get from Tokyo to Osaka. Despondency grows with each car and truck and van that ignores his offered thumb. It is as though they are doing the will of a disapproving universe.
But then, a respite. An eighteen-wheeler rolls past, bathing Jonas in light before pulling off to the shoulder. The driver, a man in his sixties with a face of leather, knows just enough English to convey that he, too, is en route to Jonas’s ultimate destination of Hyōgo. Jonas exhales, not quite believing his luck. Even more fortunate—the man has mochi to spare. As he eats, Jonas remembers that the last time he ate anything was before he and Eva left for the Spire. He inhales the rice cakes.
The driver deposits Jonas in Hyōgo Ward, a quaint portside town. Still ravenous, he finds a street vendor and, when the man is preoccupied with a customer, pockets a single plum. He waits until he’s far away, well inside the Port of Kobe, before risking his first bite. The pop as his teeth puncture the skin is visceral. Juice floods his mouth, and the soft meat of the fruit is springtime itself. He’s convinced it’s the most delicious thing he’s ever tasted.
The port is more than two miles long. Massive merchant ships sit in thirty-four berths running the length of the shore. The dense plants and generators and factories of the Hanshin Industrial Region provide a backdrop of omnipresent gray. Cranes swing cargo containers overhead. Trucks and forklifts skim over the asphalt, belching out diesel fumes and coughing up black clouds.
Jonas moves from ship to ship, giant floating cities with names like Golden Nori and Guanabara and Heroic Ace. He looks for vessels bound for America and captains who speak English and might be looking to take on another hand. He talks to crews as they work. He sees a lot of shaking heads.
Eventually he finds a captain who doesn’t hire him so much as takes pity on him. “This is hard work,” the captain says. “Tough labor. Men are the lightest thing on this boat.”
“I don’t mind hard work,” Jonas assures him.
Seeming to find this humorous, the captain grabs one of Jonas’s hands in his. The man’s skin feels as coarse as rope. He offers up a dry chuckle and tells Jonas his hands might as well belong to a child. He doubts Jonas has seen a hard day’s work in his life. “But we’ll change that,” he promises, flashing a grin that’s missing two teeth.
The ship is the Tōya Maru. The chief mate gives Jonas some clothing from the laundry’s lost and found, and that night, he enjoys his first proper meal in days. Two hours later, his stomach, unaccustomed to being full and traveling by sea, throws it all overboard.
The days are long but filled with tasks that make the hours pass swiftly. Jonas is assigned to replace chipped paint, to grease the fittings on hatches, grease the fittings on tackle, grease wire. Everything on the ship seems to require lubrication. One day, one of the ABs—able-bodied seamen, Jonas learns—spies the equations on his arms and starts asking questions. After several ill-fated attempts to put the man off, Jonas confesses to being a scientist. This leads him to getting assigned technical work. He’s put with the ship’s chief engineer and ends up hanging off the bow, making repairs to the bow-tank level sensor as the ocean gallops beneath him.
He lets a beard carpet his face and grows tan from working in the sun. His darkening skin begins to obscure his tattoos, but it doesn’t matter. Whether he reunites with Amanda or not, he knows this is the reality he’ll die in. Surely the quantum energies have left his body by now.
One night, the ship is buffeted by a terrible storm. Waves as high as buildings crest over the bow and assault the deck, swarming the ship. The ABs chatter and gossip about a “sudden cold front” or the ship’s radar failing to spot the oncoming hurricane, but Jonas holds a different fear, a concern that this universe might be waking to his presence, forming designs on stopping him from reaching Amanda. He tries to console himself with the argument that such worries are a ridiculous way for a scientist to think, but he knows better. He’s witnessed it.
Two more storms break out. Power failures plague the ship. Mechanical failures. Every day, the vessel develops new ailments. The crew openly begins to consider the possibility that the voyage is damned. In every conversation, Jonas keeps his own counsel. He focuses on his share of the repairs.
Despite the universe’s best efforts, the Tōya Maru makes port in Seattle, Washington. In the dead of night, the massive vessel slips into a berth. Even though it’s three o’clock in the morning and the night is as black as pitch, the men begin the work of off-loading their cargo. Amid the hoisting and winching, in the shadow of swinging cranes, Jonas slips away into the predawn darkness.
His salary from the ship pays for a Greyhound bus ticket to New York. But in Montana, the bus breaks down on the side of I-90 East. The passengers disembark to stretch their legs while the driver works to repair it. Rather than waiting for the man to undo the universe’s mischief, Jonas hitchhikes and ends up bouncing around in the rear of a dented pickup truck he estimates is at least twenty years old. Of course, the pickup also develops trouble.
Jonas transfers to a train, which manages to get as far as North Dakota before the universe stops it. Another bus takes him through Minnesota and then Wisconsin. The universe throws traffic and unseasonable snow at it. The journey is labored.
In defiance of the universe, Jonas passes through Pennsylvania and then New Jersey. With Manhattan in sight, he begins walking. It’s the middle of the night when he arrives at Van Brunt Street. The city that never sleeps rises from the horizon like a waking giant. Apart from a handful of minor changes—a street with a different name, a building with a different facade, the Mets with an extra World Series championship to their name—it’s the New York he remembers. It’s the New York that’s home.
He quickens his pace with each step that brings him closer to the Upper West Side. He should be exhausted, spent beyond belief or description, but his strides grow quicker. He fears another storm or earthquake. Or the universe could conjure some new mischief to delay him. But he’s so close now that he knows nothing can truly stop him.
