When the ground finally rises to meet him, it’s a mercy.
But Jonas doesn’t die. This should be impossible, but he’s in too much agony for it to be otherwise. Despite all the tortures his body has suffered since leaving his room at NH Genève Aéroport, he’s never felt like this. His head throbs. Each beat of his heart brings a new volley of pain. His chest is on fire. He moves a hand to palpate the offending area, but it gives way, sinking beneath his touch. He feels two ribs swinging free, and the ensuing pain clouds his vision with black spots.
Every breath is an effort, and his only reward for each is a new spasm of suffering. And yet he manages to get to his feet, where he sees why he’s not a smear on the pavement. He’s not on pavement at all. He’s on an elevated pathway—a kind of footbridge—that stretches between skyscrapers, part of what he now sees is a latticework of pathways connecting the city’s buildings, each one offered up by the multiverse to break his fall.
Jonas is about to take this as an Eva-like sign that perhaps the universe isn’t working entirely against him when he’s thrown back down to the footbridge’s laminated metal. He knows who the attacker is, the moment reminiscent of their fight back at the Spire, two men atop a thin expanse. But this time, Victor is fueled by the memory of his earlier defeat. He refuses to let up, to cease, to stop his fists from hurling down.
The only saving grace is that Victor appears focused on Jonas’s head, mercifully avoiding his shattered ribs. If anyone is on the footbridge to witness this attack, they’re not interceding. Victor releases another punch, and Jonas feels his nose collapse. His mouth feels wet and tastes of copper.
His hands preoccupied with defending his head, Jonas brings his knee up—as hard as he can, grateful it’s not as broken as the rest of him—and connects with Victor’s groin. Victor howls in pain and redoubles his efforts. He swings a fist against Jonas’s flank, and Jonas feels one of the wayward ribs stab his lung. Now it’s his turn to scream, but he can’t catch enough oxygen.
Sensing his advantage, Victor grasps at Jonas’s throat. Jonas reaches up to pry Victor’s fingers away, but Victor maintains his grip, his knuckles as firm and white as ice. He stares down at Jonas with a cold intensity. Jonas feels a hunger, a primal drive, to plead for his life, but the words won’t come. There’s nothing in his chest but fire and blood and two jagged talons tearing him apart from the inside.
His flailing thoughts grasp for hope and seize on the idea that maybe there are more versions of himself out in the multiverse. That maybe at least one more exists and can find his way back to Amanda. That in a multiverse with as many realities as grains of sand on a single earth, there could still be one—just one—where he and Amanda are together. And happy. Maybe even with a child.
The thought brings him peace, which warms his soul as his body begins to grow cold. His eyes slowly close, and he stops struggling against Victor’s grip. He’s ready to rest now. He’s ready to go.
But then he’s falling again, the footbridge having disappeared out from under him. Gravity tugs, pulling him down, while Victor, still atop him, hands still wrapped around his neck, pushes down.
Reality changes around them again. Snow scratches at them for a heartbeat. In the next, they plunge through fire. The sky runs from gray to black to blue to an incandescent orange.
Deep within himself, Jonas summons the strength to struggle one final time. He writhes and wriggles, and still Victor’s hands remain clasped around his throat. He manages to shift his weight, and then he’s rolling over, atop Victor. And Victor, in turn, rolls over him. They’re tumbling end over end, like Amanda’s and Jonas’s ill-fated limousine, like the five-hundred-yen coin Jonas flipped in Hijiyama Park.
Jonas or Amanda.
Heads or tails.
Each fifty-fifty flip with the potential to birth a new reality.
Victor or Jonas.
One will break the other’s fall.
The universe favors certain outcomes.
TWO YEARS AGO
They married beneath an azure and coral sky on a beach at the eastern end of Long Island. Waves kissed the shore behind them as a small group of guests sat on white folding chairs arranged in an arc. The wind gusted gently off the water, and the air smelled of salt and charcoal.
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.
