In Any Lifetime: A Novel, page 20
The flight attendant makes announcements in English and German. The passengers are lectured on how to fasten a seat belt. Jonas doesn’t see any children aboard, and the hush of the cabin is disquieting. Then the plane’s engines whir, and the floor beneath him vibrates. They taxi almost immediately—no interminable wait on the tarmac, no endless queue of jets awaiting clearance for takeoff.
Their flight path takes them over the island of Manhattan. From his window, Jonas can see Ellis Island, or whatever it’s known as here, but the Statue of Liberty does not stand watch in front of it. In its place is a towering iron statue of a figure with its arm and hand outstretched, fingers straight as a ruler. It’s too far away for Jonas to get a proper look, but he’s confident that the figure is Adolf Hitler.
THREE YEARS AGO
The first week in March had always been Amanda’s favorite, when New York City shrugs off the shackles of winter, and gray skies yield to blue. She enjoyed watching the city reawaken, the world wrapped in sunlight, the air smelling of new beginnings. Spring in Manhattan felt like a second chance.
She and Jonas walked hand in hand through Central Park. The sun felt warm and seemed to make the whole world glow. They both wore shorts and T-shirts. His read MAY THE F=ma BE WITH YOU. Amanda’s ponytail was threaded through her Mets cap. They didn’t speak as they strode across the slab of green carved into the heart of Manhattan. They didn’t need to. The feeling of their fingers intertwined, their bodies close together, moving in time with each other’s steps, was enough.
She heard Jonas’s phone buzz in his pocket. She weaved a finger through her ponytail, a nervous habit, as she watched Jonas pull out his phone and blanch at the screen.
“It’s her,” he said. His voice was laden with uncertainty.
Amanda didn’t need to be told. She knew from his reaction, and the instinct was confirmed with a twinge in her stomach. The call was from the managing editor of the Journal of Applied & Computational Mathematics, and she felt her heart begin to canter. This was one of those moments when their life together could change. She nodded encouragement. “Answer it.”
“If they don’t—” He stopped, unable to give voice to the thought, lest it become true. “If they don’t publish it, I’m out of options.”
It had been a year since his dismissal from Columbia. A year of watching as Jonas’s friends and colleagues peeled off and abandoned him one by one. It wasn’t that they believed the allegation of plagiarism, they insisted, with varying degrees of sincerity. What went unsaid was that they were more afraid of Victor than loyal to Jonas. Amanda fumed to herself and her girlfriends and raged on Jonas’s behalf, but he weathered each defection and betrayal with stoic composure. Amanda had watched as he threw himself into his work, devoting countless hours to his Many Worlds Proof, diving deep into theoretical minutiae that she thought she had no hope of grasping.
He had tried to explain his work to her. He had a knack for conveying quantum physics in terms she could understand, but invariably he descended into a tangent and left her behind. She recognized the words he was using as English, but their arrangement made no sense. What mattered, though, was the way he lit up like Times Square when he talked. She didn’t understand “relative state formulation” or a “wave function collapse,” but it was of no consequence. The spark in him—the spark she’d fallen in love with—was all that mattered.
She didn’t know whether he would be able to complete his work, though she had faith in him. If he completed it, some scientific journal would publish it, she hoped, and for a year she had been sustained by the absence of the hopelessness Jonas had felt that night on the bench at the Columbia campus. She lived in dread of seeing that look on his face again, knowing that to see him so broken would break her in turn.
To keep that thought at bay, Amanda stepped in front of Jonas, looked him in the eye, and reminded him, “I’m not going anywhere.” She had repeated the assertion countless times in the previous year, and with no less sincerity.
Jonas thumbed his phone to answer the call. “Yes,” he managed, his voice tentative. “This is Dr. Cullen.”
Amanda studied his expression, his body language, anything, to glean a hint of what was being said on the other end of the call. Her heart galloped.
“I see,” Jonas said. He offered no sign of whether the news was good or bad. “Yes.”
