Sleep and the Soul, page 34
He passed it to Tony. “Is that real money, in your world?”
“Sure.”
“Then let’s test it out.”
They entered the store.
There were racks of bread, and bins of fruit and vegetables by the entrance. The names of the bakeries were all familiar, and the fruit didn’t look strange or exotic. They strolled past shelves of breakfast cereal and tinned food; a few of the brands didn’t ring any bells for Omar, but then, that was no different from walking into Aldi’s.
“You want a drink or something?” he asked Tony.
“Yeah.”
They approached the refrigerated cabinet. There was flavored milk from the usual dairies; he picked out a chocolate one for himself, and looked to Tony, who said, “I’ll have the same.”
The cashier was a bored-looking man in his twenties. “Eight dollars,” he said, when Omar put the drinks on the counter.
“Are you sure?” Omar could have sworn the tag on the shelf had said $3.20, though maybe that had been the price of a neighboring item. “Don’t you want to scan them?”
“The scanner’s on the fritz.”
Omar handed over his ten dollars, and the man barely glanced at it before giving him change.
On the street, he opened his carton and took a long swig. Tony hesitated. “What if the food’s different here? Like ... mirror-image molecules, or different isotopes?”
“We can still breathe the air, can’t we?” Omar replied. He didn’t really know what fears were reasonable, but weird chemistry seemed like the least of their problems.
“Okay.” Tony sampled the milk warily, then seemed to decide it was palatable.
“You want to check out your house?” Omar asked him.
Tony was quiet for a while. “I’ve got a key,” he said. “But what if it doesn’t fit?”
Omar shrugged. “Then I’ll help you break in.” There were far worse things that might have ceased to match than the lock and the key, and he suspected that the odds for all of them were more likely to grow worse over time than better.
They continued down the street, past shops and houses whose architecture all seemed familiar, whatever variations had been wrought at the level of paint and lettering. A few cars began speeding through the traffic, honking frantically as they weaved from lane to lane. Omar kept expecting to hear sirens closing in on the offenders, but the police were either dealing with more serious transgressions, or had gone off to tend to their own personal meltdowns.
“You got brothers and sisters?” he asked Tony.
“A little sister. She’s ten. What about you?”
“Two older brothers.”
“Still in high school?”
“No. One’s working in Darwin, one’s studying in America.” Omar wondered if they might have been spared the disruption, even if he was now separated from them.
Separated by what, though? If the world had been torn apart, where were the fault lines? “The roads all still join up,” he said. There were no sudden dead-ends, no mismatched strips of asphalt like an earthquake might have produced. “And the buildings have barely changed.”
“I think it’s mostly people that are different,” Tony replied. “People, phones and underwear.”
“Maybe it will all snap back into place,” Omar joked.
Tony checked his boxers again. “Oh, come on! Purple?”
“What did you put on this morning?”
“Black.” He sounded a little offended by the thought that he might have willingly chosen anything else. “So have I swapped bodies with someone who wears purple underwear ... or just swapped underwear with them?”
“I don’t feel like I’ve swapped bodies,” Omar said.
“I don’t either,” Tony admitted. “But swapping underwear would be gross.”
Omar tried to elevate the conversation. “Who was the Prime Minister, when you woke up this morning?”
“Tanya Plibersek.”
“Same here.” Omar floundered; did he really want to run through a list of heads of government, when neither of them could check their answers on the web? Winners of wars? Assassination attempts?
He settled on, “You remember Covid?”
Tony laughed. “How could I forget?”
“Then our worlds probably aren’t much different,” Omar decided. “But until half an hour ago, I wasn’t in your school, and you weren’t in mine.”
“So whose world is this?” Tony asked. “If we’ve both come from other places, is there anyone who’s stayed put?”
“I don’t know.”
They turned off Gleason Street, with Tony leading the way. A woman approached them. “Have you seen my son? Samuel?”
Omar said, “I’m sorry.” He’d never had a classmate by that name, and even if he had it wouldn’t have helped.
The woman grew distraught. “He can’t have just vanished!”
“Everyone seems to have ... shifted around,” Tony explained.
“He’s a very quiet boy,” the woman stressed. “Very shy.”
“We don’t know where he is,” Omar replied, resisting the urge to start inventing search strategies that he had no reason to believe would succeed, just to offer her some comfort.
She grimaced and shook her head, but let them pass. They walked on in silence. Omar was half-wishing now that he’d parted from Tony earlier; it might not have improved his chances of getting back to his family, but either way, he was dreading having to watch his new friend coming to terms with his own loss.
“It’s down here,” Tony said, taking a final turn. “The fifth from the corner. At least the house numbers are all the same.” He laughed softly. “That neighbor’s lawn was almost dead, before.” The front yard they were passing was a lush, reticulated green.
A dog began barking, out of sight but not far ahead.
“Is that yours?” Omar asked.
