“Get me in. Do it now.” His voice is starting to rise. He feels tingling in his extremities but can’t tell whether it’s adrenaline or a sign that he’s running out of time. He senses the police closing in, so he reminds Gillard of the gun by pushing it against his head. “Tell them to put their guns down and back away.”
With apparent reluctance, Gillard utters through gritted teeth, “Si vous avez un coup de feu, prenez-le.”
“Tell them to put their weapons down,” Jonas reiterates. He’s shouting now, partially out of stress and partially to compete with the bleat of the Klaxon.
“I just told them.”
“And I’d believe you,” Jonas retorts, “if I didn’t speak French.” With that, he pistol-whips Gillard, and the inspector collapses at Jonas’s feet, hopefully close enough that the other police won’t chance shooting their comrade. He’s bought himself seconds, but he wastes them on a futile attempt to open the door. It’s locked. Behind him, the police officers advance, guns poised. Doing his best to ignore them, he brings Gillard’s gun down and fires a quick shot, the first in his life with live ammunition, blowing the lock apart. He swings the door open and closes it quickly behind him.
Jonas scans the room, a warren of file cabinets and shelves and lockers. He drops the gun and, fueled by adrenaline, drags one of the larger cabinets in front of the door. The police throw their combined weight against this bulwark, but the file cabinet holds its ground, a silent sentinel.
He’s pulling drawers and knocking items off shelves, thrashing desperately like a drowning man grasping for a rope, when reality begins to change around him. At first, he could mistake the phenomenon as a trick of the light or the by-product of all the adrenaline singing in his veins. Like heat rippling off a stretch of asphalt, the world begins to blur, losing shape and form. Jonas strains to focus but only manages to trade his warped, diffused vision for a swiftly shifting one. The walls, painted a utilitarian gray, shift to an olive green, then off-white. File cabinets grow shorter, then taller. The shelving changes orientation. The pattern on the floor beneath him changes color, the linoleum tiles shifting and swapping and flipping. The file cabinet skids an inch deeper into the room. The police on the other side of the door are making progress.
Jonas feels the clock ticking down. Around him, the room flickers. He glimpses new universes—new interiors, new landscapes—flashing around him like images through a zoetrope. Night. Rain. Snow. A sunrise. A city. A forest. With each flash, the evidence room seems farther and farther away.
Jonas tells himself he should surrender, let the cosmic forces he unleashed sweep him away through an infinite number of parallel realities. He’s about to give up, to let go, praying that if there’s any justice in the universe—in the multiverse—then somehow, some way, he’ll be reunited with Amanda.
When he sees it, he thinks he’s hallucinating. It doesn’t seem real. Can’t be real. And yet . . . there it is. Black text on a white field.
His name.
CULLEN, JONAS
A sticker affixed to a bag of thick, milky plastic. Jonas surges toward it with violent urgency. The world around him shifts and slips and changes, like radio stations snapping in and out of frequency, giving him glimpses of other universes.
His fingers grasp the bag. It’s on top of a pile of similar evidence bags, right out in the open. Some distant part of him chastises himself for not realizing it sooner: the evidence was waiting to be filed, so of course it wouldn’t yet be in one of the cabinets. The bag is as light as air. His fingers fumble for its singular content, his ring, its white light still throbbing. He fishes it out of the bag. His hands tremble, pulsing with adrenaline. All around him, reality slips, compounding his disorientation. He wills himself to focus, to steady his hands.
Please God, just let me complete the simple act of slipping this ring onto my finger.
The Almighty, apparently, isn’t taking requests at this particular moment because the floor disappears out from beneath Jonas’s feet, and a furtive glance confirms that it’s not just the floor. The entire room, the entire building, blinks out of existence, and in an instant, Jonas is in free fall, alone, plunging through an oil-painting sunset.
The ring pinballs between his fingers. Every second that ticks past is another where he could lose his grip on it entirely.
Around him, the sunset shifts to an acrid gray sky. The horizon rises to meet him in a jagged apocalyptic vision. He plunges toward the upturned wing of a downed airplane, jutting up from the ground like a pike. He’s seconds away from being impaled upon it, when . . .
The wing is gone. Replaced by a city whose buildings are integrated with vines and other varieties of verdant growth. A perfect, seamless blend of cityscape and landscape. Breathtaking.
Another reality-slip, and the city winks away. The ground now speeding toward him is covered with an immaculate garden the size of a small town. It’s encased by a translucent dome several stories high. Explosions, blossoming like fireworks overhead, reflect in its glass surface.
Then a cluster of skyscrapers rises from the earth, clawing at the sky and blotting out the sun. They missile toward Jonas, the ring still fumbling in his hands, refusing to cooperate, as he asks for one more miracle . . .
The ring slips onto his finger with such simplicity that Jonas is given cause to ask himself why it had been such a chore in the first place. In an eyeblink, the buildings shooting up at him flash away. Gravity retains its hold on him, though, and he continues to fall.