Amanda searched his face for a hint, any clue she could decipher, and saw nothing. The tension was unbearable.
“Thank you,” Jonas said, his voice as level as the horizon.
She watched him tap the phone to end the call. He stared at it while she stared at him, searching for any sign of hope, resisting the urge to ask, willing herself to wait for the verdict.
After an eternity, Jonas finally said, “They’re going to publish it.” He sounded stunned. The thought escaped him in a breath.
Amanda let out a scream. She clutched Jonas tightly and yelled her joy in his ear. Still embracing him, she jumped up and down. In her heart, she knew she was feeling relief and elation in equal measure, but she didn’t care. This news was a year in the coming and well worth the wait, and she felt unburdened immediately.
Then, strangely, something struck her in the back. She pulled her arms from around Jonas. Whatever had hit her flopped to the ground. Her first instinct was that a bird had flown into her, but looking down, she saw it was a fluorescent-pink disk. A Frisbee.
A goateed hipster with a stud in his nose ran up. “Sorry!” he yelled. “My bad.”
Amanda shook her head, recalling her first time meeting Jonas two years before. Life had an ironic way of repeating itself. She looked to Jonas and mock-chided, “Did you pay him to do that?”
Jonas didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to face her and got down on one knee. Something disconnected in Amanda’s brain. Was what she thought was happening actually happening?
Jonas shrugged. “So what if I did?”
The world stopped. Everything seemed brighter, louder, more real. Amanda’s mind oriented itself to record each second, full with the knowledge that this was one of life’s most important moments. Her fingertips tingled. She couldn’t feel her legs. The entire world shrank to the patch of grass where she was standing.
Jonas handed her the Frisbee. There was a spot beneath its surface, like the anticyclonic storm on Jupiter that Jonas had shown her at the Hayden Planetarium. She flipped the disk over to get a better look and gasped. Taped to the underside was a diamond ring. Her breath caught in her throat, but she managed to remark, “You certainly timed the hell out of this.”
“Yeah, that was a lucky accident,” Jonas admitted. “But it’s like I’ve been telling you, the universe—”
“Favors certain outcomes,” she breathed. She held the Frisbee in her hands and stared at the ring. It held a single diamond, its facets catching the sunlight and reflecting it back through the tape. The hipster snapped a photo with his phone. She looked at Jonas, who was still kneeling. “You know you can get up now, right?” She wanted to kiss him, to tell him she was desperate to marry him, though in her heart, they were already committed beyond marriage, and she didn’t care if that made any sense at all.
“Not yet,” Jonas said. A puckish grin formed on his face, and Amanda wondered what was next. His smirk grew a little wider, and then he asked, “Why do I do just as you say? Why must I just give you your way?” It was like when he described his work to her; she recognized the words as English, but they made little sense.
Then recognition dawned. Her eyes widened. “No,” she whispered through teeth bared in a wide grin. “You’re not actually going to . . .”
Yes. He started to sing.
Amanda beamed and laughed. She could never remember being as happy, and her joy was so potent, she didn’t even feel the tears gushing from her eyes.
“Why do I sigh, why don’t I try to forget? It must have been that something lovers call fate . . .”
“I love you too much,” Amanda cried. In that moment, it was all she knew and ever wanted to know.
“Kept me saying I have to wait,” Jonas bellowed, shooting to his feet. His hands waved. People started gathering to stare in slack-jawed astonishment, but Jonas didn’t seem to care. He was scream-singing, fueled by joy and abandonment, with no regard for who was watching. “I saw them all, just couldn’t fall, till we met!” He drew out “met” to at least four syllables. His voice cracked. He was leagues away from being on pitch. “It had to be you! It had to be you!”
Amanda was suddenly aware of the Frisbee still dangling from her hand. She turned it over, peeled the ring away, and slipped it on her finger. She felt her tears at last. One day, she would look back and examine why she had given herself over to such emotion. Why would a ring and a promise mean anything when she’d already given herself to this man and committed her life to his? She reminded herself that her tears and her joy weren’t the products of the promise of marriage but rather her appreciation of Jonas, a man who had gone from thinking that singing was “silly” to doing it as loud as his lungs permitted in front of anyone around to witness it.
