Amanda watches confusion play across Jonas’s face. Her mind is churning, trying to make sense of what she’s witnessing. She hears a sudden crack of thunder, and her heart leaps in her chest. The morning sky abruptly darkens. Overhead, cumulonimbus clouds appear without warning. Sheets of rain begin to fall. Lightning strikes inches from where Jonas is standing. Any wonder or confusion Amanda has been feeling is replaced with a primal sense of fear.
“What’s happening?” she yells over the din of the storm, her voice laced with terror.
“It’s the universe,” Victor answers. “It doesn’t want this.” Then, with an eerie calm, he reaches into his coat and pulls out a handgun. “It wants this,” he says, leveling it toward her.
Amanda has never seen a gun outside of television and film, and the sight of one causes her to gasp. All around her Mother Nature rages, hurling rain and lightning down on them. Behind Amanda, raindrops drum away at her embryonic painting. If she turned from the gun and looked, she’d see a weeping canvas with grayish streaks crying down its surface.
Jonas is surging forward, trying to reason with Victor—Can it really be him?—while rain and lightning lash about them. “Victor . . . you don’t want to do this. Just—just put the gun down. Put the gun away and we’ll talk. Whatever the problem is, we can talk this out.”
Victor raises the gun another inch. “I’ve already talked it out. This is what the universe wants.”
Amanda watches his finger curl around the trigger. Everything moves in slow motion, taking on the quality of a dream. That’s what this is, she thinks. Of course, it has to be a dream. With that epiphany, all that is happening—the preternatural storm, the two dead men resurrected, Victor’s mania—snaps into focus and makes sense.
When Victor fires the gun, Amanda first mistakes the report for another thunderclap. But then she sees Jonas drop to his knees. Her mind reconstructs the previous second: Victor shot at her, and Jonas threw himself in front of the bullet. She watches, slack jawed, as crimson mists into the puddle beneath Jonas’s crumpled form.
She drops to her knees, instinctively cradling him in her arms. His form sags ominously in her grip. Everything blurs as her eyes fill with tears and rainwater. She clears them with the back of her hand and sees a bloody chasm where Jonas’s heart should be. Her hand rockets forward to stanch the bleeding, but his blood geysers between her fingers. She thinks to move for her phone, back near the roofline with her forgotten canvas. She could call for help, but that would mean leaving Jonas, and she fears he’s too far gone already.
Jonas’s fingers tremor toward her face. Blood peeks from between his teeth. “I did it,” he breathes. “I made it back to you.”
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.