Until a car smashes into him.
No, that’s not right, he tells himself. He considers his positioning and comes to the conclusion that he smashed into the car. From above. Its roof has crumpled beneath his weight, the windshield blown out in jagged pebbles.
He’s on his back, he realizes. Everything hurts. Every nerve sings in agony, but at least they confirm that he’s alive. He stares up and recognizes his surroundings. He’s in Pregnin, a small town near CERN, a little over a mile and a half from the Swiss border. He’s been here before, albeit in another reality, and knows the buildings, the architecture. He knows in his bones that he’s still in France, but the houses and structures are suffused with a Japanese aesthetic.
He feels warm. Astonishment wells in his gut. Elation.
He’s done it. He has become the first human to travel between universes, to traverse realities. The enormity of this achievement hits with the force of a blow. His Many Worlds Proof, a work so momentous that it garnered him a Nobel Prize, feels suddenly insignificant by comparison. Proving the existence of parallel worlds was the academic equivalent of summitting Everest. But to travel to one . . . that’s landing on the moon.
Questions and uncertainties stampede through his mind. Is Amanda here? Which reality has he ended up in? Is Amanda here? Is this the right universe? Is Amanda here?
Sounds begin to leak into his awareness. He hears urgent French, an overlapping of voices. People emerging from their homes to see what’s happened.
“Cet homme, il est tombé du ciel.”This man, he fell out of the sky.
He hears excited chatter and the sound of people running toward him. He shifts, trying to right himself atop the crumpled steel, and is rewarded by a pain unlike any he’s ever felt before. It shoots forward, spreading out from behind his eyes to overwhelm his whole body until he topples from the car, landing hard on asphalt. Tiny pieces of safety glass dig into his face until he passes out.
FIVE YEARS AGO
Jonas walked through SoHo—an artsy enclave waging a losing battle against gentrification—past the condos and clothing stores, the street vendors and restaurants. He consulted his phone, its GPS guiding him. The air tasted of pollen. The sun felt warm. It was spring, and the whole world felt new.
As he walked, he felt his pulse rise. For three days, his thoughts had dined on recollections of Amanda. How the sun had danced in her eyes. The little dimples formed by the upward tilt of the corners of her mouth. The way he felt when he replayed their brief encounter over and over, drawing out new details, exulting in its ephemera.
Of course he was attracted to her. He had perfect recall of her T-shirt draping over her breasts, the tone of her legs. How supple her skin was. Beautiful in every conventional sense. But all that felt ancillary, borderline irrelevant. What attracted him was her energy, her spirit. He saw in her a kindness that he was immediately drawn to, an effect he felt compelled to investigate. She was a diamond he could envision examining from every conceivable angle, each facet rewarding him with a new color.
Jonas had had his share of relationships and assignations, but whatever aesthetic qualities he may have possessed were always blunted by his “boring,” “academic” occupation. Possessing multiple doctorates in quantum physics wasn’t exactly a turn-on. Yes, he met the occasional undergrad who found the student/professor dynamic alluring, but Jonas steadfastly resisted such attachments. They felt lurid, as if he would be taking illegitimate advantage of his power. What he craved was more substantial. He didn’t want or need a relationship or a long-term commitment—not that he would have resisted either—so much as hunger for a connection, the magnetic pull of another human being.
The phone vibrated in his hand, alerting him that he was mere steps from his destination. The gallery was modest, no different from every third storefront in SoHo. Galleries, apparently, were the bulwark against the encroaching tide of condominiums that threatened to engulf the entire neighborhood. This one had oak floors and wrought iron pillars. Large canvases hung from the exposed ceiling on thick steel cables. Tiny laminated cards announced their titles, artists, and media. Jonas examined the menagerie, playing a little game in his head, seeing if he could identify which works were Amanda’s.
He felt drawn to a series of canvases, each one either four feet by four feet or six feet by six feet, massive squares covered in watercolor and gouache. Each depicted the New York City skyline from a different vantage, high and wide and expansive, daring to depict Manhattan the way God sees it. But a single painting stood out from the rest, depicting a vantage from Downtown—specifically, the rooftop of One World Trade Center—gazing from the southern tip of the island north toward a looming Manhattan. It was like being perched on a giant’s toe and staring upward. The painting was titled Pinnacle.
Jonas found the image breathtaking, portraying the city he knew so well in a way he had never seen or even imagined. Pinnacle and its siblings were photo-real but offered vistas that seemed beyond human sight. It made no sense, and Jonas had no rational explanation, but he knew in an instant that Amanda’s hands had wrought these incredible images. He confirmed the suspicion with a glance at the tag beneath each painting and fell even deeper in love.
As he stared at one of the paintings, drinking in all the details, marveling at the artistry, a dealer approached—a guy no more than twenty, with an earring and a hipster’s wardrobe, no doubt some art major working his way through college.