It was the most perfect moment her mind could conjure, and Amanda had never known such joy.
NOW
Hiroshima, like Japan itself, has thrived in a world without a Fat Man or Little Boy, without bombs, without a pair of nuclear holocausts. Here, 150,000 souls never died by fire in the time it takes a bird to flap its wings. Japan never entered the Axis alliance, sidestepping the descent into authoritarianism made by many of its sister nations.
Nevertheless, the city retains many of the same qualities Jonas remembers from his lone visit, six years and several universes ago. The streets remain clean enough to eat off. The people are buoyant and polite. The food is exquisite. Everything is done properly or not at all. It is a country populated by proud citizens who have every right to their national esteem.
The skyline is largely unchanged but for one notable exception, a massive tower that erupts out of the ground to claw at the sky. Jonas estimates that it’s even taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It is sleek and bright, a shard of silver planted in the middle of the city as if by God. Little wonder why they call it “Za Supaya”—the Spire.
Two days after his arrival in Hiroshima, Jonas walks, carrying two plastic bags laden with new purchases. He’s relieved to have left an electronics store without having stolen anything. The apartment he’s renting with Eva is a five-minute walk from the Spire, a prefurnished lodging of the kind favored by businessmen on long trips. The apartment has only one bedroom, but Jonas takes comfort in the routine of sleeping on the couch.
He enters and finds Eva working on her laptop. He pulls a charger from one of the bags. “Will this do?”
“Perfect,” Eva says, reaching for it gratefully. “Can’t believe I forgot to pack mine.”
“Well, we left in a hurry.”
“What about you? Did the store have everything you need?”
Jonas begins emptying the bags. He spreads a coterie of electronic items out on the coffee table, including circuit boards, copper wiring, and an AC adapter. “Mostly. There are a few precision tools I’ll need to find at a jewelry store or something. I’m not worried, though. If I can’t find them in Japan, they can’t be found.” He could have made his purchases in New Berlin, of course, but that would have meant trying to get them through security at Himmler International, and the risk just wasn’t worth it.
“This is all for your tether?” Eva asks.
Jonas gestures to his work. “I don’t know how it will react to the recalibration of the particle collider. Seems like a sensible precaution just to overhaul it entirely. Of course, I’ll need to replace the lithium-ion battery.”
“Of course,” Eva says dryly. “But I thought if you take the tether off”—her fingers flutter like a flock of birds—“you’ll leave this universe.”
“That’s what makes it tricky. I’ll have to work with one hand while the other maintains contact with the capacitance sensors on the inner circumference.” Eva greets this news with a blank stare, and Jonas just waves the notion away. “At any rate, I hope it’s all moot. The idea is to leave this reality for my final destination. Either way, I won’t need the tether anymore.”
“You know,” Eva says, “for some reason, I find it mildly offensive that you keep referring to my reality as ‘this’ reality.” Her tone is playful.
“I apologize.” Jonas bows his head in mock penitence. “I need to make sure your reality’s Linear Accelerator will do the same job as my reality’s Large Hadron Collider.” He looks down at the formulae on his arms. “I only have one more shot at this,” he continues. “Speaking of which, have you received any word from your friend?”
Eva hesitates for a fraction of a second longer than Jonas expects. “He says he’s still working on it.” Her voice sounds far away.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Fine.” Something in her voice still sounds less than convincing. “I made us reservations at Sushitei Hikarimachi tonight. Hope you like omakase.” She forces a smile and carries her laptop and new charger off into the bedroom.
As Jonas watches her go, he wonders what’s bothering her. For someone so warm and inviting, she has moments of inscrutability.
Dropping the thought, Jonas turns back to the parts he’s collected. He has a lot of work to do.