“No, but it sounds just like Leon from next door.” Tony turned to him, excited. “What if the animals have all ... ?” He trailed off, confused. Omar couldn’t blame him; any touch of familiarity seemed hopeful, but it was hard to flesh out a scenario in which someone else’s pet would guide him back to his own version of reality.
As they came to what should have been Leon’s house, a wiry gray-and-white dog ran back and forth behind the low garden fence, snarling at them. “It’s not him,” Tony admitted glumly. “His coat’s different.”
When they stopped outside number 12, Omar didn’t press Tony to start listing changes. So, his neighbor’s dog was new to him, and maybe the curtains or the letterbox here had been different when he’d left for school that morning. But if there were any exceptions to the shuffling of the deck, surely they’d be within families?
Tony walked up to the front door and took the key from his pocket. Omar approached, racking his brain for some words of consolation and encouragement he could utter when the inevitable happened.
Tony put the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door.
Omar said, “Fuck me.”
“Are you coming?” Tony asked impatiently.
Omar followed him inside.
There was some kind of poster hanging in the hallway, with Chinese characters in gold on red. In the kitchen, pictures on the fridge showed two children, a boy and a girl – the boy too young to be his host, but with roughly similar features. The girl was also much younger than ten, so they could just be old photos.
Tony opened the fridge and took out a jug of orange juice. “You want some?”
“Sure.”
He poured two glasses and handed one to Omar. Omar took a sip, then looked around the room. “Is it similar?”
“Yes.”
“You think your family still lives here?”
Tony nodded toward the fridge. “That kid’s not me.”
“Oh, man.” Omar lowered his gaze. “That doesn’t settle it, though,” he reasoned. “If everyone’s moved, your parents could still end up here, just like you did.”
“Maybe.” Tony drained his glass in silence.
Omar said, “You want to see if there’s anything on TV?”
“The living room’s through there.” Tony gestured back down the hall. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Okay.”
Omar found the room, and hunted for the remote. The TV was working perfectly, but as he flicked through the channels all he saw was cartoons and old movies.
He heard a toilet flush and water running, then footsteps approaching. “There’s no news,” he said, turning from the screen.
The boy standing in the doorway looked a bit like Tony, and was dressed much the same, but it wasn’t him.
“What are you doing?” the boy demanded. “How did you get in here?”
“Tony let me in.”
“Who’s Tony? And what happened to Mehdi?”
Omar rose to his feet. “My name’s Omar,” he said. “I came here with Tony. He lives here; he had a key.”
The boy said, “I have the key. And I came here with Mehdi.”
Omar gazed back at him in silence, hoping he would at least reach the same conclusion.
“You replaced Mehdi, while I was in the bathroom?” the boy suggested.
“Or you replaced Tony,” Omar replied. “Or both. I don’t know the right way to think about it.”
“So we’re still moving? It hasn’t stopped?” The boy scowled. “But all the time me and Mehdi were walking here, I didn’t see anyone disappear off the street.”
Omar said, “Me neither. But even from the start, nothing’s changed right in front of my eyes, like a cut in a movie.” It was more like one of those seamless tricks where they panned away from a group of people, then panned back to reveal some impossible alteration.
The boy remained in the doorway, regarding Omar warily. “What’s your name?” Omar asked him.
“David.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Omar had hoped that they might still be allies, inheriting some of the camaraderie that had led both pairs of newly met strangers to the same place. But if David was unsettled by his presence, he didn’t want to outstay a welcome that had been meant for someone else.
“Good luck,” he said, picking up his backpack. “I hope you find your family.”
“You too,” David replied.
Omar left the house and headed back the way he’d come. The dog that wasn’t Leon had been replaced by another dog with darker fur, though it barked at him with similar fury. The lush lawn near the corner hadn’t died, but it was much less verdant.
When Omar reached the twice rebranded convenience store, he could see from the doorway that the checkout was unattended. He was starting to wish that he’d spent his money on something more substantial than chocolate milk, and he wondered if his last two dollars could at least get him a cheap pack of flatbread; he’d placed the coins in his pocket, and he could still feel them through the lining, pressing against his skin. But he was afraid to go inside now, lest the malleable world conspire to frame him as a shoplifter.
He walked on, but then he stopped in the street and opened his backpack, wondering if a previous owner might have stashed something edible. There was nothing inside but textbooks. Only half of the titles were familiar, but each book on its own seemed perfectly ordinary; when Omar flicked through them, the typeface and formatting remained consistent, the page numbers ascended in the usual fashion, and the subject matter didn’t jump from geography to mathematics halfway through.
He took out his phone and tried a PIN at random, with no luck, but maybe next time he’d chance on an unlocked state, and find his way into the settings to make that “permanent” ... before passing on the favor to someone else.
Walking by the school, he saw half a dozen students playing soccer, all in their street clothes. They were shouting at each other, happily engaged in the game as if nothing in the world was troubling them. He could probably join them if he wanted; it wouldn’t matter if he never saw any of them again.
But he kept walking, back toward his house.
