A part of him will always blame himself for Victor’s vendetta, suspicious of the possibility that Victor was right, that his own achievements were the result of Victor’s brilliance. “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The thought plagues Jonas. Had he stood on Victor’s shoulders? And if so, was there anything so wrong in that? Shouldn’t what was good enough for Newton be good enough for Cullen?
Jonas has no answer, despite years of asking himself the question. Lying on the cold, hard ground—his lungs bleeding, his bones broken, each breath a labor—he starts to believe that this is what he deserves. The world grows dark, and the basic act of keeping his eyes open begins to feel impossible.
Voices begin to leak into his reverie, but they sound distant, walled up.
“You okay, buddy?”
“Don’t move, okay?”
“Help’s on the way.”
“I’m done, Amanda,” Jonas mutters. “Wherever you are . . . I’m done. And I’m sorry.”
“Don’t talk,” one of the voices says. “Save your breath.”
“I’m sorry. You—” Jonas’s voice catches. He feels a tear escape. A memory tortures him. “You can’t swim against the tide of the universe.”
He feels no electricity, no pinpricks beneath his skin. Whatever quantum phenomenon that has made his recent trips possible is now spent. This universe, this reality, is finally—finally—the last one he will ever know.
And the thought that Amanda is still alive, that she will now mourn a trio of Jonases, is more painful than anything his body has endured.
So Jonas lets go. If there’s an afterlife, there’s an Amanda there waiting for him. He goes to her.
NOW
Somewhere far away, a child is crying. Jonas is barely cognizant of it and completely unaware that it’s really the wail of a siren. He is deaf to the murmur of the crowd, to the commotion of the paramedics as they strap a blood pressure cuff on him and check his airway.
Questions and commands are barked at him. “Sir, can you hear me?”
“Can you look at me, sir?”
“Can you feel that?”
“Can you squeeze my hand?”
The answer to every question is no.
His body moves in response to each of the paramedics’ manipulations as though dead. They poke and prod him, needles are produced, veins are punctured, but nothing changes.
Jonas hears someone calling his name from a million miles away. No, not calling—screaming. A woman’s desperate voice. Amanda’s voice.
If he could open his eyes, Jonas would see her pushing through the throng of onlookers, tears streaming down her face, which is pale with terror. One of the paramedics turns from Jonas to hold her back, but she keeps screaming his name.
One of the cruelties of death is its capacity for delusion, for creating hallucinations of divine perfection as one slips the bonds of life. This, Jonas is convinced, is the reason he’s hearing Amanda’s cries. “I’m coming, my love,” he gasps. “Don’t worry. I’m coming.”
“I’m here,” she replies, and for the first time, it doesn’t sound distant. For the first time, he feels hands on his face, sliding over his sweat and tears. “I’m here,” the voice repeats with an urgency he can’t make sense of.
His mind, always his most reliable asset, fights through a fog of pain, laboring despite lack of oxygen. If the voice belongs to Amanda, if the voice isn’t from whichever plane exists after death, if what he’s hearing is real, it would mean that of all the universes he fell through, he somehow landed back in the one where Amanda is alive. The odds of such a thing are beyond even Jonas’s ability to calculate. The only explanation is that, deprived of blood and oxygen, he’s hallucinating, a predeath psychosis.
But her lips feel so real on his. The tears falling from her eyes and onto his face are beyond his capacity to imagine. Her pleas, her desperate cries for him to open his eyes are . . . beyond his ability to ignore.
It feels impossible, the hardest thing he’s ever done, but Jonas opens his eyes. And the image he sees is watery, a photograph slowly coming into focus. But he can’t deny it. He’s looking up at her. Amanda. Crying and smiling. Terrified and relieved. Grieving and joyous. All at the same time.
“I knew you’d find me,” she says through tears.
Jonas tries to speak, but the words don’t come. It’s all he can do to keep breathing, to keep looking at her. To feel the grip of her hand. To see her face. To know that, somehow, he’s home.
The crowd is chattering as the paramedics work, and suddenly an entire city reasserts itself. But as Jonas stares up at the woman he loves more than his own life, the two of them are the only two people who exist in the entire world.
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.