Victor’s Cray has lost the scent.
After encountering Jonas’s pathetic doppelgänger—a low-resolution copy of Victor’s nemesis—Victor tasked his computer to scour the multiverse for signs of the quarks and neutrinos thrown off by Jonas’s tether, but those signs went inexplicably dark. Of course, Victor has no way of knowing that the phenomenon was an unintended consequence of Jonas’s “overhaul.” And so Victor continues to search, pushing his machine to its limits. He weaves new algorithms and releases them into his computer models like hounds on the hunt. He codes and recodes and codes again. His computer peers into universe after universe, but each time, his hounds return breathless and empty handed. The multiverse contains a near-infinite number of realities, yet all are quiet.
Victor considers the possibilities. That Jonas could be dead is the first that comes to mind, but in that case, his tether would still be working, casting off telltale neutrinos. Or maybe Jonas and his tether reality-slipped and found themselves underground, their molecules coalescing with that of soil and silt, rocks and pebbles. Such a mishap would likely damage the tether beyond operation, accounting for the lack of detectable neutrinos. The thought of Jonas tortured by dirt in his bones and rocks in his blood brings a smile.
Victor rolls the idea around in his head, envisioning all the myriad ways Jonas could be consumed by the earth. Each vision is more grotesque than the last, but in every one, Jonas’s mouth is agape, caught in the act of a final, silent wail of indescribable agony.
As satisfying as this ending would be, as exquisite a justice as Victor could contrive—Jonas ultimately killed by his own attempts to defy the will of the universe—he knows it’s not the explanation. True, it’s just an instinct, but that same intuition has guided Victor throughout his whole life. It won him Phaedra. It brought him to the zenith of his profession. The fact that that very same instinct lost him both is an inconvenient point he chooses to ignore.
He knows that Jonas is still alive. It’s just that his tether has ceased to function. But that doesn’t mean Victor cannot find him.
Jonas resides in a world not his own. A dog in a manger. An interloper. In whatever reality he has landed in, his presence is unnatural, an anomaly. As a matter of science, such peculiarities should be easy to detect. The multiverse may possess a near-infinite assortment of realities, but it is only a matter of time until Victor locates his nemesis.
And then they’ll finish this.
Though modest in appearance, Sushitei Hikarimachi is considered one of the best restaurants in Hiroshima. White lamps dangle, casting a sheen on the laminated menus, which seem out of place in such a high-end eatery. Jonas and Eva share a table along the wall, where they are served slices of fish so delicate, they’re almost translucent. Sashimi in assorted shades of pink and ivory. Sushi that rises to the level of art.
“Can I ask you a question?” Eva says.
“Of course,” Jonas answers. “Anything.”
“I’ve been avoiding it . . .”
“Why?”
She waves at the air with her chopsticks as though trying to catch the right words with them. “I don’t know. It feels selfish. Or weird. Or something.”
Jonas smiles warmly, trying to recapture some of the camaraderie and lightness that he has enjoyed with Eva in both her incarnations. “Why don’t you just ask and let me be the judge?”
Eva reaches for her sake and drains the small glass. “You told me how you met me before. Well, not before. Elsewhere. Not elsewhere . . .” She shakes her head and furrows her brow. “There’s really no good word for it, is there?”
Jonas shrugs. “Scientific breakthroughs often require new words to describe them.” He studies her and is reminded of her beauty, a quality he’s studiously ignored since meeting her counterpart several universes ago. Why? He casts the thought away. “You want to know what you were like,” he observes, reading her. “If you were different.”
She nods, a hint of embarrassment in her expression.
“You weren’t different,” he assures her truthfully. “You were pretty much exactly the same, right down to the way you picked at your right thumb.”
Eva had been digging at the skin of her thumb with the nail of her index finger, but she stops, instantly self-conscious. But then another emotion replaces it. Jonas has had enough experience with feeling like someone was stepping on his grave to recognize it in someone else, and he knows that he’s just made a serious mistake.