It was mid-afternoon now, and the streets were almost empty. Omar passed a middle-aged man coming the other way, pushing a stroller with a screaming toddler. The man wasn’t quite ignoring the child, but each time he glanced down he seemed to recoil and look away. A woman jogged by, staring straight ahead. Two primary school kids in broad-brimmed hats chatted volubly as they dawdled along; Omar couldn’t tell if they were long-time best friends, miraculously unseparated, or new acquaintances doing their best to make each other welcome.
He didn’t recognize any of these people, but the neighborhood itself still felt utterly familiar. Maybe if he’d been away for a few years it would have been the same, with a smattering of small differences too numerous to ignore but too minor to apprehend individually. Nothing he saw could begin to dent the conviction that this was his territory – still conforming to the map carved deep into his brain over the decade since his family had moved here, before he could remember, at the age of three.
When he reached number 77, he paused to take in the changes one by one. The geraniums in the flower bed at the side of the yard had gone from red to purple. The paint on the front walls of the house was still white, but it was peeling from the eaves. The living room window was crystal clear, letting him see the grain in the wooden slats of the venetian blinds behind the pane; it had been grubby before, and his mother had been nagging him to clean it.
As he approached the screen door, it looked less worn than he remembered, and when he opened it, it emitted a different creak than he was accustomed to. The front door bore faint dirty finger marks that were only noticeable because they were not quite where they should have been. But his key slid into the lock, and turned smoothly, and when he pushed on the door it opened.
Inside, the carpet in the hallway looked the same, but smelled newer. Omar hesitated, wondering if there might yet be a way to recover everything. If he backed out now and retraced every step since he’d left the house that morning, maybe he could undo all the changes.
That plan was absurd – but then, the whole situation deserved to be rejected for the same reason. This wasn’t a dream, but it had to be a kind of fever. He couldn’t banish it with feverish rituals; all he could do was stare it down and hope it would wear off.
In the living room, the family photos showed a couple his parents’ age with three children, the eldest a girl. They might have been newly discovered cousins. Omar stared hard at the youngest boy in the portraits, his gaze penetrating the flesh. The little prick had stolen his cheekbones. Whatever subconscious casting director was orchestrating his breakdown, they seemed to have hired one of those forensic anthropologists who reconstructed people’s appearance from their skeletons. That didn’t really explain Rami turning into a woman, but then, he wasn’t around to complain.
Omar went to the room that ought to have been his own. The bed, the desk, the chest of drawers were all in the right position. The bookcase was just as full as he’d left it, though some of the books had been swapped for other volumes, matching the size and shape of the originals more closely than their content.
His map of the world had been replaced by a star chart, and the blanket on his bed was different, but his desktop computer was, as far as he could tell, exactly the same. His father had forbidden him from putting a password on it; Omar hoped that was a universal prohibition, or at least one entirely determined by bone structure. He hit the power button, and waited for the thing to boot up.
The desktop appeared, with no login screen demanding authorization. Omar opened a web browser and tried to reach a few news sites, but they all returned errors; search engines and social media were the same. Wasn’t the internet supposed to be so robust that it could weave connections around any obstacle? There were no broken streets, so why should there be broken fibers?
He leaned back in his chair, frustrated. The computer itself still worked – which meant the various components hadn’t ended up incompatible, and nor had different portions of the software found themselves working at cross-purposes. But if that feat of integrity was like his textbooks managing to stay on-topic, maybe traffic on the net was suffering something more akin to a delivery driver turning up at what should have been Gino’s Convenience, only to find that the paperwork for their consignment didn’t match the business’s new name. None of which explained how the whole phenomenon managed to walk the line between dreamlike incongruity and running a chainsaw through everything ... though if it had gone wild on the scale of his own body and turned him into some kind of composite, he probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to know about it.
He went back to the living room and tried the TV. Like the broadcasts he’d seen at Tony’s house, there was no news interrupting the bland daytime schedule. Had the journalists who’d usually rush to cover any local disaster all given up and gone home, or was he picking up signals from stations where there’d been no disruption at all? In the advertising breaks, some of the brands and businesses were familiar; others were like the fictional ads embedded in a drama, where just enough had been changed to avoid infringing anyone’s trademark. But that still didn’t tell him if the world these images came from was the world he was sitting in as he watched.
Omar left the house, walked around the block, and entered it again. The carpet was older now, the family in the photos was different, the star chart in his room was a poster of a rapper, and the computer he’d left powered up was no longer switched on.
He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The sheets smelled as if they’d been laundered with an unfamiliar detergent, but the mattress felt exactly right. Whenever he’d slept in a different bed, on a holiday or visiting relatives, he’d spent the night chafing like a runner in ill-fitting shoes. How could he be lost, how could he be exiled, when he could lie here, so at ease?
The sound of a car pulling into the driveway roused him from the edge of sleep. He jumped up – noticing in passing that the rapper had been usurped by a travel poster – and ran to the living room, where he peeked out through the blinds. The car was the same model as the one his family had had for the last few years, but he couldn’t see the number plates, or the driver who’d just emerged.
